Jim Crace: The Gift of Stones

HERE THEN WAS the strangest recompense. It was a simple matter for the riders from beyond the hill, much used to drinking, perfume, quarrels, horsetheft, wars, to first give father too much drink from their leather travel-mates of spirit and then to strike him neatly on the chin. The softest blow, not a feather’s breadth too shallow, not a feather’s breadth too deep, flicked my father’s head back on his spine. He spiralled, fell. ‘It was my first encounter,’ father said, ‘with our good friend Hard Drink.’

They took his arm off, too. They were used to amputations. Their family dead were dismembered and buried in a pot. It was less trouble than digging graves or building chambers under earth. It was not only dead limbs, either, that they were used to cutting. One horseman lifted up a hand with two fingers and a thumb half gone as evidence that they could take a knife to living people, too. They were often fighting, casually with strangers, and there were many wounds. The body held no mystery for them. Leaf was happy to pass on the task and watch the experts with his knife. First they tied a leather strap above my father’s elbow. Clear earthen pus burst from the swollen upper arm. Briefly some colour returned to his limb and then beyond the elbow joint it turned the inner blue of mussel shells. A second leather strap was tied higher on the arm and a slat of wood was rested on my father’s chest as a working surface. They put his arm upon it and strapped it to the wood with ropes. They threw spirit on his arm. His skin was cut and opened with those few sharp scraps that Leaf had gathered from the flake nest on his anvil. An uneven thin red line was cut. My father flinched and moved his arm in sleep.

Those who expected a scarlet eruption, a cascade, were disappointed. The straps held father’s blood at bay. The horseman with the knife was now impatient. With the strong and even strokes of a deer-hunter stripping and salting meat, he cut into the flesh with Leaf’s new flint. The bunched stem of arteries and nerves was the most resistant, but the three boyish muscles which enfolded it gave way before Leaf’s perfect edge like wet peat. The audience had never seen such colours. With so sharp a knife it was a speedy task to separate the knuckles of the higher bone from the two long bones below the elbow. With a belch of clear and bitter fluid the unhinged lower arm came free. Its bluish tones had paled. It was no colour. It matched my father’s face. Bury it, the cutter said. My father’s arm was gone. Leaf put out his hand to retrieve the knife. I’ll keep it, said the cutter. That leaves us even on the day.

There is no need, I think, to embroider this much more. It was dark by now. The horsemen — boastful and jostling with the villagers — had to ride away. They had their flints. They’d paid their recompense. All in all they’d had a lively day. My father was unconscious on the bed, drunk and bruised and dreaming. The bleeding was quickly stemmed with wood smoke. Maggots of the screw-worm fly would be brought and placed upon his wound to accelerate the healing. The skin would stretch and pucker, frown upon the world. And it would drip its poison and its undiminished pus forever like tree sap, like semen, like a punctured boil.

My father’s story, then, of how he lost his arm presents a village briefly gone awry. We must retain the image of a normal day, the workshops busy with the rhythm of bone and wood and stone, the causeways quiet and empty except for children delivering new flints, the marketplace a murmur of transaction as wheat and skin and pots changed sides with axes, spears and knives. The anthill was at work, measured, skilful, dull, secure. To this we add the day’s disruptions — a heavy arrow, the wind and manes of horses, the trepidations of a dying boy, the perfume and the decorated bones, the taste of spirit on my father’s dreaming lips. How were people on that night? Were there better tales to tell across the hearth as hot, flat stones were made ready for the meat? Were children silent, tense? Was there more passion in the hearts and beds of those who’d watched the horsemen mount and ride off to the night? My father had it so. He drew for us a portrait of our home and village sent skittish by these uninvited guests, their gifts. Children were conceived that night. Subversive thoughts were aired at the expense of traders, flint, the drudgery of work, the slavery of skill. Maybe, even, blows were struck and quarrels made and mended with a hug. The man who’d kicked away the bowman’s arrowhead made the most of that, telling and retelling what he’d done, perfecting every detail. His midnight version was the best: Who said that bowman toppled to the ground? he asked. I plucked him up myself and tossed him there.

And then, of course, the embers died. The village slept. It woke as usual with the dawn and slowly, painstakingly, more flints were formed; the hammers, scrapers, bellows, chisels were gathered up and put to work. Here was the normal day — except, of course, for one small boy who slept on and on for fear of waking to his pain — his severed arm caked and stiffened by dry blood, his nightmares blustery and full of stone.

‘LISTEN HERE ( my father said ). I’ll tell you what occurred. I’ll keep it simple, too. I won’t tell lies. So don’t expect some bristling story of revenge, the sort retold in whispers after dark about the boy who killed the lambing wolf or the wife who drowned her husband’s secret friend or the feuding sons. There is revenge to come, for sure. Malice and my elbow stump are twins. But at that moment when — seven years of age — I watched the bowman’s smile, there was no revenge in my mind. Children aren’t like that. They are more subtle. Is that the word? Or is ‘simple’ closer to it? Let’s hear it then, let’s tell the truth: the sum of my ambition at that time was not to kill the bowman for the damage he had done, but to be the bowman, to be on horseback in the wind like him, to let the heavy arrow fly at anything I wished, to struggle loose from stone.

Let me describe his face as best I can. You’d think it was a leather purse with teeth. You never saw his eyes. He had a horseman’s squint. He was only young, but he was weathered as a piece of bark. Sometimes my memory conjures up a small moustache, sometimes a scar above his lip. I can’t be sure. It was years ago and I have told this story many times and changed it just as often. But one thing never changed. The bowman’s face, his smile, his eyes, expressed in full what neighbours in our village had most distrusted in my own face. Look, you see it now, a little blunted, true … but dreams … but turbulence … but downright cussedness. He could have been my brother.

So is this my story, then? Watch out, you say, he’s chipping and he’s knapping at the truth. He’s shaping it to make a tale. Two brothers. Separated at their birth. And reunited. In a feud. I’ll spare you that. I’ll save that story for the children late one night, and we’ll get on with something less exciting.

So I was seven, almost dead, but tough and cussed, too, and on the mend. My chin was bruised. The skin was broken on my head. I’d lost a lot of blood. My lower arm, my hand — the one I used for eating, fighting, wiping arses — was snug and damp somewhere beneath a rock. Or flung from the clifftop into the wind. Gull food. Or — this is likely — disposed of on the hill beyond the village. Down some disused pit. The hill was full of holes. I’m buried there. A bit of me, at least.

Who cared for me? At first it was the uncle who’d sobbed out shallow promises to my dying mother when I was small. ‘See to the boy,’ she’d said. Uncle kept his word. He’d raised me as his own. That means I shared the slappings that he gave to his six sons and daughters and his wife. That means that I was underfed and generally ignored unless there was a job to do, some lift or fetch and carry. But when he heard that I was wounded and that my arm was briefly famous, he showed himself the model of devotion. He was among the men who volunteered to knock me out. It was his mallet on my brow.