The professor was pleased.

“I’ve never seen something representational and abstract in this way,” Carl said. “It’s astounding. Really.” His voice trailed off.

The few classmates within hearing range were quiet. The professor wanted to shout from the exhilaration he felt in having such a rare student. It was not something he had thought he would see again.

Zachary walked the farm every day. The time of day varied. The length of the walk varied. It was often a saunter now. His large mongrel dog Buster would be at his side. It was a regular event but not a punctual one. He did it faithfully yet he could have not done it. He could have stayed inside all day. Walking around his property was not something he had to do. He did it naturally and without thinking. It was like breathing but without the physical necessity. Walking was part of being ‘out’ there, in it, outside, outdoors, not sheltered or cloistered. It was a gentle sculpting of the surface of his day.

In Zachary’s experience, stone was something about which people felt nothing. It was hidden in plain view and usually ignored; infrequently feared - as in graveyards bristling with headstones or threatening jagged cliffs.

In his case, there was a deep attraction. He didn’t think the sunken unspoken feeling he had could be nurtured. It wouldn’t blossom. It was there before words and feelings.

“We will approach the sculpture first as a material and then as a form. Later we will apprehend the form within the form. The form before the form. The form that surrounds the form.”

He hadn’t gone out yet that day. It was early morning and cool. His wife called him. He looked at her with bleary eyes. He didn’t feel like talking.

“I’m going to town. Do you want to come?” she said.

Even right out of bed and sleep, Sally spoke in those efficient clipped phrases, her thin lips barely moving. Her voice surprisingly loud given her apparent lack of facial or chest movement. Wide awake, planning, bustling from the beginning of the day to the end. Did a farmer’s wife ever retire? Zachary wondered.

He shook his head to her question.

“Nope.”

“Want anything?

She was wearing her yellow summer dress. Her greying hair was cut short and curled. He gazed at her. She had a pleasant thin figure, wrinkled and freckled and attractive. His face sagged more in the morning, maybe the face muscles were still asleep; his grey hair was thick, splotched with brown. His eyebrows were solidly dark brown and gave him a youthful look.

“Nope.”

“You still thinking about that ... rock?”

There was disbelief in her voice. He shuffled his feet and shook his head quickly. He was annoyed.

It was a twenty minute drive in from the farm to the campus on the outskirts of a mid-sized city. For the last four months, he had gone to Trenton once a week on Saturday morning. Carl, his shaggy-haired thirty-something professor at the university, was enthusiastic.

“You’ve tremendous talent, Zachary. Tre-men-dous.”

At first, it made him feel good but then how old he was eroded that elation. The other students were much younger. This great undiscovered talent of his made a previous life as a farmer seemed wasted. Farmer, retired farmer, sculptor. It was depressing. It was the power of the mind to turn happy memories into chaff.

The muteness of stone was part of its power to him, its authority almost. It didn’t speak because it didn’t want to, shouldn’t have to. Like the land he had farmed for thirty-one years, it was arresting. There was more gravity in a silent thing. It affected its surroundings. It affected an observer’s psyche.

He thought about it longer and he found that he would allow that sound could have power too. His love of silence didn’t mean he was against sound. But he found that the kind of bottomless pull of which he was thinking could not have come from an ordinary sound. It would have to be a sound that was pure and elemental and devoid of personality and separate from its source; only itself. He laughed at himself. He did it whenever he thought he seemed phoney: where phoney was being in love with abstraction; stupid was hating abstraction. He couldn’t resist adding in his own thoughts, maybe stupid was also being in love with abstraction.

Sally came home at four o’clock that afternoon. She had brought a few groceries and some sewing supplies. Zachary saw the sunlight glint off the hood of their green pick-up truck as it turned into the long gravel driveway: two strips of packed earth and loose stones that ran for nearly a half-kilometre. The driveway wound in a long loop in front of the house. The house’s thick stone facade matched the driveway’s whitish grey gravel.

He stayed out where he was on top of a ten meter rise near the edge of the fifty hectare wood at the back of the property. He wasn’t far from the enormous projection of Precambrian granite that she referred to as the ‘rock’. One reason she didn’t like it was because it always seemed slippery and she had fallen there and hurt her wrist once: not broken but badly sprained and painful for weeks. Now the ‘rock’ was inspiring nonsense in Zachary’s head.

“I want you to make, attempt to make (he laughed and the class giggled in response), something that is intensely representational B-U-T (he paused and melodramatically surveyed the class) of no known object. We will see it as a representation but we will NOT know of what. It will elude us!”

He came into the house more than an hour after she had returned. She knew he had had seen her drive in. She was mad about it. Her sharp eyes rested on the striated white scar tissue on his left hand.

The chisel had slipped when he was delivering a hard rap with a mallet and his hand had been pushed into a sharp edge on the stone. It had bled and hurt. Sally had wrapped a tourniquet around his wrist and bandaged it and drove him to the hospital. All in an angry silence except for a distraught curse when she first saw him bleeding. Fear and the need for action had narrowed her eyes as she worked busily and efficiently. He had surreptitiously watched her and saw the judgements percolating in her eyes. He had known something would come of it.

