The Stonemason(6)

BEN Is that why you wouldn't go out there with them?

PAPAW No. The reason I wouldn't go out there was just a plain everday reason. No man can lay stone and be thinkin bout whether he goin to have to tear it back down again. Ain't no use to get in no such habits as that. You know that man up there ain't goin to let nothin stand forever noway. Not in this world he ain't. And it's against that judgment that you got to lay stone. If you goin to lay it at all.

BEN So who owns the stonework that's not paid for?

PAPAW Well, under the law you can get a lien on the work. You can claim it, but you cain't take possession of it. The man you built it for, he can take possession of it, but he cain't claim it. The law don't have no answer. Where men don't have right intentions the law cain't supply em. You just at a dead end.

BEN Then no one owns the work?

PAPAW The man's labor that did the work is in the work. You cain't make it go away. Even if it's paid for it's still there. If ownership lies in the benefit to a man then the mason owns all the work he does in this world and you cain't put that claim aside nor quit it and it don't make no difference whose name is on the paper.





SCENE IV

The basement. Ben at his small table. The light comes on at the podium.

BEN Whose work is it? I know that there are stones in that house that his uncle Selman kid up. There's no stone for Selman. He's buried behind the house. Somewhere on the hill. My grandfather's views must incorporate the life of Selman. All Selmans. These views appear to be some labor theory of value. But there's a further agenda. Because the world is made of stone the mason is prey to a great conceit and to whatever extent the look and the shape of the world is the work of the mason then that work exists outside of the claims of workers and landholders alike. Reading Marx in my last year of school only sent me to Hegel and there I found his paradigm of servant and master in which the master comes to suffer the inner impoverishment of the idle while the servant by his labors grows daily in skill and wisdom.

The house was built in 1836 and that date is cut into the lintel stone over the front door. The Telfairs black and white came here from South Carolina in the 1820's. His father and mother were slaves as was his brother Harris, born 1861, and his sister Emmanuelle, born Christmas day of 1862. Seven days before the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation. The stone sills of the cabin where he was born are still there behind the house.

I can remember the house when it had a roof on it. We'd take visiting relatives out there on Sundays when I was a child. There were black people living in it then but I don't know what their name was. I bought the place in 1966, the house and forty two acres in three separate parcels, and I gave him the deed at his one hundredth birthday party four years later. He looked at it for a long time. Nobody knew what it was that he was looking at. It got more and more quiet and finally Carlotta said: "What is it, Papaw?" and he had tears in his eyes and he just handed it to her and looked away.

He had me promise not to disturb the pale renters interred on our farm but I had no intention to do so. He says that for himself we can just throw him out in a sinkhole when he quits this world. But he'll be buried with his ancestors black and white in full possession of the earth whereunder he lies. It balances out, he says. Yes. The arc of the moral universe is indeed long but it does bend toward justice. At the root of all this of course is the trade. As he always calls it. His craft is the oldest there is. Among man's gifts it is older than fire and in the end he is the final steward, the final custodian. When the last gimcrack has swallowed up its last pale creator he will be out there, preferring the sun, trying the temper of his trowel. Placing stone on stone in accordance with the laws of God. The trade was all they had, the old masons. They understood it both in its utility and in its secret nature. We couldn't read nor write, he says. But it was not in any book. We kept it close to our hearts. We kept it close to our hearts and it was like a power and we knew it would not fail us. We knew that it was a thing that if we had it they could not take it from us and it would stand by us and not fail us.

Not ever fail us.

— CURTAIN —





ACT II





SCENE I


Late morning in the kitchen. Ben is standing with a cup of coffee looking out the window. The breakfast dishes are on the sideboard and there is still a plate of biscuits and other things on the kitchen table. Big Ben enters. He is dressed in a double breasted cream colored suit with a gabardine shirt the open collar of which is worn folded down outside the suit lapels. He carries a camelhair overcoat over his arm and a hat in his hand. Soldier comes in from outside stamping the snow from his shoes.

BIG BEN You get the rearview mirror?