by Jim Crace
The farmers had gone home to feast on their achievements. If they’d stayed, my father claimed, they would’ve seen precisely who was king of that wild world. ‘When everybody’s dead, there’ll still be crabs and flies and carcass shrubs and weeds to strip and clothe the world. There’ll still be stone.’
So it seemed to him, the knapper’s son, as he stood with Doe in the carnage of the heath and listened to the old man talk of husbandry, that the world was cut in two – one for chaos, one for coma – just as the scriptures of his village said. All the outside world required was the liberty to pound and crush, to hammer and to bruise. It didn’t matter what. It didn’t matter if the blows were rained on geese or huts or dogs or boys, so long as there were blows and careless brawls and sudden gusts of hardship to blow good fortune down.
At home – that other, duller world, where now my father steered Doe and her daughter to start their lives afresh – the village blows were innocuous and prescribed. They were rained down on flint. He … they, the workers with two hands, were made tame, secure and virtuous by labour. Their skill was their salvation and their numbness. For once the village of my father’s birth, contemplated from that battlefield of geese, seemed – what was his phrase? – as snug as poppy seeds. Such was the gift of stones.
21
PERHAPS NOW IS the time to make myself quite clearly known to you. It will not do if I stand darkly by to cough and comment at my father’s tale. It is my story, too, and I should show my face. You know me as my father’s daughter and his only child. All that is false. His title ‘father’ was well earned, though not by right of blood. We are not kin.
I am the girl of Doe.
I am the child that he first touched when mother said, ‘Please help.’ She left him standing there, in charge of chicken, dog and child, his gift of samphire fallen at his feet, while she walked off to greet the horseman on the heath. I was the child he rocked to sleep or fed with bean paste and with fish, the one with whom he practised early words like drink and dog and bird. It was for my amusement that he perfected his repertoire of faces and new sounds. I was the first in his adult, one-armed life to barter love with love. So father he became. So father he remains for me.
It was on my father’s arm, with my mother, Doe, exhausted by the slaughter of the geese and the walk along the coast, trailing in our wake, that I first came upon the villagers of stone. My age was not yet two, yet I maintain that I recall that day. We were walking with our backs against the wind and sea. The path was springy, bracken. It led up from the crusty boulders of the shore to the windy brow where Leaf had built his huts. His walls were thick and packed with moss. There was no sign of life – except that, tapping in the wind, there was the rhythmic beat of antler tine on flint, the squeak of bellows, the hum of people hard at work.
Once we had walked beyond the brow and the wind had dropped we heard those beats and taps, those hums and squeaks, in jostling profusion. They sounded like the first and heavy drops of summer rain or like a thousand nutbirds pecking at a shell. The further that we walked into the village, the heavier the rain of pecks, the quieter the sea and wind, the more uniform and tended the walls and pathways that we passed. It must have seemed, to one so young and sensuous as me, that we had sunk into a dream where all disorder had been vanquished by invisible and systematic hands. Compared to what we’d left behind, the turmoil and the passion of the heath, here was a world of symmetry and of composure.
Quite soon we heard the sound of voices. The merchants were at work. We came on to the market green and there – amongst the produce and the crowd
– my father saw his uncle trading stone. Now my recollections become enmeshed in father’s version of that day. How many times since then I’ve watched him mime his uncle’s face, its irritation and dismay, its comic fear of our fatigue and what it meant, as we approached his trading stall. We looked to him for heat and food and sleep. He looked at us as if we were weevils in his bread. He had no choice – in front of all his neighbours and the purchasers of stone – but to welcome father and his family home.
22
THAT EVENING uncle asked my father to explain. There was no point in telling lies, my father said. If what he wanted was a woman for a tale, he’d not invent one quite like Doe. There she was, reduced and tearful in their midst. They all could see she was no siren from a ship. Her perfumes were of wood smoke and of slott. Who’d want a dab of that around their throat or wrists? Her clothes were brown and grey. Her skin was scarred and pallid, her face a mask of weariness from all the weeping and the walking that she’d done. Her eyes – quite clear and grey and unabashed when she and father had first met – were, in a single glance, both hard and meek. Was she the only story he’d brought home? His cousins were not pleased, though knowing him, they waited for the twist. ‘Why have you brought her here?’ they asked. ‘What use is she to us? What can she do? Whose is the girl? Not yours, for sure. She’s got too many arms.’
