The God of Endings by Jacqueline Holland EPUB & PDF – eBook Details Online
- Author: Jacqueline Holland
- Language: English
- Formats: PDF / EPUB
- Status: Available For Free Download
- Genre: Fiction
- Price: Free
- File Size: 2 MB
- Publish Date: March 7, 2023
WHEN I was a child, the dead were all around us. Cemeteries were not
common in the early years of the 1830s. Instead, small, shambling family
graveyards butted up against barns, or sprung up like pale mushrooms at the
edges of pastures, in the yards of church, and school, and meetinghouse—
until eventually you could look out across the village, see all those
gravestones like crooked teeth in a mouth, and wonder who the place really
belonged to, the huddled and transient living or the persistent dead?
Many folks found this proximity to death and its souvenirs discomfiting,
but my father was the first gravestone carver in the village of Stratton, New
York, which meant that the distillation of death and grief into beauty was
our family business. Death, to me, was tied inextricably to cherished things:
to craftsmanship and poetry, to my father and to the beautiful things he
made, and I couldn’t help but feel some tenderness for all of it. Even all
these years later, I can still see those gravestones vividly.
Drizzle-gray slabs
of slate, smoothly planed and cool to the touch; grainy sandstone in its
striated shades of red and brown and buttercream; soapstone soft enough to
etch with a thumbnail, yet somehow able to resist the assaults of time and
the elements; letters and symbols, crosses and cherub wings, and forlornlooking skulls chiseled delicately into the surfaces; beveled edges smooth
and sharp beneath the pads of my small, inquiring fingers.
Like the works of his hands, my father also remains vivid. When I
remember him, he is working, always working, at his craft. His eyes and
hands search a great heft of rock for its secret seams, and then, with wedge
and mallet, he splits it open as one might split an orange. With great focus,
he hammers at his chisels, patiently lifting away slow, stubborn ribbons of
schist like potato peels to carve the rounded tympanums. With pick and file,
he etches and sands and then blows the glittering mica dust into the air.
Noticing me, his watchful daughter standing in the doorway, he looks up
and smiles, but his hands are ever diligent; they glide along surfaces,
feeling their progress.
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