Then she too became a gravestone: creamy yellow, reticulated by thread-thin veins of iron, embellished along the side panels with fine scrolls and rosettes, and with a centerpiece inscribed “Loving Mother,” all of which I remember in greater detail than I remember her. I have few memories of my mother, who died giving birth to a baby who died with her, but one of the memories I have is the sudden indignity of her finger in my mouth, swiveling roughly, fishing a piece of rock from it. When I was very young, I would go about with bits of stone in my mouth, enjoying the feel of the rough grain against my tongue. Noticing me, his watchful daughter standing in the doorway, he looks up and smiles, but his hands are ever diligent they glide along surfaces, feeling their progress. With pick and file, he etches and sands and then blows the glittering mica dust into the air. With great focus, he hammers at his chisels, patiently lifting away slow, stubborn ribbons of schist like potato peels to carve the rounded tympanums. His eyes and hands search a great heft of rock for its secret seams, and then, with wedge and mallet, he splits it open as one might split an orange. When I remember him, he is working, always working, at his craft.
Like the works of his hands, my father also remains vivid. Drizzle-gray slabs of slate, smoothly planed and cool to the touch grainy sandstone in its striated shades of red and brown and buttercream soapstone soft enough to etch with a thumbnail, yet somehow able to resist the assaults of time and the elements letters and symbols, crosses and cherub wings, and forlorn-looking skulls chiseled delicately into the surfaces beveled edges smooth and sharp beneath the pads of my small, inquiring fingers. Even all these years later, I can still see those gravestones vividly. Death, to me, was tied inextricably to cherished things: to craftsmanship and poetry, to my father and to the beautiful things he made, and I couldn’t help but feel some tenderness for all of it.
Many folks found this proximity to death and its souvenirs discomfiting, but my father was the first gravestone carver in the village of Stratton, New York, which meant that the distillation of death and grief into beauty was our family business. Instead, small, shambling family graveyards butted up against barns, or sprung up like pale mushrooms at the edges of pastures, in the yards of church, and school, and meetinghouse-until eventually you could look out across the village, see all those gravestones like crooked teeth in a mouth, and wonder who the place really belonged to, the huddled and transient living or the persistent dead? Cemeteries were not common in the early years of the 1830s. When I was a child, the dead were all around us. Now in 1984, Collette finds her life upended by the arrival of a gifted child from a troubled home, the return of a stalking presence from her past, and her own mysteriously growing hunger.Ĭombining brilliant prose with breathtaking suspense, The God of Endings serves as a larger exploration of the human condition in all its complexity, asking us the most fundamental question: is life in this world a gift or a curse? Her youthful beauty masks the dark truth of her life: she has endured centuries of turmoil and heartache in the wake of her grandfather’s long-ago decision to make her immortal like himself. Intrigued? Well read on to discover the synopsis and the first chapter from Jacqueline Holland’s The God of Endings, which is out now.Ĭollette LeSange is a lonely artist who heads an elite fine arts school for children in upstate New York. By turns suspenseful and enchanting, this breathtaking first novel weaves a story of love, family, history, and myth as seen through the eyes of one immortal woman.
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