by Jim Crace
THE FIRST THING that my father noticed was the stench. The saltland heath – sodden and yellowed by the winter – was sweating in the sun. It smelled like rotten fruit, like beer, like cow’s breath. The earth was passing wind; it belched at every footfall; its boil had burst; it was brackish and spongy with sap and pus and marsh. And then he saw new people in the distance, their makeshift shelters, and their fires. Last year, at summer’s end, there had been none – just her, the dog, the child. The heath was home to six or seven families now.
‘They’re waiting for the geese,’ the woman said. ‘I’m waiting, too. They come back every year, the geese, those people there. It means that summer’s come. We’ll eat fresh food again. I’m sick of nuts and crabs.’
Once more she was obsessed with food. Goose eggs, goose fat, goose meat. She talked about the feast that there would be once the geese came in. Mesmerized, she said, by the ripe and rotten odour of the springtime heath and lured by choruses of frogs, the birds would plummet from the sky. The males would fly in first to squabble over nests and to preen themselves in readiness for mating. Then – two, three days later – the females would arrive. There’d be the rough-and-tumble of feeding, breeding, rearing young, and then, before the shortest day, the tribe of geese would rise again, their goslings too, and fly away, inland. Where to? The woman did not know. Nor could she solve the mystery of where the geese flew from, nor what there was beyond the sea, nor why the birds were not like sheep, homelovers, fearful of the outside world, faint-hearted, calm.
‘Those men and women think,’ she said, pointing at her springtime neighbours on the heath, ‘that geese are people that have died. They say my husband and my boys are geese.’ She shrugged. ‘Who knows? I’ve also heard them say that geese bring babies, that geese bring dreams, that geese are blessings to the poor. I’ve heard it all. Myself, I know the truth. I’ve seen it every year. The geese bring summer and take away the frosts. You’ll see.’
The spring was early but the geese were not. My father waited for three days before the first skein passed overhead and went inland.
‘Those aren’t ours,’ the woman said. They waited three days more and, finally, at dawn, an arrowhead of geese came in from off the sea, chuckling amongst themselves and calling ahead to the people there – cowl-yar, cowl-yar – that winter had pulled up its roots and fled.
My father stood and watched their flight, the nomads on the wing. They were the great pea geese. He’d seen a stray before, a single bird, exhausted, blown off course by starvation and by storms. It had fallen – just as the woman had described – onto the causeway of his village, by the market green. No one had known quite what to do – until a stoneworker had strode from his workplace and struck the goose across the head with a wooden mallet. Then everybody knew what next. Goose meat was such a treat. They’d cooked it there and then. Its flesh was drenched and tasteless from the flight.
But he had never seen such a buoyant, stately fleet of birds before, not in such numbers, not in such rhythmic unison. He looked up at their heavy breasts, their long necks and at the slow and ponderous greeting of their wings which seemed too brief and effortless to keep such heavy birds aloft. They passed across the elderberry rocks so low that a man on horseback could have picked them from the sky like pears. And then they rose a little on the heath, repulsed it seemed by the pungency that they encountered – re-encountered – there. This was their annual resting place. A single, leading goose swooped down like a hawk, its wings half-folded, its body dropping in a whiffling spiral dive. And soon its companions had spiralled, too, and dropped exhausted on the heath like pigeons hit by stones. Already there were other arrowheads spread out above the sea and soon the pungent heath was throbbing, panting, with the brief distress of voyagers whose voyage now was done.
‘Go on,’ she said. ‘Catch us a goose.’ She handed him a heavy, knuckled stick. ‘They won’t taste at their best until they’ve fed. But I can’t wait. Just the thought of goose is making soup inside my mouth. Go on, go on. Pick something plump.’
My father had not killed before. His village had been fed by trade, not harvesting or slaughter. Already several neighbours were walking with their sticks down to the weary geese. My father followed them. He’d watch and learn their craft.
