Jim Crace - The Gift of Stones

She might have had to pester him for days on end with ‘Let me try’ or ‘I’m as strong as any man — just give me half a chance’ or ‘Have a heart. I’ve got a child to feed’ before he paid her any heed. And then what could this shy, obliging cousin do except allow this woman and her child to help him load the sled at least? And then to let her walk with him — taking turns at pulling on the ropes — down into the village, its empty causeways, its eyes and minds engrossed, its workshops beating with the pulse of bone on wood on stone. We have to guess that no one saw them passing by. The cousin would have shrank away in shame if anyone had called out or teased him, later, about the woman at his side.

He must have made her wait outside the house in case his family spotted her. The only way to make her go was payment of some kind, some recompense for those few flints that she had added to his pile. He could not comprehend exactly what the barter was and who owed what to whom, or why. He only understood the obligations of labour and of trade, that picking stones and pulling sled for half a noon was worth — a guess — a basketful of apples? Some grain? Some nuts? An egg or two? He felt as if he had been fooled by her. The kindness had been his. He had not wanted her to help or welcomed extra hands upon the rope. She’d merely slowed him down. Yet now it seemed he was obliged to pay for her intrusion.

There were twists of bacon drying in the smoke above the fire. He pulled one loose. It would not be missed. He went outside and, avoiding Doe’s grey eyes, gave the twist to me and scuttled back to the simplicities of flint. By dealing with a child, he thought, he had sidestepped yet satisfied the rituals of exchange.

We should not laugh at his bad luck. Yet there was something lumbering and comic about the look that crossed his face when he approached the hill next day. Doe was waiting for him there, between the double guards. She called him cousin. She pointed to the pile of perfect flints that she had already chosen for his sled. Let’s not call on the image of the honey and the bee. This cousin had no sting. He was a simple blow-fly caught — and flapping — in the finest web.

He thought his fortunes had improved when she seemed happy to allow him to load and take away her stone without her help. He said, ‘Stay here, and when I come again I’ll bring another twist of bacon for the girl.’

‘Bring something else,’ my mother said. ‘We’ve meat enough for now. Bring bread. Or milk.’ He was happy to oblige. It was a bargain if compared to the embarrassments of yesterday. He was content to share these odd and teasing intimacies with her so long as she and he were out of sight. Besides, the flints she’d piled were good enough. Why should he complain?

Next day he came with eggs and bread. She waited for him with a pile of stone. This blow-fly was enmeshed again. She had him trapped. A tougher cousin would have sent her packing that first day, without a second thought. There’d be no bacon twist. This cousin was too kind. He paid the price. Next day he brought my mother milk. She paid for it with flint.

I do not recall what happened then, except that those two, three bashful men with mischief on their minds soon spied my mother’s industry. They were emboldened to allow her to collect their flint as well. It must have seemed — you know the wily artifice of men — that Doe’s new task of piling stone would lead them closer to tasks more shared and intimate.

So now we had four sleds to load, and more to come. We were employed. Our faces were well known. The stoneys who were used to labour for themselves were quick to welcome and to use this unexpected new resource. They saw the logic of our lives, and why we chose to live halfway between the stoneys and the stone. It made good sense that they should spend more time tapping gently at their flints, unfastening the implements that hid within, while we — for apples, eggs and bread — brought in the stone, took back the waste, maintained the hill. No one could say to us again, ‘That hill is ours, not yours.’

THIS IS the way my early childhood passed. Like all the other stoneys there we rose at dawn. It was the light that woke us. The more we were accepted, the more there was for us to do. My first job was coaxing from the embers of our fire an early flame, then warming stones for us to heat our bread. So silent was my mother at those times, that I am startled that I learned to talk. Yet talk I did, nonstop. I was a woodland bird, my father said. My mother had become as voiceless, distant as a kite. I had become a warbler in love with its own song. Here was the proof — if there was any doubt — that children are soon free of what their parents are. If I was heir to anything, it was my father’s, my false father’s tongue. I shared, too, his reticence with stone.

Yet on those mornings when the skies were pink and calm and the ocean wind was shy to come ashore, that hawk that father used to decorate his tales could spy me taking at a sprint the gradient between our house and the flinty hill. My mother, Doe, still half awake on this latest day of labour, was less eager to begin. But, once at work, she was more diligent than me. She did not pause, bent double like a broken fern, in her job of loading stone on sled. She felt, at last, that she and I were safe so long as there were stoneys needing stone, so long as there were farmers, horsemen, fishers, wrights who wanted arms and tools.

For all my sprinting and my talk I was a lazy child. It was more fun to chase the rabbits or to test how far stray seeds would fly if tossed into the wind than work. It was more fun to make up songs, aloud, with teasing rhymes. It was more fun to mime a little constipation so that I could creep away to see what lay beyond the village and the hill.

But Doe was not amused by me. Her love — so light and pliant on the heath — was solemn on the hill. Her nightmare was that she would die and I would be alone. If she could pass to me the gift of stones, then she could die and leave me with the means to live alone. And so it was, despite the sneeze of tethered horses in the distant wood, despite the plumes of smoke which summoned from the outside world, despite the lure of father and his idle life upon the shore, I found myself enslaved.

This is how we worked. My mother used an antler pick to pierce and loosen chalk. She broke it up and pushed away the noduled roots of flint which were the tougher siblings of the chalk. She knew the trick required to spot the grain inside the stone. She knew which flints would make long knives, which were the densest, most resistant stones ideal for hammers, strikers, axe blades, picks, which were loose enough in grain, shape and disposition to flake for arrowheads or spears, which would splinter into harpoon barbs, which were only good for putting into walls. She sorted flints in piles and pointed to the one which I should lift and load. And then the next stone. And the next stone too. All day. That is how the job was done. We grazed and turned the earth like goats except our cud was flint not grass.

We were not good at loading all the stone on sleds. The studs and hollows would not embrace for us, or if they did, the journey down the slope towards the village would rattle loose the flint and we — in full view of every idle stoney there — would have to start again. Instead we used large baskets made from reed which we had traded in the marketplace for surplus bacon earned through shifting stone. We tied the baskets on the sled. We went to every workshop in the village — including Leaf’s — and came away with food or skin or fuel. The stoneys treated mother much as the merchants treated them. That is to say they treated her with all the coldness and respect with which fishermen treat fish. She was the chit and I the sprat who serviced them with stone. The passion that she roused amongst some men when we first came had cooled. She was more rounded and constrained. She was like them, a stoney night and day.