by Jim Crace
There were twists of bacon drying in the smoke above the fire. He pulled one loose. It would not be missed. He went outside and, avoiding Doe’s grey eyes, gave the twist to me and scuttled back to the simplicities of flint. By dealing with a child, he thought, he had sidestepped yet satisfied the rituals of exchange.
We should not laugh at his bad luck. Yet there was something lumbering and comic about the look that crossed his face when he approached the hill next day. Doe was waiting for him there, between the double guards. She called him cousin. She pointed to the pile of perfect flints that she had already chosen for his sled. Let’s not call on the image of the honey and the bee. This cousin had no sting. He was a simple blow-fly caught – and flapping – in the finest web.
He thought his fortunes had improved when she seemed happy to allow him to load and take away her stone without her help. He said, ‘Stay here, and when I come again I’ll bring another twist of bacon for the girl.’
‘Bring something else,’ my mother said. ‘We’ve meat enough for now. Bring bread. Or milk.’ He was happy to oblige. It was a bargain if compared to the embarrassments of yesterday. He was content to share these odd and teasing intimacies with her so long as she and he were out of sight. Besides, the flints she’d piled were good enough. Why should he complain?
Next day he came with eggs and bread. She waited for him with a pile of stone. This blow-fly was enmeshed again. She had him trapped. A tougher cousin would have sent her packing that first day, without a second thought. There’d be no bacon twist. This cousin was too kind. He paid the price. Next day he brought my mother milk. She paid for it with flint.
I do not recall what happened then, except that those two, three bashful men with mischief on their minds soon spied my mother’s industry. They were emboldened to allow her to collect their flint as well. It must have seemed – you know the wily artifice of men – that Doe’s new task of piling stone would lead them closer to tasks more shared and intimate.
So now we had four sleds to load, and more to come. We were employed. Our faces were well known. The stoneys who were used to labour for themselves were quick to welcome and to use this unexpected new resource. They saw the logic of our lives, and why we chose to live halfway between the stoneys and the stone. It made good sense that they should spend more time tapping gently at their flints, unfastening the implements that hid within, while we – for apples, eggs and bread – brought in the stone, took back the waste, maintained the hill. No one could say to us again, ‘That hill is ours, not yours.’
25
THIS IS the way my early childhood passed. Like all the other stoneys there we rose at dawn. It was the light that woke us. The more we were accepted, the more there was for us to do. My first job was coaxing from the embers of our fire an early flame, then warming stones for us to heat our bread. So silent was my mother at those times, that I am startled that I learned to talk. Yet talk I did, nonstop. I was a woodland bird, my father said. My mother had become as voiceless, distant as a kite. I had become a warbler in love with its own song. Here was the proof – if there was any doubt – that children are soon free of what their parents are. If I was heir to anything, it was my father’s, my false father’s tongue. I shared, too, his reticence with stone.
Yet on those mornings when the skies were pink and calm and the ocean wind was shy to come ashore, that hawk that father used to decorate his tales could spy me taking at a sprint the gradient between our house and the flinty hill. My mother, Doe, still half awake on this latest day of labour, was less eager to begin. But, once at work, she was more diligent than me. She did not pause, bent double like a broken fern, in her job of loading stone on sled. She felt, at last, that she and I were safe so long as there were stoneys needing stone, so long as there were farmers, horsemen, fishers, wrights who wanted arms and tools.
For all my sprinting and my talk I was a lazy child. It was more fun to chase the rabbits or to test how far stray seeds would fly if tossed into the wind than work. It was more fun to make up songs, aloud, with teasing rhymes. It was more fun to mime a little constipation so that I could creep away to see what lay beyond the village and the hill.
But Doe was not amused by me. Her love – so light and pliant on the heath – was solemn on the hill. Her nightmare was that she would die and I would be alone. If she could pass to me the gift of stones, then she could die and leave me with the means to live alone. And so it was, despite the sneeze of tethered horses in the distant wood, despite the plumes of smoke which summoned from the outside world, despite the lure of father and his idle life upon the shore, I found myself enslaved.
