The Gift of Stones Read online

  3

  THE 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.’

  4

  LEAF’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?

  Leaf placed his sharpened antler tine on the flint, exactly where the tendon was attached, and struck it with a wooden mallet. These were the perfect tools but only in hands like Leaf’s that were firm and certain. If the direction of his impact were a feather’s breadth too shallow the fracture would surface too soon. The knife blade would be shorter than a thumb. It would be chisel-shaped. Or, if the impact were a feather’s breadth too deep, the fracture would plunge so that its blade end curved in a lumpy hook, a talon, a beak, a keel. Who’d want a poisoned arm removed with that?

  For Leaf himself there was no tension. He knew what to do. He’d done it many times. One blow and the blade blank broke loose, spiralled for an instant on the anvil and fell into the apron on Leaf’s lap. There, on its underside at the point of impact, was the distinctive raised tump of stone, like a tiny bulb or a winkle shell. Beyond, in the foothills of the tump, the flint feathered and radiated like a slow tide on a flat beach. It was a good, long blade, still warm from the fire.

  Once again Leaf and his daughter ret
urned the stone to the flames. Leaf exercised his hands and – half exultant, half impatient – blew out his cheeks to match the working of the bellows. He chose the best tools from his workshop for turning the blank into a finished blade. He sat, with a different, lighter anvil on his knees, to receive the hot stone. Again he worked with antler tines but with no hammer. A little sideways pressure removed the tump, the shell, the bulb. More pressure produced a mounting nest of fine and shallow flakes on the anvil as the blade was patterned and reduced.

  Enough, you say. A boy awaits. The afternoon has almost gone. There is no need to detail the patience and the expertise with which Leaf etched a pattern of shallow facets along the cutting edge, or how the flint’s parallel flaking scars were ground ice-flat with grains of sandstone, or how the stoneworker reconciled his quest for beauty, symmetry, utility with the urgency of his task. If there had been time he would have cut a block of ash and made a handle for such a knife. He would have fixed the blade into the ash with birch resin. It takes two days to harden. He would have worried at the flint until it had lost all resemblance to stone. As it was he simply rubbed the blade in grease, to boast its natural colours and to catch the light, and – picking up a few sharp scraps from the flake nest on his anvil – delivered his newest tool to the crowd who waited at his gate. He was not patient with their flattery. The blade was good, for sure. It’d do the job. But he was aggravated by the thought of what the new knife might have been were there time to finish. It would have been a tool too fine to use. It would have been an ornament.

  5

  THOSE OF US who have kicked an anthill will understand the chaos in the village. The dreaming ants, so used to patterns and to chores, had been sent wild and spirited by the unheralded disorder of the day and by this thin excuse to shout and smile and swagger. In the causeway between the huts and workshops, where normally at that hour in the afternoon there were only hens and children, the crowd was advancing with the amputation knife. Faces, which usually were white with dust and concentration from the shaping of the flint, were flushed and restive and keen to play a part. Voices were high and unrestrained. There were wars of jostling and of tripping in that crowd. It was as if the sober stoneys were all drunk and far too blithe to care exactly what it was that brought them there but only glad to be involved.

  There was a mood of unexpected celebration, too – not because the wounded boy – my father – was considered careless, indolent, untrustworthy, the sort who only had himself to blame for any ill-luck in his life, but because their rigid working day had been disrupted by the horsemen, by the making of the knife, by the prospect of a bloody afternoon.

  Who would carry out the operation? There were no volunteers. There was no man or woman among the villagers who could boast experience in such matters. And there was no time to fetch some expert from the outside world, some butcher-herbalist or adept knapper of the flesh. My father’s version of events expertly shapes a symmetry between his dying body on the bed – the stillness of the bulrush boy, with the blackening blood, the paling skin, the cold and sweaty forehead – and the bluster of the villagers faced with a task beyond their skills. A balding volunteer was quickly nominated, one who was not present in that room and so could hardly make his case for staying absent. Leaf should carry out the amputation, someone said. He’d made the knife. He would know its properties. Besides, he was the finest craftsman of them all. He had a steady hand. Compared to making leaves of stone it would be a quick and simple task for him to shorten this boy’s arm.

  Once again the crowd set off – this time, uphill, into the wind, towards the ocean brow. Come on, Leaf, they called. There’s work for you. No one was fool enough to specify. But Leaf would not leave his workshop – where he sat, another anvil on his knees, excavating oysters – until he knew the story. And then he wouldn’t move at all. He had no ambitions as a carver, was all that he would say. He had his lunch to eat. He’d done his share and made the knife. No more. Find some other sap to chop the boy in two.

