The Gift of Stones

by Jim Crace

  My father stood alone and startled – for now he understood the power of the truth.

  23

  NOW I CAN remember for myself. I do not need my father’s floating eyebrow or his single, restless hand or the baiting and dramatic contours of his voice to shape and ornament my life. I do not need his hawks for commentary. I have my own.

  My witness-hawk took wing when I was two or three. Each dawn it rose above the village, my feathered memory, to hover and to scrutinize what passed for life below. I see myself, a little plainer and a little plumper than my mother ever was. I see her, too. My mother was not happy there. She had good cause. In father’s boyhood there had been two breeds existing side by side, the stoneys and the mongers, the craftsman dynasties who worked the flint and the traders whom the stone made rich. My father now had introduced a third and wretched breed, the pair of homeless vagrants from the heath. What could we do?

  At first we simply shivered to the welcome that the villagers gave us. Their indifference was prying. There were no greetings, but they raised their eyes as we walked by and paused above their stones. They clearly disapproved. Of what? Our meagre clothes, our weathered skin, our helplessness, our voices which – more used to shouting in the wind than trading whispers by the hearth – were loud? Here were people with the eye to penetrate a stone, to look beyond the crust of smoky, mottled chalk and spy the tool within. Yet that eye was blind if required to pierce a stranger’s skin, to judge a woman by her face, to spot the empty stomachs and the empty hearts which could be filled and warmed as much by smiles as food.

  My father said that they were shy, suspicious, that they were only used to dealing with new faces over trade. ‘It will take time,’ he said.

  ‘It will take time for them to change? Or us?’ my mother asked. She was dismayed at everything she saw, and father took the blame. She had no wish to be like them, tied and bound by the regulation of the working day. What kind of life was that? To live like tethered goats in one small sphere of grass; to do and say exactly as the neighbours; to not touch this or that, to not go here or there; to intervene all day between your heart and tongue; to turn out, at dawn, and climb the flint-pit hill in listless, yawning lines because some merchant had the force to say, More stone.

  Still, we had to stay.

  ‘There is no choice,’ my father said. ‘We’ll have to make here home.’ But making homes was not his skill. The one-armed man who seemed to manage on the heath was here – a cousin’s phrase – just like a cuckoo, good at Talk, not Do. For all his plots and promises he could not build four walls of stone, a roof, a house. He could not lift with his one hand. My mother could. Despite her paleness and the shallow flesh that hid her bones, she was tough. And tougher here, with people all around, than she had been upon the heath, disarmed and addled by her widowhood.

  My father’s plot was this – that Doe and I were now his family; that we would settle into love, with Doe his sister, mistress, friend entwined with him; that, given time, his uncle and his cousins would provide. He thought his tongue would build a home for us.

  My mother’s toughness was an axe that had two blades. Its second edge was petulance. She could not wait for father to conjure up stone walls. Her back was cold. She had a child to feed. She had no time for father’s fondness, his clumsiness, his tales. She found his presence irksome. She pushed him far away because she was too overwhelmed by cares for gentleness. All she yearned for was a home that could not be broken down with sticks.

  And so, while father went hunting with his toes for shellfish in the sand and wondered whether the water in his eyes was spray or tears, Doe cleared a site of bracken in between the last house of the village and the hill. This was the spot where the many clifftop paths converged into one steep track and passed between the two rock sentries to climb the bluff of chalk and reach the warren of mine shafts beyond and the drifts of unworked flint. She was no fool. It was a simple task to find flat building stones amongst the spoils and then to slide them downhill from the summit of the track until they settled on her bruised and flattened bracken.

  The hill was on her side. The villagers were not. She could not hope to help herself to stone without some stoney raising the alarm. A delegation came of busy-bodies and of idlers. They pushed Leaf to the front and whispered what they’d want to say if they were him. Leaf was not pleased to be summoned from his work to deal with such affairs. The wind was lifting all his hairs and making knots. My mother met him with a look that said, You’re less than geese. You don’t scare me.

