Stone, Paper, Stone
Before you were born, and I was dead, this story was told at night on the green.
Once, a man lived in the town who did nothing but harm. His name was Carrick Cark, and, of course, a woman loved him. The woman was Sara Kasp. This town where they lived lay in a narrow, dark valley with trees pressing in from both sides. It was known for its limestone, which the quarrymen split into blocks and rolled down the mountain in carts of thick timber. Those blocks found their way far and wide, to bright and big towns, on the plain, on the coasts. They were fit into the walls of white towers that Sara Kasp, from a child, saw in her dreams. From a child, she worked down in the quarry alongside her father and mother, alongside the grown men, and she worked harder and better than any. They said of Sara Kasp in the town that she had only to look at the limestone for the limestone to cleave.
Carrick Cark lived in a house in the pines at the top of the valley, a strange wooden house, too tall and too thin. He was just four years old when his parents were killed. There were many who saw it but were afraid to go near: Broc and Dell Cark crying out in a storm of small stones, running through the town and up the long road toward their house, stones striking again and again their hands, their arms, their shoulders, their heads. When they went down to their knees, the stones came harder and thicker, and many at that moment had to cover their eyes.
It was a strange thing, they said, but the Carks had always been strange, and worse than strange. For generations they had had their own share in the quarry, one of the largest in town, and done little with it in the way of splitting stone blocks. But other things, yes, they had done. Hadn’t Broc Cark’s father been at the winch when it failed and Jes Sen and Tam Conn were both crushed? And hadn’t Broc and Dell Cark laid the fuses when the blast missed its mark and Rogan Niles was blown back off the ledge? Those two on the road, people said, battered by stones that seemed to come from the sky, it was what they deserved. It was the recompense of the limestone itself.
At the time this story really begins, Carrick Cark was grown, and grown idle and wild, a young man in a green coat walking up and down the long road. Sara Kasp too was grown, and grown strong and unsmiling, a young woman with hair whitened by limestone always lifting and dropping the sledge on white stones. She lived with her mother and father, although girls younger were married, and her father had begun to speak at night in the house of what her marriage could bring: another pair of hands, a strong back, more blocks in the cart. For the Kasps had the greatest share in the quarry of all, and the only limit to wealth their own labor. No one worked longer in the quarry each day than Jorn Kasp, unless it was Sara, his daughter, or Lisle, his wife. Yet work all they could, they still fell behind. The larger families quarried more stone.
Gravin Dammersen was soon much at Sara Kasp’s elbow. She knew that it was he whom her father had chosen. His skill with the chisel and wedge was praised by quarrymen two times his age, and once, when a horse died in its traces on the way to the market, he had himself hoisted the chains and pulled with the team. Why not Gravin Dammersen? Sara Kasp had no reason to give. Every day in the quarry, she moved deeper and deeper into the ground. Far off, to the east and the west, along the road that crossed the road that came down from the valley, on the plain, on the coast, there were towers with the white stones Sara Kasp had split in their walls. Was this why? She did not know and stayed silent. Gravin Dammersen brought her a pendant he had made out of quartzite and clay, a sledge the size of her thumb to wear around her neck on a cord. Her mother wore something like it. When no one was looking, Sara Kasp let it fall from the ledge down, down, down into the odd quarry water, pale green, which sometimes cast up what it swallowed and sometimes did not.
