The Gift of Stones (13 page)

She could not guess the secret of a wall. Her walls became four piles of stones, thick at the ground and tapering like sapling firs. She pushed lengths of wood between the stones to keep them still. She packed the holes with bracken and with mud. The roof was untrimmed branches weighed down with slates and moss. Our house was what a house would be if it were made for badgers or for bears.

At first, our lives were like theirs too, furtive, taciturn, aloof. If father was two men then mother was two women. The village Doe was wary of the world. If stoneys passed we sank into our cave. If father came with food, my mother would not talk. Her temper was as chronic as the wind – and just as indiscriminate.

What explanation can there be for my mother’s sudden, random sourness? It’s just that people are like trees. They have their seasons, too. They don’t transplant. For Doe, my father was to blame for all the bad luck in her life. Who else was there – apart from me – who could share the burden of her dislocation and her grief? That small voice which whispered at her cheek and said, Be rational. Return his love. Accept his food. He’s all you’ve got, was silenced by the volume and the force of her despondency. The louder voices cried, What kind of friend is he? He’d led her from the mayhem of the geese along the coastal path with promises of food and shelter and of warmth. What welcome had there been? – Why have you brought her here? What can she do? What use is she to us?

She could not forget that first and bitter night when she had listened, only half asleep, to what my father had to say to his assembled cousins and their friends in the dusk of uncle’s house. ‘This is a story made by life,’ he’d said, and then produced a tale so close to truth that she’d believed his ornamented details, too, the insult roosting in the trees, the spitting-samphire meal, the serene and fleshy portrait of her younger self, the bouncing family on the rorqual bones, the oarweed on the shore. She’d swallowed that. It was her story, feathered and adorned.

What she was forced to swallow, too, were all the versions of her husband’s death, the killing of her boys. Perhaps abducted by the trees at night? Perhaps by wolves, or horsemen? My father brought their deaths to life. He dragged their bodies into undergrowth. He turned their bodies into wood. Their arms were boughs. Their blood was sap. Their skin was bark. Their eyes were knots. And worse. He’d said: ‘Perhaps Doe’s husband thought like this – I have my sons and all this wealth in whale. I’ll find myself another wife and a home less windy than the heath.’

Consider once again the consternation that my father’s story caused, not to the twenty men, the wives and boys, the dog, the hen, the moon, the first of nighttime’s bats and moths that had gathered there. They could simply peel away before the tale was done. Instead we should consider poor and captive Doe, the homeless widow, underfed and half awake, her lungs so tight with fear that she was snoring open-eyed. Death she understood. It came. It went. It left a corpse. Corpses could not trade in whale. Or set up house away from wind and heath. Or take new wives. But a missing husband and two sons? My father’s story – which with a string of tales, ‘perhaps … perhaps’, had killed them off five times for good, destroying every hope she’d had – had also brought them back to life. He had them fit, and well, and dwelling – wind-free – somewhere else. With someone else.

My father had released three breeds of grief to gnaw and tumble in her gut. Her boys and husband were alive in her again and hating her for leaving home before they had returned. Or else she saw them living on the heath, the boys no older than the day they’d left – but the woman they called mother was not called Doe. Or else she saw their bodies there, amongst the geese. The trailing blossoms of the carcass shrubs were torn and buffeted by wolves and crabs and crows. The maggots rolled and tumbled like the surf. Toadstools dined on flesh. She dreamed herself back on the heath, making graves. My father was there, too. He could not help. One arm was not enough. Instead he stood a short way off, a little stunned by mother’s pot and drenched in hard-earned drink. The dog and child awoke, alarmed. The heath was stirring to the cries of, ‘Get out. Go home. You don’t touch me!’ And then she saw the strangers’ braid of fire and heard the slap of harnesses and reins and the pestle-pounding of her dog, her hut. She built a cairn of stones above her husband’s grave. The stoney with the balding head arrived. He said, ‘Those stones are ours, not yours.’