Carl went through the types of stones. Sedimentary, Metamorphic, Igneous. He passed over Man-Made stone. It wasn’t real stone, he said. The colours of limestone, its hardness. A trace of chemistry. Zachary liked the look of Travertine or maybe it was the sound of its name. Naturally, they spent hours on Marble.

Zachary kept some pebbles on his work bench. He had picked them up on the Huron shore on a lazy hot afternoon during the past summer. He could never resist collecting beautiful or interesting stones and rocks. The smoothness and roundness of the water-worn stones mesmerised him. He felt simple being so taken in by them. It made him reticent.

The next morning he again walked out to the ‘rock’. He stood at the foot of the huge granite projection and studied the chips and shards of stone there, what seemed like the shedding of a great petrified animal. They seemed so different, the smooth lakeside pebbles on his wooden work bench and the sharp-edged rough flakes of granite piled on the red clay and mostly-buried wind-and-rain-swept outcrop of stone. The same composition but with compelling surfaces that disoriented and distracted him away from that fact, that forced him to substitute shape and sheen for substance. It disturbed him to be so quickly and deeply drawn to the surface, to be held there captive to its tale.

“I want to sell,” she said late the next morning.

He laughed, his saddle-shaped ears jiggled. He found that his recent days had too much in them.

“Just like that?” he asked.

She grimaced, a tight little smile on her lips.

“What’s the point in owning a farm if you’re not farming it?” she said.

It was difficult for him to rebut. It made sense.

“It doesn’t feel right to sell now.”

She ignored his comment. She pulled out a travel magazine.

“After we sell, I want to go for a vacation.”

He said nothing. She left the room. After a few minutes, he heard the bath water running. He lit the wood fire and sat in an arm chair in front of it. Buster sat at his feet. Absent-mindedly, he patted him. It was an interesting revelation. The kids were gone. The farm had been the glue of their marriage. He sensed that. Farm, kids, farm. Now it was coming unstuck. No glue could hold forever. There had been romance at the beginning. It seemed far-off. In retrospect, he felt that romance was merely a season. It had to be. It came and went because it could never last. It wasn’t meant to.

He was heavy-set, big but not fat in the body. He had high cheekbones and a full jowly face. Heavy big eyelids and small eyes, lively and troubled. Easy to frown. There was a sallow drawn look to him, the kind often seen in smokers which he wasn’t. A sense of failure was burning him up. The awful finality of falling short and running out of time. Ambition was his hellish alchemy. For him, it was transmuting a golden past into a leaden present. He really had no complaints until he dredged up his selfish what-could-have-been. The Great Sculptor.

“What are we trying to do? Are you creating for yourself alone? Could you create something that resembled nothing else, that called to mind no other thing? Try to do that? Something that resembles nothing. No thing.”

He sat in the university library. Sally was back at the farm calling realtors. He didn’t want to be around. He read about rock beds. They took as much as a hundred million years to form. In places, the Precambrian shield was over a billion years old. That fascinated him, something holding together for so long. He didn’t want to sever that link by quarrying rock out of the formation on his farm. He wanted his next work to be ‘out’ there, outside. Dimly, he acknowledged to himself that he was working with surfaces, stuck on the surface, on the outside looking in. There was a glumness about it.

“Working with granite is very hard,” his youthful professor cautioned.

Zachary was not deterred. Farming is for the stubborn and he was going to carry that cargo into sculpting.

“But leaving it in place?” Carl gasped when Zachary stated that he did not want to quarry the stone.

They talked about the weather and how hard it might be to work outdoors.

Zachary had to laugh. Who would see it tucked away on private property? It was cheaper for Zachary not to have it quarried. It could always be quarried later. What if it took longer than he thought, asked Carl. Zachary was silent as he thought about Sally and the realtors. Does it have to be granite? Carl asked. He had a large calcite piece. Zachary, the retired farmer turned sculptor, wanted it to be granite but he didn’t want to be obstinate about it. He’d think about it. He thanked Carl for the offer of the calcite, he knew it was expensive. Carl must have meant it when he said Zachary had talent.

She wouldn’t tell him about the realtors.

“You’re going to need my signature, aren’t you?”

“In case you’ve forgotten,” she said, “the farm is in my name. The whole farm.”

He smiled and gave a nervous cough, that was supposed to have been a clever way to protect the property.

“Protect it from what now? Lying fallow? Let’s face it, you’d never sell.”

He went out for a walk.

It didn’t have to be stone. Zachary said, for him it did. Carl smiled. He knew Zachary would say that, he said. How’s that? He had had a student like him a while back. Just one other? asked Zachary.