It was not long after that Carrick Cark appeared between the cranes on the edge of a long shelf of stone. Sara Kasp was the first one to see him. She was on that same shelf, breathing hard, turning the winch. The day was foggy and wet, a treacherous day, a day when the ground moves from under your feet. She kept turning but watched to see what he did. He went even closer to the edge of the shelf and looked down and looked over. He came to where she stood at the winch. If she had let go the winch, she might have reached out and touched the sleeve of his coat, but good men would have died. It was hard, though, to hold on. Her whole life she had seen Carrick Cark but in glimpses. He was rounding a bend in the road, or jumping down from a stone wall in a field. He was running up a slope into woods. He seemed, when he stopped there beside her, as though suited for glimpses. He seemed made of wrong angles that deflected the eye. Sara Kasp turned and kept turning, yet her desire to let go of the winch exerted a force so strong she started to tremble. She wanted to trace Carrick Cark head to toe with her finger, to understand where his body divided from everything else. She didn’t hear Gravin Dammersen run up behind her. He caught the handle as her hands finally slipped. Down below, the block swung on its chains but kept rising as Gravin Dammersen turned with all of his strength. A general shout went up. Quarrymen ran about in the fog, and Jansen Witt took a false step and was gone. No one could see through the fog to the spot where he had landed but all could hear the sounds that he made, from low groans to high whistles, like wind across the cracked rim of a jar. Jorn Kasp led the search down the stoneface to ledge after ledge. Sara Kasp remained still. She watched Carrick Cark until he was once more a glimpse, a shadow threading the treeline. Gravin Dammersen came to the Kasp home that evening to eat and to drink and to ask Jorn Kasp for Sara’s hand, her hand which had slipped from the winch, which Jorn Kasp said was his to have and high time.
And so, the story begins at night in midsummer, the moon high and bright at the top of the valley. The town’s unmarried women had gathered beneath a tree on the green. Sara Kasp was among them. It was not in her nature to feel ease with any and she felt it least with those women. She had played with them as a very young child, before she went down to the quarry and they stayed above and learned to weave, or picked beets. They knew what none in the quarry would ever believe: that Sara Kasp was more fearful than the smallest and weakest, that she was afraid of close spaces and afraid of the dark. Once, playing otters, the girls crawled one at a time in and out of a hollow log by the river but Sara Kasp had frozen with her head in the dark mouth of the log and did not move until the other girls pulled her out. Another time, they stole kits from a large underground den, each girl squeezing through the long tunnel and wiggling back, pulling a kit by the scruff. Sara Kasp took instead from a low branch a bird too young to fledge and joined in the game, until Luma Muns fed the bird to her kit. Only because her true self was so fearful could Sara Kasp lock her up in a dark box inside and keep her quiet and still while she worked. Sometimes she forgot this true self was there, and then the sight of Luma Muns would remind her. Over the years, she had hurried by the girls when she saw them outside the shop or filling buckets at the pump on the green, but for this, there was another and better reason. Sara Kasp had no time for a word. Her life moved between the stone ledge and the narrow bed in her room. Even a nod slowed her more than Jorn Kasp allowed.
But that night was different, warm as day, and the trees and high mountains, as though outlined in white upon black. In the center of town, the moon filled every window. No one could sleep. Everywhere they could, people lingered, drinking the shopkeeper’s beer, or whispering in their yards, in the streets. The morning’s work seemed far off, or did to all but Jorn Kasp, who walked through the town, peering over this fence and that, in search of his daughter and wife.
Sara Kasp’s wedding was in one week and one day. She stood among the unmarried women and Luma Muns said: The moon is just right. Come along.
The moon was so bright the girls cast shadows on the road, and Sara Kasp, coming last, studied each one. Her own was broad as a block. The long road rose up the valley with pastures behind the stone walls on both sides, and the sheep with the moon on their wool seemed to float above the dim grass.
Here, said Luma Muns. They had reached the part of the road where the pines came in close, and Luma Muns paused between two iron posts. Here, years ago on the road, Broc and Dell Cark had gone to their knees with the stones raining down and been killed by those stones and after dragged to the road side and put in the earth and these two iron posts driven down. Luma Muns went between them and all the girls followed her into the pines. It was darker in the pines, and the girls stumbled over roots and caught their skirts and loops of their hair on thorns and thin branches, and then the pines pulled back in a ring.
A house had once stood in that place and had fallen to ruin. There was a story told of that house at night on the green. A man and a woman once lived there together. The woman loved the man more than her life, but of what good was such love, thought the woman, if death proved the stronger. She could not rest for this thought and harried her husband until he came with her into the yard. She laid two stones on a stump, a white stone and a black. She laid too her head on the stump and held her hands just above the two stones. She said to her husband, now strike my neck with the axe. If I grab the white stone, I yet love you. If I grab the black stone, I do not. The man struck with axe and his wife’s head rolled to the ground and she grabbed neither stone. The man married again and when he sat by his bride on the green at the long, laden table, before he could eat one bite of the feast, he put his hands to his neck. He fell from his chair, kicked his legs and was dead. The bride’s brother reached into his mouth and pried a stone from his throat.
