The Stone Carvers Read Online Free PDF

suggestion after the saint who attached herself to Francis. But as a mature woman in the early 1930s, Klara was not averse to being called “the spinster.” She liked the sound of the word, the way it flung itself out of one’s mouth and thrust itself, bristling, into the day. She was eccentric, as spinsters are meant to be, but she was forgiven this by the nuns and most of the village because of some unhappy events in her early life. When she burst into meetings of the village council, demanding a war memorial, the esteemed councillors soberly waited out the storm, then, after the door had banged shut behind her, remarked on her early sorrows. They talked about how she lived all alone, up there at Becker’s Corners on the farm behind the church with only the odd hired boy to help her with her livestock, or the storing of winter firewood, or the requirement that four or five pails of water be hauled each day from the pump to the summer kitchen. Their assumption that she was “geist-ridden”—old enough at almost forty to be surrounded by ghosts—was true enough, but what the men didn’t know was that this affliction gave Klara enough spiritual company to make her life quite full. And as for keeping herself busy, the spinster had tailored the splendid jackets of everyone in town.
    Klara had her memories, a cemetery full of dead family members, a village from which most of her schoolmates had fled, a brother who had vanished, an ancient religion replete with narrative, the knowledge of the village’s mythology, two difficult skills learned from two masters (her mother and her grandfather), friends in the convent, and a solid sense of how to keep her mind intact, despite the constant loneliness. She had also the possession of something that only a very few spinsters have: independence and a past.
    She was aware that most unmarried women in her village, and in the villages surrounding hers, had always lived auxiliary lives. Called in to look after the household when one of their more fortunate sisters gave birth to a child or hovering by the side of the sickbeds and deathbeds of elderly relatives, a spinster’s career was often one of service to those whom nature had dealt with more fairly. They had no particular past because no man had felt moved to consider them, for whatever reason, as an object of romance or, failing that, as a useful object of domestic labour in married life. But Klara served no master; she alone determined the tasks she would perform each day. And when she was quite young, romance had disturbed and illuminated her life, had cast its light and its shadow over her for one intense, confusing season.
    She did her best not to dwell on this any longer, feeling that to remain absorbed by a personal past of a romantic nature was unbecoming to a woman of her age. Better to be outdoors herding her white cows or harvesting apples, or indoors tailoring a suit jacket, washing windows, sweeping up. Or at the church polishing pews, or in the cemetery tending the plants around the family plot.
    In her twenties it had been a fierce, unspoken sorrow, this past, catching her off guard during the day, causing her to dig her nails into the flesh of her palms, or taking her quite unexpectedly back to scenes so tender she could be locked in them for long periods of time, could find herself standing quite still, completely absent from the task that had been occupying her hands. This frightened and appalled her—so much so that she began to train herself in the art of stoic apartness, a separation from her former self. She had been a good pupil in this endeavour and began finally to behave normally as a spinster, keeping the past at a distance, on the other side of the fence, of her skin.
    Only once in recent years had she given in to it, and this had caused her to do something quite odd on a moist summer day, one that was uncharacteristically misty for the season. All week, inexplicably, she had permitted scenes from