Jim Crace - The Gift of Stones

For Leaf himself there was no tension. He knew what to do. He’d done it many times. One blow and the blade blank broke loose, spiralled for an instant on the anvil and fell into the apron on Leaf’s lap. There, on its underside at the point of impact, was the distinctive raised tump of stone, like a tiny bulb or a winkle shell. Beyond, in the foothills of the tump, the flint feathered and radiated like a slow tide on a flat beach. It was a good, long blade, still warm from the fire.

Once again Leaf and his daughter returned the stone to the flames. Leaf exercised his hands and — half exultant, half impatient — blew out his cheeks to match the working of the bellows. He chose the best tools from his workshop for turning the blank into a finished blade. He sat, with a different, lighter anvil on his knees, to receive the hot stone. Again he worked with antler tines but with no hammer. A little sideways pressure removed the tump, the shell, the bulb. More pressure produced a mounting nest of fine and shallow flakes on the anvil as the blade was patterned and reduced.

Enough, you say. A boy awaits. The afternoon has almost gone. There is no need to detail the patience and the expertise with which Leaf etched a pattern of shallow facets along the cutting edge, or how the flint’s parallel flaking scars were ground ice-flat with grains of sandstone, or how the stoneworker reconciled his quest for beauty, symmetry, utility with the urgency of his task. If there had been time he would have cut a block of ash and made a handle for such a knife. He would have fixed the blade into the ash with birch resin. It takes two days to harden. He would have worried at the flint until it had lost all resemblance to stone. As it was he simply rubbed the blade in grease, to boast its natural colours and to catch the light, and — picking up a few sharp scraps from the flake nest on his anvil — delivered his newest tool to the crowd who waited at his gate. He was not patient with their flattery. The blade was good, for sure. It’d do the job. But he was aggravated by the thought of what the new knife might have been were there time to finish. It would have been a tool too fine to use. It would have been an ornament.

THOSE OF US who have kicked an anthill will understand the chaos in the village. The dreaming ants, so used to patterns and to chores, had been sent wild and spirited by the unheralded disorder of the day and by this thin excuse to shout and smile and swagger. In the causeway between the huts and workshops, where normally at that hour in the afternoon there were only hens and children, the crowd was advancing with the amputation knife. Faces, which usually were white with dust and concentration from the shaping of the flint, were flushed and restive and keen to play a part. Voices were high and unrestrained. There were wars of jostling and of tripping in that crowd. It was as if the sober stoneys were all drunk and far too blithe to care exactly what it was that brought them there but only glad to be involved.

There was a mood of unexpected celebration, too — not because the wounded boy — my father — was considered careless, indolent, untrustworthy, the sort who only had himself to blame for any ill-luck in his life, but because their rigid working day had been disrupted by the horsemen, by the making of the knife, by the prospect of a bloody afternoon.

Who would carry out the operation? There were no volunteers. There was no man or woman among the villagers who could boast experience in such matters. And there was no time to fetch some expert from the outside world, some butcher-herbalist or adept knapper of the flesh. My father’s version of events expertly shapes a symmetry between his dying body on the bed — the stillness of the bulrush boy, with the blackening blood, the paling skin, the cold and sweaty forehead — and the bluster of the villagers faced with a task beyond their skills. A balding volunteer was quickly nominated, one who was not present in that room and so could hardly make his case for staying absent. Leaf should carry out the amputation, someone said. He’d made the knife. He would know its properties. Besides, he was the finest craftsman of them all. He had a steady hand. Compared to making leaves of stone it would be a quick and simple task for him to shorten this boy’s arm.

Once again the crowd set off — this time, uphill, into the wind, towards the ocean brow. Come on, Leaf, they called. There’s work for you. No one was fool enough to specify. But Leaf would not leave his workshop — where he sat, another anvil on his knees, excavating oysters — until he knew the story. And then he wouldn’t move at all. He had no ambitions as a carver, was all that he would say. He had his lunch to eat. He’d done his share and made the knife. No more. Find some other sap to chop the boy in two.

At last, of course, partly persuaded by the accusations that his reticence was merely cunning, that his knife was blunt and splintered and could not amputate a toadstool let alone an arm, Leaf was persuaded to leave his shellfish and his workshop and set off, downwind, towards — he thought — the dying, poisoned, bloodless boy. Meanwhile my father, for some reason unexplained and inappropriate for his condition, had begun to feel quite well again. His arm was painful, but the sleep had restored his spirits and reduced his fever. He sat up upon his bed and wondered what there was to eat about the house. He wondered, too, what all the noise was in the causeway beyond the wall. Slowly the possibility occurred that he would not need to lose his arm at all.

His revival was not widely welcomed. Leaf and his companions were not relieved to see their patient standing at the gate, his expression once again the usual stew of idleness and insolence, his arm hanging heavily at his side. His liveliness presented them with problems. ‘He should be down and out,’ said Leaf. ‘I can’t cut a boy who’s half awake. He has to be unconscious.’ Some beer would have done the trick for a boy of father’s size. Or — better — a cup of wood spirit or headspin made from grain. But this was the village of stone where work and trade were king and queen. No one got drunk, no one had drink. The fabric of the village was made strong by the warp and weft of rules. Intoxicating drink was not allowed. It produced bad flint.

They returned my father to his bed and debated their difficulty. Here they had a boy whose arm was damaged beyond repair. If they did not swiftly put Leaf’s knife to use, first his shoulder, then his chest would succumb to the poison in the elbow. It might take hours, it could take weeks — but finally the boy would die. There is a limit to what can be cut away. You can’t remove a shoulder and a chest. But with a cussedness that matched his usual manner the boy was conscious. How could they put an end to that? There were those amongst them — Leaf included — who harboured thoughts that perhaps the village would be no weaker if the boy did die. He’d never make the best of workers. He had no love of stone. He spent too long idly on the beach, or in the woods. Such thoughts, of course, were left unvoiced. The warp and weft again demanded that the boy be saved. And now.

It is not difficult to stun a sheep. A blow to the head with a wooden mallet is known to quiet the beast for the butcher’s knife. So it was with father. They thought they’d knock him out. Here the tale presents a boy of seven, already bloody from a wounded arm, stood up by men twice, three, four times his age and battered round the head. One misjudged fist blow to his nose caused more blood to flow. One mallet blow to his brow (to which, by now, we must add my father’s terror and his sobbing) brought up an instant, broken bruise in the shallow flesh above the skull. A last desperate finger chop to the nape of his neck caused the perpetrator more damage than the boy. He was not stunned. It was a scene too rough and comic to seem cruel. Those men who could strike a flint and dislocate its core with the force and delicacy of owls hunting mice and shrews could not bludgeon one small boy to sleep. It was a foreign craft.