Luma Muns was also soon to be married, to Iver Lomm, the shopkeeper’s son. She led the girls around the ruined house, the blocks and the beams.
A girl cried: It’s the stump! Always, on such visits, in the night, one girl made this cry. But all had been by day to that clearing, and there were no stump, just the house lying ruined, and the well by the larch.
Luma Muns drew a pouch from her skirt and shook out two stones, white and black. She dropped them both in the well and pulled up the bucket. She reached in and pulled out a stone.
White or black? said the girls, and Luma Muns smiled and kept her hand closed. Druisilla Clive went to the well and dropped two stones of her own and pulled up the bucket and lifted out the white stone. Luma Muns pressed stones then into Sara Kasp’s hands. The woods were quiet, and above, the moon had the raw, unburied look of limestone just quarried, pulled up high on black chain. Sara Kasp went to the well and she heard the girls laughing and she let go of the stones. As the bucket came up, she saw the moon floating in the water it held, the moon like the limestone she quarried, and she thought, the stone will be white.
Her wedding was in one week and one day. The stone would be white, and why not? Why not love Gravin Dammersen? Was he worse than any other?
Sara Kasp reached in the bucket and her fingers brushed the bottom and sides. She poured out the water. She felt in the bucket. There was no stone at all.
White or black? said the girls, and she held her hand closed, and she did not smile. The bell rang in the town and Luma Muns turned. The girls sang as they followed Luma Muns from the well. Sara Kasp did not follow, or sing. She sang only when turning the winch, when she thought if she didn’t her strength would fail and her arms would both break. The girls disappeared in the pines. The song that they sang sounded thinner and thinner and soon Sara Kasp couldn’t hear it at all.
At the edge of the clearing, like a pine between pines, stood a tall, thin man, black haired, in green, Carrick Cark, and then he was almost beside her.
Sara Kasp, he said. I have something to give you, something you lost.
He held out his hand.
She thought of the stones, white and black, in the well, and of Gravin Dammersen’s pendent, the sledge, in the odd quarry water. But in his hand, Carrick Cark hadn’t either. He had a piece of white felt, cut and folded and stitched into the shape of a hare, with long felt ears and eyes and nose of black thread. It was Sara Kasp’s plaything, lost long ago in the woods.
She took the felt hare.
She said: There were no boots small enough for my feet when I first went down to the quarry. My father bought the smallest boots that he could and packed the toes with wool. My mother made me this hare with the wool that was left.
Carrick Cark said: I found this hare in a nest.
Sara Kasp nodded. He would have, yes. She had taken the hare with her to the quarry one morning, tucked safely inside her shirt pocket. But the hare had hated the quarry, and he had hated the close dark of the pocket and she had felt his displeasure like a pain where he lay against her chest, near her heart. When the midday bell rang, she crept between the cranes and into the woods and put the hare in a nest in a crabapple tree’s lowest fork. That evening, she went back, and the hare and the three young birds in the nest were all gone. Had Carrick Cark taken also the birds?
Carrick Cark said: I watched the nest for hours, the birds and the hare, and at sundown they all flew away. I saw you come and look for the hare, in the nest, on the ground just below, but you never looked up.
Sara Kasp looked up. She threw the hare as high as she could, but she couldn’t track his arc against the bright and black sky and he was too soft to make a noise on the ground when he landed. She felt afraid, and Carrick Cark said: Do you think I’ve come here to harm you?
She thought, and she thought he had not but that, regardless, harm would come and was coming, that with some it is like that, and she thought maybe there are others who welcome all harm, who hope for the towers to topple, and with her this was the way.