This is how we worked. My mother used an antler pick to pierce and loosen chalk. She broke it up and pushed away the noduled roots of flint which were the tougher siblings of the chalk. She knew the trick required to spot the grain inside the stone. She knew which flints would make long knives, which were the densest, most resistant stones ideal for hammers, strikers, axe blades, picks, which were loose enough in grain, shape and disposition to flake for arrowheads or spears, which would splinter into harpoon barbs, which were only good for putting into walls. She sorted flints in piles and pointed to the one which I should lift and load. And then the next stone. And the next stone too. All day. That is how the job was done. We grazed and turned the earth like goats except our cud was flint not grass.
We were not good at loading all the stone on sleds. The studs and hollows would not embrace for us, or if they did, the journey down the slope towards the village would rattle loose the flint and we – in full view of every idle stoney there – would have to start again. Instead we used large baskets made from reed which we had traded in the marketplace for surplus bacon earned through shifting stone. We tied the baskets on the sled. We went to every workshop in the village – including Leaf’s – and came away with food or skin or fuel. The stoneys treated mother much as the merchants treated them. That is to say they treated her with all the coldness and respect with which fishermen treat fish. She was the chit and I the sprat who serviced them with stone. The passion that she roused amongst some men when we first came had cooled. She was more rounded and constrained. She was like them, a stoney night and day.
Here, perhaps, an eyebrow should be raised. Beware of what a mother’s daughter says. I was a child – six years of age by now – and far too young to question or to judge what Doe had done and why. I’m speaking here with father’s voice. His love for Doe had cooled as well. Or changed at least. His hopes were now regrets. They hardly spoke. My father stayed away. He could not bear the woman she’d become, well fed and busy on the hill. He much preferred the ulcers and the dirt, her thinness and her poverty, her helplessness when she was living on the heath. He much preferred those dusks when she – called out by horsemen in the grass – said, ‘Hold the child. This won’t take long.’
She did not need him now. She had no need of any man. The labour which had made of her a slave had made her freer too. My father was the only one whose life was rid of stone. And so he used the phrase ‘flint-hearted and flint-tongued’ to dismiss the woman he had courted for so long. She would not let him take revenge. She dealt with him as if he were someone she owed a debt. She hid from him. She would not meet his eyes. For her my father was the heath. She dare not think of him or it.
But we have missed my father and the heath. As this tale has journeyed on and brought us to that point where Doe, transformed and fattened, was working on the hill, we have felt the absence of the man whose rudder-tongue could steer us free from our small world. We are all tired of stone. We crave some geese or ships, some smoke or riders, some moonlit footprints shining like a pair of tumbling glow-worms in the damp. We crave again my father’s single restless hand, the teasing undulations of his voice, his tales, his falsities.
And so I’ll let my father’s version take the oar again. He was the one who knew what happened next.
26
‘IT WAS THE END of summer when she died (my fa
ther said). Who knows exactly when?
In those days when she lived so diligently beside the hill my life was what it always was. So there you see me once again upon the shore, running toes along the sand. What else was there to do before the nighttime came? My days of “simply filled my chest with air and took off down the coast” were gone. I was not well. I was a thwarted man. The song I sang was this: How sad is he who has no wife. His seed is trapped. It turns to poison in his loins. His blood runs hot and burns. It dries his body and he leads a pale and angry life.
Move on, I’d tell myself. Forget this Doe. She’s lost – though quite how lost I did not guess. I was throbbing for her still. In the bony swelling of my severed arm. And elsewhere too – though I had a ready palliative for that. The cure for my arm was death. And until then, it seemed, I had to live with pain. The flint-cut bone, its covering of skin so tucked and tightly drawn, was now, as I grew older, softening and turning bad. The stump was red except where blisters formed or punctured so that pus could drain and dry. See here. My arm. This is no tale. If I wanted to invent misfortune for myself I’d not invent this arm or what occurred to Doe. I’d suffer the bad luck that mends. I’d not be me.
