The Gift of Stones

17

THE WOMAN showed him how to pluck and draw a goose and not waste time. The feathers must be pulled soon after death, she said, before the flesh turns cold and stiffens. She started with the feathers underneath the wings, and then the down upon the breast, and then the tougher flights on wings and tail. She seemed more animated than she had ever been before, and laughing as she worked. It was the thought of father’s antics on the heath. The baby and the dog seemed happy too. Her laughter touched them all.

Once all the feathers had been pulled she singed the carcass in the fire. The plucked goose-skin became a landscape cleared by flames. She laid the blackened bird upon its back and cut its pinions and its neck. Now the crop could be removed and the entrails loosened with two fingers. She cut the body between tail and vent, worked free the gizzard and drew away the giblets in one piece so that no bitterness was spilled upon the flesh. She threw the giblets to the dog. All was achieved with the focus and the craft that father recognized from men like Leaf. She’d reshaped the goose.

Next day, his stomach tight and queasy from the goose’s grey and muscular flesh, my father returned to his village.

‘Take them a bird,’ she said, smiling at the prospect of another drama on the heath; the dog, the stick, the spongy earth, the bludgeoned body of a goose, my father (tumbled like a drunk and caked in marsh) flailing with one arm. He shook his head. ‘Goose meat is far too good for them,’ he said. He had grown selfish as all men do when they discover families, homelands, of their own. His other life was not for cousins. They had their flints, their skills, their status in the marketplace, the certainties of work and trade. He had the outside world, its geese, its sailing ships, its makeshift dwellings in the wind. They’d have to do without his geese.

He took them other gifts instead, the stories that he’d found upon his way. There was the story of the talking goose. It was snow-white except for a golden bill and feet. It said … and here my father could devise a goose-borne message that would tease whatever audience he had assembled at his feet. There was the story of the woman and her magic dog. They lived inside a house made out of hair. The dog could cook and stitch and start a fire. The woman hunted rabbits with her mouth. There was the story of the boy who had the gift of flames. He could spit fire. Those people who stayed close to him need never fear the cold. There was the story of the stench which, bruised and angered by a traveller who had held his nose when passing, hid inside the traveller’s bag and (depending on my father’s mood) came out to cause all kinds of mayhem in the world.