She said: My father used to say, finish your supper or Carrick Cark will nose round for the scraps. But this is what I imagined: that you had taken a vow. You would not eat a morsel of food from the town. When people said, Carrick Cark was just here and he stole this or that, the pie from the sill, the milk in the jug by door, I thought, it was not Carrick Cark. Carrick Cark’s parents were killed in the road and no one lifted a finger to help him. People said, better the child dies too, and the few who wanted to bring a basket up the long road were stopped at the first bend and sent back. I thought, Carrick Cark lives up there in the pines. He lives on pine nuts and bark, on acorns and cattails. He grinds these all into flour and bakes from it bread and this is all that he eats, this coarse bread, with pine sap and jam. He does not need what no one will give him.
Carrick Cark said: And when, in town, a kitchen garden is trampled, or a baby gets a dot of blood in its eye as though the eye were pricked with a pin, is that Carrick Cark?
Sara Kasp said: People call those things by that name.
And you? asked Carrick Cark. What do you call by that name?
Sara Kasp touched the sleeve of his coat. She traced a line in the palm of his hand. Then for a time they sat on the edge of the well, hip to hip. There was silence and the moon floating above on the sky.
Carrick Cark said: I was with my parents that day on the road.
I know, said Sara Kasp. It’s a story everyone tells.
I felt the stones strike, said Carrick Cark. But the stones had no weight.
A stone is all weight, said Sara Kasp. That’s all a stone is.
Then: How did they feel? Those stones without weight?
Carrick Cark seemed to consider and she thought, of course, they felt like many things, and he is wondering which thing to tell. He said: Like spinning. Like spinning so fast you see the back of your head and then your own face.
Sara Kasp looked at Carrick Cark’s face. She tried to imagine a stone with no weight. If the quarry could spin, she thought, you would see a wall and then a wall, wall after wall. There was nothing beyond, nothing to reach. She rose to her feet. There was her father waiting, her mother waiting, work in the morning.
She said: I must go, but Carrick Cark was already gone.
For three days, Sara Kasp worked harder in the quarry than ever before and ate nothing her mother prepared, not a morsel of food. On the fourth day, she could not move from her bed. Her father shouted and her mother pleaded, but she put her cheek on the pillow and closed her lips tight. Her father brought Gravin Dammersen into the room and he sat on the chair by the bed in the way of one unaccustomed to sitting, one who worked on his feet or collapsed on his back with hard snores. Gravin Dammersen spoke to her, the longest speech he had made. He said this: Once he had been bitten in the night by two spiders, bitten on the lid of each eye. In the morning, the swelling was such that all he could see was the red of his own swollen skin. But even so, he went to the quarry. He worked at the stone. He had to touch the stone over and over, with the tip of his nose and his tongue, to feel what it was he should do, but then he knew, and he did it. He could work without eyes, and if he had too, he could work without hands. He could drill a hole and fit in the wedge with his teeth. Sara Kasp said nothing at all, and soon Gravin Dammersen and her father and mother had no choice but to go to the quarry and leave her.
Sara Kasp got up then and tied her hair in a braid and dressed in her dusty work shirt and pants and went out into the street. The Kasps lived in the center of town, where the quarrymen lived, house close upon house. Sara Kasp did not turn at town hall to go up the path to the quarry. She went on, past the shop, and Herda Lomm, the shopkeeper’s wife, was sitting on the step in the shade nailing together a box. Herda Lomm was well liked in the town for the shows she put on with paper cutouts and strings, and for her light hand at the scale in the shop. She was sister to Sara Kasp’s mother, though every year saw them further apart.
Sara, she said. Tell your mother I have the cloth for your dress.
She passed the bakery and the baker, Josep Hoit, was standing in the doorway. He was big as a quarryman and the flour in his beard might have been dust from the limestone.
He said: Sara Kasp, give this to your father.
He gave her a list of figures and sums, the prices of all the pastries and cakes for the feast.
She passed the lime works and Gravin Dammersen’s mother just then came out and she stared and she said: Is that Sara Kasp? And by day on the street? Is something the matter?
When Sara Kasp tried to pass, she blocked her way, and said with a smile that narrowed her eyes: My son told me that nothing could keep you away from the quarry. He said you have stone in your soul, and that’s why you’re well suited.