No wonder mother could not talk to father or thank him for his gifts or show the casual openness which had ensnared him on the heath. She was a different woman now. He was a different man. The sea wind on the coastal path had turned them upside down. The truth of what she felt for him had tumbled like a ball of gorse. The one-armed lad, the brother, friend and son, who’d cheered her up so much had gone. What could she say when father stood before her house of stones, his one hand bearing comforts, clothing, food, and asked her why she looked, at once, so hard and meek and cold? What had become of the woman that he pictured on the heath?

My father’s picture – naturally – was more a flight of romance. It was blind. Its centrepiece was me and Doe. She pushed her hand across his forehead and his skull. She stroked his tussock hair. In tones that matched the pallor on my father’s face, she said, ‘It’s you. It’s you. It’s you.’

Here were two people, then, unsteady and misshapen. Their world, that summer, was as restless and as tousled as an unshorn goat. My father was the wisest of the two. For once he held his tongue. He did not bully mother to conform. He came with food and seashore gifts and left without a word to her. He carried me down to the shore and let me search and paddle in the pools. Together we collected empty shells. We wrestled and played chase. Where father failed with mother, he was bound to win with me. I had no picture of the heath and nothing to forget.

If father was the wisest one, then mother, once again, was the most determined. Quite soon she found that life for badgers and for bears was not for her. Perhaps the villagers would find a niche for her inside their world of stone.

Instead of hiding behind her tumbled walls when stoneys passed, she took to standing in their way and greeting them with cries and smiles. Her thin and bony frame was no threat to them. The village men – no paragons of strength compared to farmers, say, or horsemen – could have pushed her to one side as if she were a twig, if that is what they wished. But what they wished was something else. My mother – standing in their way, thin-set and unabashed – was a challenge of a different and uncertain kind. She was not like the mothers and the wives with whom they lived. She was not tame. Her house, her pile of stones and branches, was not a house. It was a den, an earth, a lair.

So it turned out that there were men who took the pathway in between the village and the hill more frequently than they had done before. They found good cause to walk up to the double-sentry rocks in search of flints, let’s say, that normally their youngest sons could find. And if they saw that Doe was not in sight, they found excuse to whistle or to sing or drop their rocks and curse or clear their chalky chests so that the noise would summon her and she would block their path.

Some stayed aloof. They’d only passed that way to pry. Some traded greetings and walked on. But there were two or three among the stoney men – the sort who were the first to make a crowd, the last to bed at night – who were less proud.

There is a phrase, Whenever man and woman meet, then Mischief is the third. In this case Mischief was bashful and discreet. It hung around but it hung back. It bode its time. Those unproud men, most used to angular and patterned lives, could hardly speak their minds. What could they say? That somewhere in between the pity and disdain that they felt for mother and for me was pinched and pressed a busy hankering for mischief in the grass. For all they knew such naked words would bring the hill down on their heads. Besides, they dare not chance what mother might reply. She was the sort, it seemed, who might delight in spreading indiscretions. That was her danger and her charm.

There are old men who can remember Doe. I’ve heard them talk. No man would claim that she was beautiful or young or that her face was anything but dispirited and thin. Her only allure, it seemed, was her independence and defencelessness. And yet – that other phrase that seemed to rule our lives – She was Honey, They were Bees. Once they had sampled her sweet and angry greetings and her smile, so more unguarded in their manner than those that village women gave, they could no more keep away than they could openly solicit her for greater trade than smiles.

My mother was uncertain, too. Stoneys were not horsey men. Their faces were a fog. She feared their rigid, hidden lives, their mouths. She feared their coolness and their caution. The dog that does not wag its tail or bark, she told herself, is the dog to watch. It bites. So she was slow in saying what she wanted from those two, three men who’d stop and talk with her. If only she could say, Please, help me build a house that doesn’t shift and groan like shingle on the beach. Or, What is there to do? What work is there for me? Then, perhaps, that niche inside the village would appear. It was a village, after all, where trade was king, where labour was respected. All my mother had to trade was labour and herself. She was just like them. She’d rather be like them than like a badger or a bear.

