The Gift of Stones (12 page)

Doe, her husband and the dog came down with knives. The tide, the night – and seagulls – left them little time. Already they could hear the wolves calling out their bids for meat. The crabs were massing too. Again my father had some fun with seagulls, crabs and wolves. His audience was beached and left helpless by the warp of words, the weft of mime, in father’s storytelling net.

‘The man soon showed his boys how whales were cut,’ my father said. ‘They had sharp knives. The best. Let’s not waste good blushes in the dark by saying where that village was that mined and worked these knives.’ He pointed at his severed arm. ‘Let’s simply say that these were tools well used to cutting flesh.’ He held up his hand and formed a perfect, leaf-shaped knife as thin as air. He mimed the body of the whale. He was its weight, or so it seemed. He showed exactly what it took to cut into the silver-birch bark of the belly, how meat was carved away in cubes, how skin was stripped, how candle fat was melted into scallop shells with reeds as wick. He showed how hard it was for two adults and two boys to snap the rib bones from the whale. They stood upon each rib as if it were a bouncy bough. They jumped in unison until the rib detached, and then they tumbled with it onto the shore, the dog and seagulls squabbling for the jelly and the blood.

Quite soon they had enough long bones and meat and fat and skin. In the morning they would go to the market green. They’d do good trade. Each rib was worth a horse, or a cow or a pair of goats. Four ribs could make a hut. One rib would keep a carver prosperous and busy for a year. One tiny piece of rib would make a needle of such sharpness that it would never dull. Thank fortune for the sea, the tide, the wind. It had brought the whale ashore. The whale would make them safe and rich.

It was no wonder, father said, that they were reckless on that night. ‘The boys were fast asleep. You know the world. The woman and her man embraced. They didn’t take much care.’ He let that last phrase tease a little in the night. And then, ‘The careless lovers are the ones with memories in flesh, a baby on the hip, one on the breast, one waiting to be served, one on its knees, another with its finger in the food, two others fighting on the ground, three dead and buried, and a dozen more to come. The careful lovers are the ones who … let’s not say what. There are a thousand ways. But here’s a tip from me. You know the oarweed on the shore? It’s just the thing and just the size. It’s smooth and wet and opens like a pouch. You put it on. I’ll not mime that. But, men, watch out for crabs. And women, eels.’

The guffaws that my father earned with such fantasies as this were as hollow as a wormed-out nut. No one knew for sure if father was sincere. His oarweed tip had all the style of truth but all the signs of foolery as well. Who would be the first one there to try it out? Which father, lover, beset by babies and by lust, would pioneer the oarweed harvest on the shore? What price would every neighbour pay to be a moth upon the wall when that first man, bedecked in weed and naked, talked sweetly to his smiling wife?

My father clapped his hands to bring them back. It was too dark to see him wink. ‘Remember who this story’s for,’ he said. ‘We have two lovers rich with whale. They could afford another child to add to their two boys. That night – as scavengers wrestled on the beach for food – they wrestled on their mat. He did not let her simmer there while he ran down to rummage amongst the wolves and crabs and gulls for oarweed on the shore. Life’s far too short for that. They were in love. That night his seed broke from its husk. It put out shoots. It put out roots. A girl was made. That girl who’s sleeping with her mother there. You see, I tell no lies. She’s there, she’s there, if you could only see her through the dark. She’s flesh and blood and bone. Shhh, let her sleep. This story is too sad for her.’

At dawn, my father said, they loaded up a sled with whale and tied on the ribs. The man, the boys, the dog set off towards the village where the stoneys lived and where the richest market was. The journey would take all day. One day for trade. Another day to get back home. Three days in all. The woman was content. In three days’ time they would have livestock of their own. Fresh goat’s milk, that was the summit of her ambition. She’d be fulfilled. Except that her husband and her boys – my true father and my brothers – did not come home. The dog came back, unscathed. But no one else.

Who knows what happened in those days? my newfound, storytelling father asked his cousins. No one will ever know. Perhaps they perished amongst the knappers here. Perhaps Doe’s husband thought like this: I have my sons and all this wealth in bones upon my sled. I’ll find myself a younger wife and a home less windy than the heath.

