The Gift of Stones (7 page)

And then? my father’s audience enquired. What then? Of course he would not say. The power of a tale is in the gaps and pauses. I hear his voice. I know his tricks. And there is a phrase that comes to mind which father often used. ‘We’ll never know,’ he’d say. ‘We can but guess. A young man and a woman in the grass. What could they do but hunt out insects in the soil, or teach each other songs, or sleep? I couldn’t say. I didn’t creep up close enough to see. And anyway they pulled a screen of grass to block my view.’

His audience applauded. He had delighted them. Their minds – so used to earthbound things – had flown, danced, like larks, like gnats, with father’s tale. They knew full well – if there were ships and women sailors armed with odours of that kind – what would have happened in the grass. They knew, imagined, what they’d have done … if only life was like a story, simpler, freer, less ordained.

My father paused for larks and gnats to settle, and then he held a finger up and halved his voice to double their attention. ‘Be warned,’ he said, ‘if ever that ship puts to shore near us.’ His story had not ended with the transactions in the grass. There was more to tell. The old men of his story were unconscious on the beach like washed-up seals – the young and fit were stunned and sated in the grass. What then? The snare. The sailor-women – chuckling at their power over men – gathered up the charcoal, cloth and pots that were on offer there and stowed them in their boat. They took to sea. What had their cargo cost them? What had the merchants and their sons to show for their endeavours? Who had been gulled by whom? My father did not need to say. He had his hearers spellbound with the questions.

Here was a story custom-made for men. But father took a chance and told it to the women, too. They loved it even more. They laughed and held their sides at father’s picture of the slack, defenceless menfolk on the beach and the scheming women out at sea. He had them nodding at his final words that ‘There is a place, between the navel and the knees, where the wisest men are fools’.

For children, gathered in a ring for father to amuse, his ship contained less physical distractions. The women came ashore from a craft whose sail and hogging line were stiff and white with ice. They saw my father hiding in the rocks. They beckoned him. He went. He had no choice. They were honey; he was bee. There is no need to fear, they said. We’ve lost our way. He asked: Where is your destination? The sun, they said. We’re sailing to the sun. He said: You’ll fry. But they displayed no fear of heat. It’s cold we fear, they said, and snow and frost and ice. Already we are cold. Our fingertips are dead. Our toes. Our ears. If we can reach the sun then we’ll be free of fear. Show us where to sail to reach the sun, and we will heap on you rewards that have no name, that are magic, that are as old as time.

And if I cannot? father asked. What then? Then we will turn you into ice, they said. To demonstrate their panic and their power, one of the women sailors lightly touched a tress of oarweed which hung from rock into a pool. One touch and it was ice. A frozen shore-crab toppled free and skated, slid, ten limbs brittle, on the crisp and glinting surface of the rock-hard pool. An anemone which had been red and sinuous became a snout of ice. Its thousand snakes shivered one last time.

‘What could I, should I do?’ my father asked his audience, enacting every shiver. ‘I was too cold with fear at what I’d seen and heard to help them on their journey. Does anybody know? What is the best way to the sun?’ The children did not know. Up, up, they said. The sky. But father shook his head, for ships don’t fly. The routeway must be sea. The children shook their heads as well.

‘Come on,’ my father said. ‘Speak up! The sailors are impatient. They have to reach the sun. Their fingers are stretched and ready for the task of touching me and turning me to ice. Come on. Come on. I’m going to catch a chill!’

He beckoned with his arm and made the children gather close. He whispered the solution. ‘The sun was going down upon the sea,’ he said. ‘My time was running out.’ And then … of course! The sun … Was going down … Upon the sea … And soon the two would meet! The answer was so simple. He told the sailors to be patient. Stand upon the beach, he said. Each night the sun must sleep. It rests inside the sea. The fishes are its dreams, the tide its breaths. You’ll see it fade. And drop. And settle on the water. Sink. You then set sail until you reach the point where you saw the sun go down. You’ll find a gaping hole with steaming water all around. Put down your anchor. Wait. And, when the sun goes down that second night, your journey’s at an end. Your boat is anchored at the spot where once there was a steaming hole. The sun comes down upon your deck. I promise that you’ll never freeze again.

