The Gift of Stones

25

THIS IS the way my early childhood passed. Like all the other stoneys there we rose at dawn. It was the light that woke us. The more we were accepted, the more there was for us to do. My first job was coaxing from the embers of our fire an early flame, then warming stones for us to heat our bread. So silent was my mother at those times, that I am startled that I learned to talk. Yet talk I did, nonstop. I was a woodland bird, my father said. My mother had become as voiceless, distant as a kite. I had become a warbler in love with its own song. Here was the proof — if there was any doubt — that children are soon free of what their parents are. If I was heir to anything, it was my father’s, my false father’s tongue. I shared, too, his reticence with stone.

Yet on those mornings when the skies were pink and calm and the ocean wind was shy to come ashore, that hawk that father used to decorate his tales could spy me taking at a sprint the gradient between our house and the flinty hill. My mother, Doe, still half awake on this latest day of labour, was less eager to begin. But, once at work, she was more diligent than me. She did not pause, bent double like a broken fern, in her job of loading stone on sled. She felt, at last, that she and I were safe so long as there were stoneys needing stone, so long as there were farmers, horsemen, fishers, wrights who wanted arms and tools.

For all my sprinting and my talk I was a lazy child. It was more fun to chase the rabbits or to test how far stray seeds would fly if tossed into the wind than work. It was more fun to make up songs, aloud, with teasing rhymes. It was more fun to mime a little constipation so that I could creep away to see what lay beyond the village and the hill.

But Doe was not amused by me. Her love — so light and pliant on the heath — was solemn on the hill. Her nightmare was that she would die and I would be alone. If she could pass to me the gift of stones, then she could die and leave me with the means to live alone. And so it was, despite the sneeze of tethered horses in the distant wood, despite the plumes of smoke which summoned from the outside world, despite the lure of father and his idle life upon the shore, I found myself enslaved.

This is how we worked. My mother used an antler pick to pierce and loosen chalk. She broke it up and pushed away the noduled roots of flint which were the tougher siblings of the chalk. She knew the trick required to spot the grain inside the stone. She knew which flints would make long knives, which were the densest, most resistant stones ideal for hammers, strikers, axe blades, picks, which were loose enough in grain, shape and disposition to flake for arrowheads or spears, which would splinter into harpoon barbs, which were only good for putting into walls. She sorted flints in piles and pointed to the one which I should lift and load. And then the next stone. And the next stone too. All day. That is how the job was done. We grazed and turned the earth like goats except our cud was flint not grass.

We were not good at loading all the stone on sleds. The studs and hollows would not embrace for us, or if they did, the journey down the slope towards the village would rattle loose the flint and we — in full view of every idle stoney there — would have to start again. Instead we used large baskets made from reed which we had traded in the marketplace for surplus bacon earned through shifting stone. We tied the baskets on the sled. We went to every workshop in the village — including Leaf’s — and came away with food or skin or fuel. The stoneys treated mother much as the merchants treated them. That is to say they treated her with all the coldness and respect with which fishermen treat fish. She was the chit and I the sprat who serviced them with stone. The passion that she roused amongst some men when we first came had cooled. She was more rounded and constrained. She was like them, a stoney night and day.

Here, perhaps, an eyebrow should be raised. Beware of what a mother’s daughter says. I was a child — six years of age by now — and far too young to question or to judge what Doe had done and why. I’m speaking here with father’s voice. His love for Doe had cooled as well. Or changed at least. His hopes were now regrets. They hardly spoke. My father stayed away. He could not bear the woman she’d become, well fed and busy on the hill. He much preferred the ulcers and the dirt, her thinness and her poverty, her helplessness when she was living on the heath. He much preferred those dusks when she — called out by horsemen in the grass — said, ‘Hold the child. This won’t take long.’

She did not need him now. She had no need of any man. The labour which had made of her a slave had made her freer too. My father was the only one whose life was rid of stone. And so he used the phrase ‘flint-hearted and flint-tongued’ to dismiss the woman he had courted for so long. She would not let him take revenge. She dealt with him as if he were someone she owed a debt. She hid from him. She would not meet his eyes. For her my father was the heath. She dare not think of him or it.

But we have missed my father and the heath. As this tale has journeyed on and brought us to that point where Doe, transformed and fattened, was working on the hill, we have felt the absence of the man whose rudder-tongue could steer us free from our small world. We are all tired of stone. We crave some geese or ships, some smoke or riders, some moonlit footprints shining like a pair of tumbling glow-worms in the damp. We crave again my father’s single restless hand, the teasing undulations of his voice, his tales, his falsities.

And so I’ll let my father’s version take the oar again. He was the one who knew what happened next.