Listen now. I’ll tell you what my father said. It was dusk outside his uncle’s house. The uncle’s cronies were all there, the cousins and some merchants, Leaf, some knappers who had left their workshop and its shadows to walk and cough up chalk into the air. Say twenty men, some wives, some boys, a dog, a hen, the first of nighttime’s bats and moths, the moon. Father’s returns to the village always gathered crowds. His stories were – like rare and distant perfumes, cloths and jewels – much prized.
‘You see I have a woman here,’ he said, indicating where my mother sat and dozed on the outskirts of the crowd. ‘A small girl, too. Shhh, let them sleep because what I have to say is meant for you, not her.’ That sent a wave of interest through the people gathered there. What they expected was some fun, some bloated indiscretions or some jokes at her expense. He raised one hand and wagged a finger. Be quiet, be still, it said.
‘This is a story made by life,’ he said. ‘It’s true in every way.’ That caused some cautious laughter and some shouts. ‘You know that when I want to make your eyes stretch wide, I stretch my stories wide to match. You know that when I want some fun, I let my stories tickle truth. You know all that. You are not fools. Well, now, here is a tale that’s meant to make you weep. There is no need for camouflage. The world out there is sad enough. So this is not a dream. This, to a hair, is fact.’ He’d never heard an audience so quiet. They sat and waited to be entertained by truth.
It was a love story of a sort. The girl was pretty with grey eyes. No man could pass her by without blushing at the courage of her gaze. When she was young she met a man who lived close by. Their parents were at war. Some ageing insult was roosting in the trees between their homes. They would not speak. They would not let the daughter see the son. And so the lovers ran away. Why not? Chance is a pear. It isn’t ripe for long. It drops. It rolls away. It rots.
Where did they run? Not far. The man knew of a heath where they could live quite well. The sea was close, with fish and crabs and laver and marshy beds of samphire, too. If she liked rabbits, he’d trap them for her. They’d eat well. And, in the spring, the wind would bring in geese. Had she never tasted goose eggs, or its flesh? Then she would. He took her to a hide which had been built upon the heath when last spring’s geese had arrived late and the people waiting there had grown cold. It was the summer and quite warm. The sea and sky were matching blues. The earth was dry and firm. The man caught fish and gathered samphire. They grilled the fish on hot red stones which crumbled in the fire. They stewed the samphire in sea water. She watched him as he stripped the flesh with his front teeth and threw the stem into the fire. She did the same. Their stems embraced. They whined and bubbled in the fire like spit in love. That night – and here my father’s neighbours held their breath – they lay together on beds of rush. They talked – then dreamed – of what it would mean to live their lives in pairs.
They had two boys. There were no problems with the births. They all grew strong on mussels roasted in hot stones, on baked guillemot, on lobsters, coalfish, ka
le. If there was any food to spare, or if the reeds were long enough to pull, or if the rabbit traps were generous, then the man would take them for exchange at the villages close by. He’d bring back milk and cheese and beans. And beer. One day he bartered a basketful of laver for a pup. It was the litter runt of hunting dogs. He gave it to the boys. They had a dog and food and fun. They felt as if their heath was blessed. Even the wind, it seemed, which came in steady from the sea was whistling their tune.
‘That chit who’s sleeping there,’ my father said, pointing at poor Doe, ‘was once as serene and fleshy as a seal.’ The circle turned and looked – or tried to look because the dusk was down and, for all they knew, the woman and her girl were gone. But – with my father’s help – they remembered her, the thinness of the skin and hair across her skull, the jackdaw shoulders, the insect hands. You know the storyteller’s tricks; with every detail in the list he mimed and had some fun with jackdaws, insects, skulls.