  ‘These stones are ours,’ he said. ‘Who said that you could take these stones?’

  ‘These stones are mine,’ she said. ‘I found them on the hill. I brought them here. They’re mine. How are they yours?’

  ‘You’re not from here. That hill is ours, not yours.’

  ‘And the air round here is yours as well,’ she said. ‘I breathe; I steal your air. And the wind that’s making such a skimpy harvest on your head? Is that your wind? How can it be that it blows my hair, too?’

  Leaf was not equipped for Doe. He shrugged and cursed the wind.

  ‘We’ll let these stones be gifts from us,’ he said. ‘But do not fool yourself. That hill is ours. If you take stone, what then? Then anyone can come and help themselves and build a wall. But still, you are a woman with a child. We’ll close our eyes on you and what you do.’ He turned and led his delegation back to work. My mother built her walls.

  24

  OUR HOUSE was like no other. My mother found that stones, however flat and heavy, were not keen to lie still at her bidding. Her stones were like the shyest snails which never showed their heads, but moved when no one watched. Her stones had life. They crept. They nestled. They muttered in the wind and heat. And so she built four living walls which would not stand like all those other village walls made out of more quiescent stones. Her walls were wayward, unsubmissive. They toppled in the wind. They barked her ankles. They fell down on my leg and did not move despite my screams and tears.

  She could not guess the secret of a wall. Her walls became four piles of stones, thick at the ground and tapering like sapling firs. She pushed lengths of wood between the stones to keep them still. She packed the holes with bracken and with mud. The roof was untrimmed branches weighed down with slates and moss. Our house was what a house would be if it were made for badgers or for bears.

  At first, our lives were like theirs too, furtive, taciturn, aloof. If father was two men then mother was two women. The village Doe was wary of the world. If stoneys passed we sank into our cave. If father came with food, my mother would not talk. Her temper was as chronic as the wind – and just as indiscriminate.

  What explanation can there be for my mother’s sudden, random sourness? It’s just that people are like trees. They have their seasons, too. They don’t transplant. For Doe, my father was to blame for all the bad luck in her life. Who else was there – apart from me – who could share the burden of her dislocation and her grief? That small voice which whispered at her cheek and said, Be rational. Return his love. Accept his food. He’s all you’ve got, was silenced by the volume and the force of her despondency. The louder voices cried, What kind of friend is he? He’d led her from the mayhem of the geese along the coastal path with promises of food and shelter and of warmth. What welcome had there been? – Why have you brought her here? What can she do? What use is she to us?

  She could not forget that first and bitter night when she had listened, only half asleep, to what my father had to say to his assembled cousins and their friends in the dusk of uncle’s house. ‘This is a story made by life,’ he’d said, and then produced a tale so close to truth that she’d believed his ornamented details, too, the insult roosting in the trees, the spitting-samphire meal, the serene and fleshy portrait of her younger self, the bouncing family on the rorqual bones, the oarweed on the shore. She’d swallowed that. It was her story, feathered and adorned.

  What she was forced to swallow, too, wer
e all the versions of her husband’s death, the killing of her boys. Perhaps abducted by the trees at night? Perhaps by wolves, or horsemen? My father brought their deaths to life. He dragged their bodies into undergrowth. He turned their bodies into wood. Their arms were boughs. Their blood was sap. Their skin was bark. Their eyes were knots. And worse. He’d said: ‘Perhaps Doe’s husband thought like this – I have my sons and all this wealth in whale. I’ll find myself another wife and a home less windy than the heath.’

  Consider once again the consternation that my father’s story caused, not to the twenty men, the wives and boys, the dog, the hen, the moon, the first of nighttime’s bats and moths that had gathered there. They could simply peel away before the tale was done. Instead we should consider poor and captive Doe, the homeless widow, underfed and half awake, her lungs so tight with fear that she was snoring open-eyed. Death she understood. It came. It went. It left a corpse. Corpses could not trade in whale. Or set up house away from wind and heath. Or take new wives. But a missing husband and two sons? My father’s story – which with a string of tales, ‘perhaps … perhaps’, had killed them off five times for good, destroying every hope she’d had – had also brought them back to life. He had them fit, and well, and dwelling – wind-free – somewhere else. With someone else.

