Chapter Five — Honesty You Could Feel With Your Thumb

The basketing was on the Friday, and Jules came for her at half six in the van that smelled of corn and the dog he no longer had, and said nothing about it being her first time, which was how she knew he knew what it was.

She had the basket in her lap. Six birds in it, the six Jules had picked off the perch with his hands going over each one in a second the way a blind man reads a face, putting back the two she'd chosen because she liked the look of them, which was the wrong reason and he'd let her find that out by not arguing. Not that one. He's carrying water. Feel him. And she'd felt him, and felt nothing, and put him back anyway because Jules's certainty was a thing you didn't fight twice in a morning. The six in the basket now were cocks. They sat low and tight and did not coo. They had spent the week wanting their hens through a wire and the wanting had hollowed them out and lit them up at once, and you could feel it through the wicker against her knees, a kind of hum, six small motors idling toward home before they'd even been taken from it.

Weduwschap, Jules had called it. Widowhood. You took the hen away and the cock went half mad with it, and the half-madness was the engine, and the whole brutal art of it was to make the bird love something it couldn't have so it would tear the sky apart to get back. She'd thought it was the ugliest thing she'd ever heard when he first laid it out for her in the hok, flat, like feed instructions, and she'd said so, and Jules had looked at her with his pale wet eyes and said, Ge moogt het lelijk vinden. The birds don't. You're allowed to find it ugly. And gone back to the perches.

"You've the rings?" he said now, not looking from the road.

She had the rings. The numbered rubber rings the club would put on at the door, that was the club's job, but Jules meant Staf's loft stamp and the entry papers, and she had those, in Staf's old leather folder gone soft as a glove, with his name on every line in his own hand and a space at the bottom where her name had to go instead and didn't fit.

"I've them," she said.

"You'll let me do the talking and then you'll do it next time," Jules said. "That's the deal. I'm not doing it for you. I'm doing it once in front of you."

"You said that about the feeding."

"And now you do the feeding." He took the turn into the Stationsstraat, past the frituur with its blind down and the church with its one cracked bell that the town still rang at the wrong half-minute, a beat behind God, the way her grandfather's clock down the row had always struck a beat behind the church. "Same with this. Watch the once. Then it's yours."

She looked out the smeared window at the town going by in the grey, the cités with their dark halves, a man in a doorway with a dog and a cigarette and nowhere to be at half six on a Friday, the dead winding-gear standing up over all of it at the end of the long street like the last black tooth in a jaw. Twelve years shut. The thing that had pulled the whole town up out of the ground every morning and let it back down every night, that had been the only thing in Sint-Amandsheide that went somewhere and came back, until it stopped, and then the only thing left that went somewhere and came back was in a basket on her lap, idling, wanting a hen.

The club was a low brick building behind the café, joined to it by a corridor that smelled of both at once — old beer and pigeon. Het lokaal. She had never been inside it in her life. She had stood outside it as a child holding Staf's hand while he went in for ten minutes and came out smelling of smoke, and she had understood even then that it was a place for men and birds and not for her, a church with its own door, and she'd hated it the easy way you hate a place that won't have you.

It would have her now. That was the joke. She walked in behind Jules with the basket and the soft folder and the whole low warm room turned to look — fifteen, twenty old men, flat caps and good coats over working bodies, and a long table down the middle covered in green baize the colour of a billiard cloth, and on the table the clocks.

She had not been ready for the clocks.

She'd thought, a clock, and pictured something like Staf's brass thing in the tin, the one she had not been able to look at for more than a second before shutting the lid on it. But there were twenty of them, heavy wooden boxes the size of a small dog, dark with age and oil and handling, brass-cornered, each with its little glass window and its key and its crank, sitting in a row on the green baize like a congregation that had got there before her. Each man's clock. Each man's truth-machine, brought in to be made honest together. The whole sacrament of the thing was laid out on a billiard cloth in a back room behind a café in a dead town, and the men stood around it the way men stand around a thing they have done every Friday of their lives and would do until they died.

Jules put his hand flat on her shoulder blade, just for a second, just to move her forward, and then took it off.

"Maes," he said to the room. "Staf's loft. The girl's flying it this year."

Nobody said anything for a moment that was a beat too long, the way the kitchen had gone when Coemans read the will, the silence a room makes around a thing it isn't going to argue with and isn't going to welcome either. Then an old man near the table — small, with a face like a walnut and a cardigan buttoned to the throat — said, "Staf's girl," not to her, to the others, placing her, and a low murmur went round that she couldn't read, that had her grandfather's name in it and something else under it she couldn't catch.