Again Sara Kasp tried to pass, and the time Gravin Dammersen’s mother stepped aside. She called to Sara Kasp’s back: I’ve heard it said that your father sent you too young to the quarry, but my son said to me, mother, when you know Sara Kasp, you know she has never been young.
On the long road through the fields, Sara Kasp saw the farmer Hayden Bost coming toward her, his mules pulling a cart partway filled with beets.
He said: You’re Jorn Kasp’s girl. Do you see in this cart? These are all of my beets. That’s it. There’s not a single beet more. Since your father led the council last season in their vote to seize my south field, I can’t even fill this one cart. Tell your father I hope my soil won’t scrape. I hope it sticks to the stone and keeps growing beets. See who bids on it then, see who wants a tower of beets.
After that, the pines drew in close to the road, and she passed the two iron posts. She remembered the day when Broc and Dell Kasp were killed right there on the road. She was just four years old. She stood in the crowd by her mother on this very spot, and all she could see were the quarrymen’s legs and the fine white dust in the air as they shoved one another and shouted. There was a kind of high screaming she had never heard, not then and not since. There was the sound of stone hitting flesh and stone hitting stone. She had covered her ears and knelt down and felt the warmth of the road and felt the road shake.
She reached the top of the valley and the road ended in weeds and Carrick Cark was in front of the tall wooden house. She hadn’t realized the long road was so quick to travel, that it wasn’t so far from her house to his. There were hours before the day’s work in the quarry was ended. The air had the sharp smell of pine and the sweet smell of baking.
She didn’t know how to say what she felt. She couldn’t look fully at Carrick Cark, not in the day, in front of his house, not yet. She looked back down the road. She thought she would see the whole valley: the pastures dotted with sheep, the green rows of beets in dark fields, the slate roofs and white houses of the town, and partly screened by thin trees and the arms of the cranes, the cliffs of the quarry, the piled blocks, the mounds of loose stones. But all she saw were the pines.
She said: I’m very hungry.
Behind the house, there was an untidy garden, with lettuce all in flower. The wind blew and Sara Kasp could see the thin black seeds of the lettuce carried off into the woods. From a clay mound on top of a stump, Carrick Cark pulled a loaf the color of bark, and as rough. They sat at a wooden table covered with moss, and they ate the coarse, hot bread, the whole loaf.
Sara Kasp said, and now will you show me the house?
There were three floors and each floor was one room with a staircase winding through the middle. Lettuces were growing in pots on all the windows. In the top room, there was a narrow bed by the wall and a green coat on a peg.
Sara Kasp said: I’m going to be married.
She sat down on the bed. She untied her hair. Carrick Cark watched her closely. When the story is told at night on the green, Sara Kasp unties her hair on the bed. Carrick Cark watches her closely. The light in the little room shudders as though something is passing between the earth and the sun. They go down the winding stairs and out into the woods. Carrick Cark shows Sara Kasp how to find a black mushroom that looks like a leaf, and at the stream he skips stones. His stones go on and on down the stream and for the first time in the story, Sara Kasp laughs. She thinks of a wooden house like a tower, and of a tower of lettuce, and of a tower of beets. She thinks of a thin black seed flying into the woods, how that too can be a day’s measure. She thinks of the thin stone skimming the top of the stream, faster than the water, lighter than air.
On the bed, Sara Kasp lies back and arranges her hair. She says to Carrick Cark: And now will you come even nearer? He doesn’t answer. She sits up and he comes. He sits and they press forehead to forehead and somehow there are hours in the day, even for this, for the pressing of foreheads, and Sara Kasp shuts her eyes. She opens her eyes. She shuts them. The light shudders and shudders. They are still there, on the bed. She puts her arms behind her back. She says: I don’t need my eyes or my hands. Carrick Cark says, no, and he comes even nearer. She says: I will use my nose and my tongue and my teeth. I will feel until I know what to do. And that is what Sara Kasp did.
It was dark when she stole down the long road and back through the streets of the town and climbed through her window. Inside her room a lamp burned and her mother was sitting in the chair by the bed with folded cloth on her lap.
