The Gift of Stones (4 page)

The properties of the goods for barter were now declared. Here was perfume of the strongest kind. Here were vials of decorated bone unparalleled for beauty. Here were arrowheads, spear-stones, tools which, when compared to those made elsewhere (and here a clumsy arrowhead was indicated and tuts exchanged), were sharp, light, fast, strong and shapely. The traders recommended an exchange – five decorated perfume bones for twenty arrowheads, three spear-stones and a tongue-shaped axe with a good thick butt. After some time and some concessions, the bargain was agreed. They clapped hands to bring it to an end. The horsemen put their flints in the skin bag and handed over the hollowed deer bones. Once more they clapped hands – and that would have been the end of that exchange had not one man, barely twice my father’s age, leant forward to retrieve the ugly stone which he had last seen that morning as it dipped and laboured from his bow.

Now that the barter was at an end, the restraints and etiquettes of trade could be set aside. One of the knappers, his head still spinning from the scent, surprised himself and his companions with a sudden, half-considered act. He kicked the arrowhead away – and its owner toppled foolishly upon the mat. Here the horsemen were at a comic disadvantage. They were dismounted. One of their number was face down. They had transgressed, they were reminded, not only in the unseemly efforts to regain the arrowhead, but also in the damage done that morning. (Now everyone was startled at the plainness of the words.) There was a boy, not far away, they said, in pain and dying. It was the horsemen’s fault. They ought to make their bowman provide some recompense. You think we’re fooling now, they said. Come on, we’ll show you what a careless bow can do. The traders and the knappers there, with the horsemen at their centre, amused and hardly fearful, now set off for the place where my father lay. There they joined their unsettled, work-shy neighbours who had formed the first crowd of that day and demanded entrance to the room. The boy was conscious, standing, his injured arm bloodied, swollen and inert. The bowman smiled.

H
ERE THEN WAS
the strangest recompense. It was a simple matter for the riders from beyond the hill, much used to drinking, perfume, quarrels, horsetheft, wars, to first give father too much drink from their leather travel-mates of spirit and then to strike him neatly on the chin. The softest blow, not a feather’s breadth too shallow, not a feather’s breadth too deep, flicked my father’s head back on his spine. He spiralled, fell. ‘It was my first encounter,’ father said, ‘with our good friend Hard Drink.’

They took his arm off, too. They were used to amputations. Their family dead were dismembered and buried in a pot. It was less trouble than digging graves or building chambers under earth. It was not only dead limbs, either, that they were used to cutting. One horseman lifted up a hand with two fingers and a thumb half gone as evidence that they could take a knife to living people, too. They were often fighting, casually with strangers, and there were many wounds. The body held no mystery for them. Leaf was happy to pass on the task and watch the experts with his knife. First they tied a leather strap above my father’s elbow. Clear earthen pus burst from the swollen upper arm. Briefly some colour returned to his limb and then beyond the elbow joint it turned the inner blue of mussel shells. A second leather strap was tied higher on the arm and a slat of wood was rested on my father’s chest as a working surface. They put his arm upon it and strapped it to the wood with ropes. They threw spirit on his arm. His skin was cut and opened with those few sharp scraps that Leaf had gathered from the flake nest on his anvil. An uneven thin red line was cut. My father flinched and moved his arm in sleep.

Those who expected a scarlet eruption, a cascade, were disappointed. The straps held father’s blood at bay. The horseman with the knife was now impatient. With the strong and even strokes of a deer-hunter stripping and salting meat, he cut into the flesh with Leaf’s new flint. The bunched stem of arteries and nerves was the most resistant, but the three boyish muscles which enfolded it gave way before Leaf’s perfect edge like wet peat. The audience had never seen such colours. With so sharp a knife it was a speedy task to separate the knuckles of the higher bone from the two long bones below the elbow. With a belch of clear and bitter fluid the unhinged lower arm came free. Its bluish tones had paled. It was no colour. It matched my father’s face. Bury it, the cutter said. My father’s arm was gone. Leaf put out his hand to retrieve the knife. I’ll keep it, said the cutter. That leaves us even on the day.

There is no need, I think, to embroider this much more. It was dark by now. The horsemen – boastful and jostling with the villagers – had to ride away. They had their flints. They’d paid their recompense. All in all they’d had a lively day. My father was unconscious on the bed, drunk and bruised and dreaming. The bleeding was quickly stemmed with wood smoke. Maggots of the screw-worm fly would be brought and placed upon his wound to accelerate the healing. The skin would stretch and pucker, frown upon the world. And it would drip its poison and its undiminished pus forever like tree sap, like semen, like a punctured boil.

