The Gift of Stones

18

THE PATTERN that emerged was this — my father was two men. One was the husband-brother-son, the clumsy, willing settler on the heath who’d turn his hand to anything — to feeding the small child with paste from beans and fish; to hunting mushrooms, chasing crabs; to coddling embers in the smoke at night as the woman and her daughter rocked and hummed themselves to sleep. This was the man who came to love the girl and treat her as a daughter of his own. He knew the sweet stewed-apple smell of the childish water that she passed. He helped her understand and say her first few words: drink, dog, no, bird, kiss, hot. He invented faces and new sounds for her amusement.

The other man was the minstrel-king of lies, the teller of wide tales who could not (they said) even pick his nose with his one helpless arm. He couldn’t shell an egg. Yet, with his tongue, he could concoct from, say, geese, ships and smells, a world more real than real.

They did not question his migrations or interrupt the voices that seemed to summon him away every week or so. The villagers — or those at least whose hearts were not shut by custom and by work to father’s world of fraud and flam — could see his need for gathering more tales on their behalf. There were none to be unearthed amongst the workshops and flint-piles of the stoney village. The knappers had no tales. Such diversions must be hunted in the outside world and plucked and drawn and served up to them, reshaped and heated by my father.

So the path along the clifftop, where the gulls were upside down and where newly beaten passageways edged past rocks and winkle-berry thickets, was worn wide and flat by my father’s to-and-fro. He did not need the stars or luck to find his way. The path was his. He recognized each rock, each fallen tree, each brook. Here was the debris of his fire. Here the ship’s sail had ducked into the waves for good. Here the dog seals came ashore to roll and grumble in the sea’s white phlegm. It could be walked — at speed — in half a day. But father took his time. There was no haste. The wind was warm. And it was true — within a few days of the arrival of the geese the spring had come. The coastal path was blue and gold with buds.

At the end of spring my father set off once again to see the woman and her daughter. By now the geese had settled down. He found them grazing on the tide line or upping in the water for the eel grass there or dozing on their eggs in nests deep in the heather. The caravan of birds was quiet and fat again. The nomads were becalmed. They scarcely stirred as father took the path across the heath towards the hut of reeds.

The geese had taught the baby how to walk. She spread her legs and rocked from foot to foot. Her arms were bony wings. Her cries — cowl-yar, cowl-yar — were answered by the birds. She was the largest gosling on the heath. She lifted up her arms when my father arrived. She let him pick her up and slapped his nose in greeting. She pushed her fingers in his mouth and gripped his gums and pulled. She knew his face and smell.

The dog was yapping, too, and licking father’s ankles and his feet. The woman came out of the hut. She looked well-fed. She thrived on goose. Her lips were pink. There were no greying moons beneath her eyes or sores upon her face.

‘That’s better now,’ she said, pointing at his head. ‘You look less like a tussock.’ She ran her hand across his hair as if he were her child. He would have seized her by the wrist and kissed her hand except that, if he had, he would have dropped her daughter on the dog. He rubbed her ribs with his severed elbow but she did not stay close to acknowledge his embrace. She seemed unnerved. A gang of men had passed that day, she said. Thirty, forty men. With bows and sticks. Not horsemen, but on foot. They’d camped inland, beside the wood. She pointed out the braid of smoke that their three fires were plaiting in the distance. Who could they be? Now father was unnerved. He threw wet earth upon the fire. Troublemakers looked for smoke or light. For all his gifts of lying and invention he could not concoct a tale that night that would explain the friendly purposes of men in gangs with sticks and bows. They slept without a fire and had cold dreams of trouble-making on the heath.

Their dreams came true.

But first, there was the sound of horses. And then a voice called out, a drunken voice. ‘Rabbit. Rabbit. Doe.’ The woman and my father, submerged by fear and nightmares in the hut, their chins and faces wet with goose, awoke and held their breaths. Outside there was more laughter, and then another, younger, daring voice: ‘Doe-doe. Sweet doe. Come out.’

‘I’d better go,’ she said. ‘I know these men. They mean no harm. Here, hold the child. I’ll not be long.’ And then, ‘It’s just their joke. The horsemen call me Doe. They tell their women and their neighbours that they’re off to catch a rabbit when, in truth, they’re coming here. You see? A joke.’

She went outside, untying all her strings and laces as she walked. She held my father’s goatskin gift under her arm. There were two horsemen there, both mounted on black mares. The older rider held his horse in check. It waited for the woman as if expecting food. The younger man — about my father’s age — was too impatient to control his mount. As Doe approached, as Doe the rabbit got closer to his snare, he jumped down from the horse. ‘Me first,’ he said. The older rider turned his horse and moved away a little distance, his back turned to the woman and his friend … his son? … his nephew? … his young charge?

