Chapter Three — The Will's Teeth

It did rain, the way the town had promised itself it would, a fine grey rain that did not so much fall as hang, and the whole of Sint-Amandsheide stood in it at eleven o'clock and watched Staf Maes go into the ground with their collars up and their faces wet and could not have said, any of them, whether the wet was the rain or themselves.

Lieselot stood at the lip of the grave between her father and the priest and looked at the brass on the coffin and thought about feed.

She thought about feed because it was a thing she could do something about, and the rest of it she could not. She had given the birds their morning ration before the cars came, gone down the garden in her good shoes with the bag of the depurative mix Jules had told her to start them on, the light stuff, the cleaning-out stuff, and she had scattered it badly and watched the forty heads go down and had felt, standing there in the loft smell with the rain not yet started, more like a person than she would feel all day. So now, at the grave, with the priest saying the words about resurrection that the town did not believe and would not be told it didn't, she thought about whether she'd given them enough or too much, and whether the young cock, the nervy one Staf had called Manneke, had eaten at all, because he hadn't, he'd stood off in the corner with his shoulders up, and a bird that won't eat is a bird telling you something you don't want to hear.

The priest finished. The town crossed itself. Somewhere off the back of the crowd a man coughed the deep coal cough, the one half of them had, and it was the most honest sound made at the graveside all morning.

They came past her after, one by one, the whole town, and took her hand in their two hands and looked at her with the wet faces and said the thing. He was the last of something. They said it in the words they had — amai, kindje, and a hard one, your opa, a hard one — but it all came to the same, and what it meant, she understood, standing there having her hand pressed by men who smelled of pils and rain and birds, was not we are sorry he is dead. It was we are sorry he is dead because now there is one less of us who remembers when we were a place. They were not burying a grandfather. They were burying a Saturday in 1958 that they had each, every one of them, spent their whole lives standing inside.

She let them. She had her own face for it, the shut one, and she wore it, and they took the shut face for grief and were glad of it, because a town wants its dead wept for and she was the only one with the standing to do the weeping, and she would not give them even that, and they did not know she was withholding it, and that was its own small mercy.

Her father wept. Bram wept the loud unashamed way of a man three drinks past being able to choose, his big hand over his mouth, and the town liked him better for it than it had liked him in years, and he knew it, even drunk he knew it, and Lieselot watched her father be loved for crying at the grave of the man who had passed him over, and understood something about her father that she did not have words for and did not want.

The buyer was there. She didn't know it yet.

He stood off at the edge of things by the chapel wall in a coat too good for the town, a square soft man of maybe sixty with a driver waiting in a clean grey car at the cemetery gate, and he watched the burial the way you watch an auction lot being walked out, with a kind of patient appetite, and at one point he caught Bram's eye across the graves and Bram, drunk, lifted his chin to him, the smallest nod, the nod two men give who have already had a conversation. Lieselot saw it and filed it and did not understand it, then.

She understood it an hour later, back at the house, when the cars had gone and the town had gone to the lokaal to drink to Staf properly, the way it wanted to, and her father came in out of the rain with his black tie pulled loose and sat down heavy at the kitchen table and said, not looking at her, "There's a man wants to see the birds."

"What man."

"A man." Bram turned the salt cellar round on the oilcloth, round and round. "From up by Antwerp. He buys lines. Good lines." He said good lines the way he said most things, like he was quoting someone who'd hurt him. "He came down for the funeral special. That's respect, that is. A man drives down from Antwerp for a funeral, that's a man who knows what your opa was."

"He came down to look at the loft."

"He came," said Bram, "to pay respects." But the salt cellar went round and round.

"How much."

Her father looked up at her then, and for a second there was something in his wet drunk face that she would think about later, something that was almost relief, almost gratitude, the look of a man who has been dreading a fight and finds the other person already knows the shape of it. "Enough," he said. "Lieseke. Enough to clear what I owe and a good bit over. Enough that I never have to—" He stopped. He didn't say be this. He gestured around the kitchen, at the cold range, at the house his father had paid off and left to him because at least a house can't be ruined by the man who has it. "Enough," he said again. "He'll take the lot. The whole loft, the records, the line of the 58, all of it, one price. He'll take it off your hands tomorrow and you can go back to being fifteen."

"It's not yours to sell."

"I'm your father."

"It's not yours to sell," she said again, in the flat voice, and watched the word father sit there between them not doing anything, the way it usually didn't.

"You don't even like them," Bram said, and there it was again, the one true thing, the family's one reliable knife, and he picked it up the way he always did, by the blade, so it cut him too. "You never went near them. Fifteen years and you never once— and now you're going to stand in my kitchen and tell me—" He pressed the heels of his hands into his eyes. When he took them away his face had gone soft and pleading and worse than angry. "It's a way out, Lieseke. For both of us. He left you a way out. Whatever he was thinking, leaving them to you and not me— maybe that was him being smart for once. You take the money. You take the money and you go to your schools in the city and you're shot of this whole— this whole graveyard of a town. He'd want that for you. He would."

