Jim Crace - The Gift of Stones

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.

‘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.

The farmers had gone home to feast on their achievements. If they’d stayed, my father claimed, they would’ve seen precisely who was king of that wild world. ‘When everybody’s dead, there’ll still be crabs and flies and carcass shrubs and weeds to strip and clothe the world. There’ll still be stone.’

So it seemed to him, the knapper’s son, as he stood with Doe in the carnage of the heath and listened to the old man talk of husbandry, that the world was cut in two — one for chaos, one for coma — just as the scriptures of his village said. All the outside world required was the liberty to pound and crush, to hammer and to bruise. It didn’t matter what. It didn’t matter if the blows were rained on geese or huts or dogs or boys, so long as there were blows and careless brawls and sudden gusts of hardship to blow good fortune down.

At home — that other, duller world, where now my father steered Doe and her daughter to start their lives afresh — the village blows were innocuous and prescribed. They were rained down on flint. He … they, the workers with two hands, were made tame, secure and virtuous by labour. Their skill was their salvation and their numbness. For once the village of my father’s birth, contemplated from that battlefield of geese, seemed — what was his phrase? — as snug as poppy seeds. Such was the gift of stones.

PERHAPS NOW IS the time to make myself quite clearly known to you. It will not do if I stand darkly by to cough and comment at my father’s tale. It is my story, too, and I should show my face. You know me as my father’s daughter and his only child. All that is false. His title ‘father’ was well earned, though not by right of blood. We are not kin.

I am the girl of Doe.

I am the child that he first touched when mother said, ‘Please help.’ She left him standing there, in charge of chicken, dog and child, his gift of samphire fallen at his feet, while she walked off to greet the horseman on the heath. I was the child he rocked to sleep or fed with bean paste and with fish, the one with whom he practised early words like drink and dog and bird. It was for my amusement that he perfected his repertoire of faces and new sounds. I was the first in his adult, one-armed life to barter love with love. So father he became. So father he remains for me.

It was on my father’s arm, with my mother, Doe, exhausted by the slaughter of the geese and the walk along the coast, trailing in our wake, that I first came upon the villagers of stone. My age was not yet two, yet I maintain that I recall that day. We were walking with our backs against the wind and sea. The path was springy, bracken. It led up from the crusty boulders of the shore to the windy brow where Leaf had built his huts. His walls were thick and packed with moss. There was no sign of life — except that, tapping in the wind, there was the rhythmic beat of antler tine on flint, the squeak of bellows, the hum of people hard at work.

Once we had walked beyond the brow and the wind had dropped we heard those beats and taps, those hums and squeaks, in jostling profusion. They sounded like the first and heavy drops of summer rain or like a thousand nutbirds pecking at a shell. The further that we walked into the village, the heavier the rain of pecks, the quieter the sea and wind, the more uniform and tended the walls and pathways that we passed. It must have seemed, to one so young and sensuous as me, that we had sunk into a dream where all disorder had been vanquished by invisible and systematic hands. Compared to what we’d left behind, the turmoil and the passion of the heath, here was a world of symmetry and of composure.

Quite soon we heard the sound of voices. The merchants were at work. We came on to the market green and there — amongst the produce and the crowd — my father saw his uncle trading stone. Now my recollections become enmeshed in father’s version of that day. How many times since then I’ve watched him mime his uncle’s face, its irritation and dismay, its comic fear of our fatigue and what it meant, as we approached his trading stall. We looked to him for heat and food and sleep. He looked at us as if we were weevils in his bread. He had no choice — in front of all his neighbours and the purchasers of stone — but to welcome father and his family home.

THAT EVENING uncle asked my father to explain. There was no point in telling lies, my father said. If what he wanted was a woman for a tale, he’d not invent one quite like Doe. There she was, reduced and tearful in their midst. They all could see she was no siren from a ship. Her perfumes were of wood smoke and of slott. Who’d want a dab of that around their throat or wrists? Her clothes were brown and grey. Her skin was scarred and pallid, her face a mask of weariness from all the weeping and the walking that she’d done. Her eyes — quite clear and grey and unabashed when she and father had first met — were, in a single glance, both hard and meek. Was she the only story he’d brought home? His cousins were not pleased, though knowing him, they waited for the twist. ‘Why have you brought her here?’ they asked. ‘What use is she to us? What can she do? Whose is the girl? Not yours, for sure. She’s got too many arms.’