Jim Crace - The Gift of Stones

The children in the ring looked at my father’s elbow stump. They saw no magic there. My father looked at it and them, intently, as if he expected the frowning tucks and scars to burst apart and a new arm to emerge. When nothing happened, my father shrugged. ‘I got it wrong,’ he said. ‘Look here.’ He held his good hand out. ‘You see? I already have one healthy arm, four fingers and a thumb. I should have asked for two!’ The children laughed, but they’d been fooled. They wanted proof that father’s tale was true. ‘I have the proof,’ my father said. ‘I have the gift of ice. Which boy, which girl, will step out here and touch me on the hand? Come on. Be brave. If anyone is turned to ice, we’ll melt them on the fire.’ He made as if to pick a child from amongst the crowd. They backed away. They screamed and giggled. They hid. There wasn’t one who’d take the chance of proving father’s lies were lies.

We do not need to hear my father’s other variations, the bespoke stories that he told to tease and stimulate his aunt, his neighbours, his enemies, the old. He was never lost for words. He had a name for everything — or invented one. He’d out-hoot an owl, they said.

And so it was that father became — not liked exactly, or respected — but useful in the village, and admired by some. He could be seen — the irony is rich — inside the sanctum of Leaf’s yard reworking folktales for the family as the master sat at anvils and his daughter pumped the fire. You’d meet him, too, at any great occasion, celebrating with a tale the naming of a child or marking death and burial with some fitting yarn. And there were hardly any feasts or meetings of the village which did not feature father fantasizing at the higher table in the hall. Imagine, too, the usefulness of such a skill on market days. His uncle was not slow to make the most of that.

The paradox is this — we do love lies. The truth is dull and half asleep. But lies are nimble, spirited, alive. And lying is a craft.

‘Let us be cruel and listen to that craftsman, Leaf,’ my father said if he was ever pressed to justify his elevated standing with some villagers or the applause which marked his wilder tales.

‘Imagine you have spent all day crouched over stone. Your eyes are tired, your back is stiff. You need to take a stroll and the way that you have taken leads you to Leaf’s workshop. You lean upon his perfect wall. How was your day? you ask. You do not care — you simply want to be amused, to hear another voice that isn’t stone on stone.’

But Leaf — and this was father’s point — could only answer in one way. He would knock the splinters of chipped flint from his chin and lips, rearrange the camouflage of long, stretched hairs across his head and simply tell the truth. It would be flat, his tale. It would take his audience through the day, his daughter at the bellows, the master at the stone. If his listeners did not hold their hands aloft and say, Enough, he’d detail every shallow flake that fell upon his anvil, he’d have them witness all the tedium of work, each word of his would be a hammer blow.

‘Imagine, now,’ my father said. ‘A liar intervenes. He picks upon the leaf that always rests upon Leaf’s bench. Leaf is too shy, he says, too modest. Today the master’s dream came true. He found a flint which had the colours of this leaf. It was an oak in stone. He shaped it with the bays and headlands of this leaf. You see the stem and veins? You see the curling stalk? Leaf made them all in stone. He made the flint so light and thin that it began to rustle like a winter leaf disturbed by wind.

‘Should you believe what this deceiver says?’ my father asked. ‘You are not fools — but you have had a trying day and he has made you laugh. Only Leaf is not amused. And that makes you laugh some more. You play the game. You challenge both these masters — the storyteller and the stoney — to produce the flint-leaf for inspection. Leaf himself is silent. What can he say? He’s stuck. These lies have made a fool of him. But the liar is not trapped. He never is. He does not care. He says: Leaf’s leaf was on the table, cooling, lifting at its edges from the breath of those who came to see it. It would make Leaf the richest, greatest knapper in the land. And then what happened? Yes, you’ve guessed. A bird came in and took it for its nest. It was so light, this flint, the bird bit through it with its beak. The pieces floated to the floor like oak ash drifting from a fire.’

Imagine if the liar then invited everyone to look down on the floor, to get down upon their hands and knees, to find the pieces of the leaf-in-flint. Everybody would snigger at his thinness of deception. A leaf-in-flint, indeed! But could anybody swear, my father asked, that their eyes would not momentarily dip, their eyelids flicker, their knees give way, at the prospect of a shattered oak leaf on the floor? Salute the liars — they can make the real world disappear and a fresh world take its place.

‘The secret of the storyteller,’ father said, ‘is Never Smile. A straight mouth and a pair of honest eyes is all it takes to turn a stone to leaf.’ You’ve never seen a face like his when he was telling tales. It was as candid as the moon.

THERE WAS one certainty in what my father told to me. The woman in the hut, her child, the dog — none of these were false. They were not characters from stories. Their tale was far too bleak. ‘If what I wanted was a woman, I’d not invent one quite like her,’ he said. He mentioned her to no one there. He put her out of mind. But he could not shake her loose from his imagination. She haunted every story that he told. And every time he looked outwards from the village — towards the sea, towards the heath — it was her grey eyes that he saw, her body in the grass, a horseman’s hands upon her waist.

Nothing stopped him now. It was expected, if he chose, that he would disappear again into the outside world. That’s where, it seemed, he got his stories from. The villagers imagined him, a hunter, tracking down his tales. He’d soon be back. Some villagers — those elders who mistrusted too much levity, those victims of my father’s tongue like Leaf — were quite relieved to see him go. He was disruptive. He had skills that could not be bartered in the marketplace. He had no time for stone. Some children were a little frightened of him, too. They did not like the scars and fissures of his arm. They did not trust his tales which, like sling stones, were sharp on every side.

And so, when spring came round, my father crept into his uncle’s yard one night and helped himself to gifts that might please the woman and her child. A wooden top that had been his youngest cousin’s. A goatskin mat. Some nuts, some grain, a good flint knife. Some scallop candles. A pot. He wrapped them in the skin and tied them to his back. It was a night that only comes in spring. The air was warmer than the earth and, as he trod the usual route along the bracken path between the village and the sea, his feet sent up a puff of frost which turned to mist on contact with the air. In that no-light of moon and stars, it looked as if his feet were shining like a pair of tumbling glow-worms in the damp.

The sea was out. It was the spring low tide, and shore that normally was undersea was breathing air for once and basking in the moon. This was my father’s path. He took advantage of the tide. At night it seemed much simpler than the clifftop route, the path of wolves and goats along which he’d blundered in the summer past. He walked barefoot and cursed the pebbles and the weed which made the going both slippery and hard. The sand was worse — it opened up beneath his feet like drifting snow. One arm was not enough for keeping balance. He fell down and the sandprints that he made with hand and feet and knees winked and bubbled as they filled with sea. He’d left the glow-worms on the bracken path. Now his tracks were listless silver spheres which shrank and flattened as the wet sand at their edges collapsed to fill the holes.