The geese were tired – but they were not entirely senseless. They understood the purpose of this human delegation armed with sticks. They scattered. They lowered their heads and necks and hissed if anyone came close. The trick, it seemed, was to stand quite still and wait. Goose-brained is what the villagers called a man whose memory was poor. There was good cause. These geese forgot the danger of the sticks once there was no noise or movement. They shuffled back to graze the grass and reeds at the butchers’ feet. Six or seven paid the price. One clout across the shoulders was the best. Their weaving bodies – so sinuous and subtle on the wing – were dumplings on the heath. Killing those few was simple. It took no skill. My father stood stone-still. Quite soon he had a trusting congregation of grazing geese. He chose the plumpest, took one deep breath and grasped his stick.
Of course my father could not allow his butchery to be a speedy, plain affair. One blow, one goose, one feast. He could not – at least, in his retelling of that day – resist the role of the buffoon. ‘That wretched dog of hers,’ he said. The dog, it seemed, was just as keen as all the people there for goose. It had sunk down, its nose far-stretched, its tail tucked in, and followed father across the heath. It had found a spot in thigh-length grass where, out of sight, it could come close to father and his congregation. It took the lifting of the stick as some command. It came out of the grass with the speed and manners of a thunderclap. Its single bark sent every goose haywire. Save one. The plumpest in the congregation. It seized the bird by its wing, which was as inefficient as catching lobsters by their claws. The goose began to beat the heath with its free wing. My father’s stick came down, and struck the dog a glancing blow across the back. It opened up its mouth and let its prey – except some feathers – go free. The goose – unable to distinguish man from dog – went for my father’s legs. Its black and yellow bill was stronger than it looked. It bit. My father fell. The goose tugged on his coat and the dog – unnerved by father’s blow – stood back and barked.
We would be fools to swallow such a comic tale – the dog, the stench, my father down and caked in sap and pus and marsh – but catch a goose he did. He swears to that. Perhaps the dog regained its courage and seized the bird again. Perhaps my father and his flailing stick struck lucky. Perhaps a springtime neighbour, taking pity on the one-armed clown, simply stepped across and dealt the final blow.
17
THE WOMAN showed him how to pluck and draw a goose and not waste time. The feathers must be pulled soon after death, she said, before the flesh turns cold and stiffens. She started with the feathers underneath the wings, and then the down upon the breast, and then the tougher flights on wings and tail. She seemed more animated than she had ever been before, and laughing as she worked. It was the thought of father’s antics on the heath. The baby and the dog seemed happy too. Her laughter touched them all.
Once all the feathers had been pulled she singed the carcass in the fire. The plucked goose-skin became a landscape cleared by flames. She laid the blackened bird upon its back and cut its pinions and its neck. Now the crop could be removed and the entrails loosened with two fingers. She cut the body between tail and vent, worked free the gizzard and drew away the giblets in one piece so that no bitterness was spilled upon the flesh. She threw the giblets to the dog. All was achieved with the focus and the craft that father recognized from men like Leaf. She’d reshaped the goose.
Next day, his stomach tight and queasy from the goose’s grey and muscular flesh, my father returned to his village.
‘Take them a bird,’ she said, smiling at the prospect of another drama on the heath; the dog, the stick, the spongy earth, the bludgeoned body of a goose, my father (tumbled like a drunk and caked in m
arsh) flailing with one arm. He shook his head. ‘Goose meat is far too good for them,’ he said. He had grown selfish as all men do when they discover families, homelands, of their own. His other life was not for cousins. They had their flints, their skills, their status in the marketplace, the certainties of work and trade. He had the outside world, its geese, its sailing ships, its makeshift dwellings in the wind. They’d have to do without his geese.
He took them other gifts instead, the stories that he’d found upon his way. There was the story of the talking goose. It was snow-white except for a golden bill and feet. It said … and here my father could devise a goose-borne message that would tease whatever audience he had assembled at his feet. There was the story of the woman and her magic dog. They lived inside a house made out of hair. The dog could cook and stitch and start a fire. The woman hunted rabbits with her mouth. There was the story of the boy who had the gift of flames. He could spit fire. Those people who stayed close to him need never fear the cold. There was the story of the stench which, bruised and angered by a traveller who had held his nose when passing, hid inside the traveller’s bag and (depending on my father’s mood) came out to cause all kinds of mayhem in the world.