My father did not turn away. He watched. He watched the braggart youth take the woman’s arm and pull her roughly to the ground, the goatskin thrown aside. He watched him stumble to his feet a few moments later and honk his pleasure like a goose. He watched the older man take his turn with Doe as the younger horseman backed and scurried in the grass to recapture the mare which in his haste he had not bothered to secure.

‘I had my hand around the baby’s throat,’ my father said. ‘I’d killed a goose. I’d kill her child. And then the dog. I’d pull the whole hut down and set fire to all her world. I wished I was a horseman and a bowman then. I’d put an end to beasts like them with arrows in the heart.’

That’s what father said. But what he did was better suited to a one-armed man of words. He kept well back in case the horsemen saw him there. He soothed the child. He held the muzzle of the dog. He cursed the malign illogic of his own erection. He swore he’d save the woman — he’d rescue Doe from tupping for a trade.

She was no fool. She understood the hurt he felt. But finer feelings were not food. They could not kindle fires. Or warm a child. You could not make a coat from finer feelings. The men on horseback that came, once in a while, with their simple needs were worth more to her than cuckoos of my father’s kind. She met my father’s stare with eyes that were unabashed and unashamed. She’d taken care of two men — and been paid — in the time it took a potter to block some clay or a stoney to heat one flint. She’d made them sneeze. So what? If she had to suffer men between her legs then let the cost be theirs, poor fools. She held out the object of her trade for father to admire. It was a water pot, half full of headspin made from grain. ‘Forget your troubles. Drink!’ she said.

He’d drunk this headspin once before — from the leather travel-mates of horsemen, on the day they cut his arm in two. But he’d had no chance to savour it. He’d drunk too much too quickly, and then they’d struck him on the chin. He’d savoured drinker’s headache, that was all, and had those bad and stoney dreams. What would his cousins think, or Leaf, if they could see him now, cross-legged and urgent in the woman’s hut, with spirit rolling round his mouth and anger in his eyes? They’d wonder whether stories came from drink. Was that the trick? Was that the secret of my father’s to-and-fro? His wildness and his fantasies, his enmity to stone and work, came not from devils but from drink. My father did not care. His cousins only knew what they were told. He’d keep these secrets to himself, the geese, the woman and the drink. They were the outside world.

And so the two of them were drunk, though he more drunk than her. Her stomach was more tough. Her head was strong. My father was an easy prey for the liquid in the pot. It burnt his mouth at first and made him cough. But then he learnt the trick of sipping with his tongue and letting headspin melt onto his throat like sucked ice and curl into his gut and blush into his head, his heart, his eyes. He recognized the taste from bread that had gone green. But the sweetness and the power of the drink was new. It made him sneeze and wipe his eyes and fashion from the fear of men with sticks, and his hatred for the riders, and the concord of the night, and the even, conspiratorial breathing of the dog and child, a certainty that the time had come for him to touch the woman who sat in darkness at his side. Where to begin?

If father was an amateur with drink, then he was a booby and a greenhorn when it came to touch. ‘Who cared for me when I was small and had no mother and no home?’ my father asked, in those tearful, melting moods which came with age and illness. It was our task to answer, Not a one, and then to hug him while he cried. ‘Ah, that’s the cure for all woes,’ he’d say. ‘More hugs. I had no hugs when I was small. I never learned to kiss. Imagine that! The nearest that my uncle got to loving me was his mallet on my brow.’ And then — his spirits rising — he’d tell some tale. Of how he learned to kiss, from seal pups on the beach. Or how he learned to hug, from bears. He made a bitter joke of it, but we could tell that there was bone beneath the flesh. He ached for touch. And so he ached for her, the woman on the heath, the thin and bony widow who bartered her own flesh.

He passed the pot of headspin and, when she took it, dropped his hand onto her knee as if by chance. He said, ‘You’re cold.’ And then, ‘What can I do to keep you warm?’

‘Go out and light the fire,’ she said.

‘But there are men out there.’

‘So what?’ The drink had made her hard. ‘There are always men out there. Why should I go cold?’

‘You won’t go cold,’ he said with that breathless tenderness that women find so insincere and wearying. ‘I’ll keep you warm.’ He would have put his arm round her and hugged if he’d had an arm convenient for that. But he was sitting on the wrong side of her. His stump and her arm met, two different breeds. He turned his body to her and reached with his good arm for the hair behind her head. He put his head down on her shoulder and — almost breathless from the drink and fear and expectation — kissed her on the neck. He might as well have sat with his one arm round a tree and kissed the bark for all the interest that she showed.

