The Gift of Stones

by Jim Crace

  The paradox is this – we do love lies. The truth is dull and half asleep. But lies are nimble, spirited, alive. And lying is a craft.

  ‘Let us be cruel and listen to that craftsman, Leaf,’ my father said if he was ever pressed to justify his elevated standing with some villagers or the applause which marked his wilder tales.

  ‘Imagine you have spent all day crouched over stone. Your eyes are tired, your back is stiff. You need to take a stroll and the way that you have taken leads you to Leaf’s workshop. You lean upon his perfect wall. How was your day? you ask. You do not care – you simply want to be amused, to hear another voice that isn’t stone on stone.’

  But Leaf – and this was father’s point – could only answer in one way. He would knock the splinters of chipped flint from his chin and lips, rearrange the camouflage of long, stretched hairs across his head and simply tell the truth. It would be flat, his tale. It would take his audience through the day, his daughter at the bellows, the master at the stone. If his listeners did not hold their hands aloft and say, Enough, he’d detail every shallow flake that fell upon his anvil, he’d have them witness all the tedium of work, each word of his would be a hammer blow.

  ‘Imagine, now,’ my father said. ‘A liar intervenes. He picks upon the leaf that always rests upon Leaf’s bench. Leaf is too shy, he says, too modest. Today the master’s dream came true. He found a flint which had the colours of this leaf. It was an oak in stone. He shaped it with the bays and headlands of this leaf. You see the stem and veins? You see the curling stalk? Leaf made them all in stone. He made the flint so light and thin that it began to rustle like a winter leaf disturbed by wind.

  ‘Should you believe what this deceiver says?’ my father asked. ‘You are not fools – but you have had a trying day and he has made you laugh. Only Leaf is not amused. And that makes you laugh some more. You play the game. You challenge both these masters – the storyteller and the stoney – to produce the flint-leaf for inspection. Leaf himself is silent. What can he say? He’s stuck. These lies have made a fool of him. But the liar is not trapped. He never is. He does not care. He says: Leaf ’s leaf was on the table, cooling, lifting at its edges from the breath of those who came to see it. It would make Leaf the richest, greatest knapper in the land. And then what happened? Yes, you’ve guessed. A bird came in and took it for its nest. It was so light, this flint, the bird bit through it with its beak. The pieces floated to the floor like oak ash drifting from a fire.’

  Imagine if the liar then invited everyone to look down on the floor, to get down upon their hands and knees, to find the pieces of the leaf-in-flint. Everybody would snigger at his thinness of deception. A leaf-in-flint, indeed! But could anybody swear, my father asked, that their eyes would not momentarily dip, their eyelids flicker, their knees give way, at the prospect of a shattered oak leaf on the floor? Salute the liars – they can make the real world disappear and a fresh world take its place.

  ‘The secret of the storyteller,’ father said, ‘is Never Smile. A straight mouth and a pair of honest eyes is all it takes to turn a stone to leaf.’ You’ve never seen a face like his when he was telling tales. It was as candid as the moon.

  15

  THERE WAS one certainty in what my father told to me. The woman in the hut, her child, the dog – none of these were false. They were not characters from stories. Their tale was far too bleak. ‘If what I wanted was a woman, I’d not invent one quite like her,’ he said. He mentioned her to no one there. He put her out of mind. But he could not shake her loose from his imagination. She haunted every story that he told. And every time he looked outwards from the village – towards the sea, towards the heath – it was her grey eyes that he saw, her body in the grass, a horseman’s hands upon her waist.

  Nothing stopped him now. It was expected, if he chose, that he would disappear again into the outside world. That’s where, it seemed, he got his stories from. The villagers imagined him, a hunter, tracking down his tales. He’d soon be back. Some villagers – those elders who mistrusted too much levity, those victims of my father’s tongue like Leaf – were quite relieved to see him go. He was disruptive. He had skills that could not be bartered in the marketplace. He had no time for stone. Some children were a little frightened of him, too. They did not like the scars and fissures of his arm. They did not trust his tales which, like sling stones, were sharp on every side.

