“I disagree. My mother’s headstone was just as important”
“It was a little different and a lot smaller.”
“But you’re accustomed to carving granite. You know how the rock will respond to your touch.”
She gazed at his hands, and he fought against shoving them into his pockets. He couldn’t work with his hands in his pockets, and he couldn’t work wearing gloves. She’d spend a lot of time staring at his large ugly hands. The sooner he accepted that, the better.
She lifted her eyes to his. “How do you know where to begin?”
“You ever make a quilt?” he asked.
“Of course. What woman hasn’t?”
“Well, you know how you take all the little pieces and sew them together? It’s like you’re building something. I do the opposite. I take something that’s finished—like the rock—and scrape away its covering to reveal what it is inside.” He plowed his hands through his hair. “That doesn’t make sense.”
“Yes, it does. You’re trying to get to the batting.”
He smiled. “Yeah, I reckon so, although that doesn’t make it sound very exciting.”
“Which figure will you work on first?”
“In the beginning, I’ll work on the whole monument.”
“I don’t understand how you can work on the whole thing when it’s so big. I thought you’d work on it in sections.”
“I work on it in layers. See your shadow?”
She glanced at the silhouette stretching out behind her.
“It’s not your true shape, but it’s close enough that a person could tell from looking at your shadow that you were a woman. I try and imagine what the monument’s shadow will look like from every side, and I concentrate on those images. Then I’ll use the larger chisels and points to create the monument’s shadow in stone. When I have everything shaped so it resembles a shadow, I’ll switch to the smaller tools and work on the details.”
“How do you know if you’re doing it right?”
He dropped his gaze to the ground. He didn’t know; he wouldn’t know until the monument was finished. “I’ve had a lot of failures.” He lifted his eyes to hers. “Do you want to see them?”
Her eyes widened in wonder. “Your failures?”
He nodded.
“You kept them?”
“Most of them, so I could figure out what I did wrong.”
“Where are they?”
He smiled. “In the graveyard.”
“It’s not your typical graveyard,” he said as they walked past the house to an area where pecan trees provided a cool morning shade. “It’s just a place where my ideas died.”
Meg stepped carefully around odd shapes of stone that peered through the wildflowers.
“Pa used to bring the stone out here when he was finished with it so what I started with wasn’t the best quality anyway.” He knelt in the tall grass and moved the weeds aside. “This was the first thing I ever tried to carve. Reckon I was about eight.” He peered at her. “What do you think it is?”
She hoped an eight-year-old boy wasn’t buried deep inside him expecting her to guess what he’d created. She didn’t care if she hurt the man, but she didn’t want to hurt the child. She grimaced. “A cloud?”
He smiled broadly. “A turtle. It was a good thing to start with because it’s flat and close to the ground so I didn’t have to worry about it supporting any weight.”
“What did you learn from your turtle?”