Perhaps they met with wolves, attracted and made cruel by the smell of dog and whale. The dog ran off. The man and boys were too entwined with the riches on the sled. They did not run. They died.

Perhaps they were abducted by the trees at night. They strayed into the breathing forest. The roots sprang from the soil and held the boys. A branch curled round their father and held him tight, so that he could not scream or use his fists and feet. The dog barked at the trees and showed its teeth, and then turned tail and fled the forest. In time the bodies of the man and boys turned to wood. Their skin was bark. Their eyes were knots. Their arms were boughs. Their blood was sap. Any travellers who passed by there would get to know the trees whose knobs and trunks were men, whose roots were swollen in the shape of boys. Those trees were signposts through the wood.

Or, perhaps, the truth was this. A pair of horsemen were camped along the way. They’d trapped two rabbits with a snare. They’d eaten rabbit for three days. They were eager for a change. Such was their luck that here was whale meat on a sled. They’d only eaten whale meat once before. They set their horses square across the path. They said, Let’s swap. You take the rabbits. We’ll have whale.

Doe’s man was careful not to give offence. He offered them a generous cut of meat. But now the horsemen did not care for meat. They counted up the ribs which bounced and rattled on the sled. They knew their worth. Perhaps they bantered for a while, toying with the man’s politeness and his fear. Perhaps they simply took their clubs and sticks and bartered with some bruises to his head. One thing’s for sure, in transactions such as that, it is the horsemen who grow rich and not the man and boys on foot. They would have dragged the bodies into undergrowth. Perhaps they aimed some idle kicks at the dog and then left it there to lick its masters’ icy cheeks. That night they’d boast of their good luck and dine on whale. Perhaps.

‘What should the woman do?’ my father asked. ‘Her husband and her boys were gone. The whale was picked and cleaned and broken up by stones and tide and washed back out to sea. If you were her, what would you do to find your family again, once you’d tired yourself with tears? If you were wise, you’d take the dog and point its nose and follow where it led. She did just that. It led her here. Of course. Where else? This was her husband’s destination. Don’t laugh. I’ve told you once before, this is a story made by life. This, to a hair, is fact. That dog came here. It brought her to the market green. Such wealth, such homes, she thought. But the people here, they had no time for her. She had no merchandise, just tears and questions and a dog. What happened to my family here? she asked. Does anybody recognize this dog? Did anybody deal in whale and bones a little while ago? Who’ll help me now? You sent her home without replies. And now she’s back again, with me. Does no one recognize her face?’

Consider now the consternation that my father’s story caused. He’d brought its characters to life and placed them in his uncle’s house, sleeping, close enough for the villagers to hear their snores, and for their snores to sound like accusations and complaints.

Quite soon they found it far too dark and cold to listen to my father any more. They peeled away before the tale was done, unmoved by father’s portrait of the widow and her child on the heath, her struggles not to die, her hardships, grief and hunger, the slaughter of the geese, the crushing of her hut. Quite soon there were no cousins left to hear my father’s tale. His audience – excluding bats and moths – had crept away, unamused and angered by the venom in his voice.

My father stood alone and startled – for now he understood the power of the truth.

N
OW I CAN
remember for myself. I do not need my father’s floating eyebrow or his single, restless hand or the baiting and dramatic contours of his voice to shape and ornament my life. I do not need his hawks for commentary. I have my own.

My witness-hawk took wing when I was two or three. Each dawn it rose above the village, my feathered memory, to hover and to scrutinize what passed for life below. I see myself, a little plainer and a little plumper than my mother ever was. I see her, too. My mother was not happy there. She had good cause. In father’s boyhood there had been two breeds existing side by side, the stoneys and the mongers, the craftsman dynasties who worked the flint and the traders whom the stone made rich. My father now had introduced a third and wretched breed, the pair of homeless vagrants from the heath. What could we do?