  At last, of course, partly persuaded by the accusations that his reticence was merely cunning, that his knife was blunt and splintered and could not amputate a toadstool let alone an arm, Leaf was persuaded to leave his shellfish and his workshop and set off, downwind, towards – he thought – the dying, poisoned, bloodless boy. Meanwhile my father, for some reason unexplained and inappropriate for his condition, had begun to feel quite well again. His arm was painful, but the sleep had restored his spirits and reduced his fever. He sat up upon his bed and wondered what there was to eat about the house. He wondered, too, what all the noise was in the causeway beyond the wall. Slowly the possibility occurred that he would not need to lose his arm at all.

  His revival was not widely welcomed. Leaf and his companions were not relieved to see their patient standing at the gate, his expression once again the usual stew of idleness and insolence, his arm hanging heavily at his side. His liveliness presented them with problems. ‘He should be down and out,’ said Leaf. ‘I can’t cut a boy who’s half awake. He has to be unconscious.’ Some beer would have done the trick for a boy of father’s size. Or – better – a cup of wood spirit or headspin made from grain. But this was the village of stone where work and trade were king and queen. No one got drunk, no one had drink. The fabric of the village was made strong by the warp and weft of rules. Intoxicating drink was not allowed. It produced bad flint.

  They returned my father to his bed and debated their difficulty. Here they had a boy whose arm was damaged beyond repair. If they did not swiftly put Leaf ’s knife to use, first his shoulder, then his chest would succumb to the poison in the elbow. It might take hours, it could take weeks – but finally the boy would die. There is a limit to what can be cut away. You can’t remove a shoulder and a chest. But with a cussedness that matched his usual manner the boy was conscious. How could they put an end to that? There were those amongst them – Leaf included – who harboured thoughts that perhaps the village would be no weaker if the boy did die. He’d never make the best of workers. He had no love of stone. He spent too long idly on the beach, or in the woods. Such thoughts, of course, were left unvoiced. The warp and weft again demanded that the boy be saved. And now.

  It is not difficult to stun a sheep. A blow to the head with a wooden mallet is known to quiet the beast for the butcher’s knife. So it was with father. They thought they’d knock him out. Here the tale presents a boy of seven, already bloody from a wounded arm, stood up by men twice, three, four times his age and battered round the head. One misjudged fist blow to his nose caused more blood to flow. One mallet blow to his brow (to which, by now, we must add my father’s terror and his sobbing) brought up an instant, broken bruise in the shallow flesh above the skull. A last desperate finger chop to the nape of his neck caused the perpetrator more damage than the boy. He was not stunned. It was a scene too rough and comic to seem cruel. Those men who could strike a flint and dislocate its core with the force and delicacy of owls hunting mice and shrews could not bludgeon one small boy to sleep. It was a foreign craft.

  Here I am tempted to infiltrate my own concocted version of those moments in the past. I knew my father and his neighbours. Timid is the word. They could not strike a boy in such a heartless way. I imagine them frozen and hesitant at the very thought of it. The fist drawn back would not unleash itself. The raised mallet would be held back by the force of custom. Theirs was an ordered, working village. Scrapping was for cockerels.

  It was at this moment, then (my father cowering but untouched, Leaf’s new knife untested, the dusk upon them), that the horsemen of that morning returned to the village with goods to trade. They left their horses, as requested, in the care of children and proceeded on foot between the huts and workshops to the market green.

  It would be an error to imagine that just because a small boy had been injured and that a crowd had gathered for the amputation, that the working life of the villagers had ended for the day. There are those who cannot settle and for whom a
ny occurrence is excuse enough to form a crowd. But there are others, too, who never let their focus shift. The world could split in half and still they’d have their noses pointing down at the work bench or the stall. And so it was that the horsemen found a reduced but busy marketplace on their return and merchants there whose outrage at the wounding of a village boy was swiftly tamed by the usual courtesies of trade. Except, of course, that the crudely struck arrowhead that had caused such hilarity in the morning was prominently displayed amongst the local, finer tools so that the horsemen might understand exactly what debts there were to pay. Yet far from embarrassment at the rediscovery of their arrowhead these men were jocular. They pointed at the head and chuckled. So there it is, they seemed to say. They’d spent a lot of time in vain knocking back the bracken. They expressed no interest in the boy who’d last been seen in flight. In fact these horsemen did not seem reliable, predictable in any way. There was much laughter amongst them, and warmth and swagger, too. Their hair was long. Their clothes were decorated. The expression in their eyes was bold and childlike. They seemed at ease – yet wayward, loud and unrestrained.