Jim Crace: The Gift of Stones

There was a moment when the bowman reached the rock from which my father had fallen when his choice was either to continue the chase or to stop and search for that poisoned sapling reed and stone. The world was full of boys that he could chase and kill, but an arrow was of value. It could make its heavy, winding flight again, ten, twenty times. You can’t eat boys, but an arrow can stop a deer, a seal, a hen. You can barter arrows for some honey, say, or skin. There is no trade in dead and skinny boys. That, then, is where the bowman stopped the chase and knelt in the undergrowth. Where was his arrow? He found the scallops. He wiped the blood which had stuck to them on the mosses and the grasses and put them in his purse. And then he set to work on the vegetation with his stave, beating at it in a circle and looking for the polished rose and yellow of the arrow’s shaft. He did not find it. He could not find it. My father held it in his one good hand and was running with it to our village.

I cannot guess what spiteful, foolish instinct had made father pause to stoop and take it from the ground. But there was some sense of triumph there, as he made a bloodied return to his people, that he had doubly vexed the stranger with the bow. ‘That man had lost the chase and he had lost an arrow, too,’ my father said. ‘Some compensation for the blood and scallops which I had lost, and his poison in my arm.’

His neighbours passed the arrowhead from hand to hand and shook their heads and laughed. They knew this stone. Greywacke. Picked out of the gravels, the shales and mudstones, on some riverbank and worked on by an amateur. Here were the flattened planes where the stone had been pounded. Here was a fracture at the arrow’s stem. Here were the impact dents where the hammer stone had struck the parent stone sending random chips and dust into the eyes, no doubt, of some muscular, hasty manufacturer who had not grasped that simple truth that stones are broken not by the power of the hammer. Stones are like scallop shells, like nuts. A clumsy, heavy blow will shatter them. One gentle, well-aimed strike with a wooden pin and they will open for you like a gate.

Yet what clumsy tool was this? A small boy could do better. No wonder that the horsemen wanted trade if all the stones and arrows that they had were worked so poorly. They would be back, for sure, and with better trade than threats. If they came again and my father lived, the bowman could be asked to provide some recompense.

I will not tire you with my father’s recollections of the fever and the pain that followed. He had saved his own life, it was said, because he cut himself below the arrow wound. Any poison had dispersed. But he had lost much strength and the wounds were slow to bind. His wrist and elbow began to swell and then his fingers became both stiff and shaking. By noon the colour of the skin had changed and, if his arm was pressed, clear water which smelt like damp earth bubbled through fissures to the surface. Soon the pain transferred itself to his upper arm and there were no feelings below the elbow. It was then that he was told that he must lose an arm or die.

IT HAD BEEN my father’s task, some months before the arrow struck his arm, to help with the opening of a new shaft on the hill beyond the village. All the boys and girls were ordered there. It was their job to stand in line with baskets and tip the disturbed topsoil — and the useless stones, the surface flints made unworkable by frost — into disused workings. What they sought was the undisturbed floorstone of flint at depths unknown to worms. This was the act that underpinned the village. If the stone was good then there were profits to be made. The hefters and the craftsmen, the women in the workshops pacing the five-pointed star between the spit, the anvil, the bellows, the cradle, and the pot, could expect good prices for their finished flints from the traders in the marketplace. This is how it worked: there were two breeds existing side by side, the stoneys and the mongers, the villagers who dug and worked the flint, the traders who hawked and peddled it with the world beyond.

‘You’ll never guess,’ my father said, ‘which breed was fat and wealthy, which gave the orders, which named the price, which (for the opening of that new shaft) did not stand and shiver in the line with baskets full of earth.’

The stoneys’ children had been told to start at dawn. It was the light that woke them, and then the noise as all the able-bodied people cleared their throats and noses for the day or stretched their limbs or greeted their families and their neighbours. It was another working day but an exciting one for the children there. The usual routines could be discarded. The village and the workshops would be empty until the new shaft had been dug and the quality of the new stone tested.

The hill was reached by taking paths across the coastal, cliff-top bracken until a bluff of chalk with seams of flint was met. Then the paths converged as there was only one route forward, a steep track with two rock sentries. The youngsters reached it first and for reasons of their age took the gradient at a sprint. Behind, the older men and women, still half awake on this latest day of labour, were less eager to begin. They made their way through the bracken, some singly, some in pairs, so that to a hawk — be grateful to my father for the image — their progress would seem like a waterfall of people, a dozen slow streams meeting in an impatient, fresh cascade.

My father’s ornateness as a storyteller cannot obscure the one plain truth that needs no hawk for decoration — that the village was obsessed with work, with industry, with craft. It made the people purposeful, wealthy, strong. It made them weary too, and a little jealous of the outside world beyond the hill, beyond the warren of mineshafts, its drifts of unworked flint.

‘There were outsiders close by on that morning,’ said my father. ‘As we came onto the hill, breathless from the climb, all could see a distant, breakfast fire, plaiting a rope of smoke for the sky. There was the sneeze of tethered horses. There was the smell of meat.’

Here, perhaps, we should raise an eyebrow. Beware of father’s tongue. He has led us in his story to the hill and what we might expect is some detail of the labour there, the firing of the grass and gorse and heather, the loosening of the turf, the breaking of the chalk, the shifting of the stones as a hundred people went to work, the tedium. Instead, my father said, he slipped away. No one missed him. He walked towards the smoke. The men there called him over. They let him feed the horses with long grass. They gave him bread and rabbit. There was more laughter amongst these dozen than amongst the hundred on the hill. They blew birdsong with blades of grass. They were in no hurry to begin the business of their day.

Later they put him on a horse and rode away from the coast. He visited their encampment of houses made from skin and wood and played with boys of his own age whose hair was long and tempers short. Some time later he returned to the hill along the landmarks that he had noted in the morning, the fallen tree, the rookery, the clearing with the spongy path, the bluff. The villagers were hard at work. Men were disappearing underground to shoulder height and loosening the chalk with antler picks for the children and the women to load in baskets and dispose. No one had remarked on his departure or greeted his return. For all they knew or cared he had been relieving himself behind a bush. That was his day of labour. And though our eyebrows may be raised when we consider the facts that father conjured for us, the challenge that he made was this: Who there, amongst the hundred on the hill, did not take a journey on that day? The eye is focused on the stone that must be lifted to the shoulder and then pushed onto the broken turf at the rim of the pit. And then the next stone. And the next stone too. All day. That is how the job is done. The body is engaged. But the mind is like the hawk that father summoned for the image of the paths and the waterfall. It can fly. If one of the men had clapped his hands at one instant in the deepening of the pit and asked, ‘Where are you?’, not one would answer, ‘Hard at work upon the hill.’ They were elsewhere. Kings and heroes. Young again. Out at sea. In love. Winning arguments that they had lost the night before. Eating well. Rich. Walking in the forest to the plume of smoke that beckoned there. Hunting scallops with their toes.