Jim Crace - The Gift of Stones

Here, perhaps, an eyebrow should be raised. Beware of what a mother’s daughter says. I was a child — six years of age by now — and far too young to question or to judge what Doe had done and why. I’m speaking here with father’s voice. His love for Doe had cooled as well. Or changed at least. His hopes were now regrets. They hardly spoke. My father stayed away. He could not bear the woman she’d become, well fed and busy on the hill. He much preferred the ulcers and the dirt, her thinness and her poverty, her helplessness when she was living on the heath. He much preferred those dusks when she — called out by horsemen in the grass — said, ‘Hold the child. This won’t take long.’

She did not need him now. She had no need of any man. The labour which had made of her a slave had made her freer too. My father was the only one whose life was rid of stone. And so he used the phrase ‘flint-hearted and flint-tongued’ to dismiss the woman he had courted for so long. She would not let him take revenge. She dealt with him as if he were someone she owed a debt. She hid from him. She would not meet his eyes. For her my father was the heath. She dare not think of him or it.

But we have missed my father and the heath. As this tale has journeyed on and brought us to that point where Doe, transformed and fattened, was working on the hill, we have felt the absence of the man whose rudder-tongue could steer us free from our small world. We are all tired of stone. We crave some geese or ships, some smoke or riders, some moonlit footprints shining like a pair of tumbling glow-worms in the damp. We crave again my father’s single restless hand, the teasing undulations of his voice, his tales, his falsities.

And so I’ll let my father’s version take the oar again. He was the one who knew what happened next.

‘IT WAS THE END of summer when she died ( my father said ). Who knows exactly when?

In those days when she lived so diligently beside the hill my life was what it always was. So there you see me once again upon the shore, running toes along the sand. What else was there to do before the nighttime came? My days of “simply filled my chest with air and took off down the coast” were gone. I was not well. I was a thwarted man. The song I sang was this: How sad is he who has no wife. His seed is trapped. It turns to poison in his loins. His blood runs hot and burns. It dries his body and he leads a pale and angry life.

Move on, I’d tell myself. Forget this Doe. She’s lost — though quite how lost I did not guess. I was throbbing for her still. In the bony swelling of my severed arm. And elsewhere too — though I had a ready palliative for that. The cure for my arm was death. And until then, it seemed, I had to live with pain. The flint-cut bone, its covering of skin so tucked and tightly drawn, was now, as I grew older, softening and turning bad. The stump was red except where blisters formed or punctured so that pus could drain and dry. See here. My arm. This is no tale. If I wanted to invent misfortune for myself I’d not invent this arm or what occurred to Doe. I’d suffer the bad luck that mends. I’d not be me.

Watch out, you say. We know his tricks. He’s milking us like cows. He thinks we’ll sympathize with all his sins because his arm is bad. You’re right, you’re right. But I’m only telling what occurred, and my story takes its shape from what has happened to my arm. With two arms I’d be knapping and too dull and chalky to tell tales. With two arms I’d not have taken off along the coast, or killed the goose, or brought the woman and her girl back home. An arrow ruled my world; it made me what I am.

What kind of man is that? I must presume I am the vengeful sort. I’ve said before that malice and my elbow stump are twins. When Doe made clear that she rejected me I did not wish her well. I wanted her to see that she would suffer on her own, that I was the only straw for her to catch. I offered her gifts of food. But she was in no mood for me. She feared my tongue. She feared, I think, that I might talk about the horsemen on the heath and what she did for them and what they paid.

She clearly did not fear the tongues of those few men who courted her. She was the sweetest lamb with them. I’d watched her from afar. I’d seen the way she’d block their paths and rouse them with her smiles. I’d followed her and cousin to the hill and watched her test her charms on him. A waste of time. That blushing cousin was no use. His blood sped to his face — and nowhere else. And yet. Somehow. She’d trapped him. And herself. He’d ended up the sheepish devotee of Doe. She’d ended up a devotee of stone.

At times I wished I had less time. The hours that I passed, alone, were hours free to concentrate on pain. I saw the strength the stoneys had in focusing all day on flint. Each mallet blow, each flake, each bellow breath, each sticky cough which tried and failed to lift the chalk dust from their lungs would cut their worries short. They did not seem to mope. Was I the only one to see that, all around, the world was tumbling, spinning, wild? The bats were flying in the sun, the butterflies at night. You only had to briefly lift your head above your parapet of stones to see that where the village ended mayhem ruled and danced.

I expect you smile and brighten in expectation of some fantasy of mine. You’re weary of those tales in which the ship lands on the beach and unloads women, perfume, plagues or sailors hunting for the sun. You’ve heard each variation of the way my arm was lost; the women and the beasts, the drunk and hungry traveller who mistook it for a chicken, the cruel and giant gull. You’re tired of the talking goose, the magic dog, the travelling stench, the boy who had the gift of flames. You’re ready for some freshly fashioned tale. The thought of mayhem dancing gives you hope. Instead, all hope ends here.

Again it starts with what I took to be a ship. One night the wind was coming off the land and sweeping out to sea. For once the rooks were flying over water and the waves, at dusk, were tossing back their heads and hair and fleeing from the beach. The sea, so used to going with the wind, had reared in anger at the way its mate had turned. It was in turmoil, like a grey and boiling pot of gruel. The wind, instead of calling, “Home, go home,” was singing, “Back, keep back.” The land, so tired of all the pounding it endured, was turning on the sea.

Of course, the stoneys went inside and packed the unprotected land side of their homes with wads of moss or peat to keep away the draughts. I walked up to the avalanche of stones and wood that Doe had built herself. I thought the wind would turn her home into a fall of rocks and take her and her daughter, too, in a tumbling tour of village, beach and sea. I stood outside and called, “Doe, Doe, sweet Doe. It’s me.” I dare not call too loud despite the wind. My errand was too shy.

At last, when she had offered no reply, I pushed aside the flapping gate-screen to their home. I sensed the bodies lying there. Doe’s tense and wakeful breaths. The quaver of the sleeping girl. The wrestling of the wind and walls.

“It’s me,” I said again, though, in that light, me might have been one of a dozen men.

“What is it, then?” she asked.

“Are you all right?”

“Of course.”

“It’s windy out.”

“We’re used to wind.”

I went outside and propped my back against the dry, land wind. I heard but could not see the sea. Yet there were yellow lights. It seemed as if there were three stars which had taken refuge in the shallow water just offshore. They seemed to bob and shift. These were the kind of lights to make a story bob and shift as well. They were the lights of ghosts or lightning fish or baby stars which hatched from surf; they were the early lights of windswept dawn or the spitting embers of the dusk, if that is what I chose.