Jim Crace - The Gift of Stones

THE FLINT FROM that new pit was smoky brown with mottles in grey and yellow. My father’s generation was practised in the sorting of the stone. Its colour did not count. It was from weight and form that the villagers could tell with half a glance the way the stone would split, which piece would hold firm for an axe-head, which would fracture into scrapers, which were the most suitable for slingshot, what to keep for best, what to jettison at once, where the sharpest blade was seated in the planes and fissures of the stone.

Now, with an amputation on their hands and with a dying boy, stunned and mewling from the pain and poison in his arm, they searched amongst the unworked flint with care. What was needed was a knife with an edge so fine that it could sever father’s elbow, cut the sinew and the flesh in such a way that any wound would mend. Anyone who has plucked and split a chicken for the spit will know how hard it is to separate the meat and bone, to snap a wing or leg cleanly at the joint and separate the limb. It is best done cooked and with the teeth. (And here, of course, if there were children in his audience, my father would not resist the obvious embellishment to his tale, that this was his fate too. They cooked his raw and living flesh over the fire and removed his poisoned arm with forty bites. There were the teeth marks still. He would present his puckered stump — not too slowly, not too close. And, indeed, you thought you saw the logic to his lies — those indentations, those pussy fissures and frowning scars could be the work of mouths.)

But once again it is the plainer story that we favour, the one which places father on his bed, semiconscious, weak, his elbow pierced and swollen, his wrist and hand caked in blood from the morning’s black and self-inflicted wound. Someone stood and rubbed water on his forehead, on his lips. Nothing could be done until a knife was made.

A stone was chosen from the spoils of the new pit. It was hoof-shaped with a tendon-like ridge running from its ankle. With luck there was a good blade within, but tools do not simply drop from flints like pips from pods. The patience and the artistry of a craftsman is what it takes. And some luck, too. And, as luck would have it, there was a craftsman in the village at that time renowned for the sharpness of his blades. Renowned also for the bluntness of his tongue, his dolefulness, rigidity. I will not say his family name for my father never used it. Behind his back he called him Leaf, like all the other boys. The reason is no mystery. This man would always keep a leaf upon his bench. He could replicate its shape in flint, its texture almost, its autumn colours, its patina. He aimed to match its thickness, too, its thinness. But its weight? Would he ever come that close?

Leaf was the man given the task of fashioning the amputation knife. Here it is certain that my father’s version of events was cake of his own making. How could he have known how Leaf went to work and the problems that the craftsman met — my father was dreaming, dying in another house. He could scarcely brush away a fly. So here I must abduct my father’s story for a while and spend some time — as father never would — talking of our village skill with flints. We have before us, on a bench placed in the good light of a workshop yard, a hoof of stone.

This is a moment of great patience. Leaf would not wish to work the flint too soon despite the boy and his condition. He had first to picture in his mind’s eye the type of blade, its length, its weight, most suited for the amputation.

Leaf’s huts were on the windy brow of the village, above the beach and sea. But we should not picture him walking to the shore, absently popping the wrack, or even looking out to sea to gain his working focus and his inspiration. He did not like the beach with its unruly rocks, its colonies of weed, its changing shape. If he could he would have squared it off. Where was the utility of the sea? What was its symmetry?

Our village looked inland. We were not fishermen. Fish was bad to eat — though gulls’ eggs, crabs and shells were welcome in the spring. And we were not sailors either. The sea brought no one luck and so we stayed away. Lives were passed in this one place, working stone and seeking respite from the wind. For the villagers then, a still day was a day when their hair simply lifted from their foreheads. It didn’t tug their scalps. It didn’t slap their faces. And so we should picture Leaf in that short time before he struck the flint, crouching for protection behind the wall of his workshop yard, holding a wet finger to the cracks to check for draughts, pushing fussy wads of moss between the stones, vainly wiping strands of hair across his head (for he was almost bald), and imagining the perfect blade that he would make. His youngest daughter had lit the fire with driftwood and with bracken. Its flames hardly danced. Leaf’s walls had all but stunned the wind.

He took the flint and turned it in his hands. Would it do for such a task? Leaf wanted even-textured, predictable stone. Flawless stone. He wanted stone that would not shatter but would fracture at the point that he dictated. All looked well enough. He moved his daughter from the fire and placed the unworked flint into the ashes and the flames. She brought the bellows and pumped heat into the fire. The grey and yellow mottles on the flint darkened to match the brown. Leaf squatted at his daughter’s side and watched. He dare not let the flint turn black. It could split or splinter. But he wanted a hot stone, one that could be worked easily and precisely and at speed, one that would open from the delicate, controlled impact of the softest hammer. Cold stone was resistant to the gentle arts of knapping. Hot stone was best. His daughter brought two long slates from his basket of tools. Once her father had sat on his stool with a flat stone anvil on his knees, she retrieved the heated flint with her slate tongs. She put it on the anvil and, spacing her legs for a firmer stance, held the stone in place. ‘Now all that stood between me and death,’ said father, relishing his circumstance, ‘was a hoof of roasted stone and a hairless, trembling Leaf.’

LEAF’S FIRST BLOWS were simple ones, and hardly trembling. He had to form a rough but tidy core from the quarried flint so that it would sit firmly on his anvil. One blow with a crude stone hammer removed the flint’s grey rind. Another squared its base. A third removed a nugget of intrusive chalk. It was a simple matter requiring not skill or strength, but confidence. The core stone that remained would have served elsewhere, in some less sophisticated place, as an implement in itself. You could club a man to death with such a stone, or crack nuts. Where was the craft in that? But how to make a knife? Where to begin?

Untutored hands would muster all their energy and smack the hammer on the flint. With luck, there might be tiny scrapers accidentally made that would serve as barbs for arrows or for cleaning skins. But only one stone, thus struck, in twenty thousand would provide, by chance, a long, strong splinter for a blade. Craftsmen — cautious, focused, their tongues curled and dry — would take their time. They would seek to understand the stone, to know its valleys and its hills. That tendon-like ridge on the hoof of stone — was it the length and thickness, would it serve as a blank for the amputation knife? Could it be detached easily from the core?

Leaf placed his sharpened antler tine on the flint, exactly where the tendon was attached, and struck it with a wooden mallet. These were the perfect tools but only in hands like Leaf’s that were firm and certain. If the direction of his impact were a feather’s breadth too shallow the fracture would surface too soon. The knife blade would be shorter than a thumb. It would be chisel-shaped. Or, if the impact were a feather’s breadth too deep, the fracture would plunge so that its blade end curved in a lumpy hook, a talon, a beak, a keel. Who’d want a poisoned arm removed with that?