Lambsquarters (30 page)

It took a day to fill both walls, to mix and pitch and level, and to stand back and admire this pristine stripe, white against the grungy grey of the old plaster that had been papered so many times without ever seeing the light. Papered and papered and painted over to obscure any whisper from the ghosts of the original plasterers.

My trowel got little rest after its initiation. Jack posts in the basement raised the centre of the house about the height of a hand, cracking the walls above the doors, leaving huge gaping holes and piles of plaster on the floor. Mouse holes (arches I thought existed only in cartoons) appeared under the layers of pasted wallpaper, and more than once my trowel’s work was defeated next day by squatter’s rights.

By spring I was trowelling outside, pointing stone foundations and bricks, and digging in earth rich in nutrients, ready for flowers and fruits. The stonework was haphazard, required a different kind of muck, and the bricks have a trowel of their own, a narrow pen-sized instrument, curved to snug the space between the rows, ooze out the excess and cut it off with an edge. Small beer.

I have had countless garden trowels, cheap metal objects, painted white or green or yellow, with plastic or wooden handles, wide blades or narrow. For years I replaced them as I ruined them. Some succumbed at first thrust, first tilt. Trowels are not levers. I tried plastic blades (they don’t penetrate), soft handles (they bend), narrow shafts (they collapse). Then I bought the perfect trowel. It was forged steel, expensive, strong, trusty. Its blade was slim but not anorexic; its handle solid but not rough. It was my twin all spring: where I went in the garden, it came too.

During the long days of spring, starting right after morning chores when the sun rises early and the dew sinks into thirsty ground, I follow the dandelion roots down to their underworld, passing the three-headed Cerberus of dog bur, dogbane and dog grass. The dog bur is the best. It’s sticky and prickly but has an easy root to lift. Dog bane is woody and puts up a tough resistance. Dog grass is the worst. Its roots weave an impenetrable and unending subterranean labyrinth. A Heraclean task.

Morning weeding and afternoon planting. When the sun is soft and the earth warm, my trowel makes the hole, mounding earth aside. I water, place and plant, tamp with the back of the blade, scoop the fresh soil in place, move to the next. Pungent basil, reeking tomatoes, and hot peppers, which dare me to touch my face, the trowel settles them all in their rows. Distant neighbours who will grow into intimate friends.

By evening, when the blackflies swarm and the light wanes, I take my pail, my pots, my trowel to the tap and rinse and park them for another day.

One morning, my perfect trowel was gone. Vanished. Thomas had been mortaring by the tap. He’d put in a new window well, moved rocks back, dug a trench, poured cement, smoothed, flattened with his mason’s tool, mortared new rock sides into place with skill. The job had taken weeks and had somehow swallowed my trowel. Trowelled it in. Like a time capsule, or an interment, or a pomegranate mistakenly eaten. It was gone, never to surface again with no one to bargain for its release. I’ve never found another like it.

THE STONE TROWELS
are never idle in season. Their work began with Grant Mather, a stonemason with long hair and a penchant for Earl Grey tea. He laboured one summer on the barn courtyard, rebuilding a wall that something didn’t love. Rubble and promise, remnants of its former life as foundation, the
stones and mortar lay in ruin, cannoned, crumbled, humbled and low. And Grant, who but for an
i
and an
e
would be the rock itself, spread his tools amongst the wildflowers
(Mather
meaning “camomile”) and slowly brought the wall back from death. He split, he placed, he eyed and he smoked. He butted his joints in the mortar and carefully sealed their tombs. He taught me to mix, to point and to place. He taught Thomas to split, to lift, to design. He taught us the physics and the aesthetics. And, oh, the trowels! Tiny mortaring trowel babies, spoon-sized, butter-knifed. Large capacious trowels, hungry for the hod. Grant spread his perfect mix and the stones grew from rubble into a mural of pinks and greys, purples and greens.

I followed his teaching, learned my lessons, took my wheelbarrow to the sand pile, shovelled in the mix, added water in small amounts. Too little water makes the mortar grainy, dry and unmanageable; too much and you have a slurry. Mortar should feel like snow on the shovel. The trowel cuts down and lifts, forms a liquid edge around a tight pack of muck. It comes off the forehand like a shuttlecock, sails through the air with a flick of the wrist and lands in the crevice, a perfect score.

The following summer was mine. I had my own sand pile, my own trowel, a whole barn foundation to point, inside and out. The bank side is underground, but inside is a solid rock face, stones outlined with the
empty holes and spaces of mortar past. On the hottest days, the stones were cool. Sheltered from the sun, wedged against the dark earth to the north, they waited calmly with a cold dignity to be redefined, reglued, renewed with fresh mortar, with the gentle stroke of the trowel. I hosed them down, flushed out the crumbling bits of cement and straw, the grains of sand and dirt, and began my pitch and throw. I got in a few backhands and side-swipes, and mastered the art of the tool. The west wall with outside exposure I saved for early fall, when the sun was low and less intense and warmed my back in the afternoons. I worked in patches, mortaring deep, returning to point, then back once again to finish the smooth edge, determined that no crevice would be left to hold water, allow frost to enter, or crack and attack the wall, sending it tumbling to Frost’s condition.

The west wall extends into the barnyard, evidence of the original bigger barn. It sloped with decay, its outer edge eroded to one big situpon rock. I repaired the wall gently, leaving the slope, filling the holes, capping the top. But one summer the mature John Deere tractor, steered by the youngest Harris son, connected the manure spreader with the wall and the spreader won. It cracked the mortar and loosened the rock. The situpon, also used as a mountain path by agile lambs, became treacherous.

