The Gift of Stones (8 page)

Of course, his triumph could not last. The landscape and the tide conspired to chase him off the beach. He rejoined the cliff path at that point where a valley joined the coast. Its stream spread out (remember?) amongst rocks and tumbled boulders. When he had passed this way before – at the frontier where chick-weed turned to wrack, where skylark became tern, where earth gave way to sand – the river water had been warm and shallow. He’d waded it and hardly got his ankles wet. But now, at the finish of the winter rains, the stream was deep and strong. It was too dark to follow inland on the bank until a crossing place was found. Besides, my father was in no mind for deviations or delays. He stripped and put his clothes into the goatskin wrap. He held it, high and dry, in his good hand and stepped into the water. He didn’t fall. Or drop the wrap. Or lose his footing in the stream and end up – moments later – dumped and bruised like flotsam on the beach. Dimly he could see the dry bank on the other side. He fixed his eye on that, kept his legs well spread, and crossed.

By now his teeth were chattering like a conference of knappers’ stones. His skin was barnacled with cold. His hand was stiff. He dressed – but all the dampness of the stream was soaked up by his clothes. The wind passed through him: it played his ribs. He was wattle without daub. He took the woman’s gifts out from the skin and placed them on the bank. He wrapped the skin around his shoulders and sat amongst his gifts, hunched up, a boulder, with his head upon his knees and his arm around his shins. Now the boulder trembled. He was a logan-stone, shaking on the spot. The noises that he made were icy, animal, dank; they were the rhythmic, shivering inhalations of people making love, or cowering, or cold. His stump – a loather of the cold – was numb. He knew he had to light a fire.

He stood no chance of finding any kindling or dry moss in that light. He took the flint knife that he’d stolen – the sharp and perfect product of his eldest cousin – and tried to cut some kindling from his head. (In his retelling father made it comic, miming with his severed arm and a head that now was old and dry and bald.) But on that night his hair was long enough and coarse and hardly damp. The wind had kept it dry. At first he tried to trap a hank behind his head with his numb stump and to cut the hair free at the roots. He could not hold it firm enough. The hair sprang loose. (He mimed that, too, to laughter that was cautious, thin.) Then he used one hand and tried to slice the thick hair at his forehead. It simply flattened on his skull. Here was a task that required two hands. A one-armed man could only crop his own hair with a knife if he could find the reckless courage to hack the skull, to mutilate his head.

My father put aside the knife. So much for flint and stone! He held a thin hank of hair – forty, fifty strands – between his pointing finger and his thumb. He pulled to test its strength – and then he snapped the hairs out from his head. He was surprised how easily they came, how little pain there was. He tried again. Another skein came free. Quite soon he had a nest of hair – and a head that looked chewed up by rats.

Consider now how hard it was for him to break his cousin’s knife in two, to trap the one half with his toes and strike it with the other. Producing sparks was simple – but they were haywire, shortlived, futile. What he needed was ignition, a spark which had the force and foresight to settle on the nest of hair. To simmer, smoke. To smoulder, flare. To blaze.

Depending on his mood – and on the age and temperament of his audience – my father would invent new ways of making fire. A firefly came and settled on the hair. A lizard that had flames for breath. A fireball. A fire bird. A glow stone. Even with a pair of friction sticks and the dryest moss we know how hard it is to summon fire. With stone and wind and hair? What chance? The truth is this, that father was just lucky. A spark obliged. A few hairs curled and shivered at the thorn of heat.

Fire is determined. Once it has a pinch of life, it flourishes, it thrives. The hairs sent up the sour fume of burning flesh, part crab, part cheese, part gall. They smoked and melted, flared and shrank, became one piece of brittle, sticky tar. Their blaze was strong enough for father – his hand unsteady from the cold – to light the wick of a scallop candle from his store of gifts. He lit them all. Their flames winked and guttered in the wind. My father placed one scallop in the pot to save it from the weather. Its flame reflected on the clay and, from the pot’s mouth, released a single watery pillar of light in which my father thawed his hand.

There were enough dead twigs, damp reeds, dry pith, seed masts, plant waste, bark close by for father to build up a fire with the scallops at its base and the wooden spinning top – his youngest cousin’s treasured toy – at its summit. At first it was all smoke – but the wind took that away and coaxed flames to startle on the twigs. My father was at a loss, he said, to comprehend the depth of pleasure that a fire can give.

