Stone Upon Stone Read Free

his. God ought to be like a person, so you can see that whatever’s painful for people is painful for him as well. So you can be troubled when he’s troubled. And feel sorry for him the way you’d feel sorry for yourself. And understand when there’s nothing he can do, just like a person. And even switch jobs with him awhile. Give me your cross, I’ll carry it for you, and you do some of my thinking for me.
    Pity I wasn’t an airman, or I’d have put up a propeller like the Króls’ lad Jasiu has on his tomb. I really like that propeller. But a person’s neither fishnor fowl. As for Jasiu, the last time he visited he’d made captain. His jet crashed when they were practicing for a flyby. They brought him back in a metal casket in a separate van. His pals were in another van. There were twenty of them, every one an officer. Each of them had silver cord on his shoulder, there were medals on their chests, bayonets at their sides. They carried him six at a time all the way from the house to the cemetery. They wouldn’t let anyone else do it even for one shift, though Jasiu had friends here in the village too. They’d minded the cows together and been at school with him.
    The whole village came to the funeral. The fire brigade turned out. Schoolchildren. Two older gray-haired colonels walked behind the casket and gave their arms to Jasiu’s folks, Król and Mrs. Król, one on each side. Old Król wasn’t that tall to begin with, and he seemed to have shrunk, either from being on the colonel’s arm or from his son dying, though he didn’t cry at all. Afterward people said no one would have cried at the compensation the Króls got from the government. But it could have been that when he walked next to the colonel old Król felt like a soldier too.
    Mrs. Król didn’t look like she’d been crying either. But at the cemetery, when everyone was standing at the graveside and one of the colonels said he’d died like a hero, she collapsed into the arms of the other one and they had to bring her round. She only started crying the day after the funeral, when everyone had gone home. Since then it’s been all these years and she’s still crying away.
    Then some guys came and brought sheet metal. They cut it and bent it and welded it, and it turned into a propeller. Some people didn’t think a whole lot of that propeller, they said that the parents were Christians and Jasiu himself was christened, and here there’s a propeller instead of a Lord Jesus on the tomb. If you ask me though, that propeller is sadder than a good many Lord Jesuses. Aside from anything else, it’s designed so that when the wind blows you can hear something in it, as if a plane was flying across thesky. Maybe it’s the one Jasiu crashed in? And when you stare at it for long enough, you even think the propeller’s spinning. Except it’s going so fast you can’t see it. You can just see a blur of light over the tomb. If someone wanted, that propeller could stand for a crucifixion.
    I wonder what a propeller like that might cost? Even the labor alone. An ordinary tinsmith couldn’t make one. Covering a roof is one thing, making a propeller is a whole other business. The men that put it up on Jasiu’s tomb kept checking some papers they had and measuring lengthways and width-ways and from a distance, like the guys that merged land together for the big farms. Except that at government prices it probably wasn’t that expensive. But then you have to die for the government first.
    When I worked in the district administration, whenever one of the office workers died the administration would at least send a wreath for free, with fir and spruce branches and a few flowers woven into it, and on the ribbon it would say, from your friends at the district administration. And at the graveside someone would always say a few words about how he was liked, how he was good with people, farewell, may the earth weigh lightly on you. But when a person’s on their