The Gift of Stones (6 page)

I asked her, had she seen a ship. She shook her head. She hadn’t seen a ship. All she’d seen that day was me, emerging through the heathgrass with a look of terror on my face. I’d looked so frightened of her dog and so burdened with the rain that she had no choice but to offer help.

“And that?” she asked. She nodded at my severed arm. “What happened to the rest?”

What happened to your husband and your sons? I thought. The same, no doubt. If I could lose an arm for a dozen scallops, then they could lose their lives for whale meat, rabbits, kale.

“My arm?” I said. “I lost it at my birth. You know what mothers are. Mine couldn’t wait and pulled me out, and snap. It came away. You don’t like that? Then, let it be an animal that tore it free. Half dog, half gull. No one knows its name. One bite.”

Why tell the truth when lies are more amusing, when lies can make the listener shake her head and laugh – and cough – and roll her eyes? People are like stones. You strike them right, they open up like shells.’

‘W
E ALL SLEPT
well enough. The dog was reassuring and the baby far too weak and underfed to do much else but suck and doze. I spent the morning on the marshes by the shore. There was no hurry to get home – by ‘home’ (so far) I mean the village, not the smoky hut. And there was samphire in abundance, a little past its best, but a favourite of the woman and a gift from me.

When I returned there was a single horseman waiting in the grass beyond the hut. The woman with her baby and the dog was talking to him. He gave her something which hung still and then began to flap. A chicken, upside down and twined up at its feet. She walked towards me and my gift of samphire. “Please help,” she said. She handed me the chicken and the child and made me hold the dog back by its neck. “It won’t take long,” she said.

I stood and watched and she rejoined the horseman. He dismounted and they walked into the longer grass. I watched her as she took her belted smock by the hem and pulled it high and off above her head. She stood there, thin and naked once again, the horseman’s hands upon her waist. With her good eyes she turned and watched me watching her. “Go inside,” she called. “Can’t you kill a chicken?” I did not move. They lay down on the earth. This time it was the horseman who pulled a screen of grass to block my view.’

‘Y
OU SEE
? I’ve pulled a screen of grass across the story, too. I’ll not creep up and tell you what I saw. I’ll spare myself – and her. Now you know, you can be sure, that this is truth – no chronicler with any sense would disappoint his listeners so. The narrative would buzz and hover like a gnat above the horseman and his whore. We’d watch his buttocks, double-dumplings, and her knees. We’d follow their duet. Instead, you’ll hear from me a solo of lament. I felt – in charge of dog and child and hen – as if she’d let me down. Betrayed.

I’ll beat it out as simply as I can. That night just past had been the calmest in my life. I’d found an audience at last. We’d dined on slott beside the romance of a fire. Her dozing baby and her breasts, the dismal meanness of her hut, the dog, the wind, and (more than that) the age of her which made her sweetheart-mother-sister interlaced, a braid, had filled my head with countless expectations. She hadn’t cared about my arm. Or knapping flints. Or stone. She’d said, Do this. Do that. Make sure that pot is safe. Here, take the child. And hold the dog. Can’t you kill a chicken? Could you walk down – take this bag – and pull some samphire roots? Before, I’d only ever idly stared through doors to watch the workers shaping stone, to smell their smells, to watch their lives while waiting for the Scram, Get out, We’ve work to do. And so, you see, the smallest dumpling, cooked with patience, given with a smile, could make a servant out of me, could make me lose my heart.

I had imagined … naturally, who wouldn’t? … that, given time, the pumping buttocks in the grass would be my own. And not for trade in hens. Now once again the simple sum of my ambition was not to kill a horseman but to be a horseman – though shooting arrows of a different kind. Fat chance.

I turned my back. I put the baby on her mat. I tied the dog. I released the chicken from its twine. I set it free. The child began to cry; the dog to whimper, then to bark. The hen took off. And so did I. I walked down to the shore and found the overhang of heath where I had sat and smashed the rocks one day before. I waited there. But she did not come. I searched the skyline for a ship. No ship. I set my face against the wind and almost ran. It was not yet dusk when I reached the bracken path above our village. Had I been missed? The plumes of smoke were lifting from the workshop fires. There was the pant of bellows. The air was prickly with the click of stone on stone. My people were at work. I felt as if my life was cursed with failure and misfortune.’

