The Gift of Stones (2 page)

I cannot guess what spiteful, foolish instinct had made father pause to stoop and take it from the ground. But there was some sense of triumph there, as he made a bloodied return to his people, that he had doubly vexed the stranger with the bow. ‘That man had lost the chase and he had lost an arrow, too,’ my father said. ‘Some compensation for the blood and scallops which I had lost, and his poison in my arm.’

His neighbours passed the arrowhead from hand to hand and shook their heads and laughed. They knew this stone. Greywacke. Picked out of the gravels, the shales and mudstones, on some riverbank and worked on by an amateur. Here were the flattened planes where the stone had been pounded. Here was a fracture at the arrow’s stem. Here were the impact dents where the hammer stone had struck the parent stone sending random chips and dust into the eyes, no doubt, of some muscular, hasty manufacturer who had not grasped that simple truth that stones are broken not by the power of the hammer. Stones are like scallop shells, like nuts. A clumsy, heavy blow will shatter them. One gentle, well-aimed strike with a wooden pin and they will open for you like a gate.

Yet what clumsy tool was this? A small boy could do better. No wonder that the horsemen wanted trade if all the stones and arrows that they had were worked so poorly. They would be back, for sure, and with better trade than threats. If they came again and my father lived, the bowman could be asked to provide some recompense.

I will not tire you with my father’s recollections of the fever and the pain that followed. He had saved his own life, it was said, because he cut himself below the arrow wound. Any poison had dispersed. But he had lost much strength and the wounds were slow to bind. His wrist and elbow began to swell and then his fingers became both stiff and shaking. By noon the colour of the skin had changed and, if his arm was pressed, clear water which smelt like damp earth bubbled through fissures to the surface. Soon the pain transferred itself to his upper arm and there were no feelings below the elbow. It was then that he was told that he must lose an arm or die.

I
T HAD BEEN
my father’s task, some months before the arrow struck his arm, to help with the opening of a new shaft on the hill beyond the village. All the boys and girls were ordered there. It was their job to stand in line with baskets and tip the disturbed topsoil – and the useless stones, the surface flints made unworkable by frost – into disused workings. What they sought was the undisturbed floorstone of flint at depths unknown to worms. This was the act that underpinned the village. If the stone was good then there were profits to be made. The hefters and the craftsmen, the women in the workshops pacing the five-pointed star between the spit, the anvil, the bellows, the cradle, and the pot, could expect good prices for their finished flints from the traders in the marketplace. This is how it worked: there were two breeds existing side by side, the stoneys and the mongers, the villagers who dug and worked the flint, the traders who hawked and peddled it with the world beyond.

‘You’ll never guess,’ my father said, ‘which breed was fat and wealthy, which gave the orders, which named the price, which (for the opening of that new shaft) did not stand and shiver in the line with baskets full of earth.’

The stoneys’ children had been told to start at dawn. It was the light that woke them, and then the noise as all the able-bodied people cleared their throats and noses for the day or stretched their limbs or greeted their families and their neighbours. It was another working day but an exciting one for the children there. The usual routines could be discarded. The village and the workshops would be empty until the new shaft had been dug and the quality of the new stone tested.

The hill was reached by taking paths across the coastal, cliff-top bracken until a bluff of chalk with seams of flint was met. Then the paths converged as there was only one route forward, a steep track with two rock sentries. The youngsters reached it first and for reasons of their age took the gradient at a sprint. Behind, the older men and women, still half awake on this latest day of labour, were less eager to begin. They made their way through the bracken, some singly, some in pairs, so that to a hawk – be grateful to my father for the image – their progress would seem like a waterfall of people, a dozen slow streams meeting in an impatient, fresh cascade.

My father’s ornateness as a storyteller cannot obscure the one plain truth that needs no hawk for decoration – that the village was obsessed with work, with industry, with craft. It made the people purposeful, wealthy, strong. It made them weary too, and a little jealous of the outside world beyond the hill, beyond the warren of mineshafts, its drifts of unworked flint.

