Chapter Six — The Wait

The race went up out of a town in France called Quiévrain at half past seven in the morning, and Jules knew this because Jules knew everything that could be known about a thing that was happening two hundred kilometres away where he could not see it.

He'd come at seven with a flask of tea and a fold-up stool, the kind men took to football, and set the stool in the wet grass at the bottom of the garden with the loft at his back and his face to the south, and he'd said good morning to her the way you'd say it to another man on a shift, which was no way at all, a tip of the head and a noise in the throat. Then he'd sat down to wait. Lieselot stood beside him with Staf's anorak zipped to the chin and her hands shoved up the sleeves and told herself she was only out here because the kitchen was cold and Bram was asleep in the chair with his mouth open and she'd rather watch an old man stare at the sky than listen to her father not breathe right.

That was four lies before eight in the morning. She was getting good at them. They came easy now, like a skill.

"They're up," Jules said, at half seven exactly, looking at his watch and not the sky. "Lovely morning for it. Bit of west in the wind." He licked a finger and held it up the way she'd thought only people in films did, and frowned at what it told him. "Bit much west, maybe. They'll get pushed off the line a touch, coming up. Cost them. Not the good ones."

"How do you know they're up."

"Radio." He nodded at the little transistor on the grass by his foot, turned down so low it was just a man's voice underwater. "Lossing's announced. Half seven, clean release, the lot away together." He poured tea into the cup of the flask and didn't offer her any, which she understood was a courtesy — out here, you did your own waiting. "Now we sit. Now's the bad part."

"This is the bad part. Sitting in a field."

"This is the bad part," Jules agreed, and drank his tea, and went on looking at the south of the sky as if it owed him money.

She'd basketed nine birds. She'd done it herself, two evenings ago, at the lokaal, with the old men watching her hands and saying nothing and Gust Verhoeven sealing the clock under his thumb with the wax and the little brass die so that the keyhole wore a red blister of honesty you could feel if you ran your finger over it, which she had, on the walk home, in her pocket, the cooled wax, over and over, the way you worry a scab.

Nine birds in a basket, and the basket on a convoy truck, and the truck to France in the dark, and the dark to morning, and the morning to up, they're up, and now the nine of them somewhere over Belgium coming home to a brick shed at the bottom of a dead miner's garden because forty years of a man's hands had made these particular birds believe this particular shed was the only safe place in a turning world. She had not built that belief. She had inherited it, the way she'd inherited the shed and the lie and the tin she still hadn't read past the first line. She was just the shape standing where Staf used to stand, holding the corn.

The corn was the thing. Jules had taught her the corn the night before, in his lonely tidy kitchen over tea, drawing it on the back of an envelope. You don't feed them in the morning. You let them come home to it. The bird crosses two hundred kilometres on an empty crop with one idea in its head, which is the food and the perch and the place, and you do not give that idea away cheap by feeding it before it's earned. You keep the hens shut up where the cocks can't get at them all week — weduwschap, widowhood, she had the word now and used it in her head like a coin she was getting used to spending — so that the cock comes home not just for corn but for the hen, comes home half mad for her, drops out of the sky like a stone because the only thing in the world is in there. Love and hunger, Jules had said, and not looked up from the envelope. That's all it is. You make them want two things they can only have at home, and then you throw them across a country, and you wait.

"It's cruel," she'd said, to be saying something.

"It's true," Jules had said, which was not an answer and was.

By nine they had nothing.

This was normal. Jules said it three times, this is normal, in the flat way that meant he was saying it to her and to himself both. Quiévrain was two hundred and some kilometres and even a good bird on a clean wind wasn't dropping into Limburg before half nine, ten, and with the west in it pushing them wide they'd be later, working back across the line, costing themselves the minutes that were, when you got down to it, the whole of the sport. The whole of it. Distance over time. Metres a minute. A bird that flew the same distance as another bird but did it five minutes faster won, and a bird that lived three streets further from the release and clocked later could still beat the one that clocked first, because it was further, because it was speed and not arrival, because a man with a slow clock and a fast bird could—

She stopped that thought where it started. She was getting good at stopping it. It came at her sideways now, several times a day, the arithmetic of it, the soft little arithmetic of a few minutes, and every time she got a look at where it was going she shut the door on it the way you shut a door on a smell.

