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

a good buffing, and then she rolled up her sleeves and went straight to work.
    On a spring day in her twenty-eighth year, a day of brilliant sunshine and cold breezes, it came to her notice that the door sill at the main entrance of the Home had heaved upward, displaced no doubt by severe frost, so that the door now opened with difficulty, making a wretched screeching sound. A mason was called to reset the stone. He turned out to be my father, Cuyler Goodwill.
    He was at once taken with my mother’s gentleness, a certain graciousness in her face, and the way her hands moved distractedly, one circling inside the other as she stood beside him, prompted perhaps by some obscure notion of social obligation—but he was moved beyond anything he had imagined by her sheer somatic presence. Her rippling generosity of flesh and the clean floury look of her bare arms as she pointed out the irregularity in the door framing stirred him deeply, as did her puffed little topknot of hair, her puff of face, her puffed collar and shoulders—framing an innocence that seemed to cry out for protection. He yearned to put his mouth against the inside shadow of her elbow, or touch with his fingertips the hemispheres of silken skin beneath her eyes, their exquisite convexity.
    As he worked, she stood close by, keeping him company, speaking in her halting way of the harshness of the winter, the worst in years, bitter winds, deep frosts, and now it seemed there was flooding in the fields south of Tyndall.
    Yes, my father replied, looking up at her, studying her solemn mouth, he had heard news of the flooding, the situation was very grave, but then—he lifted his small shoulders—flooding occurred every year at this time.
    He noticed that my mother’s corpulence had swallowed up much of her face but had spared her pure, softly fringed eyes.
    He refused payment for the work, saying it had taken him less than an hour to set the stone right, that it was work he took pleasure in, a change from the monotony of the quarry, and besides—nodding vaguely in the direction of the door, the roof, the facade of the Home, the cluster of noisy children playing near the road—besides, he said, he felt moved to offer what he was able. She insisted, then, that he come into the big warm kitchen, where she served him coffee and one of her brown sugar slices, just out of the oven. These slices were a miracle of sweetness, of crispness, their pastry layers neat and pretty, and the filling richly satisfying.
    He held his cup and saucer on his knee. Later he remembered looking down at his thumbnails and at the dark outline of dirt that defined them. His hands shook, but he managed to say, "May I come again?"
    She stared hard, imagining the bony plate of his chest beneath his shirt, then busied herself clearing away the crockery, moving away from him. This pleading man made no sense to her. Words flew out of his mouth and melted into the warm kitchen air. She liked him better, though, for his trembling hands and the faint oniony smell of his sweat. Despite herself, she turned and offered him a strained smile.
    "We could go walking?" he suggested.
    "I’m not," she said helplessly, turning toward him and gesturing weakly, "much of a one for walking."
    "Please," he said, astonishing himself with his courage. "We could sit and talk, if you like."
    She gave him a dry, shy look which he interpreted as a form of assent.
    Ahead of him, turning over like the pages of a heavy book, he saw the difficulty of all he would have to learn, of courtship, of marriage itself and its initiations, of a new way of speaking. The thought of so much effort brought him close to discouragement, yet he felt driven to carry on, to learn what he needed to know and to test his strength. Within a month he had exacted a promise from her. She would become his wife. They would move to the village of Tyndall thirty miles away where he had been offered a job in the new quarry. He announced his intentions to