‘There were outsiders close by on that morning,’ said my father. ‘As we came onto the hill, breathless from the climb, all could see a distant, breakfast fire, plaiting a rope of smoke for the sky. There was the sneeze of tethered horses. There was the smell of meat.’

Here, perhaps, we should raise an eyebrow. Beware of father’s tongue. He has led us in his story to the hill and what we might expect is some detail of the labour there, the firing of the grass and gorse and heather, the loosening of the turf, the breaking of the chalk, the shifting of the stones as a hundred people went to work, the tedium. Instead, my father said, he slipped away. No one missed him. He walked towards the smoke. The men there called him over. They let him feed the horses with long grass. They gave him bread and rabbit. There was more laughter amongst these dozen than amongst the hundred on the hill. They blew birdsong with blades of grass. They were in no hurry to begin the business of their day.

Later they put him on a horse and rode away from the coast. He visited their encampment of houses made from skin and wood and played with boys of his own age whose hair was long and tempers short. Some time later he returned to the hill along the landmarks that he had noted in the morning, the fallen tree, the rookery, the clearing with the spongy path, the bluff. The villagers were hard at work. Men were disappearing underground to shoulder height and loosening the chalk with antler picks for the children and the women to load in baskets and dispose. No one had remarked on his departure or greeted his return. For all they knew or cared he had been relieving himself behind a bush. That was his day of labour. And though our eyebrows may be raised when we consider the facts that father conjured for us, the challenge that he made was this: Who there, amongst the hundred on the hill, did not take a journey on that day? The eye is focused on the stone that must be lifted to the shoulder and then pushed onto the broken turf at the rim of the pit. And then the next stone. And the next stone too. All day. That is how the job is done. The body is engaged. But the mind is like the hawk that father summoned for the image of the paths and the waterfall. It can fly. If one of the men had clapped his hands at one instant in the deepening of the pit and asked, ‘Where are you?’, not one would answer, ‘Hard at work upon the hill.’ They were elsewhere. Kings and heroes. Young again. Out at sea. In love. Winning arguments that they had lost the night before. Eating well. Rich. Walking in the forest to the plume of smoke that beckoned there. Hunting scallops with their toes.

T
HE FLINT FROM
that new pit was smoky brown with mottles in grey and yellow. My father’s generation was practised in the sorting of the stone. Its colour did not count. It was from weight and form that the villagers could tell with half a glance the way the stone would split, which piece would hold firm for an axe-head, which would fracture into scrapers, which were the most suitable for slingshot, what to keep for best, what to jettison at once, where the sharpest blade was seated in the planes and fissures of the stone.

Now, with an amputation on their hands and with a dying boy, stunned and mewling from the pain and poison in his arm, they searched amongst the unworked flint with care. What was needed was a knife with an edge so fine that it could sever father’s elbow, cut the sinew and the flesh in such a way that any wound would mend. Anyone who has plucked and split a chicken for the spit will know how hard it is to separate the meat and bone, to snap a wing or leg cleanly at the joint and separate the limb. It is best done cooked and with the teeth. (And here, of course, if there were children in his audience, my father would not resist the obvious embellishment to his tale, that this was his fate too. They cooked his raw and living flesh over the fire and removed his poisoned arm with forty bites. There were the teeth marks still. He would present his puckered stump – not too slowly, not too close. And, indeed, you thought you saw the logic to his lies – those indentations, those pussy fissures and frowning scars could be the work of mouths.)

But once again it is the plainer story that we favour, the one which places father on his bed, semiconscious, weak, his elbow pierced and swollen, his wrist and hand caked in blood from the morning’s black and self-inflicted wound. Someone stood and rubbed water on his forehead, on his lips. Nothing could be done until a knife was made.

A stone was chosen from the spoils of the new pit. It was hoof-shaped with a tendon-like ridge running from its ankle. With luck there was a good blade within, but tools do not simply drop from flints like pips from pods. The patience and the artistry of a craftsman is what it takes. And some luck, too. And, as luck would have it, there was a craftsman in the village at that time renowned for the sharpness of his blades. Renowned also for the bluntness of his tongue, his dolefulness, rigidity. I will not say his family name for my father never used it. Behind his back he called him Leaf, like all the other boys. The reason is no mystery. This man would always keep a leaf upon his bench. He could replicate its shape in flint, its texture almost, its autumn colours, its patina. He aimed to match its thickness, too, its thinness. But its weight? Would he ever come that close?

