Chapter Two — The Tin

They buried him in the rain that had been certainly coming, and the town came, the way the town always came, and stood in it. The priest said the things. The grave was cut into the clay above the old workings, where the ground was good for nothing now but the dead, and you could see from the lip of it, between two umbrellas, the black winding-gear at the end of the Pastoorstraat standing over the whole business like a foreman who'd stopped pretending to work.

The old men from the club came in their one suit each. They stood in a knot to the side, caps in their hands, water running off their bald heads, and they did not cry, because men of that town did not cry at a grave any more than they'd have cried going down the cage in the morning — they did the other thing, the thing they did at the loft window on a hard Saturday when the sky stayed empty: they waited it out with their faces shut. De Staf, one of them said, just the name, the way you'd say it stepping into the café, and another nodded, and that was the eulogy that counted.

A hard man Lieselot didn't know stood at the back in clean shoes. She noticed the shoes because everyone else's were ruined in the clay and his were not, polished, dark, out of place at the edge of the grave like a man who'd come to a different appointment — a man who'd come to collect, not to grieve. He didn't look at the coffin. He looked at her. When the first clay went down he was already turning to go, and Jules — old Jules Lemmens, who'd flown against Staf for fifty years and was the only one of them who came and stood by her instead of in the knot — Jules put a hand on her arm, light as a bird, and steered her the other way before she could place the face, and said nothing about it, and that was a kindness she'd only understand later.

Bram cried. Bram cried the way he did everything, too much and too late and with an audience, and three pils in already at eleven in the morning, and the town watched him do it and filed it away, the son, the way they'd been filing it away his whole life.

Afterward there was coffee and a plate of things at the parish hall, and the town said its piece — he was the last of them, the last real one, there'll not be another — and shook Lieselot's hand one cold wet hand after another, and asked her what she'd do with the loft now, every one of them, in one form or another, with a look that already knew she'd sell and was already a little disappointed in her for it. She said we'll see forty times. By two o'clock they had gone home to their own birds, because it was a Saturday in April after all, and a man could be buried and the racing still want doing.

She walked home alone. She did not go in the house. She went down the garden in the thinning rain to the loft, because the birds wanted feeding, and feeding them was a thing she could do with her hands while the rest of her stood off to the side.

Inside, the hok was dry and warm and smelt of itself — the corn and the lime and the dusty animal warmth of them — and the rain went on the felt roof, and the forty birds shifted and muttered on their perches and watched her with their orange eyes do the thing the old man had done at four for forty years. She filled the hopper. She changed the water. The blue hen, De Late, came down off the third perch to the floor and walked the wire near her hand, not tame, not wild, just there, watching, and Lieselot did not put her hand to it. She filled the grit pot. She scraped the boards.

When there was nothing left to do with her hands she stood in the middle of the loft a moment in the falling light, and the birds settled around her, and it was the quietest place she'd been all day. Then she went up to the house and got the tin off the bed where it had sat through the Mass not getting lighter, and she brought it back down to the loft, because if she was going to open the thing she would rather do it here, among the only witnesses Staf had ever trusted, than in the kitchen where her father would come back to.

She sat on the upturned feed crate he'd always sat on. She put the tin on her knees.

Alone, the notary had said. He was clear. Well. She was alone, near enough. Forty pairs of eyes didn't count.

The lid had been on so long it had married itself to the tin, and she had to work it, her thumbnail in the seam all the way round, and when it came it came suddenly with a small dry breath of air gone stale years ago, the smell of inside, of paper kept too long and a faint oil-metal underneath it, and she had it open on her knees in the loft with the rain on the roof and she looked down into the thing her grandfather had spent six years in a safe and forty years before that not destroying.

On top, a letter. Folded in three, the paper gone the colour of weak tea at the creases, his hand on the outside of it — she knew his hand, the cramped upright miner's copperplate they'd flogged into him at the parish school in the twenties and that had never once relaxed — one word, her name. Lieselot. Not to Lieselot, not for my granddaughter. Just the name, the way the old men said it at a grave. As if she were a place you addressed a thing to.