Watch out, you say. We know his tricks. He’s milking us like cows. He thinks we’ll sympathize with all his sins because his arm is bad. You’re right, you’re right. But I’m only telling what occurred, and my story takes its shape from what has happened to my arm. With two arms I’d be knapping and too dull and chalky to tell tales. With two arms I’d not have taken off along the coast, or killed the goose, or brought the woman and her girl back home. An arrow ruled my world; it made me what I am.
What kind of man is that? I must presume I am the vengeful sort. I’ve said before that malice and my elbow stump are twins. When Doe made clear that she rejected me I did not wish her well. I wanted her to see that she would suffer on her own, that I was the only straw for her to catch. I offered her gifts of food. But she was in no mood for me. She feared my tongue. She feared, I think, that I might talk about the horsemen on the heath and what she did for them and what they paid.
She clearly did not fear the tongues of those few men who courted her. She was the sweetest lamb with them. I’d watched her from afar. I’d seen the way she’d block their paths and rouse them with her smiles. I’d followed her and cousin to the hill and watched her test her charms on him. A waste of time. That blushing cousin was no use. His blood sped to his face – and nowhere else. And yet. Somehow. She’d trapped him. And herself. He’d ended up the sheepish devotee of Doe. She’d ended up a devotee of stone.
At times I wished I had less time. The hours that I passed, alone, were hours free to concentrate on pain. I saw the strength the stoneys had in focusing all day on flint. Each mallet blow, each flake, each bellow breath, each sticky cough which tried and failed to lift the chalk dust from their lungs would cut their worries short. They did not seem to mope. Was I the only one to see that, all around, the world was tumbling, spinning, wild? The bats were flying in the sun, the butterflies at night. You only had to briefly lift your head above your parapet of stones to see that where the village ended mayhem ruled and danced.
I expect you smile and brighten in expectation of some fantasy of mine. You’re weary of those tales in which the ship lands on the beach and unloads women, perfume, plagues or sailors hunting for the sun. You’ve heard each variation of the way my arm was lost; the women and the beasts, the drunk and hungry traveller who mistook it for a chicken, the cruel and giant gull. You’re tired of the talking goose, the magic dog, the travelling stench, the boy who had the gift of flames. You’re ready for some freshly fashioned tale. The thought of mayhem dancing gives you hope. Instead, all hope ends here.
Again it starts with what I took to be a ship. One night the wind was coming off the land and sweeping out to sea. For once the rooks were flying over water and the waves, at dusk, were tossing back their heads and hair and fleeing from the beach. The sea, so used to going with the wind, had reared in anger at the way its mate had turned. It was in turmoil, like a grey and boiling pot of gruel. The wind, instead of calling, “Home, go home,” was singing, “Back, keep back.” The land, so tired of all the pounding it endured, was turning on the sea.
Of course, the stoneys went inside and packed the unprotected land side of their homes with wads of moss or peat to keep away the draughts. I walked up to the avalanche of stones and wood that Doe had built herself. I thought the wind would turn her home into a fall of rocks and take her and her daughter, too, in a tumbling tour of village, beach and sea. I stood outside and called, “Doe, Doe, sweet Doe. It’s me.” I dare not call too loud despite the wind. My errand was too shy.
At last, when she had offered no reply, I pushed aside the flapping gate-screen to their home. I sensed the bodies lying there. Doe’s tense and wakeful breaths. The quaver of the sleeping girl. The wrestling of the wind and walls.
“It’s me,” I said again, though, in that light, me might have been one of a dozen men.
“What is it, then?” she asked.
“Are you all right?”
“Of course.”
“It’s windy out.”
“We’re used to wind.”