‘ “W
HERE HAVE
you been?” my uncle shouted. He had become a trader in the spring of that same year. While his sons and daughters laboured in the workshops – and while his mutilated nephew roamed at will – he had found himself a spot in the circle of transaction at the centre of the village. His flints, arranged upon a mat, were crude and cheap and plentiful. His trading pitch was just as rough. His voice was rasping, his chest was full of chalk – flint-knapper’s lung, they called it. Between the spits and coughs, he holla’d and he crowed at any passing farmer with eggs to trade. Or any girl with cloth. Or any craftsman loaded down with pots or baskets. He’d found his talent. He’d been placed on earth to strut and shout. He was the market’s cock.

So, the “Where have you been?” which greeted me on my return was not a question seeking answers, a demonstration of concern. It was a piece of drama for the mongers and the pedlars there. Gather round, it said. We’ll have some fun – and while we’re at it we’ll do a little business, too.

“You see? He has no answers,” uncle said, pulling me to his side so that all of those who looked at me would see his axe-heads too.

“Where has he been? He disappeared like that. No word. No by-your-leave. He spent the night … who knows? Some girl, I think!” They laughed. “Some girl who should be warned. Perhaps, at night, she didn’t notice that his hugs comprised of just one arm. He had to add a leg, maybe. He stroked her with his toes. I promise you these flints, these best stone tools, are not the work of toes …” And he embarked upon his well-rehearsed display.

He tried it once again that night, for the benefit of all my cousins. “Where were you, then?” he said. I had a question unspoken on my lips, too. Did anyone remember a stranger and two boys? A dog? They came with eggs and kale and tasty saltland rabbits. Once – one, two years ago – they had some whale to trade. Did anyone recall three bodies on the outskirts of the village? Were there rumours of that kind? Did anyone recall?

“I met a woman …” I began.

“Ah!” My cousins sniggered as they ate. “I’ll bet she was a beauty … with four hooves and horns!”

“I met a woman …” I repeated.

“Let’s have her name,” said uncle, cheapened by the easy laughs he’d earned that afternoon. “We ought to let her know, poor girl, that those cuddles that you gave her in the night were done with just one hand. You had to lift a leg and stroke her with your toes.” His repetition was worthwhile. It earned him some applause. He rose and left us to it. But my cousins were entrapped.

“Who was this woman? Where …? Come on. Speak up.”

That was an invitation far too good to miss. I’d tell them all about the old reed hut behind the sea, about the woman and her family and her child, the damp, her poverty, her food. Perhaps – at night, before the dancing flames it didn’t seem unlikely – they’d share my sense of sorrow at what went on in the world beyond the hill, the world that had no stone.

But, first, I had to tell them all about the cliff, the beach, the ship upon the sea.

“What would you have done,” I asked, “if I had come to you and said, Put down your tools, I’ve seen a ship? You’d tell me, Scram. You’d call me Little Liar!” They laughed at that. They recognized the truth. “And, anyway, that ship would soon be out of sight. Unless, of course, I followed it. Why shouldn’t I? I had no work to do. I simply filled my chest with air and took off down the coast.”

My cousins had stopped eating. Their eyes were turned on me. Those phrases – “filled my chest” and “took off down the coast” – had made them hopeful in a way they could not understand. Those phrases were like perfume. They had dramatic odours. They promised more. I knew at once the truth could not be told to them. It was too dull and disappointing. No love, poor food, a woman – thin and naked, with breasts like barnacles – who sold herself for chickens. What could I say to make it sound attractive? They wanted something crafted and well turned. I wanted their applause. The truth would never do. It was too fragile and too glum. It offered no escape.

“The sea seen from the clifftop is a world that’s upside down,” I began. I stood and spread my long arm and my short to demonstrate the view I had. I pointed down.

“The gulls have backs. You’re looking down on wind. The shallows, from above, are flat and patterned, green with arcs of white where the water runs to phlegm. My ship threw up an arc of its own phlegm as it dipped and bounced before the wind. I bounced and dipped myself. We were a pair.”