She did not open it first. She lifted it out and set it on the crate beside her, careful, the way you'd lift a bird, and looked at what was under it, because she was a coward and she knew it and she'd rather meet the thing sideways.

Under the letter was a clock.

Not a watch. A clock — a constateur, the timing clock, the kind that lived sealed in the wooden box on the high shelf at the club and got brought down twice a Saturday with the reverence of a monstrance. She knew the shape of one without ever having held one. It was brass and it was old, far older than the one at the club now, a heavy round drum of a thing in a battered wooden case the size of two fists, a winding key folded against its side, a slot in the top where the rubber ring went in, a small glass face. It was beautiful in the way tools are beautiful, made to do one thing and do it true. She lifted it out and it was heavier than it looked — heavier than it had any business being, she thought, for a thing that only had to weigh the truth — and she turned it in the loft light and the brass had a deep dull shine where two generations of hands had held it in the one place, and on the base, scratched in, not stamped, a number and a year. 58.

She did not know yet what it was. She knew it was wrong for it to be here. That much the body knew before the head did. A man's race clock belonged to the club, was sealed by the club, was opened by the club; you did not keep one in a tin in a safe for forty years any more than you kept the chalice from the church under your bed. The wrongness of it sat in her hands with the weight of it. A thing built to tell the truth, she thought, not knowing yet why she thought it, kept because it had been made to lie.

She set it down beside the letter, gently, the way you set down a thing you've started to be afraid of.

Under the clock, a paper. A strip of paper, narrow and long, yellowed, rolled and gone flat with the years, the kind that fed through a clock's drum and took the punch of the time on it. There were marks on it she couldn't read — a column of small punched figures, times, a smudge of old ink — the record of one race, kept the way the clock was kept, when both of them should have been broken open in front of officials and read and put away in the club's memory and not in a dead man's tin. She didn't understand it. She understood it was a second wrong thing, twin to the first, and she put it down with the clock and didn't pick it up again.

And under the paper, at the bottom of the tin, a notebook. A cheap school exercise book, the cardboard cover soft as cloth, the kind you bought six for a franc, and she opened it and it was not racing notes, or not the ones she'd expected. It was a column of figures going down the page and over the next page and the next, dozens of them, scores of them, every one dated, the dates marching down the years — '59, '61, '64 — sums of money, small sums, a few hundred francs here, a thousand there, set down in his cramped hand in two columns like a man keeping a tab he was paying off and never finished paying. And at the head of each page, no explanation, no word, only a name. The same name, page after page, year after year, the only word in the book that wasn't a number.

Bery.

She did not know the name. She turned the pages and the name kept coming, the dates kept coming, the small sums kept going out into the dark to a man called Bery for forty years, and she sat in the loft with the rain on the roof and the cold coming up off the floor through the crate and could not make the figures into anything but what they plainly were, which was a debt. A debt her grandfather had carried, quietly, in secret, in a school exercise book at the bottom of a tin, all her life and longer, to a name she'd never heard him say once.

The clean shoes at the grave. The hard man who'd looked at her and not the coffin. She didn't connect them, not yet, not with words — but something in her connected, the way the birds had turned south all at once, all of them, before she'd thought to look.

She put the notebook down with the rest of it.

That left the letter.

She picked it up off the crate. The birds had gone still around her; the loft was nearly dark now, the last grey light coming flat through the wire, and she had to tilt the paper to the window to read it, and she unfolded it, the three soft creases opening like something reluctant, and the first lines were at the top in his hand, the same flogged copperplate, steadier than she'd have thought for the hand of a man whose hands at the end couldn't strip a ring off a bird.

Lieselot, it said. You will have looked at the clock first because you are mine and you go at things sideways. Good. Then you already half know.

And then:

The 1958 race was not mine. I made the clock lie.

She stopped.

She read the line again, and a third time, and the words did not change and did not soften and did not turn into some other thing she'd misread in the bad light. I made the clock lie. The clock that lived on her knee a foot away. The clock with 58 scratched in the base. The 1958 race — the race, the only one, the Barcelona that the whole town pinned its whole self to, the win with his name in gold leaf on the board at the club, the win that was the last and best thing this dead place had ever done, the thing they'd all stood in the rain that morning to bury the last of — the 1958 race was not mine.