  And so, when spring came round, my father crept into his uncle’s yard one night and helped himself to gifts that might please the woman and her child. A wooden top that had been his youngest cousin’s. A goatskin mat. Some nuts, some grain, a good flint knife. Some scallop candles. A pot. He wrapped them in the skin and tied them to his back. It was a night that only comes in spring. The air was warmer than the earth and, as he trod the usual route along the bracken path between the village and the sea, his feet sent up a puff of frost which turned to mist on contact with the air. In that no-light of moon and stars, it looked as if his feet were shining like a pair of tumbling glowworms in the damp.

  The sea was out. It was the spring low tide, and shore that normally was undersea was breathing air for once and basking in the moon. This was my father’s path. He took advantage of the tide. At night it seemed much simpler than the clifftop route, the path of wolves and goats along which he’d blundered in the summer past. He walked barefoot and cursed the pebbles and the weed which made the going both slippery and hard. The sand was worse – it opened up beneath his feet like drifting snow. One arm was not enough for keeping balance. He fell down and the sandprints that he made with hand and feet and knees winked and bubbled as they filled with sea. He’d left the glow-worms on the bracken path. Now his tracks were listless silver spheres which shrank and flattened as the wet sand at their edges collapsed to fill the holes.

  Quite soon he found a tidal ridge of shingle which was dry and firm. Now he could walk quickly despite the limpets and the cockleshells, the broken bones of cuttle, the crab claws and the vacant whelks which formed the ridge. From time to time he felt a movement underfoot – unnerving in that darkness – as foraging sandhoppers, sea slaters, crabs, who knows what else?, nipped and quivered at his soles. At first he was not cold. His exertions and the bag across his back preserved the warmth of his uncle’s house at night. But the sweat across his forehead and his shoulders was soon turned gelid by the wind which the sleeping land sucked and summoned from the bleaker sea. Soon he was as cold and damp as frogs. A little frightened, too. The sea, that night, curled and lisped and whispered in a voice which said, Dismay, Dismay, Dismay. No wonder that the wind took flight, took fright, and sought the refuge of the shore. The land was mute – no birds, no human cries, no sheep, no sign of welcome or of safety to my father walking on the beach.

  If we’d been him we would have turned around and gone back home. Too cold for expeditions. Too wet. Too dark. Too treacherous and full of wolves; too pitiless with wind and whispers. Too void. We’d seek the bracken path again and creep into the village, replace the nuts, the knife, the grain and candles we had stolen, and lay out with our cousins by the fire. But my father is not us. We do not share his bludgeoned vanity, his moodiness, his resolution. We do not share his ardour. He did not turn or run. He walked along the shore as if his home was close ahead and not behind. He whistled, hummed. He sang. His voice was whisked away and shredded by the wind. If we had seen him there upon the beach that night (he said), if we had watched him striding on the tidal ridge, we’d trust his word that, more than fear, he felt, for once, exultant.

  Of course, his triumph could not last. The landscape and the tide conspired to chase him off the beach. He rejoined the cliff path at that point where a valley joined the coast. Its stream spread out (remember?) amongst rocks and tumbled boulders. When he had passed this way before – at the frontier where chick-weed turned to wrack, where skylark became tern, where earth gave way to sand – the river water had been warm and shallow. He’d waded it and hardly got his ankles wet. But no
w, at the finish of the winter rains, the stream was deep and strong. It was too dark to follow inland on the bank until a crossing place was found. Besides, my father was in no mind for deviations or delays. He stripped and put his clothes into the goatskin wrap. He held it, high and dry, in his good hand and stepped into the water. He didn’t fall. Or drop the wrap. Or lose his footing in the stream and end up – moments later – dumped and bruised like flotsam on the beach. Dimly he could see the dry bank on the other side. He fixed his eye on that, kept his legs well spread, and crossed.