The task he’d given them was this: transform that woman’s carcass into seal. The stoneys and the mer- chants there were happy to oblige. They’d had an irksome day. Their heads had been in cages since sallow dawn. Their eyes had been fixed on stones and on their merchandise. Constructing seals from bones brought puckers to their noses, eyes and mouths. They saw her there, a sea-going slug upon the beach, weighed down by flesh and happiness.
Now they were ready for the whale. This was the rorqual that the sea had washed onto the red and juicy rocks. The tide backed off. The creature drowned on air. The boys – by now they were the masters of the heath – had never seen a whale before except as spray offshore. This one was twelve men long. Its belly and its chest was bright and fissured like a silver birch. Its back was ash. Quite soon these trunks were red with fruit where the seagulls had pecked holes.
Doe, her husband and the dog came down with knives. The tide, the night – and seagulls – left them little time. Already they could hear the wolves calling out their bids for meat. The crabs were massing too. Again my father had some fun with seagulls, crabs and wolves. His audience was beached and left helpless by the warp of words, the weft of mime, in father’s storytelling net.
‘The man soon showed his boys how whales were cut,’ my father said. ‘They had sharp knives. The best. Let’s not waste good blushes in the dark by saying where that village was that mined and worked these knives.’ He pointed at his severed arm. ‘Let’s simply say that these were tools well used to cutting flesh.’ He held up his hand and formed a perfect, leaf-shaped knife as thin as air. He mimed the body of the whale. He was its weight, or so it seemed. He showed exactly what it took to cut into the silver-birch bark of the belly, how meat was carved away in cubes, how skin was stripped, how candle fat was melted into scallop shells with reeds as wick. He showed how hard it was for two adults and two boys to snap the rib bones from the whale. They stood upon each rib as if it were a bouncy bough. They jumped in unison until the rib detached, and then they tumbled with it onto the shore, the dog and seagulls squabbling for the jelly and the blood.
Quite soon they had enough long bones and meat and fat and skin. In the morning they would go to the market green. They’d do good trade. Each rib was worth a horse, or a cow or a pair of goats. Four ribs could make a hut. One rib would keep a carver prosperous and busy for a year. One tiny piece of rib would make a needle of such sharpness that it would never dull. Thank fortune for the sea, the tide, the wind. It had brought the whale ashore. The whale would make them safe and rich.
It was no wonder, father said, that they were reckless on that night. ‘The boys were fast asleep. You know the world. The woman and her man embraced. They didn’t take much care.’ He let that last phrase tease a little in the night. And then, ‘The careless lovers are the ones with memories in flesh, a baby on the hip, one on the breast, one waiting to be served, one on its knees, another with its finger in the food, two others fighting on the ground, three dead and buried, and a dozen more to come. The careful lovers are the ones who … let’s not say what. There are a thousand ways. But here’s a tip from me. You know the oarweed on the shore? It’s just the thing and just the size. It’s smooth and wet and opens like a pouch. You put it on. I’ll not mime that. But, men, watch out for crabs. And women, eels.’
The guffaws that my father earned with such fantasies as this were as hollow as a wormed-out nut. No one knew for sure if father was sincere. His oarweed tip had all the style of truth but all the signs of foolery as well. Who would be the first one there to try it out? Which father, lover, beset by babies and by lust, would pioneer the oarweed harvest on the shore? What price would every neighbour pay to be a moth upon the wall when that first man, bedecked in weed and naked, talked sweetly to his smiling wife?
My father clapped his hands to bring them back. It was too dark to see him wink. ‘Remember who this story’s for,’ he said. ‘We have two lovers rich with whale. They could afford another child to add to their two boys. That night – as scavengers wrestled on the beach for food – they wrestled on their mat. He did not let her simmer there while he ran down to rummage amongst the wolves and crabs and gulls for oarweed on the shore. Life’s far too short for that. They were in love. That night his seed broke from its husk. It put out shoots. It put out roots. A girl was made. That girl who’s sleeping with her mother there. You see, I tell no lies. She’s there, she’s there, if you could only see her through the dark. She’s flesh and blood and bone. Shhh, let her sleep. This story is too sad for her.’