‘You’re drunk,’ she said. ‘You’d better sleep.’ She pushed his head away. ‘Stop that.’ But father had her taste upon his lips, the dry and ashy flavour of her skin. He could not stop. He put his hand on to her leg and stroked her there, waiting for her Yes or the courage in his arm to touch the black and hidden thicket beneath her smock. She did not keep him waiting long. The instant that his hand found nerve enough to push her clothing back she brought the pot of headspin down upon his skull. The pot was shards. My father’s head — sobered and a little bruised — was drenched in drink. His eyes were stinging. His ears were ringing to the hubbub that she made in the darkness of the hut. ‘Get out. Go home,’ she said. ‘You don’t touch me!’

Of course, the child woke up. And screamed. The dog — so recently my father’s friend — snapped and growled at father’s legs. My father ran outside. His passion closed its wings and plummeted in a whiffling, spiral dive. He did not move. He was a stone. He heard her cursing to herself. He heard the sweep and slap of the dog’s tail. He heard the baby whimper on the breast, then sleep. All that was left was darkness, the spring wind off the sea, the guroo-guroo of nighttime geese, the distant, crackling fires of strangers on the heath. My father took deep breaths. His muscles tightened with the thought of killing her. His eyes were wet — with drink and tears and cold. He wished he was a horseman now with a fist like stone and a face like weathered bark. She’d love him then, for sure.

He could not guess how long he waited. Not long — but long enough for his skin to peg and button like a goose. He did not hanker now for her caresses or her love. He wanted only to win from her some recompense. He was the storyteller, don’t forget. He knew how to deepen any plot. And so he whispered in the night, his voice unsteady, wheedling, sly.

‘Rabbit. Rabbit. Doe. Sweet Doe. Come out.’ She came at once. She stood outside her door, a still black shape. He could not guess her mood.

‘I thought that we were friends,’ my father said.

‘What kind of friend are you?’ Her voice was angry still. ‘You think I want that kind of friend? I’ve plenty of that kind. They don’t come in my hut. But you I’ve treated as a brother and a son.’

‘You go with all those horsemen. Why not me?’

‘They pay. That’s why.’

‘I’ll pay.’

She held her hand out to her brother-son. ‘Come in,’ she said. ‘We’ll talk.’

Who tells the truth about such things? Only crones and fools. My father’s version went like this: The woman, Doe, was sobered by remorse. The one-armed man who’d killed the goose and brought the goatskin gift and courted her was cold and drenched in drink and bruised about the head. She loosened all her strings and laces and at last paid back the kisses which he had invested on her neck. He’d leave it there. Such stories are best obscured by mist. The only details were the jokes at his or her expense. ‘You need two arms when you’re on top,’ he’d say, a clown who knew no shame. He’d demonstrate his lopsided, toppling passion on that night. He’d shudder, too, to mime the moment when, at last, his body emptied all its seed in Doe. And then the song he sang was this: How sad is he who has no wife. His seed is trapped. It turns to poison in his loins. His blood runs hot and burns. It dries his body and he leads a pale and angry life. But he who has a woman at his side? He is as carefree as an insect on the wing.

My father flapped his one good and his broken wing to illustrate the joy he felt the moment that he, with Doe, discharged the poison in his loins, the moment when the chrysalis of lust became the butterfly. ‘I felt nimble. I felt light,’ he said, dancing to the words. ‘Any man will say that sneezing in the night like that will bring good sleep. And when you wake, where is the fury and the sadness and the madness that you felt? All gone. The butterfly has flown.’

The truth, of course, is short of butterflies. We can presume, from what my father said on those few and candid times when we were on our own, that Doe and he remained good friends, and nothing more. When he returned to talk with her inside the hut the moment of affection was long past. The child was nervous in her sleep and stirring with bad dreams. The dog was wide awake and alert for signs that would require more barking and more bites. There were still men in gangs with sticks and bows upon the heath. The only kisses that would be given freely in that hut would be for her daughter’s lips, not his.

Although my father knew that if some horsemen came, right then, and called to her, she’d go to them — at once — he also recognized the force of what she’d said, ‘You don’t touch me! You think I want that kind of friend? I’ve plenty of that kind.’ He did not try again to put his hand upon her knee. Besides, the wind was driving back the stars and it was nearly dawn.

She’d said, Let’s talk. But Sleep is what she meant. My father did not sleep for long. He woke unsettled, mystified. The wind was racing now, the sort of wind that lifted slates from walls and sent Leaf’s hair on streaming errands from his head, the sort of wind that called, ‘Go home, go home. To your house and stone. Go home.’ The mist was low and moist and chasing inland with the wind. There was no sea. My father had some business to conclude. He went outside, the dog his one companion, and discharged his poison onto the buds and seedlings of the heath. It gathered, rolled and spongy, in the dew and hung in stringy tresses from the reeds. It formed its salty pools of sap amongst the vented lichens and the moss. My father — his one hand plenty for the task — was briefly lost amongst the ardours and the lecheries of a story of his own invention. The only sounds were the pantings of the man and dog and the bickerings of geese.