There is none holy like the Lord, there is none beside thee.
Again and again. The words beat at his temples like a secondary pulse. His boots strike the surface of the roadway in an answering rhythm that draws him behind the scrim of ordinary consciousness. He meets no one coming and going — the hour is too early for man or beast. In a small handcart, which he has cobbled together himself from odds and ends, he transports the stones he intends to set. He has come to believe that the earth’s rough minerals are the signature of the spiritual, and as such can be assembled and shaped into praise and affirmation. He also conveys, hooked into the loops of his belt, a mallet and a number of small chisels. His tools, his music, his offering — he carries all that he needs on his body.
Where my mother’s solitary gravestone once sat, now rises a hollow tower some thirty feet in height and still growing. The stones that constitute its fabric have been chosen for their strength and beauty and for their effect on the overall design. A spiral of cantilevered stones protrudes, and these allow him to ascend the steep sides as easily as an insect or a lizard might scale a wall.
More and more my father chooses to decorate the stone surfaces with elaborate cipher, even though Tyndall stone, with its mottled coloring, is thought to be resistant to fine carving. Patterns incised on this mineral form seem to evade the eye; you have to stand at a certain distance, and in a particular light, to make them out. This impediment is part of the charm for him. What he carves will remain half-hidden, half-exposed, and as such will reflect the capriciousness of the revealed world. Here he inscribes a few holy words, there the image of a bird, a flower, a fish, a face, a sun or moon. An angel half the size of his hand freezes on a worked limestone sky. A tiny stone horse grazes in a stony meadow. Cupids, mermaids, snakes, leaves, feathers, vines, bees, cattle, the curve of a rainbow, a texturing like skin — the tower is a museum of writhing forms, some of which he has discovered in the Canadian Farmer’s Almanac or the Eaton’s catalogue or in his illustrated Bible.
The carving is done on winter nights in the warmed untidy cave of his widower’s kitchen, where he has set up a workbench and vise and a good gas light. He has already, after a day at the quarry, eaten his supper of fried eggs and tinned peas, and is ready to make the stonedust fly. His tools are simple, and his technique somewhat unorthodox — he is after all, a self-taught carver, grown skillful through long periods of trial with the wooing of relief and shadow and with the spare particularity the stone is able to release. Working slowly, he feels the world shrink around him, small as a pudding basin. His attention becomes concentrated as he moves from scratch to groove, as he joins line and curve, elaborating an image that is no more at first than an atom flickering in his brain, bringing to it all its possibilities while guarding its pure modality, its essence — this, always, is the hardest part — and preparing himself for the moment when the worked stone is complete. (I wish somehow you might see these carved surfaces, how they send back to the eye a shiver of yielded revelation, so full of my father’s sad awkwardness and exertion, yet so cunning in their capture of precious light.)
Despite his gifts, the act of carving never ceases to be a labor for him — the whole of his body bends into the effort, and his face takes on that twisted monkey look of concentration you see on the faces of real artists or musicians. (Of course he never thinks of himself as an artist — his innocence is wide open like air and water.) Only when he finishes a piece and carries it to the site of the tower does he experience the fever of transcendence (though transcendence, like art, is not a word he would utter or even recognize). What he feels when the finished stone slips finally into its waiting space is the hand of God upon his head, the Holy Ghost entering his body with a glad shout.
The religious impulse, as everyone knows — certainly I know — is hard to pin down. There are ecstatics, like my father, who become addicted to the rarefied air of spiritual communion, and then there are cooler minds who claim that religion exists in order to keep us from feeling our own absurdity.
For Cuyler Goodwill, a man untrained in conventional theology, the human and the divine are balanced across a dazzling equation: man’s creation of God being exactly equal to God’s creation of man, one unified mind bending like a snake around the curve of earth and heaven. (It has taken him years to work all this out.)
For those seven pacifists forced out of the Methodist ministry in the city of Winnipeg in the year 1916, religion finds its net worth between the hard rock of private conscience and the equally hard place of the political platform.
For those farmers and their families who are — right now, in the month of June — rebuilding the Chain Lakes Meeting House after it was burned to the ground by so-called patriots — for this congregation of Friends, religion is the cement that seals shut their door on the world.
For Clarentine Flett, lying in a coma after being knocked down by a bicycle at the corner of Portage and Main, religion is a soft flurry of petals drifting and settling peacefully on the evening of her life. And for the seventeen-year-old butcher’s boy, Valdi Goodmansen, whose bicycle (exceeding the legal speed of eight miles per hour) was responsible for the accident, religion is the bottled broth he sucks like a starved infant in the middle of the night. Seek ye forgiveness and it shall be given. For Abram Skutari, who sold the boy the bicycle (twenty-five dollars), religion is an open window, as well as the curtain with which he darkens the window.
For Magnus Flett of Tyndall, master stonecutter and abandoned husband of Clarentine Flett, religion is both the container and water of remembrance, holding sacred (that is leaving untouched)
the shriveled leaves of a particular parlor plant of hers called the star of Bethlehem; also the vivid tactile memory of loose beds of stone from his native Orkney; also an image he recollects of his own father and mother, the two of them at dusk, dragging hay into a barn, and his father stopping to extract a foreign object that had flown into his wife’s eye, leaning down and removing it with the tip of his tongue.
For Principal MacIntosh of Wesley College religion is the physic for right thinking, correct living, and earnest praying. “One thing this war has done,” he writes in a letter to the Free Press, “is shaken us out of our self-sufficiency and brought us nearer to our Maker.”
For Bessie Perfect, a Wesley College student ardently in love with her botany professor, Barker Flett, religion is a painful obstruction that forms in her throat when she whispers his name against her pillow, and also when she sings, “Keep the home fires burrrrning / While our hearts are yearrrrning.”
Left to himself, Barker Flett, professor, scholar, collector of some seventeen different species of lady’s-slippers, believes religion to be a glorious metaphor for the soul’s desire. There is no God, no Son of God, no Holy Family, no resurrection, there is only desire. Desire for more. For perfection. For self-knowledge. Desire to possess all fifty known varieties of lady’s-slippers. Desire for sleep and forgetfulness. Desire for good and for evil. Desire for rapturous union, the object of which, he knows, can be, and often is, fraudulent. Lately he has been reading about a pollinating mechanism in which a male insect is attracted to certain small orchids, the lip of which simulates the sexual parts of the female insect. As a man of science, Flett finds the phenomenon obscurely disturbing, particularly the copulative gestures the excited male performs at the edge of the mute petal. He is also disturbed, though he has yet to acknowledge it, by the presence of eleven year-old Daisy Goodwill in his household, the bold unselfconscious movement of her body, her bare arms in her summer dresses, the unnatural yearning he experienced recently when he entered her darkened sick room and observed the sweetness of her form beneath the sheet.