The women watched the sun go down, they watched it bathe and wallow in the sea and throw a cloth across the sky. They thanked my father for his help. We give to you the gift of turning life to ice, they said. And this we give you, too. They tipped a little perfume from a jar into a scallop shell. He smelled it – but the skin upon his nose touched the arc of liquid. It froze. Dissolve it in your mouth, they said, and make a wish. My father sucked. My father wished. He wished he had a healthy arm, four fingers and a thumb. It will come true, the women said.

The children in the ring looked at my father’s elbow stump. They saw no magic there. My father looked at it and them, intently, as if he expected the frowning tucks and scars to burst apart and a new arm to emerge. When nothing happened, my father shrugged. ‘I got it wrong,’ he said. ‘Look here.’ He held his good hand out. ‘You see? I already have one healthy arm, four fingers and a thumb. I should have asked for two!’ The children laughed, but they’d been fooled. They wanted proof that father’s tale was true. ‘I have the proof,’ my father said. ‘I have the gift of ice. Which boy, which girl, will step out here and touch me on the hand? Come on. Be brave. If anyone is turned to ice, we’ll melt them on the fire.’ He made as if to pick a child from amongst the crowd. They backed away. They screamed and giggled. They hid. There wasn’t one who’d take the chance of proving father’s lies were lies.

We do not need to hear my father’s other variations, the bespoke stories that he told to tease and stimulate his aunt, his neighbours, his enemies, the old. He was never lost for words. He had a name for everything – or invented one. He’d out-hoot an owl, they said.

And so it was that father became – not liked exactly, or respected – but useful in the village, and admired by some. He could be seen – the irony is rich – inside the sanctum of Leaf’s yard reworking folktales for the family as the master sat at anvils and his daughter pumped the fire. You’d meet him, too, at any great occasion, celebrating with a tale the naming of a child or marking death and burial with some fitting yarn. And there were hardly any feasts or meetings of the village which did not feature father fantasizing at the higher table in the hall. Imagine, too, the usefulness of such a skill on market days. His uncle was not slow to make the most of that.

The paradox is this – we do love lies. The truth is dull and half asleep. But lies are nimble, spirited, alive. And lying is a craft.

‘Let us be cruel and listen to that craftsman, Leaf,’ my father said if he was ever pressed to justify his elevated standing with some villagers or the applause which marked his wilder tales.

‘Imagine you have spent all day crouched over stone. Your eyes are tired, your back is stiff. You need to take a stroll and the way that you have taken leads you to Leaf’s workshop. You lean upon his perfect wall. How was your day? you ask. You do not care – you simply want to be amused, to hear another voice that isn’t stone on stone.’

But Leaf – and this was father’s point – could only answer in one way. He would knock the splinters of chipped flint from his chin and lips, rearrange the camouflage of long, stretched hairs across his head and simply tell the truth. It would be flat, his tale. It would take his audience through the day, his daughter at the bellows, the master at the stone. If his listeners did not hold their hands aloft and say, Enough, he’d detail every shallow flake that fell upon his anvil, he’d have them witness all the tedium of work, each word of his would be a hammer blow.

‘Imagine, now,’ my father said. ‘A liar intervenes. He picks upon the leaf that always rests upon Leaf’s bench. Leaf is too shy, he says, too modest. Today the master’s dream came true. He found a flint which had the colours of this leaf. It was an oak in stone. He shaped it with the bays and headlands of this leaf. You see the stem and veins? You see the curling stalk? Leaf made them all in stone. He made the flint so light and thin that it began to rustle like a winter leaf disturbed by wind.

‘Should you believe what this deceiver says?’ my father asked. ‘You are not fools – but you have had a trying day and he has made you laugh. Only Leaf is not amused. And that makes you laugh some more. You play the game. You challenge both these masters – the storyteller and the stoney – to produce the flint-leaf for inspection. Leaf himself is silent. What can he say? He’s stuck. These lies have made a fool of him. But the liar is not trapped. He never is. He does not care. He says: Leaf ’s leaf was on the table, cooling, lifting at its edges from the breath of those who came to see it. It would make Leaf the richest, greatest knapper in the land. And then what happened? Yes, you’ve guessed. A bird came in and took it for its nest. It was so light, this flint, the bird bit through it with its beak. The pieces floated to the floor like oak ash drifting from a fire.’

Imagine if the liar then invited everyone to look down on the floor, to get down upon their hands and knees, to find the pieces of the leaf-in-flint. Everybody would snigger at his thinness of deception. A leaf-in-flint, indeed! But could anybody swear, my father asked, that their eyes would not momentarily dip, their eyelids flicker, their knees give way, at the prospect of a shattered oak leaf on the floor? Salute the liars – they can make the real world disappear and a fresh world take its place.