18
THE PATTERN that emerged was this – my father was two men. One was the husband-brother-son, the clumsy, willing settler on the heath who’d turn his hand to anything – to feeding the small child with paste from beans and fish; to hunting mushrooms, chasing crabs; to coddling embers in the smoke at night as the woman and her daughter rocked and hummed themselves to sleep. This was the man who came to love the girl and treat her as a daughter of his own. He knew the sweet stewed-apple smell of the childish water that she passed. He helped her understand and say her first few words: drink, dog, no, bird, kiss, hot. He invented faces and new sounds for her amusement.
The other man was the minstrel-king of lies, the teller of wide tales who could not (they said) even pick his nose with his one helpless arm. He couldn’t shell an egg. Yet, with his tongue, he could concoct from, say, geese, ships and smells, a world more real than real.
They did not question his migrations or interrupt the voices that seemed to summon him away every week or so. The villagers – or those at least whose hearts were not shut by custom and by work to father’s world of fraud and flam – could see his need for gathering more tales on their behalf. There were none to be unearthed amongst the workshops and flint-piles of the stoney village. The knappers had no tales. Such diversions must be hunted in the outside world and plucked and drawn and served up to them, reshaped and heated by my father.
So the path along the clifftop, where the gulls were upside down and where newly beaten passageways edged past rocks and winkle-berry thickets, was worn wide and flat by my father’s to-and-fro. He did not need the stars or luck to find his way. The path was his. He recognized each rock, each fallen tree, each brook. Here was the debris of his fire. Here the ship’s sail had ducked into the waves for good. Here the dog seals came ashore to roll and grumble in the sea’s white phlegm. It could be walked – at speed – in half a day. But father took his time. There was no haste. The wind was warm. And it was true – within a few days of the arrival of the geese the spring had come. The coastal path was blue and gold with buds.
At the end of spring my father set off once again to see the woman and her daughter. By now the geese had settled down. He found them grazing on the tide line or upping in the water for the eel grass there or dozing on their eggs in nests deep in the heather. The caravan of birds was quiet and fat again. The nomads were becalmed. They scarcely stirred as father took the path across the heath towards the hut of reeds.
The geese had taught the baby how to walk. She spread her legs and rocked from foot to foot. Her arms were bony wings. Her cries – cowl-yar, cowl-yar – were answered by the birds. She was the largest gosling on the heath. She lifted up her arms when my father arrived. She let him pick her up and slapped his nose in greeting. She pushed her fingers in his mouth and gripped his gums and pulled. She knew his face and smell.
The dog was yapping, too, and licking father’s ankles and his feet. The woman came out of the hut. She looked well-fed. She thrived on goose. Her lips were pink. There were no greying moons beneath her eyes or sores upon her face.
‘That’s better now,’ she said, pointing at his head. ‘You look less like a tussock.’ She ran her hand across his hair as if he were her child. He would have seized her by the wrist and kissed her hand except that, if he had, he would have dropped her daughter on the dog. He rubbed her ribs with his severed elbow but she did not stay close to acknowledge his embrace. She seemed unnerved. A gang of men had passed that day, she said. Thirty, forty men. With bows and sticks. Not horsemen, but on foot. They’d camped inland, beside the wood. She pointed out the braid of smoke that their three fires were plaiting in the distance. Who could they be? Now father was unnerved. He threw wet earth upon the fire. Troublemakers looked for smoke or light. For all his gifts of lying and invention he could not concoct a tale that night that would explain the friendly purposes of men in gangs with sticks and bows. They slept without a fire and had cold dreams of trouble-making on the heath.
Their dreams came true.
But first, there was the sound of horses. And then a voice called out, a drunken voice. ‘Rabbit. Rabbit. Doe.’ The woman and my father, submerged by fear and nightmares in the hut, their chins and faces wet with goose, awoke and held their breaths. Outside there was more laughter, and then another, younger, daring voice: ‘Doe-doe. Sweet doe. Come out.’
‘I’d better go,’ she said. ‘I know these men. They mean no harm. Here, hold the child. I’ll not be long.’ And then, ‘It’s just their joke. The horsemen call me Doe. They tell their women and their neighbours that they’re off to catch a rabbit when, in truth, they’re coming here. You see? A joke.’