In thirty-one years of marriage, they had never talked about sculpture until the last four months. Her venom on the topic was a shock. Who did he think he was? He wasn’t anything except a farmer. He didn’t look like a sculptor. He harrumphed: all that meant was that he dressed like a farmer. He was sure Sally would be even unhappier if he ‘dressed’ like a sculptor. She resented his infatuation with stone, the time he spent on it. It was more though: she wanted him to rid himself of the lyrical spirit, to cast it out or failing that, to bury and ignore it. A surfeit of wonder led to credulity and obsession. Her message was, he was better off as a practical problem-solving work-monger trudging in a plain but real world. No dizzy flights. No realm of wisps & wishes with everything hanging by a thread. He was to be grounded and rooted and bound up by the earth.

He put one foot in front of the other. He watched his boots lift and drop. Against his will, he felt his connection to that place withering. He looked up towards the rise, firs and leafy trees climbing its side around the outcrop, the ground covered with leaves and needles and decomposition and acidic soil. Who was he to think his creation had a place out here? It would only have meaning to other people. He stopped and bent down on one knee. He gently stuck his hand in a soft spot of earth and lifted a clump up, moist and brown. He asked himself a secret question, am I only human? He wasn’t thinking so-called higher though, angelic or demigod-like; he was thinking sky, sea, sun, moon, animals, rocks. When you thought too highly of yourself, he told himself, you had it wrong, you were wrong, you were very wrong.

“We got a good price,” Sally said a few weeks later. She had always handled their finances single-handed.

“We?” he asked.

She smoothed her blouse. She was wearing pants and boots, her hair pulled back in clips on each side of her head.

“They really wanted it,” she said triumphantly.

She liked trading and was good at it. He stayed silent and sat down on one of the wooden kitchen chairs. She knew he wouldn’t ask.

“Got half now, up front. The other on closing.”

She held up two cheques. His eyes glazed. He noticed the pictures were gone from the mantle. Packed-up, he thought vaguely.

“How long has this been brewing?” he said thickly.

“A while,” she answered. “You don’t love me anymore anyway. Do you?”

“Nope.” He surprised himself.

“Didn’t think so,” she snapped. “I want a nice warm vacation before I’m too old and sick to enjoy it.”

“Already got the tickets, I expect,” he said.

She sniffed. “Ticket,” she said.

He looked up at her.

“Figured you didn’t want to go. Did you?”

“Nope.”

“Didn’t think so.”

“When you going?” he asked.

“Day after tomorrow, in the morning.”

“How long?”

She didn’t answer right away. She let him stew in uncertainty. She felt he deserved it. He looked at Buster. She looked out the window.

“Don’t know.”

He thought about Bill and Theresa.

“What about the kids?”

Sally smiled. She knew he would bring that up. It was a rare time now when their predictability gave her pleasure.

“Shouldn’t be a problem. Lots of older folks go their separate ways.”

He grunted.

“How separate?”

“Depends,” she said.

She pushed off from the counter she had been leaning against. She went out to finish packing.

“I want you to draw this first. No sculpting. The idea is to draw the emergence of something. Draw the how of becoming. Ask yourself the question: is something born as is or does it transform from something else? Or? You answer.”

The thing or act alone was absolute, Zachary thought. He studied the postcard from Sally. Having fun, it said, but there was no wish you were here on it which was as good as saying, glad you’re not. Each thing or act in isolation was pure. Not ramified or judged. It was the sequence that mattered in our world. It was the mind and will that created an order for events and invoked relationships. That was what he saw when he stared at the block of marble in the university studio.

He had been searching for a small apartment near the campus, trying to get used to the idea of not having land. He had to sell or give away a lot of furniture and ‘things’. He kept the smooth pebbles. They were him, he realised. Sally was the sharp granite shards at the foot of the outcrop. It was a surprise.

The gall of creating harried him. Sticking ‘his’ Art in the face of the creators or Creator. It seemed an effrontery. He tottered on the edge of doing and not-doing. It became an ethical decision. Was he misinterpreting this mysterious urge to create? It might be that his true task was to appreciate what was all around him. That praise was the only proper creative expression. That anything else was to take ‘the fall’, allowing pride to weight down what should have been a joyful soar, turning it into a terrifying descent.

He was stymied, chisel in hand but no chisel in mind. Art implied superiority. Otherwise what was the point of it. Carl, his youthful (to him) professor, talked about it with him. Battlements that had seemed too steep and thick the day before shrunk easily before Carl’s sure-footed arguments. It made Zachary doubtful of his own opinion. Art can be anything, Carl said. It can be merely an attempt to hold onto a moment of time, to trap an essence. It can try to evoke an insight or sensibility. Don’t compare yourself to God. Never do that. That’s the trap, he said. That’s ‘the fall’. You are working with perception. That is the real rock you’re sculpting. Avoid all generalisations. All? Zachary asked hesitantly. It’s much safer that way. You’re pretty smart for a college boy, said Zachary. It was an old farmer’s joke. Carl smiled and thanked him and left. How could a young person be so ... wise? Zachary asked himself as he stared at the block. He raised his chisel. He felt ready to work.