There is a slab of marble under my bed, the queen I share with husband, Donald.  It’s a beautiful piece, white with silver-gray veins running through, perhaps two feet by two feet, and heavy.  The stone comes from my grandfather McCormack’s quarry in Vermont, and most likely cut and polished at my Aunt Mary McGann’s marble shop.  My mother gave me the piece, which was given to her by my aunt, presumably to be set on a table top or put on display in some manner.  Well, not yet. It’s part of the family inheritance – of marble.  One sister has the marble coffee table, rich, deep green – verde antique. Another has an elegant white pedestal, which stood in my childhood home. McCormack grandchildren received marble book ends for wedding presents, engraved with our initials, and somewhere, I have a piece of marble set into a medallion.

We’re marble people.  And granite. My great-grandfather, Tom McCormack, worked in the  quarries at Dorset, a foreman, I believe. Somehow, there was a connection with the Irish quarry workers and the stonecutting they had done back in Ireland. My grand-father, growing up in the business, started his own, the Green Mountain Marble Company, and for many years it provided jobs for friends and relatives and income for my grandfather’s large family. We heard stories about the marble: that it was used to build St. Bridget’s, the Irish Church on the top of the hill, where men labored after the workday was through, and the interior is decorated with gorgeous Celtic designs, probably pre-Christian.  Some of grandfather’s clean, white marble was used for public buildings and monuments in Washington, D.C., and I like to think it’s true that marble was purchased for the NYC Public Library.  Of course, a significant amount of marble went to headstones, a steady business, except for in the Depression, when such luxuries were cut back.

Marble is part of my earliest childhood memories, good and bad.  At Aunt Mary’s, we visited the shop behind the house: works in progress, broken pieces on the ground, marble dust everywhere.  We visited the old quarries, now gaping pits in the ground, set off by chain link fence, filled with water. Somewhere, I watched marble being cut with bits and drills, a screeching sound that haunted me for years.  My Aunt Tesha helped us imagine life during the heyday of the quarries, how my grandfather hired a bus to bring laborers out from Rutland – the same bus he used to take his flock of children to nearby Lake St. Catherine for summer fun.

The business declined, and no one in the family was ready or willing to take it over – a hard business, and sometimes dangerous.  Before my aunt closed down the marble shop, I went with her and one of my cousins on a delivery of stone to Barre, VT, where the industry survives.  It was a trip of about an hour, in an old, red pick up truck, my cousin at the wheel and hundreds of pounds of marble and granite in the truck bed. Over hills and along twisting Vermont roads, we hauled that weight, hopeful that the brakes would hold and trying to disregard impatient drivers behind us.  In workaday, industrial Barre, we disposed of the marble along with some of my romantic notions about the business.  I was never so relieved have that stone unloaded so that we could return light-hearted with an empty load.  

 As family legacies go, marble is not a bad one: a natural substance, derived of the sea, hidden in the earth, turned into elegant buildings, beautiful statues, and loving memorials. Hard, weighty and lasting.