BEN Then one night when I was thinking of nothing at all he was suddenly there before me so plain I could have touched him.
Papaw materializes out of the fog upstage just at the edge of the headstones. He is naked.
BEN He came out of the darkness and at that moment everything seemed revealed to me and I could almost touch him I could almost touch his old black head and he was naked and I could see the corded muscles in his shoulders that the stone had put there and the sinews and the veins in his forearms and his small belly and his thin old man's shanks and his slender polished shins and he was so very beautiful. He was just a man, naked and alone in the universe, and he was not afraid and I wept with a joy and a sadness I'd never known and I stood there with the tears pouring down my face and he smiled at me and he held out both his hands. Hands from which all those blessings had flowed. Hands I never tired to look at. Shaped in the image of God. To make the world. To make it again and again. To make it in the very maelstrom of its undoing. Then as he began to fade I knelt in the grass and I prayed for the first time in my life. I prayed as men must have prayed ten thousand years ago to their dead kin for guidance and I knew that he would guide me all my days and that he would not fail me, not fail me, not ever fail me.
— CURTAIN —
The Stonemason Page 8
