The Stonemason(12)

CARLOTTA I can't do that. God, you work night and day as it is.

BEN So?

CARLOTTA You've got your own family.

BEN Yes. It includes you.

CARLOTTA Besides school's not the answer to everything.

BEN No. But I know you want to go.

CARLOTTA I don't see that it's done you all that much good.

BEN Why? Because I work as a mason instead of teaching? I make three times what a teacher does.

CARLOTTA Yes, and I know how you make it too. You're killing yourself. And it's not the money anyway. I've got to go.

She puts on her coat. He gets up from the bed.

CARLOTTA Ben if anything has happened to him I don't know what I'll do. I really don't.

BEN Nothing's happened. I promise.

CARLOTTA You cant promise. You think you can fix everything. You cant.

She goes past him to the door. In the doorway she stops and looks at herself in her compact mirror. She closes the compact and puts it in her purse. She looks at him.

CARLOTTA I look awful. Ben, thank you.

She exits.

— CURTAIN —





ACT III





SCENE I


The kitchen at night. It is late and the house is asleep. Ben is sitting at the table with his tea and his notebook. The light comes on at the podium. Ben speaks from there.

BEN He's not always asleep when I hear him talking in his room at night. I know his mind is sound but sometimes he forgets and I know sometimes he's half awake or even sitting on the edge of the bed talking to his brother Charles whom he loved and who fell to his death from the scaffolding at the construction of the Seelbach Hotel in the fall of 1902.

He (Ben's double) picks up Papaw's bible from the table and smells the old leather.

BEN When they were breaking ground to build the bank out on the Bardstown road there was a piece in the paper about his one hundredth birthday and his letter from President Nixon and they called him and talked to him on the phone trying to get him to lay the cornerstone at their ceremony or whatever it was and he would not and they sent the vice president over here to talk to him thinking there was some misunderstanding and he and Papaw sat in the front room while Mama served them coffee and Papaw was as polite as he could be and told him no about nine times and showed him to the door and Mama was furious with him and wanted to know why he wouldn't do it and he wouldn't answer and wouldn't answer and finally he said: I ain't never laid a block of hewn stone in my life and I never will. You go against scripture you on you own. That man up there ain't goin to help you. Ain't no need to even ask.

He sips his tea and thumbs the bible open. He turns the pages.

BEN It took me a while to find that one.

He leans forward at the kitchen table, reading.

BEN And if thou make me an altar of stone thou shalt not build it of hewn stone, for if thou lift up thy tool upon it thou hast polluted it.

He turns the pages.

BEN There's another place too. Somewhere here. And all the proscribing of graven images. Why? Deuteronomy. His ribbon here. Pharaoh. We were Pharaoh's slaves in Egypt and the Lord brought us out of Egypt with a mighty hand.

He turns the pages.

BEN And Exodus. That there may be darkness over the land of Egypt. Egypt and the darkness of Egypt. According to the old charges of the Masonic order the children of Israel learned masonry in Egypt. Which I was astonished to read, having heard it from him, and he knows nothing of freemasonry. He says all honors are empty and none more than honorary masonry. Because there is nothing that will separate from the work itself. The work is everything, and whatever is learned is learned in the doing. The freemasons were right in their suspicion that in the mysteries of stonemasonry were contained other mysteries. Speculatives, they were called. Noblemen who were made honorary masons. And if it is true that laying stone can teach you reverence of God and tolerance of your neighbor and love for your family it is also true that this knowledge is instilled in you through the work and not through any contemplation of the work.

He rises and goes to the woodstove and adds a chunk of wood to the fire and shuts the door and stands looking at the flames through the grate.

BEN But not ashlar. Not cut stone. All trades have their origin in the domestic and their corruption in the state. Freestone masonry is the work of free men while sawing stone is the work of slaves and of course it is just those works of antiquity most admired in the history books that require nothing but time and slavery for their completion. It is a priest ridden stone craft, whether in Egypt or Peru. Or Louisville Kentucky. I'd read a great deal in the Old Testament before it occurred to me that it was among other things a handbook for revolutionaries. That what it extols above all else is freedom. There is no historian and no archaeologist who has any conception of what stonework means. The Semitic God was a god of the common man and that is why he'll have no hewn stones to his altar. He'll have no hewing of stone because he'll have no slavery.