There was one man – my father’s eldest cousin – who seemed to pass our house of stone more frequently than even those few men who talked. He was not one who simply stared and passed on by. He was prepared, if not to smile, at least to nod at Doe. Each day he came with an empty sled made out of bone and wood and reed. His task was to collect the flint for his family to work and trade. Of all the cousins he was the dullest and the most obliging. ‘Just like a sheep,’ my father said. He was the cousin that my father liked the best. He was the servile, cheerful sort, too soft and brotherly to wonder why the daily job of fetching stone was always his.

She followed him. Sometimes alone and sometimes with me sitting on her hip, she watched the cousin selecting stones and loading up the sled. She saw he favoured flints with ridges and with tendons. She watched him jettison those stones that seemed all chalk, too pale and light in colour and in weight. She noted how he piled the stones onto the sled so that their spurs and pinnacles, their bays and basins interlocked. At last she understood the secret of a wall. And more. She recognized there was no future for her there unless she became a stoney too. In such a place you earned respect through flint. It was the bedrock of their world. Without their stones the villagers would be – like her upon the heath – as helpless as a beetle on its back.

This was my mother’s choice, to be the helpless beetle on its back or else the working beast obliged to gather flint because – remember her initial fears? – some merchant had the force to say, More Stone. She chose More Stone. She simply said to father’s cousin when she next found him sledding flint, ‘Let me do that! Why don’t you let me fetch the flint for you?’ We can imagine how he laughed – or blushed, or walked on by. How could a woman with fir-shaped walls know anything of stone? How could a weatherbeaten chit like her move heavy loads?

She might have had to pester him for days on end with ‘Let me try’ or ‘I’m as strong as any man – just give me half a chance’ or ‘Have a heart. I’ve got a child to feed’ before he paid her any heed. And then what could this shy, obliging cousin do except allow this woman and her child to help him load the sled at least? And then to let her walk with him – taking turns at pulling on the ropes – down into the village, its empty causeways, its eyes and minds engrossed, its workshops beating with the pulse of bone on wood on stone. We have to guess that no one saw them passing by. The cousin would have shrank away in shame if anyone had called out or teased him, later, about the woman at his side.

He must have made her wait outside the house in case his family spotted her. The only way to make her go was payment of some kind, some recompense for those few flints that she had added to his pile. He could not comprehend exactly what the barter was and who owed what to whom, or why. He only understood the obligations of labour and of trade, that picking stones and pulling sled for half a noon was worth – a guess – a basketful of apples? Some grain? Some nuts? An egg or two? He felt as if he had been fooled by her. The kindness had been his. He had not wanted her to help or welcomed extra hands upon the rope. She’d merely slowed him down. Yet now it seemed he was obliged to pay for her intrusion.

There were twists of bacon drying in the smoke above the fire. He pulled one loose. It would not be missed. He went outside and, avoiding Doe’s grey eyes, gave the twist to me and scuttled back to the simplicities of flint. By dealing with a child, he thought, he had sidestepped yet satisfied the rituals of exchange.

We should not laugh at his bad luck. Yet there was something lumbering and comic about the look that crossed his face when he approached the hill next day. Doe was waiting for him there, between the double guards. She called him cousin. She pointed to the pile of perfect flints that she had already chosen for his sled. Let’s not call on the image of the honey and the bee. This cousin had no sting. He was a simple blow-fly caught – and flapping – in the finest web.

He thought his fortunes had improved when she seemed happy to allow him to load and take away her stone without her help. He said, ‘Stay here, and when I come again I’ll bring another twist of bacon for the girl.’

‘Bring something else,’ my mother said. ‘We’ve meat enough for now. Bring bread. Or milk.’ He was happy to oblige. It was a bargain if compared to the embarrassments of yesterday. He was content to share these odd and teasing intimacies with her so long as she and he were out of sight. Besides, the flints she’d piled were good enough. Why should he complain?

Next day he came with eggs and bread. She waited for him with a pile of stone. This blow-fly was enmeshed again. She had him trapped. A tougher cousin would have sent her packing that first day, without a second thought. There’d be no bacon twist. This cousin was too kind. He paid the price. Next day he brought my mother milk. She paid for it with flint.