The Gift of Stones

7

‘LISTEN HERE (my father said). I’ll tell you what occurred. I’ll keep it simple, too. I won’t tell lies. So don’t expect some bristling story of revenge, the sort retold in whispers after dark about the boy who killed the lambing wolf or the wife who drowned her husband’s secret friend or the feuding sons. There is revenge to come, for sure. Malice and my elbow stump are twins. But at that moment when — seven years of age — I watched the bowman’s smile, there was no revenge in my mind. Children aren’t like that. They are more subtle. Is that the word? Or is ‘simple’ closer to it? Let’s hear it then, let’s tell the truth: the sum of my ambition at that time was not to kill the bowman for the damage he had done, but to be the bowman, to be on horseback in the wind like him, to let the heavy arrow fly at anything I wished, to struggle loose from stone.

Let me describe his face as best I can. You’d think it was a leather purse with teeth. You never saw his eyes. He had a horseman’s squint. He was only young, but he was weathered as a piece of bark. Sometimes my memory conjures up a small moustache, sometimes a scar above his lip. I can’t be sure. It was years ago and I have told this story many times and changed it just as often. But one thing never changed. The bowman’s face, his smile, his eyes, expressed in full what neighbours in our village had most distrusted in my own face. Look, you see it now, a little blunted, true … but dreams … but turbulence … but downright cussedness. He could have been my brother.

So is this my story, then? Watch out, you say, he’s chipping and he’s knapping at the truth. He’s shaping it to make a tale. Two brothers. Separated at their birth. And reunited. In a feud. I’ll spare you that. I’ll save that story for the children late one night, and we’ll get on with something less exciting.

So I was seven, almost dead, but tough and cussed, too, and on the mend. My chin was bruised. The skin was broken on my head. I’d lost a lot of blood. My lower arm, my hand — the one I used for eating, fighting, wiping arses — was snug and damp somewhere beneath a rock. Or flung from the clifftop into the wind. Gull food. Or — this is likely — disposed of on the hill beyond the village. Down some disused pit. The hill was full of holes. I’m buried there. A bit of me, at least.

Who cared for me? At first it was the uncle who’d sobbed out shallow promises to my dying mother when I was small. ‘See to the boy,’ she’d said. Uncle kept his word. He’d raised me as his own. That means I shared the slappings that he gave to his six sons and daughters and his wife. That means that I was underfed and generally ignored unless there was a job to do, some lift or fetch and carry. But when he heard that I was wounded and that my arm was briefly famous, he showed himself the model of devotion. He was among the men who volunteered to knock me out. It was his mallet on my brow.

But then, next day, my arm was off and it was clear that I would live and thrive. He moved me to his huts on a stretcher — my cousins shared the weight — and, on the way, took every chance to sing his praises. Make way, make way, Uncle All Heart passes through. We rested in the marketplace — and there we found the world returned to normal. The disturbances of yesterday were done. There were no horsemen there. The hollowed bones of scent had gone. Don’t ask me where. There was a stir of interest in my stump — but that was their curiosity at full stretch. Why should they care? There were no scabs for them to pick. What’s done is done and soon forgotten, unless there’s debt involved.

My uncle and his family lived frugally. He wasn’t good with flints. His best were simple mallets, hammers, axes, implements without a blade. They were hardly highly prized amongst the traders in the marketplace. The gift that made Leaf rich made uncle curse. He had no patience. He was a bear. You should have seen him hard at work. You’d think his hands were feet. One pair of working hands, he’d say. Eight mouths to feed. Mine made it nine. His plan had been that his six children and I, his sister’s child, should join the workforce speedily. Eight pairs of working hands — he didn’t count his wife — could make him rich and fat. Now he wasn’t slow to see, as I lay recovering in his huts, that my recent loss, my half a pair, would not advance his plan. What kind of knapper would I make with my best arm ending in a stump? His girls could learn to work the stone, he said. They could do it just as well as boys. But me? What could I do? Get in the way, that’s all. I couldn’t fetch and carry any more. One arm was not enough for heavy stones. I couldn’t work the bellows; two handles need two hands. I couldn’t dig for flint. I couldn’t strike a tine and split a stone unless I held the hammer in my teeth.

So I grew up like some wild plant, ragged, unattended, not much use. While my domesticated cousins learned from uncle how to bludgeon stones, discovered how to cluck and chivvy at their work all day, I learned how to irritate, discovered how to peck and knap at tempers. I was the magpie, they were hens. No one came to me and said, You’ve lost an arm, so what? You’ve got another on the left. Let’s see it work. It can be done. Come on, sit down and trap the stone upon the anvil with your stump. Or, here’s the way the one-armed master goes to work; he changes crafts. He becomes the herdsman or the cook, the leatherman. His cheeses are the best. His goats. His perfect-fitting shoes. No one said, There are a thousand things to do that don’t require two arms. It takes one arm and two good legs to take a bucket to the stream and bring it back, unspilt. Do that. Or four fingers and a thumb are easily enough to take up keeping bees.

The simple truth is this, no one had the time or inclination to find a role for me. Making flints, that’s all they knew. That’s what gave them heart. That was the ritual that kept them going, that filled their time, that stocked their larders, that gave them pride. Work made them comfortable. It made them feel, We do exist, We are important, even, We count. They were the stoneys, heart and mind. They blindly fashioned flints. And gulls laid top-heavy eggs. And the winds blew off the sea. That’s how the world was made and never pause for thought. It wasn’t made for boys with stumps.

I promised you there’d be no lies, but you’ll excuse excursions and short cuts. What is the profit in listing here the countless days I fled the cursings of my uncle and my cousins to laze about the village staring idly into other people’s lives? Days spent doing nothing, when I was eight, nine, ten, could slow this story down. You’d fall asleep, you’d topple to the ground, if I told that. You’d dislocate your jaw with yawns if I recounted here the casual, endless rebuffs upon which my boyish indignation fed. I stalked the village like a homeless pup, unnamed, unnoticed, empty, cold, uncombed, and loved by no one but itself.

So, seven, eight years on. I was beyond the bowman’s age. It was the end of summer and there you see me once again upon the shore, running toes along the sand. I was well. I had no colds. My throat was clear, my lips were soft. For once the wind and sea were tame, the wrack was almost dry, the birds were grazing on the beach like sheep. There were no living scallops at my feet, just empty valves, the fluted valleys of their fifteen ribs turned green and black with seacrust. I could invent for you a sea and wind and sky that flung saltweed in my face and emptied water from the pools and cast a light so dark and feeble that even lugworms took the day for night, mistook the wind for tide, and coiled their ropes too soon upon the sand. But I will keep it calm and windless. The sight was no less strange. I skimmed a scallop out to sea and there, as unselfconscious as a cloud, a ship was passing by.

What would you do if you were me? Run back and tell the stoneys? What? That they should arm themselves and gather on the shore? That they should hurry from their workshops — the stones left baking, the bellows breathless in the hearth — and prepare themselves for trade with sailors? That they should simply stand in awe, like me, and witness from the land the recklessness of travel on the sea? They’d tell me, Scram. We’ve work to do. They’d call me Little Liar. And, for sure, if one or two were tempted to take the bracken path towards the sea to prove me false, they couldn’t reach the cliffs in time. For all the stillness on the beach, the muscles in the clothing of the sail made clear enough to me that there were breezes just offshore. That ship would soon be out of sight. Unless, of course, I followed it. Why shouldn’t I? I had no stones. I simply filled my chest with air and took off down the coast.’