Jim Crace - The Gift of Stones

My father threw the broken knife and the scorched remains of pot into the ashes of his fire. He wrapped the now-warmed goatskin round his shoulders and set off again upon his travels. He knew the way and climbed up from the valley through the mallows and the brambles — now thickening with promises of leaves and buds — until he reached the high clifftop of bracken. There was no ship upon the sea, just a rosehip sun with fleshy canopies of cloud. Already shags and waterhuggers were flying off for the day’s first fish. Fronds and frost and cobwebs gleamed with dew. Giant slugs were on the path. Rocks steamed.

Father thought then of his cousins and his uncle’s hut at dawn. It was still dark inside. Grey slates of light squeezed past partitions, curtains, screens, to rest in tapered oblong slabs on walls. If there was movement it was rats or an ember settling on the fire. If there was noise it was the rasping in his uncle’s chalky lungs. If there was exultation, it was in dreams. It ended when they woke.

My father made too much of this, his celebration on the cliff, his sense of liberty from toil at being up so weatherswept and early with the sun. But what is liberty anyway? Not much more than self-deceit, a fantasy. It only takes one stolen dawn while all the world’s asleep for the prisoner of dull routine to count himself quite free. It does not matter that the days that follow are as patterned and as uniform as the cells and chambers of a honeycomb. And so it was that father walked along the clifftop path emboldened by the dawn and relishing the cold and deathly night he’d spent huddled by his fire.

At midday, he reached the low coast, the juice-red rocks, the overhang of salty heath where he had sheltered from the rain. Again there was a mist. But this time he did not stand and fill his lungs with damp and heavy air and cry, Who’s there? He knew. He turned his back against the sea and walked inland through the fringe of arrow grass on to the heath. Quite soon he found the smudge of smoke and heard the wolf-like barking of her dog. It was the woman who called out, Who’s there? He stood a little distance from her hut and did not speak. He took the goatskin from his shoulders and held it out. His gift. She came into the open armed with a stick, the baby in a leather sling, the dog held by its neck. What she saw there was a young man in silhouette, standing on the spot where many men, on horseback, drunk, defiant, shy, had stood before, awaiting her and holding chickens, honey, cloth as payment for her time.

‘Wait there,’ she said. She took the baby and the dog back into her hut. And then came out, untying as she walked the strings and laces which secured her winter clothes. Her eyes were on the goatskin not the man. She’d use it as a cover for her daughter’s bed.

‘That’ll do,’ she said. And then, ‘Lay it down. We’ll use it as a mat. The ground is wet… ‘ And then, in tones that matched the pallor on my father’s face, ‘It’s you!’

If my father was in a mood for teasing he’d entertain us at this fork in his narration with a treatise on temptation. ‘Life is a double-headed worm,’ he’d say. ‘It can wriggle either way. It has the choice. My choice was this: to give the goatskin as a gift, exactly as I’d meant. Or to trade the goatskin there and then, with her, upon the ground.’ His audience, of course, would want the second of the two, the choice which would place my father’s hands upon her waist, her hem tugged high. They’d opt for barter, fair exchange — his skin of goat, her hardly breasts, her punctured water bags of thighs, her patch of black, untended hair.

And then? Could he then join her in the hut and tend the pot and rock the child? Did merchants on the market green invite their clients home once all the trade was done? No, no. The pleasantries of commerce do not outlive the moment of exchange. If father had sunk down with her then their passions would be spent for good; client, merchant, interchange. She’d take the goatskin to the child, without a word. He’d set off home with only breathlessness and muddy knees to show for all his efforts. You’d think it was an easy choice. But father — sweating, blushing, tempted, shy — could hardly speak.

The woman was looking closely at him now.

‘What have you done?’ she asked. ‘Your hair!’ She reached forward and pushed her hand across his forehead and his skull. ‘Who’s done that to you?’

‘I did it to myself,’ he said. ‘To light a fire. I had no moss. I just had hair.’ He twisted a skein of hair between his fingers to show what he had done. ‘Here, I brought this skin.’

‘For what?’

‘For you. A gift.’

The dog was barking now, and the baby mewling like a gull. My father and the woman walked back to the hut with nothing dealt and everything to trade.

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.