He looks at where I've tapped. Then he walks to the orange flag and pulls it from the ground. Walks back. Pushes it into the soil exactly where my boot was.
I go back to my sketchbook. He goes back to reading the hill.
We walk down together when the light shifts to afternoon.
He looks at me. "Come to the workshop," he says.
"When?"
"Tomorrow." A pause. "Morning's better. The light's better."
I write down the address he gives me, which I didn't need to write down because I'd already looked him up. I write it down because I want him to see I'm taking it seriously.
He drives away in a truck that's as old as it is dirty. I stand on Ridgeline Road with my sketchbook and look up at the hill.
That's how we begin.
two
Flint
Thequarryworkshopatseven in the morning is the best version of any place I know. The light comes over the east ridge and hits the stone face in a way that shows you everything — every fault line, every vein of quartz, every place where the rock wants to give and every place it won't. You learn more about a stone in morning light than you do in an afternoon with a chisel.
I go into the workshop. The Jamie stone is there in the corner. It's been there for three months, covered with a drop cloth, and every morning I walk past it and most mornings I don't take the cloth off. It's a piece of gray-green granite from the east face of the quarry, a piece I set aside two weeks after the fire because I knew even then that it was the right stone, the right weight and color and quality of light in the grain. I've been waiting for the right moment to start cutting it, and three months of waiting has told me I don't know what the right moment looks like.
I take the cloth off this morning. I look at the stone for a while. Then I put the cloth back on and go to meet whoever's coming up the drive.
Her car is a Subaru with a roof rack and mud up the sides from roads she's clearly taken off-route. Ivy hops out, her dark hair catching the sunlight. She has a canvas bag in one hand and her sketchbook in the other.
"The workshop first," I say. "Then I can show you the quarry face if you want to see where the stone comes from."
The workshop is the converted office from when Matthewson Stoneworks was just quarrying — my father's operation and his father's before that, before I took it in a different direction. The floor is stone I laid myself, gray-green from the same vein as the memorial stone, polished enough to be practical. The walls have tools hung on them: chisels, points, pitching tools, a set of tooth chisels for texture work, the pneumatic equipment along the far wall. There are current projects at various stages: a custom kitchen surround for a house up the valley, two grave markers for a cemetery up north, a garden sculpture commissioned by someone who wants something abstract and has trusted me to figure out what that means.
She walks through it slowly. She doesn't touch anything without looking at me first, which I notice.
I show her the portfolio binder — photographs of the memorial pieces I've done over twelve years. Not all of them. The ones that worked the way I wanted them to. She sits at the worktable and goes through them without rushing, and I go back to the surroundings and work while she looks. She's quiet the whole time. Good quiet. The kind that isn't waiting for something to fill it.
Then she stops.
I know she's stopped because the sound of turning pages stops. I look up. She's at a photograph about two-thirds of the way through the binder.
"This one," she says.
It's the garden for a fisherman's family on the east coast. I did it eight years ago — a commission I nearly turned down because it was too far. The wife called me a million times before I said yes. The installation is a flat disc of local slate, embedded in the ground at the top of a cliff where her husband used to fish, surrounded by whatever grew there naturally — I didn't plant anything, I just cleared and levelled and let the ground do what it was going to do. In the center of the slate disc I carved one word:Here. That's all.
I walk to the table. She's studying it. I can see what she's looking at — not the stone itself but the plants that have come in around it in the photograph, two years after installation. Grasses, sea campion, a volunteer buddleia in the upper left that nobody planted.
"The plants aren't from your design," she says.
"No."
"They're from hers. The cliffs. Whatever was already in the seed bank of the soil."
"Yes."
She's quiet. Then: "You understand that some grief doesn't want to be resolved."
I look at her. She's still looking at the photograph.