Where were you? said her mother. My sister saw you, Greta Dammersen saw you, Hayden Bost saw you. Where did you go? What were you doing all day while we broke stones in the sun?
Sara Kasp thought of how little she had done and how much.
Her mother’s face paled. She bunched the cloth with her hands, yards of cloth, white as limestone.
She said: I told your father you were sick in your bed. I lied to your father. But tomorrow you must come back to the quarry. There’s work to be done, and it’s harder work with fewer to do it. You know that I lost seven children.
Sara Kasp said: Yes mother, I know. This was a story her mother would tell. She had told it before sitting in that very chair by Sara Kasp’s bed.
Her mother said: Two went blue in the cradle, one got spots, one drank milk and swelled up. One exhaled in my arms and I shook him and shook him. One jumped out of my arms and hit wrong on the ground. One pulled down the stew pot and boiled.
Sara Kasp went to her mother and touched her shoulder.
Her mother said: I used to think I was cursed, cursed by Broc and Dell Cark. The trouble began when we got their share of the quarry. Broc Cark accused your father of buying votes on the council. Your father said that Broc Cark was unfit and the whole town had decided. They fought on the green, until Broc Cark, ran, hissing threats. After, I didn’t know a moment’s peace. One night I couldn’t sleep. I went to the front of the house and opened the door. Dell Cark was standing right there. When she saw me, she smiled. For years, nothing was right. There was fever in town. The water went bad in the wells. It rained for a month and mud slid down the mountain and buried the quarry and we had to dig through the mud. These were dark times in the town, but they were the darkest for us, for your father and me. But then it ended. It ended the day those two were struck down in the road.
You should sleep, said Sara Kasp.
Her mother smoothed the cloth in her lap. Her hands were large, fingers thickened, with knots at the joints, but she could still ply a needle and thread. She stood.
There’s your dress to sew, she said. It’s night work.
Mother, said Sara Kasp and her mother turned in the doorway. With father, said Sara Kasp: at the well—was your stone white or black?
White, said her mother. Of course, it was white.
Sara Kasp went down the next day to the quarry, and the next, and the next. The first night of these days Herda Lomm came to speak to Sara Kasp’s mother. Supper had been cleared from the table and the table piled with cloth.
Sara Kasp’s mother said: I can’t stop sewing to greet you. There’s too little time. Sara, bring your aunt a cup of hyssop tea and bring her your father’s chair. Jorn has taken our cart to the blacksmith. We found just this evening that both axles have broken. It’s as though someone sawed through the iron.
Herda Lomm waved away Sara Kasp, the cup and the chair.
Lisle, said Herda Lomm. That’s strange and now listen: My paper cut outs are gone. I had each readied to the last string and dowel, but they’re missing from the back room of the shop.
Sara Kasp’s mother looked up at her sister, and Sara Kasp looked between the two women and thought for the first time how they had the same face, but her mother’s was blunted, or her aunt’s had been sharpened.
Her mother said: Was nothing else taken?
Nothing, said Herda Lomm. Not a coin from the till. But the box, the puppet theater I built, it was smashed into pieces.
She said to Sara Kasp: The show for your wedding is spoiled.
Sara Kasp said: Surely the wedding can wait?
Her mother’s scissors flashed through the cloth.
Her mother said only: No.
It was my best show, said Herda Lomm. Shall I tell you the story? You can imagine the box is right here, the theater, and the paper figures moving inside. Can you imagine?
Sara Kasp’s mother bent over the scissors. Sara Kasp sat in her father’s chair.