And the worst of it, she thought, was that her father believed it. That her father had built, in the few hours since the grave closed, an entire little church around the idea that selling the dead man's birds was a thing the dead man would have blessed, and that he, Bram, was doing it out of love. He half was. That was the part she couldn't get her hands round. He half was.

"There's a condition," she said. "On the will. You heard it."

"Coemans's lawyer talk."

"Fly them or lose them. This season. Under the name. If they sit a year they go to the club, or they're sold and the money goes—" She stopped where Coemans had stopped. Elsewhere. She knew now where elsewhere was. She had a tin upstairs with a column of figures in it and a name at the head of the column, and she was not going to say that name in this kitchen to this drunk man. "—the money goes somewhere else. Not to us. So if you sell them, you sell them broken. You sell them out of the season and you've broken the one thing that made them worth what your man from Antwerp wants to pay."

She had not known she knew that until she said it. She'd worked it out somewhere in the back of herself, in the part of her that was good at the thing she'd spent fifteen years refusing to be good at — the part that ran the numbers, the velocities, the angles, the part that was, she was beginning to suspect with a low dread, exactly her grandfather's part. The line of the 58 was worth a fortune because it raced and won. A loft that didn't fly was just forty birds in a shed. Staf had tied the money to the flying on purpose. He'd built a trap out of his own legend, and the jaws of it were: to be worth selling, they had to be flown; to be flown, they had to be hers; and to keep them hers, she had to do the one thing she'd sworn she never would.

Bram stared at her. Slowly, slowly, the drunk fog of him understood that his daughter had just, in two sentences, taken the floor out from under the only plan he had.

"He did that on purpose," Bram said.

"Yes."

"The old—" Bram's mouth worked. He looked, for a moment, like he might laugh, or weep, or put his fist through the cold range. "He did it from the grave. He reached up and—" He shook his head. "You know what he was, your opa. You think you do because he was good to you. But you don't know what he was. None of you know what he was."

It was the closest her father had ever come to the truth, and he didn't know he'd said it, and he said it as a complaint about being passed over, and Lieselot, who had a tin upstairs that knew exactly what Staf Maes was, said nothing, and held her father's drunk eyes, and felt the whole weight of the thing she now carried alone settle a little lower on her, like water finding its level.

She went back to the cemetery in the afternoon. She told herself it was to get out of the house and away from her father, and that was half of it.

The rain had thinned to nearly nothing. The new grave was a wound of dark earth in the grey grass, the flowers already going flat and brown at the edges, the wreaths the town had sent leaned against the temporary cross with their ribbons running ink in the wet. VAN UW VRIENDEN VAN DE VERRE THUIS. From your friends at De Verre Thuis. The club had sent the biggest one, of course. The club always sent the biggest one.

There was a man at the grave.

He had his back to her and a flat cap in his two hands, held down in front of him, and he stood at the foot of the grave not the head, off to the side, the way you stand at a grave you have not come to mourn. He was big through the shoulders and gone still in the way that big men go still, and his shoes — she saw them before she saw anything else about him — his shoes were clean. Good black shoes, polished, the rain beaded on them, not a speck of the cemetery's mud on them anywhere, in a town where every man's shoes carried the place on them like a second skin. A man who had stepped from a clean car to a grave and would step back to a clean car and take none of it with him.

He heard her on the gravel and turned.

He was about her father's age but nothing like her father. Heavy-faced, hard, the face of a man who has held something in for so long that holding it in has become his face. He looked at her the way Coemans had looked at her, a beat too long, except that where Coemans had been measuring her against a document, this man was measuring her against something older, and she could not read it, and it made the back of her neck go cold the way the tin had.

"You're the girl," he said.

"I'm the granddaughter."

Something crossed his face at granddaughter — not quite a flinch, the ghost of one, gone before it landed. He looked back down at the grave, at the dark earth, at the club's enormous wreath, and his jaw worked once, slow, the way Bram's did, except Bram's worked toward saying a cruel thing and stopping, and this man's worked toward saying nothing at all and almost failing.

"He's down there, then," the man said.

"Since this morning."

"Aye." He turned the cap in his hands, once, all the way round. "Forty years he was up there"—he didn't look at her, he tipped his clean-shod chin off toward the town, toward the lokaal where the wreaths came from, toward the honour board she hadn't yet seen with Staf's name in gold leaf at the top of it—"up there in all of it. And now he's down here. Same as everybody. Funny how that works." He said funny like it was the bitterest word he owned. "You wait and you wait for a man to be brought low and then God does it for nothing, does it to everybody, for free, and it doesn't—" He stopped. He'd said more than he'd meant to. She watched him gather himself back behind the still face, the way you'd watch a man button a coat against weather.

"Did you know him," she said. "My grandfather."

