Jim Crace: The Gift of Stones

Of course, you’ve guessed. A boy, half man, can’t race a ship. I dropped into a valley where a stream spread out amongst the tumbled boulders of a beach and then climbed through mallows, brambles, bracken, moss until the sea was wide again. The ship had gone. I waited for the trenches in the water to surface, rise and flatten, and for the distant sail to signal in the wind. But all I saw were black waterhuggers flying singly for their ledges and the brows of seals as they came inshore for shelter and for rest. There was just a chance, I thought, that sailors were like seals, that when the winds blew hard and the sky grew dark they turned their own brows to the land and sought the safety of a beach. Perhaps there was a spot ahead where ships could put ashore. I should have turned myself and sought the safety — and indifference — of my uncle’s huts. I walked a few steps back towards our village. It was no good. The wind — now armed with flints of rain — was in my face. I turned my back against the wind. I carried on. I ran.

The landscape changed. It was not cliffs and coves. Low heathland swept gently to the shore where thrift and black-tufted lichens lived side by side on rocks with barnacles and limpets. There were clumps of seablite, flourishing on spray. There was arrow grass and milkwort. All the herbs and medicines and dye plants that we saw bunched and dried and up for barter in the marketplace were in abundance here. It made sense to gather some on the journey home and offer it as evidence that I could earn my keep. At last I could admit that I would not reach the ship. The coastline was in view for quite a distance. There were no sails. I collected seablite for its purple fleshy leaves. Good for stews and dyeing wool. It is not easy to harvest plants whose roots are tough enough to withstand wind and sea when you have one arm and everything is wet. You tug too hard and slip and damage what you pick. I soon gave up. I’d go home empty-handed but with purpled fingers.

It was when I sought some shelter from the rain that I noticed all the rocks. I found a place beneath an overhang of heath which was still dry and protected from the wind. I sat there, looking out to sea, uncertain what to do. And then I saw the colour of the stone. Juice-red like elderberry stain. I’d not seen that before. Arrowheads and knives in red would cause a stir. I’d bring my uncle here and my six cousins. We’d carry rocks back home.

I chose a piece about hand-sized and wedged it between my feet, its upper, rounder face well clear. I did not expect to make a tool. I simply thought that I would test the blades and edges at its core. I hit it with a stone of equal weight and size and colour. One blow. Both stones — the one in my left hand, the one between my feet — broke open and apart. They crumbled like a fist of clay. It felt as if I’d brought two drinking pots together. All I had was shards, none bigger than my thumbnail. I tried it once again, with different stones. More shards. More random piles of stone.

I cannot say how foolish and how alarmed I felt, sat there, seduced away from a little food and warmth by one lost ship, my one hand red from seablite, the sea shore red with stone. I had encountered there a rock unknown to all my neighbours. A stone so soft — I soon would learn — that the sea could break it up. A stone so soft it couldn’t crack a skull. Was this some illness, some disease? Imagine if the illness spread, if it made its way along the coast to infiltrate the flint pits on the heath. A picture came into my mind which left me smiling and breathless with its implications. Leaf’s youngest daughter was carrying a heated stone, a juicered stone, across the workshop. She placed it on her father’s anvil on his knees and, spacing her legs for a firmer stance, held the stone in place. Leaf positioned his sharpened antler tine upon the stone, his hands as steady as his eye, and struck it with a wooden mallet, certain of his craft, and grateful for the chance to work on something new.’

‘IN FACT, it might have been a dream. I fell asleep, my head upon my hand. The walking and the wind had tired me out. When I awoke I couldn’t see the sea, I couldn’t tell the colour of the rocks. There was a mist and it was dusk and all that mattered was the distance from our village and the fear of being stranded in the night. You’d all be just as fearful, that’s for sure. The beach is fine by daylight, but at night it is too open and too cold. There might be wolves. There might be worse. And yet to walk back along the cliffs could not be done. I’d fall. I’d shred myself on thorns. I’d drown in rain and blackness and in leaves. I stood and looked inland across the heath. I filled my lungs with damp and heavy air. “Who’s there?” I said. And then I raised my voice and called, “Who’s there?”

I was answered by a dog. Its bark was wolflike for an instant. My stomach and my bowels made soup. My legs gave way. I’d never known such fear, not even when young leather-purse, the bowman, had come blundering through the bracken to retrieve his arrow, his stave circling in the air, my right arm lost. That was in the day, and I was close to home. Now I stood as still as stone, breathing through an open mouth and planning what I would do when the pack had sniffed me out. I’d run into the sea. Would that have done the trick? Can wolves swim? I wouldn’t know. There were no wolves. There was another bark, high-pitched and servile. It was a single dog. And there behind its call, just lit and barely visible, the grey on grey, was a streaming plume of smoke.

Now you see me running on the saltland heath, sending rabbits to their burrows, putting up the roosting birds. I didn’t care. There was a smudge of safety in the air. If there were fires and dogs then people were close by. I’d pass the night with them. They wouldn’t harm a one-armed man, a youth, a boy. I’d eat, sleep, go home in light. I’d take an elderberry stone’.

‘ALL WE HAD to eat that night was slott. The woman ground the fish eggs into creamy paste and added green flour. She rolled the mixture into dumplings and heated them in sea water on the dampened fire which she had lit too dangerously close to the reedwork of her hut.

“Watch the pot,” she said. “Don’t let it crack. And call me when they’re done.”

“When are they done?”

“They’ll rise and float,” she said. She took a cup of water and stooped to leave the hut. In the dull light that lingered in the distance I watched her step into the grasses with her dog and walk a little way from the hut. She wore a belted smock. She took it by the hem, lifted it up to her breasts and squatted on the ground. Beneath the smock, she was thin and naked. Her buttocks and her thighs were creased and empty like punctured water bags. The hair between her legs was long and black. The dog stood before her, its tail erect, sniffing at the ground. She took its muzzle in her hands and pushed the dog away towards the hut. Her eyes were good. She saw me watching her as she added earth to earth, and cleaned herself with the water and some leaves. “Watch that pot,” she called, and pulled a screen of grass to block my view.

The dumplings were still boulders at the bottom of the sea. I turned my head away from the woman in the grass and looked about her home. Her child was sleeping on its mat. I could hear the snort and whistle of its blocked nostrils, the insect in its chest. The woman’s woven house had once been strong, but water, winter, sun, wind and frost had soaked and dried and split and snapped the reeds. Its coating of caked mud had cracked and fallen. Its roof required new timber. Its floor, fresh mats. The bracken fronds that she had used in bunches on the ground to keep out draughts and rats wheezed and fidgeted with bugs and roaches. Now I saw the sense in lighting fires so close. What smoke remained blew low into the hut, into my eyes, into the baby’s chest, into the bracken and kept the flies away.