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James Jamieson, 26, is a burly black who seems made of cannonballs. "I was an impatient person before I came here," he says with a grin. "Now I'm building something to last ten thousand years." Then he's off in a flurry of stone chips as he puts down his first draft, a half-inch cut, the width of the chisel, along the stone's edge. When he began with Bambridge, it took him three days to make an ashlar. Now he can turn one out in 15 minutes. Jamieson, an ex-butcher, has completed 18 months of his four-year apprenticeship. He finished second in a recent stonecutting competition to determine which of the apprentices would go to Bath, England, for special training. Next time he intends to be first.
The man who beat Jamieson is D'Ellis Kincanon, 25. Part Chickasaw Indian and wiry as a heather bush, Kincanon can tap stone all day on a pint of yogurt. His face is ecstatic, like a Sufi mystic's, as he finishes off a pier stone. "Everything works in sacred harmony," he says, but adds that he has never worked under such competitive conditions. "Already we're doing senior apprentice work. Bambridge is pushing us for all we are worth."
At 20, Joseph Apie is the baby, and the truest, rawest talent of them all. The dudes on his block in Spanish Harlem have seen Apie on television and they think he is righteous because he is doing something honorable. "I want to be here till the cathedral is finished," he says. "I know the stone will be here for thousands of years. People will come and look and marvel. Sometimes I finish a job and I say 'Wow!' and I sing to the stone."
Old masons say a man will rub enough skin from his hands to make an ankle-length smithy's apron before he masters the art of cutting stone worthy of dressing a cathedral. But in return he is the apple of God's eye, as this stoneworkers' fable illustrates: There was once a mason's wife who enjoyed watching her husband work in the cathedral while she sewed. The bishop knew them both and it became ritual to exchange pleasantries. One day the mason told the bishop his wife was dying and dearly wished to be laid to rest in the cathedral. The bishop haltingly explained such hallowed ground was not for masons' wives. Some weeks later his lordship politely inquired where the mason had buried his wife. "There," said the mason, pointing to a freshly set pier stone. He had mixed her ashes in the mortar. "You are very rare and precious to God," the bishop humbly replied. —By James Wilde