The Gift of Stones

20

‘IMAGINE THIS,’ my father said, reconstructing their dilemma. They had no home. There were a thousand dead geese on the heath. Already flies were sated on the blood. And beetles, ants and slugs were searching for a passage through the feathers. The sky — which so recently had been ruffled only by the wind — was bringing in the ravens and the crows. Magpies were feasting on goose eyes, and crabs were straying from the shore, bedevilled and seduced by meat. ‘No one knows where maggots live,’ he said. ‘They cannot fly or swim. But maggots crawled and tumbled in the guts of geese before the birds were cold.’ All this before the wolves arrived and plunged their noses into the moist and pungent dead. All this before the blood enriched the soil and toadstools flourished there and carcass shrubs trailed blossoms on the sinew and the bones.

The farmers had gone home to feast on their achievements. If they’d stayed, my father claimed, they would’ve seen precisely who was king of that wild world. ‘When everybody’s dead, there’ll still be crabs and flies and carcass shrubs and weeds to strip and clothe the world. There’ll still be stone.’

So it seemed to him, the knapper’s son, as he stood with Doe in the carnage of the heath and listened to the old man talk of husbandry, that the world was cut in two — one for chaos, one for coma — just as the scriptures of his village said. All the outside world required was the liberty to pound and crush, to hammer and to bruise. It didn’t matter what. It didn’t matter if the blows were rained on geese or huts or dogs or boys, so long as there were blows and careless brawls and sudden gusts of hardship to blow good fortune down.

At home — that other, duller world, where now my father steered Doe and her daughter to start their lives afresh — the village blows were innocuous and prescribed. They were rained down on flint. He … they, the workers with two hands, were made tame, secure and virtuous by labour. Their skill was their salvation and their numbness. For once the village of my father’s birth, contemplated from that battlefield of geese, seemed — what was his phrase? — as snug as poppy seeds. Such was the gift of stones.