My father’s story, then, of how he lost his arm presents a village briefly gone awry. We must retain the image of a normal day, the workshops busy with the rhythm of bone and wood and stone, the causeways quiet and empty except for children delivering new flints, the marketplace a murmur of transaction as wheat and skin and pots changed sides with axes, spears and knives. The anthill was at work, measured, skilful, dull, secure. To this we add the day’s disruptions – a heavy arrow, the wind and manes of horses, the trepidations of a dying boy, the perfume and the decorated bones, the taste of spirit on my father’s dreaming lips. How were people on that night? Were there better tales to tell across the hearth as hot, flat stones were made ready for the meat? Were children silent, tense? Was there more passion in the hearts and beds of those who’d watched the horsemen mount and ride off to the night? My father had it so. He drew for us a portrait of our home and village sent skittish by these uninvited guests, their gifts. Children were conceived that night. Subversive thoughts were aired at the expense of traders, flint, the drudgery of work, the slavery of skill. Maybe, even, blows were struck and quarrels made and mended with a hug. The man who’d kicked away the bowman’s arrowhead made the most of that, telling and retelling what he’d done, perfecting every detail. His midnight version was the best: Who said that bowman toppled to the ground? he asked. I plucked him up myself and tossed him there.

And then, of course, the embers died. The village slept. It woke as usual with the dawn and slowly, painstakingly, more flints were formed; the hammers, scrapers, bellows, chisels were gathered up and put to work. Here was the normal day – except, of course, for one small boy who slept on and on for fear of waking to his pain – his severed arm caked and stiffened by dry blood, his nightmares blustery and full of stone.

‘L
ISTEN HERE
(my father said)
. I’ll tell you what occurred. I’ll keep it simple, too. I won’t tell lies. So don’t expect some bristling story of revenge, the sort retold in whispers after dark about the boy who killed the lambing wolf or the wife who drowned her husband’s secret friend or the feuding sons. There is revenge to come, for sure. Malice and my elbow stump are twins. But at that moment when – seven years of age – I watched the bowman’s smile, there was no revenge in my mind. Children aren’t like that. They are more subtle. Is that the word? Or is ‘simple’ closer to it? Let’s hear it then, let’s tell the truth: the sum of my ambition at that time was not to kill the bowman for the damage he had done, but to be the bowman, to be on horseback in the wind like him, to let the heavy arrow fly at anything I wished, to struggle loose from stone.

Let me describe his face as best I can. You’d think it was a leather purse with teeth. You never saw his eyes. He had a horseman’s squint. He was only young, but he was weathered as a piece of bark. Sometimes my memory conjures up a small moustache, sometimes a scar above his lip. I can’t be sure. It was years ago and I have told this story many times and changed it just as often. But one thing never changed. The bowman’s face, his smile, his eyes, expressed in full what neighbours in our village had most distrusted in my own face. Look, you see it now, a little blunted, true … but dreams … but turbulence … but downright cussedness. He could have been my brother.

So is this my story, then? Watch out, you say, he’s chipping and he’s knapping at the truth. He’s shaping it to make a tale. Two brothers. Separated at their birth. And reunited. In a feud. I’ll spare you that. I’ll save that story for the children late one night, and we’ll get on with something less exciting.

So I was seven, almost dead, but tough and cussed, too, and on the mend. My chin was bruised. The skin was broken on my head. I’d lost a lot of blood. My lower arm, my hand – the one I used for eating, fighting, wiping arses – was snug and damp somewhere beneath a rock. Or flung from the clifftop into the wind. Gull food. Or – this is likely – disposed of on the hill beyond the village. Down some disused pit. The hill was full of holes. I’m buried there. A bit of me, at least.

Who cared for me? At first it was the uncle who’d sobbed out shallow promises to my dying mother when I was small. ‘See to the boy,’ she’d said. Uncle kept his word. He’d raised me as his own. That means I shared the slappings that he gave to his six sons and daughters and his wife. That means that I was underfed and generally ignored unless there was a job to do, some lift or fetch and carry. But when he heard that I was wounded and that my arm was briefly famous, he showed himself the model of devotion. He was among the men who volunteered to knock me out. It was his mallet on my brow.

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.