Chapter 22: Her Face in Stone

I sat for it every Sunday in August.

That meant sitting on a block of limestone in the yard while Orrin looked at my face for three hours at a time.

"Stop moving your ears," he said.

"They move on their own."

"Then tell them to stop."

"You tell them."

He put down his chisel, walked over, and held my left ear very gently between two fingers.

It went flat at once.

The carvers whistled.

"That's cheating," I said.

"That's craftsmanship," said the old carver.

He'd done the body himself, before anyone asked him to.

It was a hunched beast with a fox's brush curled around its haunches and claws gripping the parapet stone.

In its front claws it was holding a knotted bun.

"Every gargoyle needs a sin," the old carver said. "Hers is cardamom."

Orrin did the face.

He wouldn't let me see it.

He hung a canvas over it at the end of every Sunday, and when I tried to lift the corner, he picked me up and moved me three feet to the left.

The unveiling was on the last Saturday in August, in the yard, at dawn, because I'd just come off my shift.

Everyone came.

Wilda, in a clean apron with the deed to her building folded in the pocket, because she brought it everywhere now.

The three brides, with a cake shaped like a cathedral that had collapsed slightly on the way up the hill.

The crossing guard, the laundromat man, two nurses, the dock workers.

The heron-kin chairman of the board, in a tie.

The four carvers stood beside the gargoyle with their masks pushed up on their heads, all of them trying not to look proud.

Orrin took hold of the canvas.

He looked at me.

"If you hate it," he said, "I'll do it again."

"Just pull the sheet."

He pulled it.

It was me.

It was my face, in pale limestone, leaning out over the edge with its ears straight up and its mouth wide open.

Not snarling.

Laughing.

The kind of laugh that comes out of you when someone tells a terrible joke at the worst possible time.

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