She went outside, untying all her strings and laces as she walked. She held my father’s goatskin gift under her arm. There were two horsemen there, both mounted on black mares. The older rider held his horse in check. It waited for the woman as if expecting food. The younger man – about my father’s age – was too impatient to control his mount. As Doe approached, as Doe the rabbit got closer to his snare, he jumped down from the horse. ‘Me first,’ he said. The older rider turned his horse and moved away a little distance, his back turned to the woman and his friend … his son? … his nephew? … his young charge?
My father did not turn away. He watched. He watched the braggart youth take the woman’s arm and pull her roughly to the ground, the goatskin thrown aside. He watched him stumble to his feet a few moments later and honk his pleasure like a goose. He watched the older man take his turn with Doe as the younger horseman backed and scurried in the grass to recapture the mare which in his haste he had not bothered to secure.
‘I had my hand around the baby’s throat,’ my father said. ‘I’d killed a goose. I’d kill her child. And then the dog. I’d pull the whole hut down and set fire to all her world. I wished I was a horseman and a bowman then. I’d put an end to beasts like them with arrows in the heart.’
That’s what father said. But what he did was better suited to a one-armed man of words. He kept well back in case the horsemen saw him there. He soothed the child. He held the muzzle of the dog. He cursed the malign illogic of his own erection. He swore he’d save the woman – he’d rescue Doe from tupping for a trade.
She was no fool. She understood the hurt he felt.
But finer feelings were not food. They could not kindle fires. Or warm a child. You could not make a coat from finer feelings. The men on horseback that came, once in a while, with their simple needs were worth more to her than cuckoos of my father’s kind. She met my father’s stare with eyes that were unabashed and unashamed. She’d taken care of two men – and been paid – in the time it took a potter to block some clay or a stoney to heat one flint. She’d made them sneeze. So what? If she had to suffer men between her legs th
en let the cost be theirs, poor fools. She held out the object of her trade for father to admire. It was a water pot, half full of headspin made from grain. ‘Forget your troubles. Drink!’ she said.
He’d drunk this headspin once before – from the leather travel-mates of horsemen, on the day they cut his arm in two. But he’d had no chance to savour it. He’d drunk too much too quickly, and then they’d struck him on the chin. He’d savoured drinker’s headache, that was all, and had those bad and stoney dreams. What would his cousins think, or Leaf, if they could see him now, cross-legged and urgent in the woman’s hut, with spirit rolling round his mouth and anger in his eyes? They’d wonder whether stories came from drink. Was that the trick? Was that the secret of my father’s to-and-fro? His wildness and his fantasies, his enmity to stone and work, came not from devils but from drink. My father did not care. His cousins only knew what they were told. He’d keep these secrets to himself, the geese, the woman and the drink. They were the outside world.
And so the two of them were drunk, though he more drunk than her. Her stomach was more tough. Her head was strong. My father was an easy prey for the liquid in the pot. It burnt his mouth at first and made him cough. But then he learnt the trick of sipping with his tongue and letting headspin melt onto his throat like sucked ice and curl into his gut and blush into his head, his heart, his eyes. He recognized the taste from bread that had gone green. But the sweetness and the power of the drink was new. It made him sneeze and wipe his eyes and fashion from the fear of men with sticks, and his hatred for the riders, and the concord of the night, and the even, conspiratorial breathing of the dog and child, a certainty that the time had come for him to touch the woman who sat in darkness at his side. Where to begin?
If father was an amateur with drink, then he was a booby and a greenhorn when it came to touch. ‘Who cared for me when I was small and had no mother and no home?’ my father asked, in those tearful, melting moods which came with age and illness. It was our task to answer, Not a one, and then to hug him while he cried. ‘Ah, that’s the cure for all woes,’ he’d say. ‘More hugs. I had no hugs when I was small. I never learned to kiss. Imagine that! The nearest that my uncle got to loving me was his mallet on my brow.’ And then – his spirits rising – he’d tell some tale. Of how he learned to kiss, from seal pups on the beach. Or how he learned to hug, from bears. He made a bitter joke of it, but we could tell that there was bone beneath the flesh. He ached for touch. And so he ached for her, the woman on the heath, the thin and bony widow who bartered her own flesh.