She did not read the next line.

She found she had stopped reading the way you stop walking when the ground isn't where your foot expected it, a lurch, a body refusing before the mind has agreed to anything, and her eyes were on the page and going no further, the words after I made the clock lie just shapes now, grey on grey, and she did not read them, she could not, not tonight, not with him a day in the ground and the whole town still wet from telling her he was the last real one, he was honest, there'll not be another.

She folded the letter back along its creases. Three folds. Her hands did it on their own, very carefully, as if the thing might wake.

She sat in the dark loft with the clock and the strip of paper and the book of a forty-year debt and the unread half of her grandfather's confession on her knees, and the birds breathed around her, and the rain eased off the roof to nothing, and out beyond the wire the south of the sky went down past grey to black over the dead winding-gear, and she understood — without words, the way she understood the hour the birds turned — that she was the only living person who knew. That the town that had buried him today as its one true thing had buried a lie, and didn't know, and she knew, and he had made sure of it, he had reached up out of the clay and made certain that of all the people he could have handed it to — the club, the notary, his own son — he handed it to her, fifteen, in a cold shed, alone, because she was the one he'd told the truth to, and that was supposed to be love, and it sat on her chest like the clock in her hands, heavier than a thing that small had any right to be.

He loved me, she thought, and could not finish it, because the other half of the thought was and he lied to all of them, and there was nowhere in her, not yet, where the two would sit down together.

She did not cry. She'd cried for nothing all day and she did not cry now, when there was something. She put the lid back on the tin — the letter, the book, the strip of paper, and last the clock, settling its weight down into the bottom — and she pressed the lid till the old seam took, and the air went out of it in its small stale breath, and the tin was shut.

It was not lighter for being shut. She'd known it wouldn't be.

She came up the garden in the full dark. The kitchen window was lit; Bram was back, then, slumped at the table with the bottle and the radio low, the local station doing the racing results from the day's vitesse in the flat reverent voice they used, and from the loft of, and a name, and a velocity, somebody's good Sunday read out to a town that lived for it. He didn't look up. He'd be hours yet at the bottom of himself.

She did not go in. She stood at the foot of the garden with the tin held against her in both arms like a thing you'd carry out of a fire, and she looked back down at the loft, the dark squat shape of it against the last of the sky, where forty birds slept with their heads turned in under their wings, not knowing — still not knowing, never to know — that the man who'd built them, who'd lifted her to that window when she was small so she'd be the first to spot the speck that was his bird coming home, had not won the race that made them what they were. That the line ran back, every bird of it, to a Sunday in 1958 and a clock made to lie about a handful of minutes, and that the most valuable thing in the dead town, the fortune in feathers at the bottom of a miner's garden, was built on a theft, and was hers now, and she could not give it back and she could not keep it clean and she had not even read to the end of the letter that told her so.

The notary's voice came back to her, flat, kind, standing at the kitchen table the night before with the will in his soft clean hands. He was a stubborn old man, your father. But he was honest. The cruellest thing said in that kitchen all night, and she'd had no idea, and now she had every idea, and there was no one to tell that it was funny, because it was not funny at all.

Down at the end of the Pastoorstraat the winding-gear stood black against the black. Somewhere down the row a last clock struck the hour a beat behind the church, the way every clock in the world is a beat behind some other clock, a beat that in 1958 had been worth a man's whole life and nobody had ever known but two, and now one of those two was in the clay and the other was a name in a book in a tin in her arms, a name she'd say out loud for the first time tomorrow, or the day after, or whenever she found the nerve to read the rest of what a dead man had left the only person he ever told the truth to.

Bery.

She went inside, past her father, up the stairs, and put the tin on the floor of her wardrobe under the man's anorak she'd taken to wearing because it was there, and shut the door on it, and lay down on the bed without undressing, and listened to the wind get up out of the south off the water it had crossed, carrying nothing she could name, and did not sleep for a long time, and did not, in all that time, once miss him.