by Jim Crace
He passed the pot of headspin and, when she took it, dropped his hand onto her knee as if by chance. He said, ‘You’re cold.’ And then, ‘What can I do to keep you warm?’
‘Go out and light the fire,’ she said.
‘But there are men out there.’
‘So what?’ The drink had made her hard. ‘There are always men out there. Why should I go cold?’
‘You won’t go cold,’ he said with that breathless tenderness that women find so insincere and wearying. ‘I’ll keep you warm.’ He would have put his arm round her and hugged if he’d had an arm convenient for that. But he was sitting on the wrong side of her. His stump and her arm met, two different breeds. He turned his body to her and reached with his good arm for the hair behind her head. He put his head down on her shoulder and – almost breathless from the drink and fear and expectation – kissed her on the neck. He might as well have sat with his one arm round a tree and kissed the bark for all the interest that she showed.
‘You’re drunk,’ she said. ‘You’d better sleep.’ She pushed his head away. ‘Stop that.’ But father had her taste upon his lips, the dry and ashy flavour of her skin. He could not stop. He put his hand on to her leg and stroked her there, waiting for her Yes or the courage in his arm to touch the black and hidden thicket beneath her smock. She did not keep him waiting long. The instant that his hand found nerve enough to push her clothing back she brought the pot of head-spin down upon his skull. The pot was shards. My father’s head – sobered and a little bruised – was drenched in drink. His eyes were stinging. His ears were ringing to the hubbub that she made in the darkness of the hut. ‘Get out. Go home,’ she said. ‘You don’t touch me!’
Of course, the child woke up. And screamed. The dog – so recently my father’s friend – snapped and growled at father’s legs. My father ran outside. His passion closed its wings and plummeted in a whiffling, spiral dive. He did not move. He was a stone. He heard her cursing to herself. He heard the sweep and slap of the dog’s tail. He heard the baby whimper on the breast, then sleep. All that was left was darkness, the spring wind off the sea, the guroo-guroo of nighttime geese, the distant, crackling fires of strangers on the heath. My father took deep breaths. His muscles tightened with the thought of killing her. His eyes were wet – with drink and tears and cold. He wished he was a horseman now with a fist like stone and a face like weathered bark. She’d love him then, for sure.
He could not guess how long he waited. Not long – but long enough for his skin to peg and button like a goose. He did not hanker now for her caresses or her love. He wanted only to win from her some recompense. He was the storyteller, don’t forget. He knew how to deepen any plot. And so he whispered in the night, his voice unsteady, wheedling, sly.
‘Rabbit. Rabbit. Doe. Sweet Doe. Come out.’ She came at once. She stood outside her door, a still black shape. He could not guess her mood.
‘I thought that we were friends,’ my father said.
‘What kind of friend are you?’ Her voice was angry still. ‘You think I want that kind of friend? I’ve plenty of that kind. They don’t come in my hut. But you I’ve treated as a brother and a son.’
‘You go with all those horsemen. Why not me?’
‘They pay. That’s why.’
‘I’ll pay.’
She held her hand out to her brother-son. ‘Come in,’ she said. ‘We’ll talk.’
Who tells the truth about such things? Only crones and fools. My father’s version went like this: The woman, Doe, was sobered by remorse. The one-armed man who’d killed the goose and brought the goatskin gift and courted her was cold and drenched in drink and bruised about the head. She loosened all her strings and laces and at last paid back the kisses which he had invested on her neck. He’d leave it there. Such stories are best obscured by mist. The only details were the jokes at his or her expense. ‘You need two arms when you’re on top,’ he’d say, a clown who knew no shame. He’d demonstrate his lopsided, toppling passion on that night. He’d shudder, too, to mime the moment when, at last, his body emptied all its seed in Doe. And then the song he 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. But he who has a woman at his side? He is as carefree as an insect on the wing.
My father flapped his one good and his broken wing to illustrate the joy he felt the moment that he, with Doe, discharged the poison in his loins, the moment when the chrysalis of lust became the butterfly. ‘I felt nimble. I felt light,’ he said, dancing to the words. ‘Any man will say that sneezing in the night like that will bring good sleep. And when you wake, where is the fury and the sadness and the madness that you felt? All gone. The butterfly has flown.’
The truth, of course, is short of butterflies. We can presume, from what my father said on those few and candid times when we were on our own, that Doe and he remained good friends, and nothing more. When he returned to talk with her inside the hut the moment of affection was long past. The child was nervous in her sleep and stirring with bad dreams. The dog was wide awake and alert for signs that would require more barking and more bites. There were still men in gangs with sticks and bows upon the heath. The only kisses that would be given freely in that hut would be for her daughter’s lips, not his.
Although my father knew that if some horsemen came, right then, and called to her, she’d go to them – at once – he also recognized the force of what she’d said, ‘You don’t touch me! You think I want that kind of friend? I’ve plenty of that kind.’ He did not try again to put his hand upon her knee. Besides, the wind was driving back the stars and it was nearly dawn.