‘The secret of the storyteller,’ father said, ‘is Never Smile. A straight mouth and a pair of honest eyes is all it takes to turn a stone to leaf.’ You’ve never seen a face like his when he was telling tales. It was as candid as the moon.

T
HERE WAS
one certainty in what my father told to me. The woman in the hut, her child, the dog – none of these were false. They were not characters from stories. Their tale was far too bleak. ‘If what I wanted was a woman, I’d not invent one quite like her,’ he said. He mentioned her to no one there. He put her out of mind. But he could not shake her loose from his imagination. She haunted every story that he told. And every time he looked outwards from the village – towards the sea, towards the heath – it was her grey eyes that he saw, her body in the grass, a horseman’s hands upon her waist.

Nothing stopped him now. It was expected, if he chose, that he would disappear again into the outside world. That’s where, it seemed, he got his stories from. The villagers imagined him, a hunter, tracking down his tales. He’d soon be back. Some villagers – those elders who mistrusted too much levity, those victims of my father’s tongue like Leaf – were quite relieved to see him go. He was disruptive. He had skills that could not be bartered in the marketplace. He had no time for stone. Some children were a little frightened of him, too. They did not like the scars and fissures of his arm. They did not trust his tales which, like sling stones, were sharp on every side.

And so, when spring came round, my father crept into his uncle’s yard one night and helped himself to gifts that might please the woman and her child. A wooden top that had been his youngest cousin’s. A goatskin mat. Some nuts, some grain, a good flint knife. Some scallop candles. A pot. He wrapped them in the skin and tied them to his back. It was a night that only comes in spring. The air was warmer than the earth and, as he trod the usual route along the bracken path between the village and the sea, his feet sent up a puff of frost which turned to mist on contact with the air. In that no-light of moon and stars, it looked as if his feet were shining like a pair of tumbling glowworms in the damp.

The sea was out. It was the spring low tide, and shore that normally was undersea was breathing air for once and basking in the moon. This was my father’s path. He took advantage of the tide. At night it seemed much simpler than the clifftop route, the path of wolves and goats along which he’d blundered in the summer past. He walked barefoot and cursed the pebbles and the weed which made the going both slippery and hard. The sand was worse – it opened up beneath his feet like drifting snow. One arm was not enough for keeping balance. He fell down and the sandprints that he made with hand and feet and knees winked and bubbled as they filled with sea. He’d left the glow-worms on the bracken path. Now his tracks were listless silver spheres which shrank and flattened as the wet sand at their edges collapsed to fill the holes.

Quite soon he found a tidal ridge of shingle which was dry and firm. Now he could walk quickly despite the limpets and the cockleshells, the broken bones of cuttle, the crab claws and the vacant whelks which formed the ridge. From time to time he felt a movement underfoot – unnerving in that darkness – as foraging sandhoppers, sea slaters, crabs, who knows what else?, nipped and quivered at his soles. At first he was not cold. His exertions and the bag across his back preserved the warmth of his uncle’s house at night. But the sweat across his forehead and his shoulders was soon turned gelid by the wind which the sleeping land sucked and summoned from the bleaker sea. Soon he was as cold and damp as frogs. A little frightened, too. The sea, that night, curled and lisped and whispered in a voice which said, Dismay, Dismay, Dismay. No wonder that the wind took flight, took fright, and sought the refuge of the shore. The land was mute – no birds, no human cries, no sheep, no sign of welcome or of safety to my father walking on the beach.

If we’d been him we would have turned around and gone back home. Too cold for expeditions. Too wet. Too dark. Too treacherous and full of wolves; too pitiless with wind and whispers. Too void. We’d seek the bracken path again and creep into the village, replace the nuts, the knife, the grain and candles we had stolen, and lay out with our cousins by the fire. But my father is not us. We do not share his bludgeoned vanity, his moodiness, his resolution. We do not share his ardour. He did not turn or run. He walked along the shore as if his home was close ahead and not behind. He whistled, hummed. He sang. His voice was whisked away and shredded by the wind. If we had seen him there upon the beach that night (he said), if we had watched him striding on the tidal ridge, we’d trust his word that, more than fear, he felt, for once, exultant.