The Granite Savior: A Parable

Judge Paul Toomer, 1902

Above Columbus and Girard, above the City Mill dam, the Alabama bank of the Chattahoochee steepens while the Georgia side sprawls flat and prone to flooding. On the Alabama ridges lounges the community of Summerville, where I live year round and well-off Columbusites lodge their families during the malaria season. 

The trail that plaits along the riverbank below my farm, around boulder and tree trunk, once led up to the footbridge to Clapp's Factory three miles north of town. Now the bridge is gone, the factory in ruins, but industry still thrives in Columbus, plenty jobs for workers who during Reconstruction were recruited from as far away as Manchester, England, where agents offered millhands and their families free passage to Georgia.

No longer a road to work, the trail remains a natural park, unspoiled since Indian days. The steep bank prohibits agriculture, and on summer Sundays couples stroll here as if it were Central Park. Boys play, young men lounge with their pipes, and fishermen claim rocks along the water. Factory workers stroll as far as Rock Island in fine weather, released from their six-day prisons. But after dark all respectability vanishes, and the trail is poison to female reputations. This is my favorite time. Since my retirement from public life, I have become a lover of moonlight and its deceptions.

A trail below my house has recently become famous for a rough wall of granite, the cross-section of a house-size boulder that eons ago broke into two parts, one half sliding into the ferny mudflats, the other half displaying the mural-like cracks and striations from the heart of the mother stone. On the face of this rock, a Byzantine figure seems to emerge from the surrounding cracks, robed and bearded with his arms held out to display his palms. The right hand is the only one clear in a chaos of rough stone, but imagination supplies the absent symmetry. Even the most skeptical observer sees the manlike form once it's pointed out.

When I first came to Summerville, I don't recall seeing this figure, but in recent years it has attained the status of a miracle, particularly among evangelicals, who wedge wildflowers in the cracks at its foot and stand praying under the granite face. Maybe we all crave the visible, and those who deny themselves graven images are most grateful to the Lord for engraving one himself.

When the Granite Savior, as Brother Pinkard likes to call it, first appeared on the Rock Island Trail, I wondered why I hadn't noticed it earlier, and my natural skepticism made me suspect human agency. So I investigated. I climbed cracks on the half-boulder's face, like rough steps alongside the miracle. I'm not a young man, but my daily rambles down the steep bank--along with my nightly ones--have kept me agile. I know the paths, climbings, and mule-high boulders of those woods as well as my house and stair, memorized like the curves of a beloved. I hung on the boulder and examined the face and hands, looking for signs of carving.

It's unfair to say that I didn't  see any. Certainly, I didn't see many, not enough to account for the clarity of the bearded figure. There was a pale spot here, another there, imperfections a hundred accidents might have accounted for, but these were small and far from each other, and the gray face and hand, the clearest features, were mossy and rain-darkened.

Then last spring when the chill was just going out of the nights, I heard a sound on one of my midnight rambles where each slice and pool of moonlight under the trees is to me as exact as a plat map but more seductive. Walking a shimmering trail near the Savior, feeling rather than seeing shadows of limbs on my cheeks, I heard an odd clink like nothing natural.

"Hey!" I hollered and walked toward it. "Who's that yonder?"

I spoke because it might be somebody--or bodies--I didn't want to surprise, not at what they might be doing. Nobody answered, but I heard the flat impact and scrambling of a man jumping from a height and running away, caught at some mischief. I headed toward the sound and found myself on the split rock looking down at the moonlit patch of trail walled by the Granite Savior.

I won't say I lay in wait for him, but I did walk Indian-like after that, ears trimmed. Some men my age lose hearing and other endowments, but not Paul Toomer, thank God. I'm large enough to meet nearly anybody in the dark unless he's armed, and an armed man would be one of those divine acts demanding acquiescence, if straining trust. A week later I heard it again, that quiet, unnatural impact through the trees.

This time I circled around to the trail and was under the man on the rock face before he heard me. It was clear enough in moonlight what he was doing. Standing on the steps of the rock, he caressed with fingertips the Savior's face and then, with all the patience of a saint at prayer, positioned a gleaming tool somewhere on the chin and, drawing a mallet from his belt, struck. 

Here was human agency indeed.

"Sir," I called in the voice I once used to charge malefactors before the bench, "I'll have to ask you to explain yourself."

The Voice from the Whirlwind might have startled the poor man less. I reckon he barely kept from sliding off the rock. But after a few seconds, he collected himself, bunched up, and shoved off, turning in the air. He meant to run off as he had before, but I was on him as he landed and twisted his arm behind his back. He was a little man with blue-white hair in the moonlight, but he was strong like a cat, struggling until he understood he was caught.

His perfect acquiescence touched me, so I released him, and we stood together on the trail like whittlers in front of the courthouse. "Judge, sir," he mumbled. He knew me, of course. I didn't know him, but those two words told me he hailed from England, well north of London.

"I don't believe, sir, you've broken any law," I told him, "but I will have to ask you to explain yourself. If you'll be so kind as to come with me up to the house."

I turned and started up the trail. I had his tools, but something else, a feeling about the nature of his offense, assured me I would hear the sound of his steps on the path behind me. At the house, I showed him into my study and made him sit opposite me at my writing table with the tools between us, the mallet and stubby chisel. I guessed the tool had been inches longer when new and had seen generations of use, a keepsake from generations of artists who had carved the cathedrals of England--a lost trade now so that my guest or his father before him had retreated to the steady money of the Manchester Mills.

My voluntary prisoner seemed a man worn down by time though there was still some yellow in his hair. He stared at ridged fingers folded in his lap and avoided my judicial stare.

"You've been sneaking down there at night carving that rock, haven't you, man? A little bit at a time so folks wouldn't notice. So they'd think he was real. Now, what'd you want to do a thing like that for?"

The stonecutter's forehead wrinkled as if he'd never imagined such a question, certainly never answered it. His hand trembled. Flashing up eyes that I saw for the first time were pale blue, he lunged for the chisel and clutched it hard. Then slowly he unfolded his fingers to display the nail-like thing on his open palm. It spoke, like his sloped shoulders, of human limitation.

"Judge, if he wasn't already in that rock, could a little thing like this put him there?"

After that night the carving stopped. I accept blame for nipping a miracle short of full bloom. Still, the veneration continues. Reverend Pinkard mentions it in sermons, evangelicals still stand on the trail with folded hands, and more worldly admirers bring flowers to lodge in cracks at the figure's foot. I myself have dedicated a bed of marigolds this year to that use.

(Previously published by Bill Green in The Storyteller, July/August/September 2016.)