(1993) The Stone Diaries by Carol Shields Read Free Book Online

years, from age fourteen to twenty-six, my father, young Cuyler Goodwill, rose early, ate a bowl of oatmeal porridge, walked across the road to the quarry where he worked a nine-and-a-half-hour day, then returned to the chill and meagerness of his parents’ house and prepared for an early bed.
    The recounting of a life is a cheat, of course; I admit the truth of this; even our own stories are obscenely distorted; it is a wonder really that we keep faith with the simple container of our existence.
    During that twelve-year period it is probable that my father’s morning porridge was sometimes thin and sometimes thick. It is likely, too, that he rubbed up against the particulars of passion, snatched from overheard conversations with his fellow workers or the imperatives of puberty, or caught between the words of popular songs or rare draughts of strong drink. He did attend the annual Bachelors’ Ball, he did shake the hand of Lord Stanley when the old fellow steam-whistled through in 1899. My father was not blind, despite the passivity of his youthful disposition, nor was he stupid. He must have looked about from time to time and observed that even in the dead heart of his parents’ house there existed minor alterations of mood and varying tints of feeling. Nevertheless, twelve working years passed between the time he left school and the day he met and fell in love with Mercy Stone and found his life utterly changed. Miraculously changed.
    Stonewall in those days was a town of a mere two thousand souls, but some accident of history or perception had kept the two of them apart, and he had never, as a child and then a man in that town, laid eyes on her, had never heard mention of her name. She grew up, cloistered as any nun, in the Stonewall Orphans Home, an austere, though by no means heartless, establishment at the eastern edge of town. Here at the Stonewall Home, out of an impulse for order or perhaps democratization, all constituents lacking family names of their own, that is to say infants given over to the institution’s care by their unmarried mothers, were called Stone—thus the register ran through the likes of Bertha Stone, Caroline Stone, Gareth Stone, Hyram Stone, Lamartine Stone, and so forth, coming down to my mother, Mercy, whose lineage, like the others, was entirely unknown, though her coloring, her fine hair and hazel eyes, suggested Ukrainian parentage, or perhaps Icelandic. She was left when only a few days old, wrapped in a flannel blanket—for the June nights could be cool—and placed in the old flour barrel that sat close by the back door of the institution. These flourbarrel babies, as they came to be called, were looked after by the township, given an elementary schooling, taught a trade, and sent at fourteen or fifteen into employment—except for my mother, whose housekeeping skills made her too valuable to part with. At the age of sixteen she was assisting the housekeeper on a regular basis; four years later, when the old housekeeper died, she assumed full command.
    Her body reflected her diet of bread and porridge, but despite her girth—by age ten she was "heavy," at twenty she was elephantine—despite this she liked to get down on her hands and knees and polish a floor till it shone. Sometimes, bending over to take a rack of pies from the warm oven, she felt herself grow dizzy with pride—the gold of crisp pastry, the bubbling of sweet fruit, the perfection of color and texture. She took only a passing interest in the dozen or so boys and girls who lived in the Home—"Mercy Stone weighs forty stone" was chanted as a skipping rhyme among the foundling girls—but she loved to lay a table, thicken a sauce, set a sleeve, to starch and iron and fold a stack of neat linens. She was gifted. And her gifts were put to use. Worse lives can be imagined.
    When she stepped into a room, the girls’ dormitory, for instance, her eyes went round to take in whatever was disorderly or broken or in need of