Underneath the Overburden

Within our blood move spirals of genetic inclinations bobbing like old messages in bottles cast into the sea: when I was eleven or twelve and scribbling out some kind of theme, I mentioned that I wanted to become a writer and a stonemason; the teacher asked whether I didn’t mean writer or geologist. I didn’t, and she thought the combination unlikely, but then neither she nor I knew about Robinson Jeffers. When I became the one, I didn’t entirely forget the other but subsumed it by laying amateurish rock walls here and about from time to time. One day my father mentioned that his great-grandfather had transposed the Old Testament into couplets, a task that sounded so appalling to me that I got curious about the man, my only forebear ever to make a dollar by writing. I went in search of him, David Grayston, and found an English immigrant who earned his way into the West by doing stonework on the Erie Canal; I came across evidence that he descended from people who, for generations, had worked with a gray semiprecious stone found in Yorkshire—hence the name Grayston.

I followed his trail deep into the Ozark hills and eventually came across a woman nearly a century old who remembered Grayston’s accent and the stone troughs and herbal remedies he made and sold from his wagon; later I found a copy of some lyrics he wrote, ones accepted by the Missouri legislature as the state song; but his biblical versification I’ve not yet seen. Having discovered this fellow of rocks and words, I felt I’d fished out and uncorked one of the bottles bobbing in my bloodstream, and David Grayston’s message was: My pen and chisel, their marks are upon you.

I went in search of other occupations of forebears on my English and Irish sides. Not one of them followed any field that I have utterly no capacity for or at least interest in: no mathematicians, electricians, mortgage bankers. Now, I confess there is room for error here, since, if any of us goes back just twenty-five generations, say to the time of Chaucer, standing behind us are two parents and sixty-seven-million-and-some grandparents. Still, I like to think that in a cultural way ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny, and I believe that I would never have written this book without a stonecutting, versifying great-great-grandfather. Perhaps I’d never have written at all, and surely I’d never have sought out this particular piece of prairie, because, after the thrall of the grassland itself, the thing that lured me here was stone architecture: the adroitly laid rocks of the courthouse, the Cedar Point mill, and the bridges, banks, homes, fences, cattle chutes. Once I came to understand that these things were only one expression of what undergirded the place—geologically, biologically, and historically—then my quest turned toward the bones of the land, toward the hard seed from which this prairie and its peoples grow. Whenever we enter the land, sooner or later we pick up the scent of our own histories, and when we begin to travel vertically, we end up following road maps in the marrow of our bones and in the thump of our blood.

I can’t say that these notions were consciously before me as I walked around the quarry five miles up the much bent Middle Creek Road in the southwest corner of the quadrangle, but they were bobbing around somewhere inside, and they eventually led me to a question, which led me to Mac Stilley. The quarry, named Thut’s (pronounced Toots), on the topo map looks remarkably like the muscular arm of a stoneworker bent at the elbow, fist clenched, biceps flexed, ready to wield an invisible hammer. The works hook around a low ridge between Collett and Middle creeks, and from the road you see not the cut hill but massive rectangles of rock stacked high and suggesting Stonehenge under construction. Because the ledge of the Cottonwood formation in Chase slopes gradually up to break through the surface, building-stone pits are commonly shallow, and they little disfigure the terrain. Typically, three to four feet of overburden, a dark and granular soil, must be removed to reach the flat beds that form naturally regular fault-lines a quarryman will use when he slabs off his big blocks. In the best exposures, like the one in the Middle Creek quarry, the ledge is so evenly thick it looks like poured concrete five feet deep. As a countian said, That Cottonwood rock’s just waiting to become a building: about all you need to do is to set it up and run in the plumbing. The stone, exceptionally uniform in color, largely free of holes and veins and flint nodules, seems to be composed almost entirely of fusulinids, fossils that reveal the bed was laid down in deep water rather than in the more shallow and warmer seas of other formations here. Its nature and distinctive qualities as building stone are a result of its parentage and later ancestral forces that literally came to bear on it.

Thut’s quarry has been inactive for some time, and these stacks of stone, removed from the ledge years ago to await dimensional cutting, form a labyrinth with walls rising eight feet above my head and narrow lanes twisting and often turning into dead ends with only a couple leading through to the other side.