Grant was gone by now—moved to a rockier riding—and I called another mason to help. He never
came. So one day Thomas eyed the rubble, decried the danger, took up the trowel and began the repair. He revelled in the combination of brute strength, physics, geometry and artistry required to build with stone. He gathered special specimens, chose them for their colour, texture and tone, and brought them from distant parts of the farm. He hauled rocks high into the air with hands he hadn’t known he had. And too soon the wall was finished.

By fall he’d found a new venue: the bottom of the Sidefield, more than two rods long. He commenced to dig and gather material for a roadside stone fence. Rock piles everywhere were in danger of depletion; favourite stones, jumping and stepping stones disappeared and were replaced with fresh earth and small seedlings of trefoil. Magic stones, monster stones, round rocks and mound rocks seemingly grew legs and took themselves to the site, nestled in to wait for placement, hoped for an outside spot, gave up their moss.

The foundation hole was so big it took a ready-mix truck to fill it. This was to be a serious wall. Levels and plumb lines, stone splitters and hammers, steel-toed boots and crowbars appeared at the scene, and after the first course was placed, out came the mortar and trowel.

The wall grew on two sides and two ends. The middle was a dump for rubble rocks, rejects in size, those bits that broke off in the glacier, got rounded in the crush. They were gathered by the barrowful, tipped
into the goo and trowelled in, globful after globful, sounding
thunk
as they went. Not beautiful, these rocks, settled in between the glorious carapace of granite and limestone, conglomerate and quartz, but they formed a solid skeleton nevertheless, the backbone of the wall, hidden, veiled, but vertebral in strength and substance.

The wall rose in courses, rows of rocks that were chosen to harmonize with their neighbours, not just to east and west, but also above and below. And it was slow, cerebral work. Much of the planning weighed as Thomas leaned on the end of the crowbar. He took careful measure of mass and force, surface and density, shade and hue. The gargantuan rocks were moved with magic, with faith, with smoke and mirrors, with the help of our son, now solid himself and tall and strong and capable of shifting great weights. With the crowbar, some boards, the wheelbarrow, and the brilliant use of an old wooden ladder, propped on the morphing structure to convey massive boulders up, against gravity, a rung at a time. Higher and higher the wall grew. Mortar disappeared as fast as snow in May, was swallowed by the wall like rain by parched earth slaking its thirst. And always the trowel flicked, filled, flattened, tamped and trimmed until the summit was attained and the mortar cap went on. From mounded top to flat bottom, the trowel stamped the wall as done, curbed its growth and sealed its fate.

Thomas had another mentor mason, a neighbour up the road. He was a philosopher by profession, a painter by talent and a stone builder by inclination. He created the most whimsical of structures. He made a garden wall that is full of holes, and a pentagonal secular abbey with local rock, broken tombstones and antique carved lintels. He niched the two-storey abbey with treasures and filled it with art. His
pigeonnier
, constructed on stone stilts, supports a sculptured blend of a bird in flight and a fish. Beaked in front and fan-tailed behind, it swims in a cerulean wooden frame painted to blend with the sky. He taught Thomas how to scavenge for stone. He taught patience and colour and form. His counsel was firm, his praise was scant and his opinion is now just a memory, for he died too soon. The medieval alchemists would be astonished to see what he created. The fabled philosopher’s stone, which turns all base metals into gold, was his secret. But he was not a secretive man, and he shared his skills. Stone creations sprouted all over the township under his tutelage. One of them is Thomas’s wall at the bottom of our lane.

ONE LATE FALL DAY
I went to the wall, which was not yet finished, but put away for the season, and saw rust on the rock. It had been bloodied when a boulder had dropped on Thomas’s hand, splitting his finger like a sausage. Blood had filled my own fair mason’s
glove and had spilled onto his boots and his art, his creation of unyielding stone. He stormed into the house unable to speak, unable to look at the damage he had done, unable to feel the pain of the crush or to reconcile the danger. Our daughter, grown and calm and competent, had taken over the kitchen to cook the meal, a celebratory dinner turned meaningless as I drove Thomas at speed to town where the young medic soothed his pain as she stitched him together, saved his face and his hand.

Now, seeing the remnant of his life’s blood still on the rock, I decided to pay homage to this wall, this shell of a wall-to-be. I secretly fetched my garden trowel and a basket full of bulbs. Spreading the leaves, I dug on both sides of the wall and dropped scilla, grape hyacinth and crocus roadward, and daffodils, which the sheep won’t eat, on the field side. Carefully replacing the leaves with my trowel, I mused on the mixture of mortar and earth, blood and sweat, the meeting of trowels at this structure. It rises now as a measure of the solidity of this place. I planted my bulbs as a sacrifice to its stature and as an offering to its builder.

This is the sublime: the simplicity of the tools and the intensity of their creations.

STILES

WALLS AND FENCES,
boundaries and barriers keep things in. And out. They form aesthetic lines, staffs of meandering music in cedar rails or solid rock foundations in the stones of our land. Fences suggest entry by invitation only. Unless, of course, you are a bird or a seed wafting over, a snake slithering through, or a blade of grass rooting sideways to the other side. The stone fence is bordered by a gate into the Sidefield, is amenable to climbing, sitting and walking. It harbours sempervivum, lichen and the promise of vine.