He soon was warm, but not all of him at once. That’s the trouble with an exposed fire – it scorches cheeks and noses while necks and backs and buttocks are left freezing in the night. My father had to turn himself, a chicken on the spit, to make quite sure that he was thawed right through. And then he sat before his fire and sucked the emmer grain and ate the nuts. Their shells were fed into the fire. And while he sat there, making shapes and stories out of flames, the sun came up behind his back. If he was at a loss to comprehend the depth of pleasure that a fire can give, then what could he make of dawn? It dulled the cutting edge of wind. It brought my father’s shivering inhalations to an end. It silenced father’s teeth; the knappers’ conference of stones was suspended for the day. His wattle now had daub. The logan-stone was still.

My father threw the broken knife and the scorched remains of pot into the ashes of his fire. He wrapped the now-warmed goatskin round his shoulders and set off again upon his travels. He knew the way and climbed up from the valley through the mallows and the brambles – now thickening with promises of leaves and buds – until he reached the high clifftop of bracken. There was no ship upon the sea, just a rosehip sun with fleshy canopies of cloud. Already shags and waterhuggers were flying off for the day’s first fish. Fronds and frost and cobwebs gleamed with dew. Giant slugs were on the path. Rocks steamed.

Father thought then of his cousins and his uncle’s hut at dawn. It was still dark inside. Grey slates of light squeezed past partitions, curtains, screens, to rest in tapered oblong slabs on walls. If there was movement it was rats or an ember settling on the fire. If there was noise it was the rasping in his uncle’s chalky lungs. If there was exultation, it was in dreams. It ended when they woke.

My father made too much of this, his celebration on the cliff, his sense of liberty from toil at being up so weatherswept and early with the sun. But what is liberty anyway? Not much more than self-deceit, a fantasy. It only takes one stolen dawn while all the world’s asleep for the prisoner of dull routine to count himself quite free. It does not matter that the days that follow are as patterned and as uniform as the cells and chambers of a honeycomb. And so it was that father walked along the clifftop path emboldened by the dawn and relishing the cold and deathly night he’d spent huddled by his fire.

At midday, he reached the low coast, the juice-red rocks, the overhang of salty heath where he had sheltered from the rain. Again there was a mist. But this time he did not stand and fill his lungs with damp and heavy air and cry, Who’s there? He knew. He turned his back against the sea and walked inland through the fringe of arrow grass on to the heath. Quite soon he found the smudge of smoke and heard the wolf-like barking of her dog. It was the woman who called out, Who’s there? He stood a little distance from her hut and did not speak. He took the goatskin from his shoulders and held it out. His gift. She came into the open armed with a stick, the baby in a leather sling, the dog held by its neck. What she saw there was a young man in silhouette, standing on the spot where many men, on horseback, drunk, defiant, shy, had stood before, awaiting her and holding chickens, honey, cloth as payment for her time.

‘Wait there,’ she said. She took the baby and the dog back into her hut. And then came out, untying as she walked the strings and laces which secured her winter clothes. Her eyes were on the goatskin not the man. She’d use it as a cover for her daughter’s bed.

‘That’ll do,’ she said. And then, ‘Lay it down. We’ll use it as a mat. The ground is wet …’ And then, in tones that matched the pallor on my father’s face, ‘It’s you!’

If my father was in a mood for teasing he’d entertain us at this fork in his narration with a treatise on temptation. ‘Life is a double-headed worm,’ he’d say. ‘It can wriggle either way. It has the choice. My choice was this: to give the goatskin as a gift, exactly as I’d meant. Or to trade the goatskin there and then, with her, upon the ground.’ His audience, of course, would want the second of the two, the choice which would place my father’s hands upon her waist, her hem tugged high. They’d opt for barter, fair exchange – his skin of goat, her hardly breasts, her punctured water bags of thighs, her patch of black, untended hair.