I walked those passages one afternoon, my curiosity balanced by unease as I imagined my footsteps jarring a stack loose to squash me like a bug between two fallen bricks. The blocks are of such size that big flatbed trailer trucks can carry only a couple of the smaller ones at a time. I made a sharp turn and came into a hidden chamber where, out of the wind, the December sun warmed the enclosed air and struck a golden light against the stones as if to heat them with color. A sanctum. I sat down, made notes, scouted the sky with my binoculars. Across from me I noticed a prophylactic, and I wondered what that would be like in here, lovers hidden in a maze cut from the ancient seminal sea.

I walked out of the meanders and followed a path to a ledge of living rock, the place where the last quarryman apparently stopped work. At my feet and running ten yards as true as a meridian was a quarter-inch fracture centered on a drill hole the size of a silver dollar. Although Chase quarrymen often remove blocks in the traditional way—sledge and wedge—this fracture resulted from explosives. The configuration was utterly simple, a line and a dot, , like a musical note bestrung on its staff, a lone pearl on a strand: I couldn’t take my eyes from it. Nothing in the quarry so revealed the skill of the worker who had packed in a charge and, effortlessly and almost silently, broken off whole a big and splendid thirty-ton rectangle of the 250-million-year-old ocean.

I sat and looked at it and wondered whether there was any chance that the man who had made it was still alive, still in the county, still capable of speaking about the old craft of shooting stone. I went off in search. (When I told this story to a friend, a fellow who also loves stone and of whom I’ll speak later, he said, You were looking for old David Grayston. But I don’t think so, although I may have been hunting his strong and elemental craft and his sense of stone, because it was those that drew me to this simple configuration of hole and cleft.)

I drove to the Falls and began asking around, and I got sent back up the highway, until I ended up in Elmdale, which sits at the bottom of the Middle Creek Road. I went to a small frame house, old and worn and almost hidden by big ricks of carefully cut and stacked cordwood: slippery elm, hackberry, ash. A woman, looking sorrowful, answered the door, and I explained my mission, and she thought about it and then let me in.

Now: the closed room, dark but for a dim ceiling bulb, is thick with heat and the scent of humanity and burning logs in the old stove. The woman disappears, and I stand confused in the oppression of warmth and obscurity, and I can scarcely make things out in the small and heaped-up room; then a low, umbral Ozark voice from a comer, You alookin for me? I can just discern a slumped form in a chair, and I tell the shadow I’m hunting the Middle Creek quarryman, and the darkness says, I done the last work, and I done the first. I shot that whole quairy. I’ve found my man: McClory Stilley.

He switches on a small lamp that illuminates him only from the chest down. He wears denim coveralls, the left pant leg folded up at the knee and safety-pinned near his hip. On the small table by his worn chair is a peach can of tools, a pocket watch, a penknife, a pipe, a tin of tobacco, a pack of cigarettes, a coffee-can ashtray, and an old radio that must have once carried the voices of Fred Allen and Fibber McGee. We speak a few things, and he says pull up a chair, no use standing, things like this take some time, and I move a rung-back chair close in front of him, his knee nearly touching mine. In expectation, he raises himself a little, prepares himself, and the slowness in his voice disappears. My eyes adjust: I can see a long and wearied face, gaunt, and gray hair cropped close. He says he is sixty-five. I used to be a better worker than I am now. I’ve had fourteen surgeries: I’m cut up all over. In the veterans’ hospital, they had my heart completely out on the table, and they rebuilt it and put in all new leaders. I’ve had heart attacks for three or four men: you’re alookin at man come from the grave. Circulation problems: good blood but bad pipes. Sometimes of a night I reach down to rub my left leg, and the only thing down there is the pain. But I’m still ahangin on, still split my own farwood and run my tractor and keep the lot mowed across the street, where they have the Fourth of fuly picnic. I take care of the volunteer far trucks: start them up once a week. I guess I been very fortunately. Several times over the next couple of hours he will use that phrase.

Mac holds his cigarette between his thumb and index finger and, with his darkened little finger, knocks the ash into the coffee can. He’s telling me he was born in Arkansas, Eureka Springs, grew up on a farm, took work in an Ozark quarry in the late thirties, learned the trade. He says, First machinery I run was a sledgehammer: one man held and turned the drill—a churn drill—and two of us hit it with sledges. That was to make the hole for the black powder, and that’s where I learned to shoot rock. I come into Kansas in the fifties and up here in nineteen-and-sixty-two, and a few years later they opened that quairy up on Thut’s. That’s as good a Cottonwood rock as you’ll find, and I shot it all, but most of the quairies here was plug-and-feather work.