She’d said, Let’s talk. But Sleep is what she meant. My father did not sleep for long. He woke unsettled, mystified. The wind was racing now, the sort of wind that lifted slates from walls and sent Leaf’s hair on streaming errands from his head, the sort of wind that called, ‘Go home, go home. To your house and stone. Go home.’ The mist was low and moist and chasing inland with the wind. There was no sea. My father had some business to conclude. He went outside, the dog his one companion, and discharged his poison onto the buds and seedlings of the heath. It gathered, rolled and spongy, in the dew and hung in stringy tresses from the reeds. It formed its salty pools of sap amongst the vented lichens and the moss. My father – his one hand plenty for the task – was briefly lost amongst the ardours and the lecheries of a story of his own invention. The only sounds were the pantings of the man and dog and the bickerings of geese.
19
DOE AND her daughter were standing hand in hand, the child’s tiny arm a twig in Doe’s strong grip. My father rubbed his head to remind her of the night just past. But he had left the giblets of his lust for her hung up, like a screech owl’s breakfast, on the grasses and the reeds. He was entirely calm. He bent and kissed the child.
‘I could not sleep,’ he said. ‘I went down to the shore …’ He would have entertained her with a greater lie. But, here, the dog began to whine and point its nose towards the distant wood. There were no braids of smoke. The gang of men who had slept there had spread themselves out in a line. Their bows were ready. Their sticks were out. They did not talk. They were advancing across the heath like heavy-shouldered wolves who’ve traced the scent of deer. The dog began to bark. It was too late to strap its jaw. It was too late to flee. The loop of men was tightening round the heath. My father, Doe, the girl, were minnows in their net.
My father – poison all discharged – was not the reckless sort. What was the point in hiding in the hut? Or looking for a stick? He might just as well throw pebbles at the tide. Whatever mayhem was in stock that day would come and go whatever father did. And so they simply stood their ground, the perfect family of the heath – my father, one-armed, a damson bruise upon his head; the woman with her daughter on her hip and her free hand resting on my father’s shoulder; the dog; their frail and reedy hut. Some way off, the wasted
semen had thickened and was tacky in the wind.
It soon was clear what it was the men had come to do. The first goose that they found was struck across its spine. The eggs which it had risen to protect were smashed with sticks and feet. Its nest was kicked into the wind. The grazing birds that rose to flee were greeted in the air by flights of wooden darts. They fell like pears. Their carcasses were left. These thirty, forty men were not hunting for the meat. They came to fight a war against the nomad raiders from the sea.
At first their killing was quite calm because the birds themselves were quiet and slow to leave their eggs. The hissing, flapping geese that had quickly understood the purpose of a human delegation armed with sticks on that spring day when father was the hunter had been reduced by the observances of parenthood to docile innocents. It was not hard to lift a stick and break a goose’s back when the victim simply sat and made threats and patterns with its head. But once the men had finished with the outskirts of the flock, the absent males – alarmed by the keenings of their mates – flew in from their browsings and their uppings on the shore to stand and honk beside their nests. Some were brought down by darts before they had a chance to reach their eggs. The wooden shafts were not strong or swift enough to kill. But they could wound – and wounded geese are giddy imbeciles. The more they bleed, the more they flap like moths in fires, the more they stretch and weave their necks and shriek their plaints. Others – addled by the carnage and the noise – put down in territory not their own. They ducked their heads and spread their wings; they barked as dogs and gallivanted on the heath like headless hens. Of all the thousand geese upon the heath there was not one, except the dead or those in shells, which remained still or quiet or simply thought to leave its nest and fly away to sea.
By now the bows had done their work and the men were labouring with sticks. They whirled and struck like flail-dancers at a feast, every loop and detour of their steps ended with the carcass of a goose. They lifted and they stamped their feet like men in snow – except this snow was stained and creamy eggs, and its slush was yolk. The few who had no sticks found rocks – juice-red rocks – with which to kill the birds. The rocks and skulls fell open and apart, they crumbled into shards, the elderberry of the stone soaked by the blood of geese.
The few older, greying men were calm and concentrated at their task. For all the passion that they showed they might have been up-ending mushrooms with a switch. They turned from side to side and cut a swathe of geese with faces which declared, ‘I’ve seen this all before.’
The younger ones were not so calm. They matched the geese in noise and fever. They swung their sticks wildly in the air. They stumbled over geese. They fell on eggs. They celebrated every blow with cries of exhortation and of swank. The death of every goose was victory for them. And every death was fuel for that odd and deadly stew of temper which, in young men, is called exuberance and which in wolves is known as brutishness. They took no notice of the family standing there, huddled like lost sheep. But when the dog – uncertain if this was cause for celebration or for attack – jumped up and set about a goose, a man whose face had more spots than hairs hit out. His stick caught the dog on its side. It fell and rolled. But it did not stand again. Four men had hurried up, enraptured by the hunt. Their sticks and stones went up and down like pestles pounding corn.
Now that dogs were counted as fair game, who or what could save the hut? There were injured geese which had taken refuge on the roof. Others coveyed in the long grass at its base. Their blood was making patterns on the wall’s caked mud. Some tried to burrow and escape through the bracken fronds which Doe had placed in bunches on the ground to keep out draughts and rats. The young men gathered round. Here was unexpected fun. Only a fool would – like the dog – run up to intervene. The hut collapsed onto the geese. It fell apart and splintered like an empty husk of corn.