  My father had released three breeds of grief to gnaw and tumble in her gut. Her boys and husband were alive in her again and hating her for leaving home before they had returned. Or else she saw them living on the heath, the boys no older than the day they’d left – but the woman they called mother was not called Doe. Or else she saw their bodies there, amongst the geese. The trailing blossoms of the carcass shrubs were torn and buffeted by wolves and crabs and crows. The maggots rolled and tumbled like the surf. Toadstools dined on flesh. She dreamed herself back on the heath, making graves. My father was there, too. He could not help. One arm was not enough. Instead he stood a short way off, a little stunned by mother’s pot and drenched in hard-earned drink. The dog and child awoke, alarmed. The heath was stirring to the cries of, ‘Get out. Go home. You don’t touch me!’ And then she saw the strangers’ braid of fire and heard the slap of harnesses and reins and the pestle-pounding of her dog, her hut. She built a cairn of stones above her husband’s grave. The stoney with the balding head arrived. He said, ‘Those stones are ours, not yours.’

  No wonder mother could not talk to father or thank him for his gifts or show the casual openness which had ensnared him on the heath. She was a different woman now. He was a different man. The sea wind on the coastal path had turned them upside down. The truth of what she felt for him had tumbled like a ball of gorse. The one-armed lad, the brother, friend and son, who’d cheered her up so much had gone. What could she say when father stood before her house of stones, his one hand bearing comforts, clothing, food, and asked her why she looked, at once, so hard and meek and cold? What had become of the woman that he pictured on the heath?

  My father’s picture – naturally – was more a flight of romance. It was blind. Its centrepiece was me and Doe. She pushed her hand across his forehead and his skull. She stroked his tussock hair. In tones that matched the pallor on my father’s face, she said, ‘It’s you. It’s you. It’s you.’

  Here were two people, then, unsteady and misshapen. Their world, that summer, was as restless and as tousled as an unshorn goat. My father was the wisest of the two. For once he held his tongue. He did not bully mother to conform. He came with food and seashore gifts and left without a word to her. He carried me down to the shore and let me search and paddle in the pools. Together we collected empty shells. We wrestled and played chase. Where father failed with mother, he was bound to win with me. I had no picture of the heath and nothing to forget.

  If father was the wisest one, then mother, once again, was the most determined. Quite soon she found that life for badgers and for bears was not for her. Perhaps the villagers would find a niche for her inside their world of stone.

  Instead of hiding behind her tumbled walls when stoneys passed, she took to standing in their way and greeting them with cries and smiles. Her thin and bony frame was no threat to them. The village men – no paragons of strength compared to farmers, say, or horsemen – could have pushed her to one side as if she were a twig, if that is what they wished. But what they wished was something else. My mother – standing in their way, thin-set and unabashed – was a challenge of a different and uncertain kind. She was not like the mothers and the wives with whom they lived. She was not tame. Her house, her pile of stones and branches, was not a house. It was a den, an earth, a lair.

  So it turned out that there were men who took the pathway in between the village and the hill more frequently than they had done before. They found good cause to walk up to the double-sentry rocks in search of flints, let’s say, that normally their youngest sons could find. And if they saw that Doe was not in sight, they found excuse to whistle or to sing or drop their rocks and curse or clear their chalky chests so that the noise would summon her and she would block their path.

  Some stayed aloof. They’d only passed that way to pry. Some traded greetings and walked on. But there were two or three among the stoney men – the sort who were the first to make a crowd, the last to bed at night – who were less proud.

  There is a phrase, Whenever man and woman meet, then Mischief is the third. In this case Mischief was bashful and discreet. It hung around but it hung back. It bode its time. Those unproud men, most used to angular and patterned lives, could hardly speak their minds. What could they say? That somewhere in between the pity and disdain that they felt for mother and for me was pinched and pressed a busy hankering for mischief in the grass. For all they knew such naked words would bring the hill down on their heads. Besides, they dare not chance what mother might reply. She was the sort, it seemed, who might delight in spreading indiscretions. That was her danger and her charm.