The man looked at her then, full on, and there was forty years in the look, and she had no idea yet what was in it, only that it was old and that it was about her grandfather and that it was the opposite of every wet-faced thing the town had pressed into her hand that morning. The town had buried a hero. This man had come to make sure a hero was dead.

"You've got his birds, then," he said.

It wasn't a question. He said it the way you confirm a thing you have driven a long way to confirm. You've got his birds, then. And there was no grief in it and no kindness in it and no condolence in it; there was something underneath it that ran down and down, past the grave, past 1994, down to a Saturday in a year before either of them was born to it, and she felt it without understanding it, felt the floor of the morning drop away under the four flat words, and she thought, with a cold clear certainty that had nothing to do with anything she could prove: Bery. This is the name in the tin.

"Yes," she said. Because she would not give him less than the truth, even the small truth, even before she knew what the truth was. "I've got his birds."

He nodded, once, slow, like a man receiving a debt he had always known was owed. He set the cap on his head. He looked once more at the dark wet earth, and whatever he said to it he said inside himself, his lips not moving, and then he turned to go, his clean shoes on the gravel, and she let him take three steps before the thing in her that ran the numbers made her open her mouth.

"What's your name," she said.

He stopped. He didn't turn all the way back. She saw the side of his hard face, the rain on the brim of the cap.

"He'll have told you," the man said. "If he told you anything at all. If he was honest with you at the end the way he never was with—" He cut it off. "You'll know my name when you've earned it, girl. Or when you've decided what you are. One or the other." And he walked away down the cemetery path to the gate where the clean grey car was waiting, the same car, she realised, the buyer's car, no — not the buyer's, another car, she'd confused them, two clean cars at a poor town's funeral in one day and both of them there for the birds and neither of them there for the man — and a younger man got out of the driver's side and held the door, a hard young face that looked at her across all the graves with no patience in it at all, none of the older man's terrible control, just a flat young anger looking for somewhere to land, and then the doors shut and the car pulled out into the grey and was gone toward the road that went somewhere.

Jules found her still standing there.

She didn't hear him come; old men in this town moved over wet ground like they'd been doing it eighty years, which he had. He came and stood beside her at the grave, not too close, a small tidy old man in a good worn coat, smelling faintly of the loft and of tea, and he didn't say anything for a while, and that was the first restful thing that had happened to her all day, a grown person standing beside her who did not need her to be sad in a particular way.

"That was Bery," she said. Not a question.

Jules looked off at the gate where the car had been. His face did a careful thing, the thing she'd see it do all season, the thing of an old man deciding how much of a dangerous load to set down at one time.

"That was Marcel Bery," he said.

"He came to the funeral to look at me."

"He came," Jules said, "to make sure." He bent, slowly, and straightened the club's wreath where the wind had tipped it, a small unconscious tidiness, the hand that was never wrong with a thing. "There's history there, Lieseke. Between that family and this loft. Old history." He said old history the way the buyer said respect and Bram said good lines — a phrase laid carefully over a hole so you wouldn't see the bottom of it. "It's not for today. You've put your opa in the ground today; that's enough work for one day. The rest of it"—he straightened, brushed the wet off his hands—"the rest of it keeps. It's kept forty years. It can keep a season."

It can keep a season. She heard the false bottom in it even then. She heard a kind old man tell her a kind old lie, the same lie the whole town was built on, the lie that was carved in gold leaf on a board she hadn't seen yet — let it keep, let the dead keep their secrets, let it lie.

And up the hill the loft was waiting with its forty birds and the nervy young cock who wouldn't eat, and in her room the tin was waiting with the name in it she now had a face for, and she understood, standing in the thin rain over the raw grave with the one honest adult in the town telling her gently to let it lie, that everyone older than her had already decided to let it lie, every single one, that they had each made their peace with the same small rot forty years ago and would go on making it forever, and that the only person in Sint-Amandsheide who had not yet decided whether to let it lie was a fifteen-year-old girl with bitten nails who had wanted, more than anything in the world, never to have to decide anything here at all.

"What did he do," she said. "My grandfather. To that man."

Jules was quiet a long moment. The rain came off the brim of his cap in a fine thread.

"Feed your birds," he said at last, gently, which was not an answer and was the truest answer he had. "That young cock's off his food — I saw it this morning. He'll come right or he won't, but you watch him. You watch him tonight." He put his hand on her shoulder, once, light, the only touch all day she didn't want to shrug off, and took it away. "Birds first," he said. "The rest of it'll still be rotten in the morning."

He walked her to the gate. The grey car was long gone down the road that went somewhere, and behind them the new earth darkened in the rain over the man the town had buried as a hero and one man had buried as something else, and Lieselot went home up the dead high street to feed a bird that wouldn't eat, carrying a name she'd been given and refused, carrying the will's two teeth — fly them or lose them — closing on her from both sides at once, and behind her face, where no one could see it, the part of her that ran the numbers had already started, against her every wish, to work.