At first we simply shivered to the welcome that the villagers gave us. Their indifference was prying. There were no greetings, but they raised their eyes as we walked by and paused above their stones. They clearly disapproved. Of what? Our meagre clothes, our weathered skin, our helplessness, our voices which – more used to shouting in the wind than trading whispers by the hearth – were loud? Here were people with the eye to penetrate a stone, to look beyond the crust of smoky, mottled chalk and spy the tool within. Yet that eye was blind if required to pierce a stranger’s skin, to judge a woman by her face, to spot the empty stomachs and the empty hearts which could be filled and warmed as much by smiles as food.

My father said that they were shy, suspicious, that they were only used to dealing with new faces over trade. ‘It will take time,’ he said.

‘It will take time for them to change? Or us?’ my mother asked. She was dismayed at everything she saw, and father took the blame. She had no wish to be like them, tied and bound by the regulation of the working day. What kind of life was that? To live like tethered goats in one small sphere of grass; to do and say exactly as the neighbours; to not touch this or that, to not go here or there; to intervene all day between your heart and tongue; to turn out, at dawn, and climb the flint-pit hill in listless, yawning lines because some merchant had the force to say, More stone.

Still, we had to stay.

‘There is no choice,’ my father said. ‘We’ll have to make here home.’ But making homes was not his skill. The one-armed man who seemed to manage on the heath was here – a cousin’s phrase – just like a cuckoo, good at Talk, not Do. For all his plots and promises he could not build four walls of stone, a roof, a house. He could not lift with his one hand. My mother could. Despite her paleness and the shallow flesh that hid her bones, she was tough. And tougher here, with people all around, than she had been upon the heath, disarmed and addled by her widowhood.

My father’s plot was this – that Doe and I were now his family; that we would settle into love, with Doe his sister, mistress, friend entwined with him; that, given time, his uncle and his cousins would provide. He thought his tongue would build a home for us.

My mother’s toughness was an axe that had two blades. Its second edge was petulance. She could not wait for father to conjure up stone walls. Her back was cold. She had a child to feed. She had no time for father’s fondness, his clumsiness, his tales. She found his presence irksome. She pushed him far away because she was too overwhelmed by cares for gentleness. All she yearned for was a home that could not be broken down with sticks.

And so, while father went hunting with his toes for shellfish in the sand and wondered whether the water in his eyes was spray or tears, Doe cleared a site of bracken in between the last house of the village and the hill. This was the spot where the many clifftop paths converged into one steep track and passed between the two rock sentries to climb the bluff of chalk and reach the warren of mine shafts beyond and the drifts of unworked flint. She was no fool. It was a simple task to find flat building stones amongst the spoils and then to slide them downhill from the summit of the track until they settled on her bruised and flattened bracken.

The hill was on her side. The villagers were not. She could not hope to help herself to stone without some stoney raising the alarm. A delegation came of busy-bodies and of idlers. They pushed Leaf to the front and whispered what they’d want to say if they were him. Leaf was not pleased to be summoned from his work to deal with such affairs. The wind was lifting all his hairs and making knots. My mother met him with a look that said, You’re less than geese. You don’t scare me.

‘These stones are ours,’ he said. ‘Who said that you could take these stones?’

‘These stones are mine,’ she said. ‘I found them on the hill. I brought them here. They’re mine. How are they yours?’

‘You’re not from here. That hill is ours, not yours.’

‘And the air round here is yours as well,’ she said. ‘I breathe; I steal your air. And the wind that’s making such a skimpy harvest on your head? Is that your wind? How can it be that it blows my hair, too?’

Leaf was not equipped for Doe. He shrugged and cursed the wind.

‘We’ll let these stones be gifts from us,’ he said. ‘But do not fool yourself. That hill is ours. If you take stone, what then? Then anyone can come and help themselves and build a wall. But still, you are a woman with a child. We’ll close our eyes on you and what you do.’ He turned and led his delegation back to work. My mother built her walls.

O
UR HOUSE
was like no other. My mother found that stones, however flat and heavy, were not keen to lie still at her bidding. Her stones were like the shyest snails which never showed their heads, but moved when no one watched. Her stones had life. They crept. They nestled. They muttered in the wind and heat. And so she built four living walls which would not stand like all those other village walls made out of more quiescent stones. Her walls were wayward, unsubmissive. They toppled in the wind. They barked her ankles. They fell down on my leg and did not move despite my screams and tears.