Herda Lomm said: A woman is to be married to a good man, the hardest worker in town, but she loves another, a man so lazy he leaves his lettuce to flower. This second man does not come to claim her, so she marries the first. At the wedding feast, the townspeople eat and drink and toast the bride and the groom. Then the shopkeeper’s wife wheels her box onto the green and the townspeople leave the high table and sit on the grass and they watch. While they watch, the bride steals away. The bride runs up the long road toward the man that she loves and sees to her joy that he is running to meet her. But the groom saw her leave and with the other good men of the town he pursues her. Into the pines, cries the bride to her lover, and they run through the pines and reach a small clearing. The lover says, we’ll hide in that well, and they run to the well, and the lover leaps in but the bride turns and looks over her shoulder. Her pursuers are calling her name, and among the voices she hears the voice of the groom, and of her mother and father, and she sees them break through the pines. She tries to leap in the well but the well is a stump. The groom pulls from the stump a woodcutter’s axe. He says, I cut this tree down to build us our house. There in the clearing is the house the groom built, a sturdy, neat house, all white block and stout beam, with other stumps all around. The bride and groom go into the house and the curtain comes down.
Sara Kasp said nothing. Then she asked: The townspeople in the show, what show do they watch?
Herda Lomm said: The same show. I made the same figures but smaller.
Sara Kasp asked: And the show in that show?
Herda Lomm’s face grew sharper but then she sighed and looked tired.
She said: There is no third show. The third box is empty.
She gripped the brooch at the throat of her dress. She said: Anyway, it’s all gone.
The night of the second day, Josep Hoit, the baker, came to speak with Sara Kasp’s father. Supper was still on the table, and Josep Hoit said: I’m sorry. You’re eating your supper.
Sit down, said Sara Kasp’s father. Sara, give him your chair.
Josep Hoit said: I can’t be long. My ovens are lit. I have bad news to give you. Today I opened the barrel of flour and a thousand moths flew up in the air, more moths than I’ve seen, and no flour left in the barrel. I opened the ice chest. The chest was cold as the winter, but the butter has turned. I took the eggs from the shelf, and the eggs are all empty with tiny holes in the top of each shell.
Sara Kasp’s father laid down his fork and his knife. His black beard, though he’d washed, was here and there whitened by limestone.
He said: If I bring you a sack of limestone well ground can you use it as flour?
Josep Hoit laughed.
Jorn Kasp, he said, you’re a quarryman through and through. You want me to bake stone cakes for the feast? And how will they rise? If you’ll wait until I go back to the market, I can fetch more flour and fresh butter and eggs.
We must, said Sara Kasp. What else can we do?
But her father said: Cakes or no cakes, we won’t wait. There’s new ground to break in Hayden Bost’s field, and rumors of merchants on their way to the valley to bid on stone for a palace. They have money to buy every block we can sell.
Josep Hoit said: I can make candies with sugar and water and mint. I can glaze whatever fruits I still have in my crates. I don’t doubt I can fill the long table. It will be a strange banquet. But if you won’t wait . . .
And Sara Kasp’s father said: We won’t.
The night of the third day, Sara Kasp pulled the chair in her room to the window. She lifted the sash. Part of the moon had been sliced away and more stars had come out.
She said: Tomorrow I’m going to marry.
She got up from the chair and looked at the dress her mother had arranged on her bed, wide and white. She saw her mother’s scissors beside it. She picked up the scissors and cut the dress into shreds.
In the story a cloud at this moment passes over the moon. The light behind the paper figures goes out. It’s dark for some time. Then Sara Kasp hears a scream on the other side of her door and one more and then nothing. In the front room of the house, she finds the table turned over and her father’s chair on its side. Blood has been flung all around. In a pool of blood on the floor lies her father with a hole for an eye, and in a pool of blood right beside him lies her mother with a hole in her chest. She kneels between them and she sees Carrick Cark.
He says: Sara Kasp, is this your doing?
She lifts the scissors. Her fingers barely fit in the slender loop handles. The long blades are closed and taper to a wicked point.
She says, no, and the blades of the scissors come open as she tries to shake free the handles but they are tight as two rings.
She says: Carrick Cark is it yours?
He says: Let me tell you a story.
