A Bullamanka publishing exclusive pre-view...

This is the article that was NOT published in CRM. I pulled it and sent it to
Clem Labine at Traditional Building. I have not heard from Clem, or had an
opportunity to talk to him, but I hope he decides to pick up the option to
publish it. I think it is too good a story to let it die in silence.

copyright © Ken Follett 1997
Please do not distribute.

Where Do Stonemasons Come From?

Bull manure.  Twenty-five years ago, at the age of 20, I was self-employed,
selling bull manure.  All bull, from a cryosperm facility at Cornell
University, not far from where I grew up.  While dropping a load, one day I
met a 62-year-old stonemason named Marshall Pruitt, and he offered me a job.
 It was a step up.

When I started, Marshall said that if I lasted three months I would be a
stonemason forever.  It would be in my blood.  He said he was offering me a
choice of education, either to be the best lover in the county, or the best
stonemason. Though the former might have been interesting, I told him I was
not sure I would survive, and chose the latter.

Marshall had a reputation as a bitter, overbearing, cantankerous, irascible
white racist, the most opinionated, drunken, and unfriendly craftsperson in
all of upper New York State.  I loved the guy.

Marshall had a ten-year waiting list for new fireplaces.  These were
traditional brick fireplaces, not metal boxes with electric fans.  In the
good summer months the two of us averaged one fireplace per week, including
the chimney.  It worked for me.  I lasted three years, working twelve-hour
days, six days a week.  There were a lot of days when we said nothing to each
other, each communing solely with the stone, sand, brick, and block.
Meditation in motion.  Occasionally the mortar mixer did the talking,
speaking to us in a muddled language resembling chicken-speak.   However, if
our customers heard us clucking, we were talking to each other.  This was a
working code; it just took too long to say the longer words. Water was “aga.”

The long days often ended in arguments, and then in a drunken stupor.  Jobs
were paid for in cash and booze.  Whenever we finished a fireplace, we would
call the family around and start the tiny, sacramental first fire. This was
usually doused with a generous libation of Canadian Mist or with Rhiengold
beer.  A fireplace built in a bedroom, with its implications of fertility,
would be an occasion for an extra-rowdy bash.  Sometimes we did not make it
out of the house until the next day.

Marshall began to be a stonemason at the age of 12.  He said it was because
he was seduced by a homely, one-eyed girl out back of a school playground on
a Saturday night.  He felt sorry for her.  This would have been in the early
1920s.  The matronly principal of the school was only too happy to expel a
boy who was so overly energetic, and overly empathic, and who was also
Jewish.  Marshall began working as a bull, carrying double bags of Portland
cement in the Sierra Nevada, the Devil’s Backbone, for two stonemasons who
were building wilderness cabins.  He survived and began to learn his trade.

During World War II Marshall worked in the San Francisco shipyards, chipping
welds.  The job consisted of standing on a suspended two-by-twelve off the
side of a ship, without safety harness, holding an 80 lb. air hammer. One
day, while hanging 75 feet in the air, Marshall hit a particularly solid
weld.  If  his partner hadn’t grabbed him, Marshall would have gone down.
When I worked with him, thirty years later, he still could not climb up a
chimney scaffold more than four feet off the ground without shaking the hell
out of it.  I served as the young monkey.

If he saw a jogger, Marshall would say that anyone with a real job did not
have to run around to no place.  He constantly complained, with creative
curse words, that the youth of America were lazy, pea-brained, and indolent.
 I kept trying to prove him wrong, and worked harder.  He said he had been
booted out of the masons’ union for teaching kids to do stonework at George
Junior Republic, a place where urban delinquents are sent to be rejuvenated.
 He preferred to teach kids a useful trade than to have the benefits of the
union, including a pension.

We built fireplaces in rainstorms, ice storms, and blizzards. I slid off a
roof in the middle of a snowstorm while trying to cap out a chimney.  Another
time I was working in a blizzard.  We were actually snowed in and had to stay
at the house.  (The daughter, with Marshall’s encouragement, kept feeding me
her home-baked cookies).  As I worked, the mortar kept freezing to my trowel.
 I went inside, where Marshall was keeping warm, and asked him what was wrong
with the mortar.  He told me (in cruder words) that the mortar was setting
fast and to get back to work.

For the first year Marshall would only let me cut and carry stone.  This was
not from some honorable plan of apprenticeship, whereby I had to learn the
simple skills before the true craft.  Instead, it was his worry that I would
replace him.  One night we were both drunk at the Rogue’s Harbor Inn, in
Lansing, N.Y., when he challenged me to go streaking in the parking lot.  I
countered by telling him he was an old man and should show me how to lay
stone before he dropped dead and the old art was forgotten (I think there is
a missing “f” in this sentence).  He vowed that even in death he would sit in
Heaven and tell me to get to work.  We did not go streaking, and he did teach
me to lay stone.

Even though Marshall kept telling me that universities only function as
hotbeds of sex and depravity, I spent what few free days I had in the Cornell
architectural library, reading old books on stonemasonry.   I convinced
Marshall to build Count Rumford style fireboxes.  This was not accomplished
by rational argument, or by showing him the book with pictures, but by
incremental misunderstandings and deliberate errors in my layout, slowly
making the masonry boxes shallower and then showing Marshall an improved
draft.  Marshall was always intrigued by the mystique of a strong draft in a
well-built chimney.

Eventually we were building close approximations of the Rumford design.  The
chimneys worked better, and it also sounded exotic when Marshall got into his
sales pitch to the farmers in the rural counties.  We were building their
decorative-masonry heating-machines based on colonial American thermodynamic
science.

One time we met a kid who had gone to a school in Holland to learn to be a
stonemason.  From the way this guy talked, I became convinced that going to
school would not produce a stonemason, only a talking imitation.  I never saw
him lift a stone (he probably would have herniated himself), but he sure
could talk a good line.

Some twenty years later I had an opportunity to do a small amount of work on
the facade at Carnegie Hall. I contacted the local hometown newspaper and
talked them into doing a short article with a picture.  I later learned that
Marshall happened to be lying in a hospital when the article appeared. He had
been hit by a falling tree that he had been cutting down for firewood.  His
wife showed him the article.  Marshall had been through a lot and could not
remember which of his many helpers I was, but his wife reminded him that I
was the one who wore funny hats.  I was glad the article mentioned him,
because Marshall died in that bed.  And sure enough, not many days go by that
I do not hear him telling me to get to work.
--END--