I went outside and propped my back against the dry, land wind. I heard but could not see the sea. Yet there were yellow lights. It seemed as if there were three stars which had taken refuge in the shallow water just offshore. They seemed to bob and shift. These were the kind of lights to make a story bob and shift as well. They were the lights of ghosts or lightning fish or baby stars which hatched from surf; they were the early lights of windswept dawn or the spitting embers of the dusk, if that is what I chose.
But what I choose now is to tell the truth. Those lights – turned frantic in the bay – were sailors bringing in their boat and doing what they could with burning brands to find a passage free of rocks. Their ship was stray, exhausted, blown off-course by storms. You hold your breath to hear the tale of how I met the sailors on the beach. You’ve heard that one before, though not in wind and not at night. But here my tale is done. They sheltered from the wind. And in the morning they had gone. I did not fill my lungs with air and take off down the coast. Which coast? Which way?
A few days later, with the wind and sea now reconciled, I saw three sails far out. And, in the afternoon, two more. All of them were heading for the coast beyond the place where Doe had had her hut. I was reminded of those days when the geese came in, first singly, then in skeins. These ships were just as buoyant, and as stately, as the birds. Why was there mayhem in my mind?
Here is the paradox of ships. Our hearts should lift at sails, because they show that every tumult of the seas is weaker than the will of sailors. A ship is order, symmetry. Its line is straight, its purpose clear; it has no moods. Yet my heart sank when I saw ships in such numbers, in such rhythmic unison, heading for the shore. It felt as if an older symmetry had been betrayed, the symmetry of tides and waves, and of a horizon shimmering and dimpled for the passage of the sun, not sails. Those ships caused me alarm. They made me fear that wads of moss were not enough to keep the world at bay.
What next? The rooks again. They rose like gnats above the waving masts of trees in the forests beyond the hill. Something on the ground had frightened them, was frightening them each day. And then the fires, though distant, seemed to burn too thickly. The smoke was heavy, grey, long-lived. The sea-borne chaos had come ashore and was setting villages alight. What other meanings could there be to the sequence of the ships, the rooks, the fires?
What would you have done if you were me? Run up and tell the stoneys, Look, the smoke is thick, the rooks are high, they’re not there now but there were ships upon the sea, your world is coming to an end? Would that have caused alarm? It would have caused, instead, delight. They would have sent for me at night and asked me to repeat it all while they relaxed and ate. And if I made them step outside and look beyond the hill at smoke and rooks? What then? They’
d only marvel at the power of my tongue. The ritual of our trade was this – I did not tell the truth. They looked to me for comfort not for gloom.
Of course, a man must eat and food for me was earned by talk. I did invent for them another breed of tales in which a fleet of ships with crews, half rook, half man, had come to land. They lived on fire. Flames were their meat. Their drink was smoke. Or else (for children) a tribe of giants had come ashore and in their haste to devastate the land had knocked a rook’s egg from its nest. The story was the rook’s revenge. The moral was the power of the weak. Or else the men that came ashore were armed with weapons that were gleaming in the oddest way. The stones that made them were as light as leaves; their arrows sped like swallows. Compared, our arrows were like pigeons, plump and clumsy in the air.
This last was not a favourite tale. The stoneys and the merchants were aware that trade in flint was bad. The marketplace was not the bustle it had been. There were fewer horsemen passing through with enticing goods to trade for arms. Although the farmers still arrived to barter what they grew for what we made, there were old trading friends who seemed to disappear.
Who dared discuss this, openly, aloud? Not anyone I knew. They only whispered that perhaps there was a plague, a war, some floods, which kept the trade away. They did not doubt that life – despite its passing oddities – would go their way quite soon. This was the lesson they had learned whenever trade had slackened in the past: the outside world was never free from stone. There was no sickling of the corn, no scraping hides, no fishing, hunting, wars, no cutting flesh, no knives, no fires, except for stone and stoneys. Without the stoneys men would have to fight with sticks. And what would women use to cut the cord when children came? Their teeth? What next? Were people just as mean as wolves?