  By now his teeth were chattering like a conference of knappers’ stones. His skin was barnacled with cold. His hand was stiff. He dressed – but all the dampness of the stream was soaked up by his clothes. The wind passed through him: it played his ribs. He was wattle without daub. He took the woman’s gifts out from the skin and placed them on the bank. He wrapped the skin around his shoulders and sat amongst his gifts, hunched up, a boulder, with his head upon his knees and his arm around his shins. Now the boulder trembled. He was a logan-stone, shaking on the spot. The noises that he made were icy, animal, dank; they were the rhythmic, shivering inhalations of people making love, or cowering, or cold. His stump – a loather of the cold – was numb. He knew he had to light a fire.

  He stood no chance of finding any kindling or dry moss in that light. He took the flint knife that he’d stolen – the sharp and perfect product of his eldest cousin – and tried to cut some kindling from his head. (In his retelling father made it comic, miming with his severed arm and a head that now was old and dry and bald.) But on that night his hair was long enough and coarse and hardly damp. The wind had kept it dry. At first he tried to trap a hank behind his head with his numb stump and to cut the hair free at the roots. He could not hold it firm enough. The hair sprang loose. (He mimed that, too, to laughter that was cautious, thin.) Then he used one hand and tried to slice the thick hair at his forehead. It simply flattened on his skull. Here was a task that required two hands. A one-armed man could only crop his own hair with a knife if he could find the reckless courage to hack the skull, to mutilate his head.

  My father put aside the knife. So much for flint and stone! He held a thin hank of hair – forty, fifty strands – between his pointing finger and his thumb. He pulled to test its strength – and then he snapped the hairs out from his head. He was surprised how easily they came, how little pain there was. He tried again. Another skein came free. Quite soon he had a nest of hair – and a head that looked chewed up by rats.

  Consider now how hard it was for him to break his cousin’s knife in two, to trap the one half with his toes and strike it with the other. Producing sparks was simple – but they were haywire, shortlived, futile. What he needed was ignition, a spark which had the force and foresight to settle on the nest of hair. To simmer, smoke. To smoulder, flare. To blaze.

  Depending on his mood – and on the age and temperament of his audience – my father would invent new ways of making fire. A firefly came and settled on the hair. A lizard that had flames for breath. A fireball. A fire bird. A glow stone. Even with a pair of friction sticks and the dryest moss we know how hard it is to summon fire. With stone and wind and hair? What chance? The truth is this, that father was just lucky. A spark obliged. A few hairs curled and shivered at the thorn of heat.

  Fire is determined. Once it has a pinch of life, it flourishes, it thrives. The hairs sent up the sour fume of burning flesh, part crab, part cheese, part gall. They smoked and melted, flared and shrank, became one piece of brittle, sticky tar. Their blaze was strong enough for father – his hand unsteady from the cold – to light the wick of a scallop candle from his store of gifts. He lit them all. Their flames winked and guttered in the wind. My father placed one scallop in the pot to save it from the weather. Its flame reflected on the clay and, from the pot’s mouth, released a single watery pillar of light in which my father thawed his hand.

  There were enough dead twigs, damp reeds, dry pith, seed masts, plant waste, bark close by for father to build up a fire with the scallops at its base and the wooden spinning top – his youngest cousin’s treasured toy – at its summit. At first it was all smoke – but the wind took that away and coaxed flames to startle on the twigs. My father was at a loss, he said, to comprehend the depth of pleasure that a fire can give.

  He soon was warm, but not all of him at once. That’s the trouble with an exposed fire – it scorches cheeks and noses while necks and backs and buttocks are left freezing in the night. My father had to turn himself, a chicken on the spit, to make quite sure that he was thawed right through. And then he sat before his fire and sucked the emmer grain and ate the nuts. Their shells were fed into the fire. And while he sat there, making shapes and stories out of flames, the sun came up behind his back. If he was at a loss to comprehend the depth of pleasure that a fire can give, then what could he make of dawn? It dulled the cutting edge of wind. It brought my father’s shivering inhalations to an end. It silenced father’s teeth; the knappers’ conference of stones was suspended for the day. His wattle now had daub. The logan-stone was still.