"Granddaughter," said Jules.

"Granddaughter," the walnut man agreed, as if it were the same thing, and waved a hand at the table. "Bring her up, then. Let her see how it's done, since she's doing it."

The man with the seal was the chairman, and the chairman was Gust Verhoeven, and she knew that before anyone said it because of how the room arranged itself around him without seeming to move.

He was a big man gone soft in the way big men go, with a clean heavy face and hands that had clearly once done something and now mostly held things — held the master clock now, the club's own, the one all the others were set against, a brass-and-mahogany thing on its own stand at the head of the table with a dignity the others didn't have. He looked at Lieselot for a moment with eyes that were not unkind and were not warm, the way you look at a debt that's come due in an unexpected currency, and then he looked back down at his work.

"You set them all to the master," Jules said to her, low, under the room's noise. "Wind them, set the time off this one"—a nod at the chairman's clock—"then they're sealed. Every clock in the race carries the same time so nobody's lying about when his bird came. You follow?"

She followed. She watched a man bring his clock up and watched Gust take it in those soft heavy hands and turn the key and bring the hands round, his lips moving, comparing, the whole room hushing a half-step around each one. Wind, set, check. And then the thing she would remember, the thing that put a cold finger on the back of her neck the way the tin had: the sealing.

When a clock was set, Gust took a stub of red wax and a little brass die on a wooden handle, and he warmed the wax at a candle stub kept burning on a saucer for the purpose, and he let a drop of it fall over the keyhole of the clock — over the slot where the crank went in, the only place a man could ever get inside the works — and pressed the die into it while it was soft. And when he lifted the die there was a small round seal of red wax over the keyhole with the club's mark stamped into it, a crest worn nearly smooth, and you could not open the clock now, could not turn the key, could not touch the works inside, without breaking that seal where every man in the room could see it broken.

She understood it in her body before she understood it in her head. The seal was the thing. The seal was the whole sport. A bird could fly its heart out over four hundred kilometres of France and it meant nothing — nothing — unless the time it came home was a time no man had been able to reach in and change. Everything rested on a drop of wax the size of a thumbnail. Honesty you could press your thumb against and feel.

She thought of the brass clock in the tin at the bottom of her wardrobe, the one Staf had kept that should never have been kept, and she thought: that one has no seal on it now. Somebody broke it. Somebody broke the seal on that clock and got inside the works and made it say a thing that wasn't true, and then kept it for forty years instead of giving it back to be sealed clean, kept it under a king and a queen worn to grey, and left it to her.

"Maes," Gust said.

She brought the clock up. Staf's working clock, the loft clock, not the tin one — Jules had taken it down off the shelf in the hok that morning and shown her how to wind it and she had wound it badly and he had taken her hands off it and wound it right. It was an honest clock. It had nothing wrong with it. But she carried it up the green baize to Gust Verhoeven feeling as though she were carrying the other one, the guilty one, feeling the room watch Staf's granddaughter bring Staf's clock to be made honest, and she set it down in the chairman's soft hands and could not meet his eye.

He wound it. He set it to the master. His lips moved. And then he warmed the wax and let it fall over the keyhole and pressed the die in, and it took him three seconds, and when he lifted the die there was the little red seal, the club's worn crest, honesty you could feel with your thumb, sitting over the slot of her grandfather's clock as though such a thing had never once in the history of the town been broken.

"There," said Gust Verhoeven, and pushed the clock back across the baize to her, and looked at her at last, and there was something in his clean heavy face she would only understand later, that she filed away the way you file the thing you can't read. "Welcome to it," he said.

It did not sound like welcome.

1958.

The drum-tape from the tin is yellow as an old tooth and it carries, in faded violet ink, the punch-marks of a race forty years gone — and folded inside it, in Staf's young hand, a half-page that is not a confession yet, only a setting-down, the way a man writes a thing to keep from saying it.

Staf is twenty-four and the coal is under his nails for good now and his chest takes the stairs of the lokaal like a man twice his age. He carries his clock up the green baize. It is the same room. It is even some of the same men, only younger, only with their faces still full. The chairman then is old Verschueren, dead these thirty years, and beside him at the master clock stands a club official whose hand is on the seal, whose name Staf does not write down, will never write down, will carry to the ground unwritten — a hand that will, in the days after the race, do a small thing to a drop of wax that no one will ever look at twice.