Leaf was the man given the task of fashioning the amputation knife. Here it is certain that my father’s version of events was cake of his own making. How could he have known how Leaf went to work and the problems that the craftsman met – my father was dreaming, dying in another house. He could scarcely brush away a fly. So here I must abduct my father’s story for a while and spend some time – as father never would – talking of our village skill with flints. We have before us, on a bench placed in the good light of a workshop yard, a hoof of stone.

This is a moment of great patience. Leaf would not wish to work the flint too soon despite the boy and his condition. He had first to picture in his mind’s eye the type of blade, its length, its weight, most suited for the amputation.

Leaf’s huts were on the windy brow of the village, above the beach and sea. But we should not picture him walking to the shore, absently popping the wrack, or even looking out to sea to gain his working focus and his inspiration. He did not like the beach with its unruly rocks, its colonies of weed, its changing shape. If he could he would have squared it off. Where was the utility of the sea? What was its symmetry?

Our village looked inland. We were not fishermen. Fish was bad to eat – though gulls’ eggs, crabs and shells were welcome in the spring. And we were not sailors either. The sea brought no one luck and so we stayed away. Lives were passed in this one place, working stone and seeking respite from the wind. For the villagers then, a still day was a day when their hair simply lifted from their foreheads. It didn’t tug their scalps. It didn’t slap their faces. And so we should picture Leaf in that short time before he struck the flint, crouching for protection behind the wall of his workshop yard, holding a wet finger to the cracks to check for draughts, pushing fussy wads of moss between the stones, vainly wiping strands of hair across his head (for he was almost bald), and imagining the perfect blade that he would make. His youngest daughter had lit the fire with driftwood and with bracken. Its flames hardly danced. Leaf’s walls had all but stunned the wind.

He took the flint and turned it in his hands. Would it do for such a task? Leaf wanted even-textured, predictable stone. Flawless stone. He wanted stone that would not shatter but would fracture at the point that he dictated. All looked well enough. He moved his daughter from the fire and placed the unworked flint into the ashes and the flames. She brought the bellows and pumped heat into the fire. The grey and yellow mottles on the flint darkened to match the brown. Leaf squatted at his daughter’s side and watched. He dare not let the flint turn black. It could split or splinter. But he wanted a hot stone, one that could be worked easily and precisely and at speed, one that would open from the delicate, controlled impact of the softest hammer. Cold stone was resistant to the gentle arts of knapping. Hot stone was best. His daughter brought two long slates from his basket of tools. Once her father had sat on his stool with a flat stone anvil on his knees, she retrieved the heated flint with her slate tongs. She put it on the anvil and, spacing her legs for a firmer stance, held the stone in place. ‘Now all that stood between me and death,’ said father, relishing his circumstance, ‘was a hoof of roasted stone and a hairless, trembling Leaf.’

L
EAF’S FIRST BLOWS
were simple ones, and hardly trembling. He had to form a rough but tidy core from the quarried flint so that it would sit firmly on his anvil. One blow with a crude stone hammer removed the flint’s grey rind. Another squared its base. A third removed a nugget of intrusive chalk. It was a simple matter requiring not skill or strength, but confidence. The core stone that remained would have served elsewhere, in some less sophisticated place, as an implement in itself. You could club a man to death with such a stone, or crack nuts. Where was the craft in that? But how to make a knife? Where to begin?

Untutored hands would muster all their energy and smack the hammer on the flint. With luck, there might be tiny scrapers accidentally made that would serve as barbs for arrows or for cleaning skins. But only one stone, thus struck, in twenty thousand would provide, by chance, a long, strong splinter for a blade. Craftsmen – cautious, focused, their tongues curled and dry – would take their time. They would seek to understand the stone, to know its valleys and its hills. That tendonlike ridge on the hoof of stone – was it the length and thickness, would it serve as a blank for the amputation knife? Could it be detached easily from the core?