  My father threw the broken knife and the scorched remains of pot into the ashes of his fire. He wrapped the now-warmed goatskin round his shoulders and set off again upon his travels. He knew the way and climbed up from the valley through the mallows and the brambles – now thickening with promises of leaves and buds – until he reached the high clifftop of bracken. There was no ship upon the sea, just a rosehip sun with fleshy canopies of cloud. Already shags and waterhuggers were flying off for the day’s first fish. Fronds and frost and cobwebs gleamed with dew. Giant slugs were on the path. Rocks steamed.

  Father thought then of his cousins and his uncle’s hut at dawn. It was still dark inside. Grey slates of light squeezed past partitions, curtains, screens, to rest in tapered oblong slabs on walls. If there was movement it was rats or an ember settling on the fire. If there was noise it was the rasping in his uncle’s chalky lungs. If there was exultation, it was in dreams. It ended when they woke.

  My father made too much of this, his celebration on the cliff, his sense of liberty from toil at being up so weatherswept and early with the sun. But what is liberty anyway? Not much more than self-deceit, a fantasy. It only takes one stolen dawn while all the world’s asleep for the prisoner of dull routine to count himself quite free. It does not matter that the days that follow are as patterned and as uniform as the cells and chambers of a honeycomb. And so it was that father walked along the clifftop path emboldened by the dawn and relishing the cold and deathly night he’d spent huddled by his fire.

  At midday, he reached the low coast, the juice-red rocks, the overhang of salty heath where he had sheltered from the rain. Again there was a mist. But this time he did not stand and fill his lungs with damp and heavy air and cry, Who’s there? He knew. He turned his back against the sea and walked inland through the fringe of arrow grass on to the heath. Quite soon he found the smudge of smoke and heard the wolf-like barking of her dog. It was the woman who called out, Who’s there? He stood a little distance from her hut and did not speak. He took the goatskin from his shoulders and held it out. His gift. She came into the open armed with a stick, the baby in a leather sling, the dog held by its neck. What she saw there was a young man in silhouette, standing on the spot where many men, on horseback, drunk, defiant, shy, had stood before, awaiting her and holding chickens, honey, cloth as payment for her time.

  ‘Wait there,’ she said. She took the baby and the dog back into her hut. And then came out, untying as she walked the strings and laces which secured her winter clothes. Her eyes were on the goatskin not the man. She’d use it as a cover for her daughter’s bed.

  ‘That’ll do,’ she said. And then, ‘Lay it down. We’ll use it as a mat. The ground is wet …’ And then, in tones that matched the pallor on my father’s face, ‘It’s you!’

  If my father was in a mood for teasing he’d entertain us at this fork in his narration with a treatise o
n temptation. ‘Life is a double-headed worm,’ he’d say. ‘It can wriggle either way. It has the choice. My choice was this: to give the goatskin as a gift, exactly as I’d meant. Or to trade the goatskin there and then, with her, upon the ground.’ His audience, of course, would want the second of the two, the choice which would place my father’s hands upon her waist, her hem tugged high. They’d opt for barter, fair exchange – his skin of goat, her hardly breasts, her punctured water bags of thighs, her patch of black, untended hair.

  And then? Could he then join her in the hut and tend the pot and rock the child? Did merchants on the market green invite their clients home once all the trade was done? No, no. The pleasantries of commerce do not outlive the moment of exchange. If father had sunk down with her then their passions would be spent for good; client, merchant, interchange. She’d take the goatskin to the child, without a word. He’d set off home with only breathlessness and muddy knees to show for all his efforts. You’d think it was an easy choice. But father – sweating, blushing, tempted, shy – could hardly speak.

  The woman was looking closely at him now.

  ‘What have you done?’ she asked. ‘Your hair!’ She reached forward and pushed her hand across his forehead and his skull. ‘Who’s done that to you?’

  ‘I did it to myself,’ he said. ‘To light a fire. I had no moss. I just had hair.’ He twisted a skein of hair between his fingers to show what he had done. ‘Here, I brought this skin.’

  ‘For what?’

  ‘For you. A gift.’

  The dog was barking now, and the baby mewling like a gull. My father and the woman walked back to the hut with nothing dealt and everything to trade.

  16