Float and Trowel, Barrow and Lantern (Eight Craftsmen, ca. 1910)
Joni Tevis
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Mud on the ramp and the toes of their boots. These men are masons, but of brick or stone I can’t tell. They pose on the granite steps of what could be a bank, courthouse, church. The silvery sheen of the photograph dates it around 1910. It came to me in a box lot at an auction. I don’t know who took it, or where.
All eight men wear hats, are white. One man stands with his leg propped on a barrow’s handle. Two of them bite unlit pipes. Only one is empty-handed—no stick, float, trowel. Look at their clothes. Chaffed and mud-marked, creases set by days of work. Moth holes in the placket of this fisherman’s sweater, buttoned top to bottom.
What you learn first: how to carry. Load the hod with bricks or blocks and carry it to the job site. Unload it and do it again, again, again. Here’s the youngest, his overalls snapped over a heavy coat, work shirt, crooked tie. All of it spattered with slurry. A star on the wrist of his glove. Apprentice.
Then learn the tools: mash hammer, mell, dummy, pitching hammer. Chisel and mallet should match. Use a boaster for fine finishing work. Learn the habits of stones. Sandstone, limestone, granite, marble. You can spend your life testing their moods and tasting their dust. This man, neck stretched and seamed, must be the oldest. He’s the only one with spectacles, the only one with a mustache, the only one seated. Knees wide apart, lantern before him: light-bringer.
Look at their hands. Four men wear mitts or gloves, but every bare hand shows signs of hurt, fingers splayed or flattened at the tips, a ring finger awry and stiff from an old break. Only one, third from left, has his name preserved: Jim, written in pencil above his head. Jim’s eyes look tired. His jacket pocket bulges and his pants have two little holes torn in them. The buttons on his coat don’t match, but someone sewed them on tight.
And this man, in a tie and fedora, tucks his left hand behind his back. Stares at the camera with a look on his face like worry. He’s the one for me. Why does he hide his hand? Who taught him his trade, and where? Did he help to lay the granite he stands on? Who loves him? Where is he from—Ireland, Spain, Sicily, Pittsburgh? How much is he paid? What will he eat for lunch? I know his face better than those of many of my kin. How can what we make with our hands last longer than we do?
This is a break, not the end of the job. The windows behind them sealed off with frames of stretched burlap or screen. A work entrance of raw planks with a hasp and padlock snapped to secure the site. But against the solid blocks of stone, it all looks as temporary as it must be. The job is ongoing, and could be for some time. Maybe you start what someone else will finish.
For example, look at Washington National Cathedral in D.C. Teddy Roosevelt set the foundation stone, or pretended to, on September 29, 1907. A Sunday. Strange to work on a church on a Sunday. But this was a ceremony—a big event with crowds and hoopla. It’s work, but work with a difference.
Then for the next eight decades, the work continued, without spectators or speeches. Masons like the ones in my photograph laid the great building, one course at a time, squared and precise. I read an interview with Joe Alonso, the Cathedral’s head stone mason, who’s worked there since 1985. Asked about the masons of the past, he mused, “Just seeing their work, the work itself speaks to me….When you’re walking way back on the apse, or the great choir”—remember, this is atop the building, better than two hundred feet in the air—“built back in the 1910s and ’20s, and seeing the work they did, they actually set the standard for us as we were building the last portions of the cathedral. At least I felt that when I was up there. It had to be as good as their work.”
In September 1990, eighty-three years to the day after work began on the cathedral, Alonso set its final stone. He told a writer from the Smithsonian’s Folklife magazine that he “felt like all the other masons were up there with him, ‘maneuvering that big finial into position, checking it, making sure it was level and true.’”
That was a ceremony, and ceremony matters, but I prefer the daily work of it. A day like today. You can see what you’ve made. How I love to run my hand across the brick foundation of my own home and admire the skill behind it. There’s a fundamental earnestness in me. I want to build something that will last. Something that gives shelter and lifts the eyes to heaven.
They’re in the process of something. Not finished. The camera flashes, and the men scatter. I examine the photograph under a duoscope and up close, silver specks fleck the men’s coats and overalls, constellations of bright pips from the halide emulsion the unnamed photographer used.
Break’s over. The masons get back to work. People will climb up and down these steps for years to come, not thinking of the ones who laid them. Wars come, they know, and earthquakes. Stone today could be rubble by nightfall. No wonder that masons are given to ritual, secret belief, relics stashed in hollow cornerstones. Me too. When Alonso set the last spire, a sprig of boxwood cut from the bishop’s garden hung from the hook of the crane. Evergreen, more or less, a symbol that says Let this live on after I’m gone.
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