A goose loved a cat who loved only her feathers, which he plucked to fill the fine pillows he sold at the fair. The cat cut the cloth for the pillows in all shapes and sizes. For comfort and beauty, they could not be matched. The queen of the land slept with the cat’s very best pillow under her head, a round silk pillow, all white, with lavender stitching of the face of the moon. Every month, the cat plucked the goose to the skin, but for her very last feather, and every month the goose’s feathers grew back. Soon they were rich, the goose and the cat, and their fame spread far and wide. The emperor himself commissioned a pillow that changed always its shape and was soft as a cloud. This required the cat work day and night sewing this silk panel to that, making folds within folds, and when it came time for the filling, the cat saw that he needed every one of the goose’s gray feathers, even to the very last one. If you take my last feather you know that I’ll die, said the goose. It’s the feather that pins my heart in my chest. The cat heard the emperor’s riders thundering down the long road. His pillow lay on the table unfinished. Even so it was a wonder to behold. The cat had woven the silk himself, woven it of so many threads arrayed in so many directions the grain of the cloth kept shifting and shifting and the pillow itself changed shape just as the emperor desired. But for that one feather, the pillow would be soft as a cloud. It was the cat’s finest work. The cat heard the emperor’s horses snorting outside the front door. He seized the goose’s last feather and tugged. The feather came out and quick as thought he sewed it inside the pillow and sewed up the hole in the casing. The pillow was ready. He brought it out to the riders who carried between them a chest on long poles and they exclaimed over the pillow as they set it inside. They gave the cat a list of new orders from a dozen Imperial princes. When the cat went into the house, he looked at the goose. Dearest, he said. You’re alive! She still had one feather in her chest, small and shining and silver. It had been hidden by the other. So that feather wasn’t the last, said the cat, and he smiled with relief. We have a dozen more orders to fill, said the cat. But at that, the goose pulled out her last feather and put it through the cat’s eye. Then her heart fell out of her chest and she died.
Sara Kasp says: I can imagine the goose and the cat, both made of paper, sliding side to side on long strings.
She thinks: Is that the third show? But no, the third box is empty.
And the dark box inside her, where she locked the true Sara Kasp, fearful and weak—is that box now empty?
Carrick Cark gently slips the scissor’s loop handles over her knuckles. He lays the scissors in the blood on the floor. He says: Now we’ll have to go quickly.
They started out then from the house, and ran through the streets, and as they ran they heard murmurs behind them and the sound of doors swinging open and raised voices and Sara Kasp heard a woman cry out. The woman cried: Sara Kasp! and the cry was taken up and passed from throat to throat.
They reached the long road, and Sara Kasp ran to the right and Carrick Cark to the left. Their clasped hands held fast in a grip that made the bones grate.
This way, said Sara Kasp. To the right, the long road ran down out of the valley. The limestone blocks traveled that direction in carts. Where the valley widened, another road ran east to west, through the plains, to the coasts. To the left, the long road ran up the valley to Carrick Cark’s house in the pines, and there ended, and the mountains rose and the forests were pathless. But maybe Carrick Cark knew a way through the forest?
This way, he said.
Sara Kasp heard Gravin Dammersen’s voice. He was on the road beside her, and other quarrymen behind him, and Carrick Cark pulled her hand and they were running again, running up the long road.
When the story is told at night on the green, there is a light in the box and the stones are cut out of paper. Small stones move in front of the light, so many that it goes dark in the box.
Sara Kasp is running up the valley and the valley is dark and the townspeople are running behind her. She hears the voices of quarrymen shouting, the voices of her mother and father, her own child’s voice shouting and shouting, and the road beneath her feet seems to shake as she runs.
What do you feel? says Carrick Cark in her ear. She feels his breath on her ear and his hand in her hand and than she feels less than that, less heat and less weight. They run faster and faster.
Once a woman died in the night on the road in the town. She was walking under the stars. She was walking with a man. They were to be married the very next day. Then she died on the road. The man knew it was no fault of his own. He was afraid he’d be blamed, and he carried her body into the pines where a house had burned down and he dropped her body into the well. She ran away, he said to her mother and father. I saw her go down the road with a man, a tall man, in a green coat. And her mother and father said: How could she? Our daughter? We’ll forget that we named her, that we ever called a daughter by name.
That’s one story told at night on the green, about whom who can say? No one remembers.
Sara Kasp still comes down to the town from the pines and opens up windows and takes little girls from their cradles. I can tell you she raises them well.