Jim Crace: The Gift of Stones

But then, next day, my arm was off and it was clear that I would live and thrive. He moved me to his huts on a stretcher — my cousins shared the weight — and, on the way, took every chance to sing his praises. Make way, make way, Uncle All Heart passes through. We rested in the marketplace — and there we found the world returned to normal. The disturbances of yesterday were done. There were no horsemen there. The hollowed bones of scent had gone. Don’t ask me where. There was a stir of interest in my stump — but that was their curiosity at full stretch. Why should they care? There were no scabs for them to pick. What’s done is done and soon forgotten, unless there’s debt involved.

My uncle and his family lived frugally. He wasn’t good with flints. His best were simple mallets, hammers, axes, implements without a blade. They were hardly highly prized amongst the traders in the marketplace. The gift that made Leaf rich made uncle curse. He had no patience. He was a bear. You should have seen him hard at work. You’d think his hands were feet. One pair of working hands, he’d say. Eight mouths to feed. Mine made it nine. His plan had been that his six children and I, his sister’s child, should join the workforce speedily. Eight pairs of working hands — he didn’t count his wife — could make him rich and fat. Now he wasn’t slow to see, as I lay recovering in his huts, that my recent loss, my half a pair, would not advance his plan. What kind of knapper would I make with my best arm ending in a stump? His girls could learn to work the stone, he said. They could do it just as well as boys. But me? What could I do? Get in the way, that’s all. I couldn’t fetch and carry any more. One arm was not enough for heavy stones. I couldn’t work the bellows; two handles need two hands. I couldn’t dig for flint. I couldn’t strike a tine and split a stone unless I held the hammer in my teeth.

So I grew up like some wild plant, ragged, unattended, not much use. While my domesticated cousins learned from uncle how to bludgeon stones, discovered how to cluck and chivvy at their work all day, I learned how to irritate, discovered how to peck and knap at tempers. I was the magpie, they were hens. No one came to me and said, You’ve lost an arm, so what? You’ve got another on the left. Let’s see it work. It can be done. Come on, sit down and trap the stone upon the anvil with your stump. Or, here’s the way the one-armed master goes to work; he changes crafts. He becomes the herdsman or the cook, the leatherman. His cheeses are the best. His goats. His perfect-fitting shoes. No one said, There are a thousand things to do that don’t require two arms. It takes one arm and two good legs to take a bucket to the stream and bring it back, unspilt. Do that. Or four fingers and a thumb are easily enough to take up keeping bees.

The simple truth is this, no one had the time or inclination to find a role for me. Making flints, that’s all they knew. That’s what gave them heart. That was the ritual that kept them going, that filled their time, that stocked their larders, that gave them pride. Work made them comfortable. It made them feel, We do exist, We are important, even, We count. They were the stoneys, heart and mind. They blindly fashioned flints. And gulls laid top-heavy eggs. And the winds blew off the sea. That’s how the world was made and never pause for thought. It wasn’t made for boys with stumps.

I promised you there’d be no lies, but you’ll excuse excursions and short cuts. What is the profit in listing here the countless days I fled the cursings of my uncle and my cousins to laze about the village staring idly into other people’s lives? Days spent doing nothing, when I was eight, nine, ten, could slow this story down. You’d fall asleep, you’d topple to the ground, if I told that. You’d dislocate your jaw with yawns if I recounted here the casual, endless rebuffs upon which my boyish indignation fed. I stalked the village like a homeless pup, unnamed, unnoticed, empty, cold, uncombed, and loved by no one but itself.

So, seven, eight years on. I was beyond the bowman’s age. It was the end of summer and there you see me once again upon the shore, running toes along the sand. I was well. I had no colds. My throat was clear, my lips were soft. For once the wind and sea were tame, the wrack was almost dry, the birds were grazing on the beach like sheep. There were no living scallops at my feet, just empty valves, the fluted valleys of their fifteen ribs turned green and black with seacrust. I could invent for you a sea and wind and sky that flung saltweed in my face and emptied water from the pools and cast a light so dark and feeble that even lugworms took the day for night, mistook the wind for tide, and coiled their ropes too soon upon the sand. But I will keep it calm and windless. The sight was no less strange. I skimmed a scallop out to sea and there, as unselfconscious as a cloud, a ship was passing by.

What would you do if you were me? Run back and tell the stoneys? What? That they should arm themselves and gather on the shore? That they should hurry from their workshops — the stones left baking, the bellows breathless in the hearth — and prepare themselves for trade with sailors? That they should simply stand in awe, like me, and witness from the land the recklessness of travel on the sea? They’d tell me, Scram. We’ve work to do. They’d call me Little Liar. And, for sure, if one or two were tempted to take the bracken path towards the sea to prove me false, they couldn’t reach the cliffs in time. For all the stillness on the beach, the muscles in the clothing of the sail made clear enough to me that there were breezes just offshore. That ship would soon be out of sight. Unless, of course, I followed it. Why shouldn’t I? I had no stones. I simply filled my chest with air and took off down the coast.’

‘THE SEA VIEWED from the clifftop is a world that’s upside down. Its gulls have backs. You’re looking down on wind. The shallows, from above, are flat and patterned, green with arcs of white where the water runs to phlegm. My ship threw up an arc of its own phlegm as it dipped and bounced before the wind. I bounced and dipped myself. We were a pair. At times the ship sank out of sight, lost in the trenches of the water. More often it was I who dropped from sight. The clifftop path was cut by wolves and goats. It made no sense. At times it ran, ankle-deep, as straight as sunlight across thickets of winkle-berries. My one hand dipped and picked. I breakfasted on fruit. But then, when ferns and brambles were dominant, and low flat trees with antlers of greying lichen on their sheltered barks, the goats and packs of wolves split up. Their paths ran out. I did the best I could, but made mistakes. I finished up on rocky promontories where going on meant sprouting wings. I found good downward paths to silent coves which offered no escape except by going back. I fell from rocks. I cut my shins. At least I wasn’t lost. No one that I knew from my village had been this far before, but getting back would not be hard. I’d trampled down a path. Any fool could turn about and follow clifftops home.

Already, in my mind, I knew the story I could tell that night — that I had tracked the ship until it turned across the wind and came ashore. Then what? I’d see. My only certainty was that if I blundered on I’d greet the sailors on some beach. It was a certainty that did not falter when the wind began to quicken, the sky turned toadstool-grey, and the arcs of phlegm upon the sea shore curled to spit against the beach. I hurried on. I hurried on, despite the undulations of the path, despite the growing distance of the sail. People on their own do foolish things. They don’t know when to stop. They don’t know how. Now you understand why people live in villages, sniffing at their neighbours’ cooking and their conversations. They fear themselves and what would happen if the leash were cut and they were all alone.