Jim Crace - The Gift of Stones

‘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.

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, were 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.