  There are old men who can remember Doe. I’ve heard them talk. No man would claim that she was beautiful or young or that her face was anything but dispirited and thin. Her only allure, it seemed, was her independence and defencelessness. And yet – that other phrase that seemed to rule our lives – She was Honey, They were Bees. Once they had sampled her sweet and angry greetings and her smile, so more unguarded in their manner than those that village women gave, they could no more keep away than they could openly solicit her for greater trade than smiles.

  My mother was uncertain, too. Stoneys were not horsey men. Their faces were a fog. She feared their rigid, hidden lives, their mouths. She feared their coolness and their caution. The dog that does not wag its tail or bark, she told herself, is the dog to watch. It bites. So she was slow in saying what she wanted from those two, three men who’d stop and talk with her. If only she could say, Please, help me build a house that doesn’t shift and groan like shingle on the beach. Or, What is there to do? What work is there for me? Then, perhaps, that niche inside the village would appear. It was a village, after all, where trade was king, where labour was respected. All my mother had to trade was labour and herself. She was just like them. She’d rather be like them than like a badger or a bear.

  There was one man – my father’s eldest cousin – who seemed to pass our house of stone more frequently than even those few men who talked. He was not one who simply stared and passed on by. He was prepared, if not to smile, at least to nod at Doe. Each day he came with an empty sled made out of bone and wood and reed. His task was to collect the flint for his family to work and trade. Of all the cousins he was the dullest and the most obliging. ‘Just like a sheep,’ my father said. He was the cousin that my father liked the best. He was the servile, cheerful sort, too soft and brotherly to wonder why the daily job of fetching stone was always his.

  She followed him. Sometimes alone and sometimes with me sitting on her hip, she watched the cousin selecting stones and loading up the sled. She saw he favoured flints with ridges and with tendons. She watched him jettison those stones th
at seemed all chalk, too pale and light in colour and in weight. She noted how he piled the stones onto the sled so that their spurs and pinnacles, their bays and basins interlocked. At last she understood the secret of a wall. And more. She recognized there was no future for her there unless she became a stoney too. In such a place you earned respect through flint. It was the bedrock of their world. Without their stones the villagers would be – like her upon the heath – as helpless as a beetle on its back.

  This was my mother’s choice, to be the helpless beetle on its back or else the working beast obliged to gather flint because – remember her initial fears? – some merchant had the force to say, More Stone. She chose More Stone. She simply said to father’s cousin when she next found him sledding flint, ‘Let me do that! Why don’t you let me fetch the flint for you?’ We can imagine how he laughed – or blushed, or walked on by. How could a woman with fir-shaped walls know anything of stone? How could a weatherbeaten chit like her move heavy loads?

  She might have had to pester him for days on end with ‘Let me try’ or ‘I’m as strong as any man – just give me half a chance’ or ‘Have a heart. I’ve got a child to feed’ before he paid her any heed. And then what could this shy, obliging cousin do except allow this woman and her child to help him load the sled at least? And then to let her walk with him – taking turns at pulling on the ropes – down into the village, its empty causeways, its eyes and minds engrossed, its workshops beating with the pulse of bone on wood on stone. We have to guess that no one saw them passing by. The cousin would have shrank away in shame if anyone had called out or teased him, later, about the woman at his side.

  He must have made her wait outside the house in case his family spotted her. The only way to make her go was payment of some kind, some recompense for those few flints that she had added to his pile. He could not comprehend exactly what the barter was and who owed what to whom, or why. He only understood the obligations of labour and of trade, that picking stones and pulling sled for half a noon was worth – a guess – a basketful of apples? Some grain? Some nuts? An egg or two? He felt as if he had been fooled by her. The kindness had been his. He had not wanted her to help or welcomed extra hands upon the rope. She’d merely slowed him down. Yet now it seemed he was obliged to pay for her intrusion.