The Stonemason(18)

REPORTER I guess that's right.

BEN He was a grown man before he learned to read and write. His wife taught him. My grandmother.

REPORTER Where did she learn?

BEN She taught herself.

REPORTER I would think that would be hard to do.

BEN I would too. She worked for a family as a live-in maid in Evansville Indiana and they had twin daughters about school age and after she got them put to bed at night she'd sit down with their primers [prim-ers] and study by candlelight until one and two in the morning and then get up again at five thirty and get breakfast for the family. She did that for several years and then one day the woman—the lady of the house—went in her room and found some of their books there. My grandmother had a room up over the carriage house and she'd sneak books out of the house and read them at night and this woman found them and thought she was stealing the books to sell them—back then books were valuable—and she was going to fire her and my grandmother sat down and read for her and she let her stay.

REPORTER She must have been a remarkable woman.

BEN She was. Later she was the first black registered nurse in the state of Indiana. But she read all her life. And she remembered what she read. She could quote poetry by the hour. She could quote Scott's Lady of the Lake in its entirety and it runs about a hundred pages. When I was in high school she used to help me with my algebra. It never occurred to me to wonder where she learned it.

REPORTER And your grandfather. Does he read?

BEN (Smiling) Constantly.

REPORTER What does he read.

BEN The King James version of the bible.

REPORTER Is that it?

BEN That's it.

REPORTER You said he read constantly.

BEN He does.

The reporter nods and smiles.

REPORTER Well. He certainly seems to be in remarkable health for a man a hundred and two years old. I know he gets tired of people asking him the secret of his longevity but I couldn't get anything out of him at all. He just said that somebody had to live to be a hundred and it looked like it was him. My guess is that it runs in the family.

BEN Well. Not really. He had several brothers and sisters and they've all been dead for years. For that matter all his children are dead except my father.

REPORTER I asked him how his health was and he said it was fine and wanted to know how mine was. I thought at first he was being cantankerous but he really seemed to want to know. I wound up telling him about my eye operation.

Ben smiles. The reporter flips through his notebook and folds it away in his coat pocket. He holds out his hand.

REPORTER Well, thank you. It was a great party.

BEN (Shaking hands) Thank you for coming.

The reporter has turned to leave and then looks back.

REPORTER What is the trade? He mentioned a couple of times something about the trade.

BEN The stonemason's trade.

REPORTER Ah. Of course. Got it.

The reporter raises a hand and exits from the kitchen. Ben goes to the window and looks out. The lights come on stage right where there are picnic tables covered with red crepe and there are lanterns and folding chairs and cups and plates and the remainders of Papaw's birthday party. A wind has come up and it is evening and the buntings strung across the yard sway in the wind and a few cups blow across the yard. Papaw is sitting alone at the tables, dressed in his black suit. His hat sits on the table beside him and he holds it with one hand against it being blown away. The lights have dimmed to black in the kitchen. The light comes on at the podium and Ben appears there.

BEN I'd pretend ignorance to get you to stay. If I thought you could be fooled. But only people with wants can be fooled and you have none.

Cups and leaves blow across the yard. The old man sits holding his hat. The light dims to black and the light comes up in the kitchen. It is night and Ben's double is sitting at the table. Ben continues to speak from the podium.

BEN He always said the trade. As if there were only the one. He didn't even call it masonry. Just called it the work. Called it the trade. Does call it. Does call it.

He—(Ben's double)—sips his tea.

BEN He was a journeyman mason for eighty odd years. Journeyman comes from the word for day, and a journey was originally a day's travel. He began to contract for himself before my father married and he and my father were in business together for thirty years and technically they are yet. But the rule of the journeyman is his rule even now and he has always quit at quitting time no matter where he was on the job. The wisdom of the journeyman is to work one day at a time and he always said that any job even if it took years was made up out of a day's work. Nothing more. Nothing less. That was hard for me to learn. I always wanted to be finished. In the concept of a day's work is rhythm and pace and wholeness. And truth and justice and peace of mind. You're smiling. I smile. But very often now the stones come to hand for me as they do for him. I don't think or select. I build. So I begin to live in the world. Nothing is ever finally arrived at. The journeyman becomes a master when he masters the journeyman's trade. He becomes a master when he ceases to wish to be one.