In a series of shallow holes drilled along a line, the quarryman puts in steel shims, the feathers, on each side of a wedge or plug, and then taps them tighter and tighter up and down the line and then stands back as if waiting for the first kernel to pop, and suddenly, if he’s done the work right, a narrow fracture opens along the length of the aligned holes, and the stone can be lifted out. But the method Mac practiced is different: After you’ve catted off the dirt over the ledge and took your air hose and blowed the rock clean, you find how the seam is arunnin, and you take your straight-edge and square and draw your lines to the size the boss wants. Up at Middle Crick we used a jackhammer to make the powder holes—takes about five minutes to make a four-foot-deep hole to near that natural seam you find in Cottonwood rock. You angle down. Then you put your reamer on the jackhammer and drive it down and pull it, and you’ve got them wings that gives the direction to your break. He takes a pencil and draws the reamed hole: . Then you clean out the dust, load in the black powder and the fuse, and tamp it tight with rock and dust. That’s it.

I ask whether he completely filled the holes with explosive to break something so big, and he says, If it’s gravel you’re awantin. No, you put a little in the palm of your hand—say, a tablespoonful, that’s all—gauge it more or less dependin on the size and grade of the rock. Now, if you load her a little too heavy, she’ll snap right in two or break some other wrong way. Since strippin down to the ledge is the most expensive part of things, you don’t want to ruin too much rock.

He seems to shuffle off a few years and take on the strength and the mind of a rockman one more time. I ask, isn’t it dangerous? and he says, I never used matches. I used a Camel cigarette—nothin works better. There’s no danger in it atall if a man knows how to read his seams and use his powder and takes his own cautions. A course, I was always very fortunately.

We talk for a while about shooting rock, Mac sometimes drawing a device or technique to explain, and he is pleased to be considered competent and knowledgeable although it has been a dozen years since he last put a Camel to a bunch of fuses and watched a ledge open up like a big old watermelon. We talk about all the churches, schools, banks, even the Eisenhower Library at Abilene, each constructed of rock he’d shot, and I tell him I’ve read about Chase stone going to build the statehouse in Topeka, a reformatory, two military posts, three Kansas courthouses, four Missouri River bridges, a hundred Santa Fe Railroad bridges between Chicago and Albuquerque, a cathedral in San Francisco.

I ask how he figures limestone is created, and he says, hardly pausing, I been told in my period of life, at one time this here was all under water, but, a course, I wouldn’t have no way aknowin whether that’s right or wrong, and I ask whether he thinks it’s right, and he says, One time up there at Middle Crick, I shot a block, and when the forklift picked it up, in the rock they was a petrified fish—twenty-two, twenty-three inches long—it looked like a big old catfish. I didn’t think much of it, but the men that was aworkin for me was just about carried away. They couldn’t get over that fish abein in the rock. We run into a couple of others. I never did keep one, but I think Harvey Stark took one home. I know it’s somethin you won’t never run into very often. You ask me, and I’d say that was a normal fish when it went in there, and whatever caused the rocks to be where they’re at, that’s what petrified him in there. This rock—Mother Nature put it here—it come here—it was here—I don’t know. But it’d be quite a history.

He’s uncomfortable that he can’t pencil a diagram to explain fish in rocks for me, but he knows what I’m asking of him, and he puts down his cigarette and stokes his pipe the better to help recollection, tamps it down precisely as he must have done his powder, and then puts the Camel to the briar bowl and transfers the fire, and he says, I’ll tell you what I liked: when you take one of them rocks out, you know when you walk down on that bare ground you’re the only man alive that’s walked there that people knows about.

I ask how he felt about quarry work, and he says, I was very well interested in it. It raised my kids, montained my family. You might say I’ve got a lot of that limestone rock in my veins. He’s watching to see whether his answers are satisfactory, and he’s edgy that they might be insufficient. Limestone is somethin you get interested in and somethin you learn to like, and then you become part of it. You know every move to make: just how to mark it off, drill it, load it, shoot it, and then you see a real straight break, and you feel good. If they’s some quairymen that says nobody can shoot more than a couple of blocks at a time, and you shoot thirty in front of their eyes, that gives you a feelin you cain’t explain, and I done it.

When I get up to put my chair back by the stove, he says, I got more time if you need it, and I say, when it warms up, how about a trip to Thut’s quarry to show me how to shoot rock, and he says he’ll do that. But in June, Mac died. A month later when I passed the quarry again, I stopped and went back to the figure , and I thought of it as his epitaph, one scribed in the last block he shot, now cleaved and wonderfully squared, the ground beneath not yet having taken the first footfall of man. When that step would occur was only a question of time: Mac’s Cottonwood rock was ready for somebody sometime, waiting only for the plumbing.