Stone Will Answer by Beatrice Searle

Author:Beatrice Searle [Searle, Beatrice]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781473579323
Publisher: Penguin Random House UK
Published: 2023-02-09T00:00:00+00:00

The Tokstadfurua stands in farmland beside the Prestvegen road. Across a field a small crowd is gathered in plastic chairs. A few of them look up as we bounce down, alerted by the stone-beaten rhythm against the trailer boards. We make our usual conspicuous entrance. I park us behind the back row, directly in a chute of sun beamed through the canopy, and receive two paper cups of stewed rhubarb, just thin enough to drink. The service begins. I do not understand the Norwegian spoken but we graze our rhubarb while the words of a sonorous liturgy swim about the group. Every now and then a defining bell clang collapses, spectacularly, the serenity I have drifted into.

I look up to the tip of the tree’s needly spire. Who doesn’t start by looking up when they are promised a magnificent tree? Then I look it down as it broadens to earth in a great big funnel; a saw-toothed cone of serrated bark without needles to obscure its thickness, it thunders into a frothing braid of radial roots. Most of the tree is cordoned off by a high hexagonal fence and it is, in fact, impossible to get to, except some distance from the trunk, out here at root level, where the tree is at its most palatial and stout slabs of root have cropped up from the ground.

At the end of the service people get up, pluck their sticky clothing from their bodies and come around to the back of the seats to peer, first at the stone, and then, expectantly, at me. I give a single broad smile in response to their enquiring looks, and instantly it seems that this is taken as an instruction to form a queue behind the stone. I think I know for what but, having not said or been told anything, I am not quite sure what is going on.

I take a step towards the curious onlookers and say, Right, I’m just going to move the stone to the foot of the tree?

I receive a chorus of Ja and nodding heads.

I wonder if they have been briefed by Tone and how much they know? Something might have been said about the stone in Norwegian, during the service. It seems that it forms the concluding part, the dismissal of the congregation. The queue follows me and the stone to the root edge and re-forms, all stooped in the act of unlacing boots and rolling down socks.

And then begins a procession through the stone, slow and reverential for some, like a kind of sacrament taking; others caper in and out in barely the time it takes for a friend to take a smiling photograph. I watch in disbelief from a safe distance, as twenty people move through the footprints. We are two very similar enclosed configurations, abutting: the tree contained by its fencing, and the stone with the figure of a stander at its centre, contained by a semicircle of witnesses. The curve of onlookers revolves like

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.