This is my moment of betrayal, both of the woman and the truth. Hear how it comes to life. See my cousins, sitting there, their chins aglow with grease, their eyes on fire, their expectations high, their dreams and nightmares on display.

“I caught the ship,” I said. “It came ashore.”

I told them all about the coastline, how the cliffs died out and sank so that the heathland and the beach were clasped like fingers of two hands. I told them how the white sail of the ship was forced to labour against the tide, of how I waited hidden in a cove where the rocks were elderberry red and elderberry soft. They looked delighted when I said I’d meant to bring some red stone back for them to see, but had forgot. I’d bring some for them in a day or two. They laughed out loud. They loved – and feared – the nerve and challenge of the storyteller.’

W
E BEGGED
my father to repeat for us the story that he told that night to his audience of cousins. What happened when the ship reached shore? Were there men on board or what? What was the cargo that they brought? He claimed he was not sure, that stories were like dreams, like dragonflies. They came and went. They only gave one show. His cousins might remember. But he could not. Besides, he’d told a hundred versions since – and no two were quite the same.

We have heard my father talking – and we know the way he worked. We know that when he spoke he shaped the truth, he trimmed, he stretched, he decorated. He was to truth what every stoney was to untouched flint, a fashioner, a god. We know that when he said, ‘I’ll keep it simple too, I won’t tell lies,’ that this was just another arrow from his shaft by which we were transfixed. And so, again, we should beware when father claimed forgetfulness and said ‘Who knows what story I dished up for them that night? Who cares?’ He knew, for sure. It was a turning-point for him – though, here again, his version was much tidier than truth. His version said that that one tale, told late at night to cousins, had kicked the anthill once again. He’d startled everyone; he’d surprised himself. It was as if the village fool had, unannounced, stood up and juggled perfectly – or the stammerer had sung a faultless song. It was a revelation and a shock that in the village, hidden, uncultivated all these years, there had been this amputee, who now could hold a household silent with the magic of his words.

The truth for what it’s worth is this … and now I’m guessing, so can you see the value of my truth? … my father’s talent for inflating and for telling lies was always there, from birth. But no one guessed its power – until, that is, my father transformed his defect into craft. As the bully becomes soldier, and the meany becomes merchant, so the liar becomes bard. Where is the shock in that? But father had it thus: that one good story from his mouth transformed him in that village, overnight, from the wild plant, not much use, into their raconteur.

His cousins spread the news. Their Little Liar had a tale to tell, they said. He’d chased a boat and caught it too! And then – guess what! – the sailors all were women. And their cargo? Perfume, stored in jars the shape of birds with necks for spouts. And then they’d come ashore, and then and then … And so the story was passed on. Of course, next day, the stoneys and the mongers in the village called out to him, What’s this we hear? And father was obliged to stop and tell his story once again.

He could not, he said, have invented a more workable device for telling tales than the ship upon the sea. Each time it came ashore it could offload a new and untried plot; a different set of characters with untold loves and enmities could disembark. The ship had formed a rough and tidy core from which my father could detach at will his patterned blades of fable, romance, lies.

Come on, they said. What’s this about the women? My father soon became adept at shaping what he said to match the shining eyes of listeners. The groups of men who hung around the market green, far from their wives and children, were keen to hear a tale which flirted and which teased, which offered sex and trade. You know the appetites of men. My father could oblige. For them his ship offloaded girls with one thing on their minds. They were like sirens – and the perfume that they came to trade was like a drug that stupefied all men. He’d hidden in the rocks and watched as merchants and their sons from the villages around came down to the beach. They laid their merchandise among the wracks and urchins, between the salt heath and the sea. They made high claims for the cloth, the charcoal, and the pots which they offered for exchange. The sailors had no need to speak. They dabbed some perfume on their wrists, their necks, their breasts and offered one sniff to the noses of the men. Those men – the youngest and the fittest – who did not faint and drop like overhoneyed bees were offered more than sniffs. The sailors led them to the longer grass beyond the beach …