And then? Could he then join her in the hut and tend the pot and rock the child? Did merchants on the market green invite their clients home once all the trade was done? No, no. The pleasantries of commerce do not outlive the moment of exchange. If father had sunk down with her then their passions would be spent for good; client, merchant, interchange. She’d take the goatskin to the child, without a word. He’d set off home with only breathlessness and muddy knees to show for all his efforts. You’d think it was an easy choice. But father – sweating, blushing, tempted, shy – could hardly speak.

The woman was looking closely at him now.

‘What have you done?’ she asked. ‘Your hair!’ She reached forward and pushed her hand across his forehead and his skull. ‘Who’s done that to you?’

‘I did it to myself,’ he said. ‘To light a fire. I had no moss. I just had hair.’ He twisted a skein of hair between his fingers to show what he had done. ‘Here, I brought this skin.’

‘For what?’

‘For you. A gift.’

The dog was barking now, and the baby mewling like a gull. My father and the woman walked back to the hut with nothing dealt and everything to trade.

T
HE FIRST THING
that my father noticed was the stench. The saltland heath – sodden and yellowed by the winter – was sweating in the sun. It smelled like rotten fruit, like beer, like cow’s breath. The earth was passing wind; it belched at every footfall; its boil had burst; it was brackish and spongy with sap and pus and marsh. And then he saw new people in the distance, their makeshift shelters, and their fires. Last year, at summer’s end, there had been none – just her, the dog, the child. The heath was home to six or seven families now.

‘They’re waiting for the geese,’ the woman said. ‘I’m waiting, too. They come back every year, the geese, those people there. It means that summer’s come. We’ll eat fresh food again. I’m sick of nuts and crabs.’

Once more she was obsessed with food. Goose eggs, goose fat, goose meat. She talked about the feast that there would be once the geese came in. Mesmerized, she said, by the ripe and rotten odour of the springtime heath and lured by choruses of frogs, the birds would plummet from the sky. The males would fly in first to squabble over nests and to preen themselves in readiness for mating. Then – two, three days later – the females would arrive. There’d be the rough-and-tumble of feeding, breeding, rearing young, and then, before the shortest day, the tribe of geese would rise again, their goslings too, and fly away, inland. Where to? The woman did not know. Nor could she solve the mystery of where the geese flew from, nor what there was beyond the sea, nor why the birds were not like sheep, homelovers, fearful of the outside world, faint-hearted, calm.

‘Those men and women think,’ she said, pointing at her springtime neighbours on the heath, ‘that geese are people that have died. They say my husband and my boys are geese.’ She shrugged. ‘Who knows? I’ve also heard them say that geese bring babies, that geese bring dreams, that geese are blessings to the poor. I’ve heard it all. Myself, I know the truth. I’ve seen it every year. The geese bring summer and take away the frosts. You’ll see.’

The spring was early but the geese were not. My father waited for three days before the first skein passed overhead and went inland.

‘Those aren’t ours,’ the woman said. They waited three days more and, finally, at dawn, an arrowhead of geese came in from off the sea, chuckling amongst themselves and calling ahead to the people there – cowl-yar, cowl-yar – that winter had pulled up its roots and fled.

My father stood and watched their flight, the nomads on the wing. They were the great pea geese. He’d seen a stray before, a single bird, exhausted, blown off course by starvation and by storms. It had fallen – just as the woman had described – onto the causeway of his village, by the market green. No one had known quite what to do – until a stoneworker had strode from his workplace and struck the goose across the head with a wooden mallet. Then everybody knew what next. Goose meat was such a treat. They’d cooked it there and then. Its flesh was drenched and tasteless from the flight.

But he had never seen such a buoyant, stately fleet of birds before, not in such numbers, not in such rhythmic unison. He looked up at their heavy breasts, their long necks and at the slow and ponderous greeting of their wings which seemed too brief and effortless to keep such heavy birds aloft. They passed across the elderberry rocks so low that a man on horseback could have picked them from the sky like pears. And then they rose a little on the heath, repulsed it seemed by the pungency that they encountered – re-encountered – there. This was their annual resting place. A single, leading goose swooped down like a hawk, its wings half-folded, its body dropping in a whiffling spiral dive. And soon its companions had spiralled, too, and dropped exhausted on the heath like pigeons hit by stones. Already there were other arrowheads spread out above the sea and soon the pungent heath was throbbing, panting, with the brief distress of voyagers whose voyage now was done.