At dawn, my father said, they loaded up a sled with whale and tied on the ribs. The man, the boys, the dog set off towards the village where the stoneys lived and where the richest market was. The journey would take all day. One day for trade. Another day to get back home. Three days in all. The woman was content. In three days’ time they would have livestock of their own. Fresh goat’s milk, that was the summit of her ambition. She’d be fulfilled. Except that her husband and her boys – my true father and my brothers – did not come home. The dog came back, unscathed. But no one else.
Who knows what happened in those days? my newfound, storytelling father asked his cousins. No one will ever know. Perhaps they perished amongst the knappers here. Perhaps Doe’s husband thought like this: I have my sons and all this wealth in bones upon my sled. I’ll find myself a younger wife and a home less windy than the heath.
Perhaps they met with wolves, attracted and made cruel by the smell of dog and whale. The dog ran off. The man and boys were too entwined with the riches on the sled. They did not run. They died.
Perhaps they were abducted by the trees at night. They strayed into the breathing forest. The roots sprang from the soil and held the boys. A branch curled round their father and held him tight, so that he could not scream or use his fists and feet. The dog barked at the trees and showed its teeth, and then turned tail and fled the forest. In time the bodies of the man and boys turned to wood. Their skin was bark. Their eyes were knots. Their arms were boughs. Their blood was sap. Any travellers who passed by there would get to know the trees whose knobs and trunks were men, whose roots were swollen in the shape of boys. Those trees were signposts through the wood.
Or, perhaps, the truth was this. A pair of horsemen were camped along the way. They’d trapped two rabbits with a snare. They’d eaten rabbit for three days. They were eager for a change. Such was their luck that here was whale meat on a sled. They’d only eaten whale meat once before. They set their horses square across the path. They said, Let’s swap. You take the rabbits. We’ll have whale.
Doe’s man was careful not to give offence. He offered them a generous cut of meat. But now the horsemen did not care for meat. They counted up the ribs which bounced and rattled on the sled. They knew their worth. Perhaps they bantered for a while, toying with the man’s politeness and his fear. Perhaps they simply took their clubs and sticks and bartered with some bruises to his head. One thing’s for sure, in transactions such as that, it is the horsemen who grow rich and not the ma
n and boys on foot. They would have dragged the bodies into undergrowth. Perhaps they aimed some idle kicks at the dog and then left it there to lick its masters’ icy cheeks. That night they’d boast of their good luck and dine on whale. Perhaps.
‘What should the woman do?’ my father asked. ‘Her husband and her boys were gone. The whale was picked and cleaned and broken up by stones and tide and washed back out to sea. If you were her, what would you do to find your family again, once you’d tired yourself with tears? If you were wise, you’d take the dog and point its nose and follow where it led. She did just that. It led her here. Of course. Where else? This was her husband’s destination. Don’t laugh. I’ve told you once before, this is a story made by life. This, to a hair, is fact. That dog came here. It brought her to the market green. Such wealth, such homes, she thought. But the people here, they had no time for her. She had no merchandise, just tears and questions and a dog. What happened to my family here? she asked. Does anybody recognize this dog? Did anybody deal in whale and bones a little while ago? Who’ll help me now? You sent her home without replies. And now she’s back again, with me. Does no one recognize her face?’
Consider now the consternation that my father’s story caused. He’d brought its characters to life and placed them in his uncle’s house, sleeping, close enough for the villagers to hear their snores, and for their snores to sound like accusations and complaints.
Quite soon they found it far too dark and cold to listen to my father any more. They peeled away before the tale was done, unmoved by father’s portrait of the widow and her child on the heath, her struggles not to die, her hardships, grief and hunger, the slaughter of the geese, the crushing of her hut. Quite soon there were no cousins left to hear my father’s tale. His audience – excluding bats and moths – had crept away, unamused and angered by the venom in his voice.