‘Let’s leave.’ Father lifted up the girl and picked his way between the bodies of the geese. Doe faltered for a moment at the hut. What could she salvage from the wreckage there? The young men steamed and quivered with their sticks and watched her as she turned the broken shards of pots, the ripped and trampled mats, the shells and coloured stones with which her daughter had often played, the holed and ageing fish traps that her husband had once made, the carcass of her dog. They idly clapped their hands, shouted, laughed, jousted boasts about the work they’d done that day. Doe knew that they were mad like hiveless bees. One nervous move and they’d attack. The crushing of the dog and hut had made them skittish, itching for more fun, more death. Some sex. Some drink. A rape. A fight. She did not let them see her eyes or spot the tears that made a shallow, dampened delta in the crow’s feet of her face. She did not speak aloud the thought that mostly bothered her, that now the geese were dead the summer would not come.
Doe followed father, empty-handed, as he walked towards the sea. Their path across the heath was marked by fleshy, bloodstained boulders, which feathered and which shivered, going hot and cold with colour as the sea wind smoothed and stirred.
An old man called out before they reached the beach. His face was as drawn and bearded as an ear of wheat. There was blood upon his legs and hands. ‘Here, take a goose,’ he said. ‘They’re good.’ He mimed by chewing and by ramming fingers in his mouth. ‘Good meat.’ And then when Doe and father just walked by, he called out, ‘They had to die, those geese. We’d starve if they lived on.’
They stood to hear his reasons for the massacre of birds. He and his friends were all plain farmers – that was his excuse. They had a village and some fields beyond the forest, less than one day’s walk inland. They’d slashed and burned a clearing there about ten years before. The life was good, so far. The earth was rich. The trees cut out the wind. The pigs were fat and happy just as long as there was food and sleep. The people too. There were reeds for thatching and for bedding. There was nettle thread. And, after every gale, a glut of wood.
The old man described a farming year that was as rhythmic as a drum. The first note in the spring was emmer wheat. Then six-row corn. Then beans. Then flax, the last to bed, the hater of the frost. The goats did well all year on fodder mulched from leaves. Their milk and cheese were said to taste of elm or ash depending on the forest where they fed. In autumn there were unearned gifts in mushrooms, nuts and fruit. In winter there were bacon sides and apples wrinkled like a widow’s cheek, and grain from rat-free, stilted stacks. There was a field of fat-hen, too. Each dark and fleshy leaf was cussed like a nostril hair. Each one removed would grow again with doubled strength. The new leaves, stewed, were vegetables. The old ones – picked and dried and stacked like hay – were winter feed for beasts. The fat-hen seeds made fat-hen bread. The roots made beer. Nothing went to waste. Even dead fat-hen was good as kindling for the fire.
The farmers were not rich, of course, or powerful or satisfied. There were hard times. Who could predict the rain? Or the mood of horsemen passing by? Or the vagaries of pigs? Who could ever win the war against the charlock and the couch which were the stifling siblings of their crops? But, for all their curses and their woes, their cheeks were fat, their skins were clear, their guts were tenanted throughout the year with food. Until the geese put down, that is, until the geese discovered that cultivated fields were better than the heath, once eggs were hatched and summer come and goslings trained to fly.
At first the farmers had been pleased to welcome the few geese who came to browse between the rows of fat-hen and of wheat. Goose meat was richer than smoked pork. Goose fat was good for piles. The gosling feathers made pillows which, despite the stench, were softer and more warm than straw. Besides, the geese were cheerful birds. Their calls were melodies compared to conversations held by pigs and goats. Their coats were brighter, too. But then – two years before – the nomads had arrived in strength, their numbers doubled by the young who’d hatched upon the salty heath. They’d harvested the field, these airborne slugs. They’d cropped the emmer and the beans, the fat-hen and the six-row corn
. They’d coppiced charlock to the root. And then flown off, inland. They’d done the same the following year. And worse. They’d fouled the pasture. Their green and curly droppings had burned the soil, had overloaded loam with dung, had tainted all the earth. The farmers had no choice. They’d go to war against the caravan of birds. They’d arm themselves with sticks and bows. They’d march down to the heath. They’d show the wild world who was king by wiping out all geese.
20
‘IMAGINE THIS,’ my father said, reconstructing their dilemma. They had no home. There were a thousand dead geese on the heath. Already flies were sated on the blood. And beetles, ants and slugs were searching for a passage through the feathers. The sky – which so recently had been ruffled only by the wind – was bringing in the ravens and the crows. Magpies were feasting on goose eyes, and crabs were straying from the shore, bedevilled and seduced by meat. ‘No one knows where maggots live,’ he said. ‘They cannot fly or swim. But maggots crawled and tumbled in the guts of geese before the birds were cold.’ All this before the wolves arrived and plunged their noses into the moist and pungent dead. All this before the blood enriched the soil and toadstools flourished there and carcass shrubs trailed blossoms on the sinew and the bones.