But that is not yet. Tonight the seal goes on honest. Tonight Verschueren warms the wax and lets it fall over the keyhole of Staf's clock and presses the die, and Staf watches the little red crest take, and feels nothing but the ordinary Friday fear of a man who has the best young cock he's ever bred in a basket and a race across the water on Sunday and a town that has nothing and a wife at home and a cough he hasn't told her the worst of.

He does not know yet that he will break this seal. He does not know yet that there is anything in him that could. He is a man who has just had his clock made honest, standing in a warm room that smells of beer and birds, and the only thing he knows for certain, the thing he would have sworn his life on, is that the seal means what it says.

That is the thing the tape gives back. Not the lie. The honesty that came before it — the proof that the man who broke the seal had once stood in that exact spot and believed in it. You don't write I made the clock lie unless you first knew, in your body, against your thumb, what an honest clock was.

She did not read the tape that night. She would read it later, after, when she could.

But she carried the meaning of it home from the lokaal without knowing she was carrying it — sat in Jules's van with the sealed clock on her knees and the basket gone, handed over, her six cocks crated now into the dark of the convoy with two hundred other birds bound for the release point in the morning, and felt the weight of the clock against her legs, an honest clock with a fresh red seal on it, and could not stop her mind going to the other one.

"You're quiet," Jules said.

"It's a lot of clocks," she said.

He almost smiled. "It's the same clock twenty times." He pulled out into the dead Stationsstraat. "It's the one thing in the whole carry-on that has to be true. The bird can be slow. The weather can be filth. A man can lie about his loft, his feed, his luck, his money, what he paid for a bird, whether he's any good — and they all do, every Friday, it's half the pleasure. But the clock." He shook his head once. "You don't touch the clock. There's nothing else holding it up. Take the clock away and it's just men telling each other their birds are fast."

She looked at the seal on the clock on her knees, the little round wound of red wax, the worn crest. You don't touch the clock.

"Has anyone ever," she said, and stopped, because she heard where the sentence was going and didn't know how to land it without giving herself away.

Jules drove for a moment.

"Ever what."

"Touched it. The clock. Got inside it."

He was quiet long enough that the church bell came and went, a beat behind God. The winding-gear slid past the window, black on grey.

"Not here," Jules said. "Not in this club." And then, after the frituur, after the turn, in a voice that had gone careful the way it went careful whenever she got near the thing without knowing she was near it: "There's stories. Every club's got stories. A man's clock that ran a hair slow one famous Sunday and made him a champion. You hear them at funerals." He glanced at her, once, and away. "You don't repeat them at funerals. The dead can't answer."

The dead can't answer. She kept her face shut, the way she'd kept it shut in the kitchen, in the church, at the table when Coemans said he was honest and didn't know it was the cruellest thing in the room. The dead can't answer, and the seal she'd watched go on her grandfather's clock tonight was honest, and the one in the tin at the bottom of her wardrobe was broken and gone and kept, and somewhere in the dark of a convoy truck rolling south toward France her six birds were idling toward a home they'd tear the sky to reach, and on Sunday she would stand at the loft window and wait for them to come back, and clock them on a clock with a true seal on it, and it would be the most honest thing anyone named Maes had done in this town in forty years, and she was the only person alive who knew that was something to say.

Jules pulled up outside the house. The light was on in the front room, which meant Bram was home, which meant Bram was drinking, which was its own kind of clock you could set the evening by.

"Sunday you watch the south of the sky," Jules said. "First one to drop, you don't grab him. You let him come in to the water, you let him settle, then you take him, then you strip the ring, then you clock. In that order. You grab a frightened bird at the wire you'll have him flaring off again and your race is on the roof while the clock runs. Patience. You hear me. The whole thing's waiting."

"The whole thing's waiting," she said.

"That's the craft." He put both hands on the wheel and looked through the windscreen at the black gear over the town. "Everybody thinks it's the flying. It's the waiting. Any fool can love a bird that's home." He reached over and lifted the sealed clock off her knees, gently, and set it on the seat between them to carry in for her, because her hands were full of the folder and the basket-smell and the night. "Go on. I'll bring this."

She got out into the cold. The clock went under his arm with its little red seal, the truth of the thing, the one thing that had to be true. And she stood a second on the wet brick and looked up, the way the whole town had taught her to look up without ever teaching her on purpose, south, over the roofs and the dead winding-gear toward France and the long water past it, where her six birds were rolling away in the dark toward Sunday, and where, forty years gone, her grandfather had stood in that same warm room believing in a seal, before he learned what was in him, before he put his thumb to the wax and pressed.