The Gift of Stones Read Free

before. Eating well. Rich. Walking in the forest to the plume of smoke that beckoned there. Hunting scallops with their toes.

3
    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