The Stonemason(2)

Ben sits back in his chair and looks out the high window. Sound of a car going up the street in the muffled snow, chains clinking. He bends to his desk again.

BEN For the past two years he's been helping me build my house. Or rebuild it. It's the house that he grew up in. We go out there on weekends.

The kitchen and basement lights dim to black.

BEN Sometimes Maven and Melissa come and we have a picnic. Sometimes Mama too. The house is stone and it is laid up in the old style with lime mortar. It was built long before the introduction of Portland cement made it possible to build with stone and yet know nothing of masonry.

Lights come on downstage right revealing the exterior of the two storey stone farmhouse partly in ruins. At the front is a low partial wall of actual stone and here Ben and Papaw are at work together laying stone, chipping it with hammer and chisel, passing their trowels over the work and setting the stone in place.

BEN For true masonry is not held together by cement but by gravity. That is to say, by the warp of the world. By the stuff of creation itself. The keystone that locks the arch is pressed in place by the thumb of God. When the weather is good we gather the stone ourselves out of the fields. What he likes best is what I like. To take the stone out of the ground and dress it and put it in place. We split the stones out along their seams. The chisels clink. The black earth smells good. He talks to me about stone in a different way from my father. Always as a thing of consequence. As if the mason were a custodian of sorts. He speaks of sap in the stone. And fire. Of course he's right. You can smell it in the broken rock. He always watched my eyes to see if I understood. Or to see if I cared. I cared very much. I do now. According to the gospel of the true mason God has laid the stones in the earth for men to use and he has laid them in their bedding planes to show the mason how his own work must go. A wall is made the same way the world is made. A house, a temple. This gospel must accommodate every inquiry. The structure of the world is such as to favor the prosperity of men. Without this belief nothing is possible. What we are at arms against are those philosophies that claim the fortuitous in mens' inventions. For we invent nothing but what God has put to hand.

The lights illuminating the stone house and the workers have dimmed to black.

BEN Were it not for him I'd have become a teacher. I nearly did. I nearly did.

The lights come up at the basement desk and window. In the kitchen. Ben sits at his desk. Papaw sits at the kitchen table reading his bible.

BEN He never suggested that it would not be a good trade for me. He even encouraged me, although I knew that when I told him I was studying psychology he had little notion of what that meant. Fair enough. Psychology has little notion of what he means. Never did he smile at my pretensions. It was only when I came home after my first year of graduate school that I realized my grandfather knew things that other people did not and I began to clear my head of some of the debris that had accumulated there and I did not go back to school that fall and I did not go back that winter and by then I had already begun to learn the trade that anyone would have said I already knew since I'd worked at it for ten years and paid for my schooling with it. A trade at which I thought myself a master and of which I stood in darkest ignorance. And as I came to know him... As I came to know him. . . Oh I could hardly believe my good fortune. I swore then I'd cleave to that old man like a bride. I swore he'd take nothing to his grave.





SCENE II

Early the following morning. The lights are on in the kitchen and outside it is just graying with daylight. Papaw is sitting in his chair by the stove as Ben enters.

BEN Morning Papaw. [Pap-paw]

PAPAW Mornin Ben. Mornin.

Ben goes to the window and looks out at the yard. There is a small dog sleeping by the stove and it looks up.

BEN What do you think?

PAPAW Well. Be a mite slick out I expect.

MAMA, Ben's mother enters the kitchen. A bustling and somewhat harried looking woman in her fifties. She eyes them suspiciously and goes on to the stove and gets the coffee percolator and goes to the sink with it.

BEN You want to go out to the farm?

MAMA (Speaking loudly over the sound of the faucet) He ain't goin nowhere with you in this.

Ben smiles at his grandfather. Mama turns off the faucet and takes the percolator to the stove.

MAMA So don't you even start.

PAPAW You reckon we get out there?

MAMA Papaw don't you pay no attention to him he ain't got no sense.

She puts coffee in the percolator and she takes down a large black skillet and spoons lard into it.

SOLDIER enters the kitchen. He is Ben's sister's son, aged fifteen.

MAMA You just the man I want to see. Get them plates and set the table.

SOLDIER I just come in to see if they's any school today.