Limestone Peter

On the western elevation of a great diocesan cathedral, a handsome lad called Peter thrusts his lithe young body out from the perpendicular and surveys the ground below. He has done this for eight hundred years, and in all that time, his blank limestone gaze has taken in the changing habits and the vicissitudes of those who have strolled beneath him. If he could speak words that flesh-and-bone men could hear, he would, above all else, tell them that people never seem to change, but for the clothes they wear and the toys they play with. 

He was fashioned in the reign of King Henry III by a monk called Brother Walin. His master, his creator, was a yearning man of pagan instincts and a dislike for the profession he was required, by circumstance, to practice. He hated his tonsured hair, the coarse robes of the Augustinians, and the corruption of the offices of God. He longed, above all other things, to be a husband, a father and a stone mason. And all the while his strapped sandals trod the night stairs, for prayers and noons and vespers and other infernal liturgies of faith, he dreamt of caressing a woman and crafting images from stone. 

He made a gentle nuisance of himself amongst the mason gangs until eventually he was tossed a discarded lump of limestone from which he crafted a mischievous imp. It had no purpose, but the master mason was astounded by the artistry and allowed him, with the abbot’s permission, to while away the odd afternoon in the commission of all that made Brother Walin happy. 

As the long and unsatisfactory years slipped by, Brother Walin lost his youthful beauty and hardened his heart against those things he could never have. He began to dislike women in all their forms, and children, those dear creatures he had so longed to father, were no longer welcome in his company. Instead, he turned his sandals towards the political highway and embarked upon the general scheming and backstabbing which was as common in the houses of God as it was in the offices of the royal court. And so on the death of the old abbot, Brother Walin was unanimously elected as his successor - an office which allowed him to dream of a larger abbey more befitting of God and himself. 

As he oversaw the master mason’s plans for higher elevations and flying buttresses, his fingers, now fat and be-ringed, itched to create one last masterpiece in stone: just a small gargoyle which he could view from afar. These effigies had two purposes. The first was to deter evil spirits from the abbey’s precincts. The abbot had always found this contradictory, for surely these deformed creations were from the bowels of hell themselves? It would appear as though the devil was looking after his own. But that was the custom, and so the saints and the seraphim arced their wings indoors whilst the goblins played sentinel. And more practically, (because a soaring house of God demanded these meditations), they were an aid to drainage, which was critical in a building of such weight and dimension.

When he was not drinking, eating or politicking, the abbot squatted in the low, dusty demesne of the stonemason’s yard, and crafted something which was at odds with all the other figures emerging from the limestone blocks. In the midst of griffons and serpents and other grotesques, the abbot made a boy with curly locks, large eyes, an aquiline nose and full, sensuous lips. In that part of him which was still Brother Walin, he made a son made of stone. He traced the face with his fingers, and whispered tender endearments in his perfect shell-like ears - and within those moments when the abbot was his true, uncorrupted self, he unwittingly placed a heavy burden on his own creation; his Limestone Peter, (for that is what he called him). Such was the intensity of the abbot’s regret, and in the maelstrom of his longing, which he had so carefully disguised with contempt and distaste, he created a creature that could think and feel. 

On the day the buttresses and their gargoyles were hoisted heavenward, the abbot heaved his fat body up the scaffold and cast an ancient spell on Peter, for the man of reluctant piety had never forgotten the old ways. And so of all the interior saints and apostles, and the exterior fantastical creatures, Limestone Peter was the talismanic custodian of all. And if he fell from his great height, then the cathedral would fall soon after. Such was the prophesy of the abbot, after which he returned to his corporeal concerns and rarely looked up at Peter again.

The centuries were long and lonely and the seasons slowly wrought their damage. From his limited vantage point, he had seen the plague carts, had heard the sonorous bells of lamentation, had witnessed riots, desecration, and missiles raining down from the sky in which the old glass windows were shattered. But he had company in those days of war; the fire wardens who would climb their ladders and pitch themselves on the roof, giving Peter a nod and a kind word on the way up. 

He sees, with his unblinking eyes, lovers and wastrels, the sane and the mad, and all their behaviour is the same as it ever was. Until recently most people dressed alike. The poor, wearing the castoff clothing of the rich, were merely dirtier and more frayed silhouettes of their superiors. This is not the case now. Now the rich emulate the peasants.

He remembers when the monks were forced to leave and this great body of stone which is cleaved to his straining, spouting body, became a cathedral. In those days there were hundreds of Christians called to service. Nowadays there are fewer, and most of the talk outside is of the history. The spirituality which had crafted him, however unGodly, was waning. Limestone Peter wished that everyone would stop believing so that he might cease to exist.  

Occasionally people would look upwards and remark upon him: in the early days about how beautiful he was, but as the elements chipped away at his once fine features, he became less defined. And because his beauty was all that he possessed, the tear which ran from his limestone eye became a track line filled with moss. Small birds would occasionally alight upon him and pick away some of the moss, and he felt such joy at the lightness of their touch. He knew that they were merely nest-building, but surely there was some commiseration in their fleeting visits? If only he could speak to them. And each time his thoughts turned toward this melancholy strain, the small crack within his structure would lengthen. 

And then one day in the coolness of autumn, Limestone Peter found a friend - a young stone mason who would arrive on ropes and pulleys and produce a hammer and chisel from his pockets. 

‘Here, Peter my darling,’ he would say. ‘Let’s unclog these fine nostrils of yours …’

And this young man would spend more hours than he should telling Peter about his young wife and his two small children, whilst he wiped away Peter’s verdant tears and looked busy checking the gargoyle’s integrity and that of its immediate surroundings. Peter’s limestone heart was full of joy when this annual visitation took place. He thought he could bear another thousand years of solitude if men like the stone mason would just spend a fraction of their lives in conversation with him. Each minute spent in this company was worth a cursed century. 

One day, however, the stone mason was not himself. He was pale and there were dark circles beneath his eyes. He did not notice the crack forming where Peter’s shoulders emerged from the parapet, and the hammer and chisel stayed in his pockets. He forgot to seal him so that acid rain would not permeate him. And Peter, whose eyes were cast downwards, heard the stone mason crying, and the crack lengthened a fraction more. He told the gargoyle that he had something growing in his brain, and that he would not be able to come anymore. And he kissed Peter’s weathered cheek and disappeared from view. 

That night, when the city was as still as it could ever be; when the clubbers staggered home and the couples stopped their shouting, when the birds were asleep on their roosts and as the nightshift workers were checking their watches, Limestone Peter fell from the parapet of the cathedral. With all that he had within him, with the abbot’s incantation ringing in his limestone ears and propelled by the weight of his burden, he summoned a force so strong that his fine and handsome face shattered into a thousand pieces on the ground below. 

*****

Several hours later, when the sexton arrived for work, he peered at the pile of rubble on the ground and looked upwards, to where Limestone Peter had once perched. What a shame, he thought, as he accessed the lofty interior. And as he whistled his favourite tune, which leant itself so well to the acoustics, he failed to notice the great crack that had suddenly appeared in the roof of the transept, or the equally ominous fracture in the Lady Chapel, where the Blessed Virgin Mary found herself unaccountably covered in limestone dust.