Wendy's text came at twenty past nine. Lieselot felt the phone go off against her hip and took it out under cover of the anorak so Jules wouldn't see, though Jules wouldn't have known what it was if he had.

bus at 11. davy + them going to the pool in genk. coming?? say yes

She looked at it. The south of the sky sat over the green heap, milk-coloured, empty, the wind moving the broom on the slope so the whole terril shrugged, slowly, the one mountain the town had built turning itself politely back into a hill. Eleven o'clock. The pool in Genk, the chlorine and the boys and Wendy in her good swimsuit being a girl from a town that wasn't this one, the bus going past the city, the train past that, the whole map of out she'd been building herself toward for fifteen years, all of it leaving at eleven, with a seat in it for her.

cant. sorry, she typed. Then she looked at the sorry and didn't know who it was for, and deleted it, and sent just cant, and that was somehow worse, and she put the phone away under the anorak and looked up at the empty sky and hated herself with a clean cold completeness that was, she thought, at least honest. At least she wasn't lying to Wendy. She was just lying to the bus.

"Expecting someone?" Jules said, not turning.

"No."

"Right," Jules said, and that was the end of it, and she could have kissed his slow ugly hands for not asking, for being the one person in the whole town who would let a thing be exactly as small as it was.

The first one came at twenty to ten.

She didn't see it. She was looking at the sky the way you look at a sky, all of it, none of it, and Jules's hand came up off his knee — just lifted, two inches, the fingers spreading — and he said, very quietly, the way you'd speak in a church, "Daar."

There.

She followed his eyes and there was nothing and then there was a speck. That was all. A speck where a half-second ago there'd been air, low over the roofs to the south, a mote, a fault in the eye, and she'd have called it a fault in the eye except that Jules had said daar before it was anything at all, had pulled it out of the empty sky by knowing where to look, and now the speck did the thing that turned her stomach over without permission — it resolved. It got an edge. It got the rumour of wings. It came on, low and fast and dead straight, no bird in a film, no soaring, just a small hard committed body burning a line through the air toward one point on the earth and that point was here, was the shed at her back, was home, and it came down over the dead winding-gear and the green heap and the wet brick rows with the whole weight of two hundred kilometres behind it and it did not slow until the last second and then it threw its wings forward and dropped onto the loft board with a sound like a slap and was a pigeon. Just a pigeon. A blue cock with his beak open, panting, his eye gone bright and wild, standing on the board where ten seconds ago there'd been nothing and the sky.

Lieselot found she had her hand pressed flat against her own breastbone and did not remember putting it there.

"Don't run at it," Jules said, already up off his stool, moving slow and sideways, no hurry in him, his whole body gone soft and unthreatening. "Never run. He drops, you let him settle, he goes in for the corn, you take him in the trap. You run, you spook him, he sits on the roof to get his breath and that's your minutes gone." The cock dipped its head into the loft, into the dark and the corn, and Jules's slow hand was there and then the bird was in his two hands, and he stripped the rubber ring off the red leg with a thumb, one move, forty years in it, and dropped the ring into the slot of the clock and turned the key and the clock made a sound — a small dense mechanical chunk, a thing being bitten down on and kept — and Jules looked at his watch and said a time out loud, nine forty-one, and the clock had it now, had it stamped on the paper drum inside its sealed dark, an honest minute punched down and held, and that, she understood, watching, was the whole religion. That sound. The clock taking a true time and keeping it where no one's thumb could reach.

"You do the next one," Jules said, and handed her the cock to hold while he reset, and the bird in her two hands was the warmest thing she'd ever held, blazing, the small heart going against her fingers so fast and so hard it didn't seem like a thing a body could keep doing, a heart trying to get out of the town faster than she ever had, and she stood there holding two hundred kilometres of want in her hands and her face did something she was glad Jules had his back to.

They came after that the way Jules said they would, in ones and twos, the long quiet stretches and then daar and the speck and the slap of the board, and she clocked them, fumbling the first, smooth by the third, the thumb on the ring, the ring in the slot, the key, the chunk, the time. By half ten she had seven of the nine home. She knew the seven without counting them because she'd started, without deciding to, to know the birds — the blue cock with the white feather in his shield, the dark hen with the cross temper who bit, the small neat cock Staf had called nothing because he was nothing, a middling bird, a club bird, here he was home anyway, panting on the board, and she put two fingers on his keel before she sent him in, the way she'd seen Staf do, and felt the breast gone hard and deflated and hot, the muscle worked down to nothing, and knew — knew, in her hand, before her head agreed to it — that this nothing-bird had flown hard, had flown his guts out across a country and come home empty and meant it. Good, she told him, under her breath, before she could stop the word. Good lad.

Then there were two not home, and then there was one.

The light kept up. The wind kept its west in it. The other gardens down the row went quiet one by one as the men got their birds and went in to their dinners satisfied or unsatisfied, and the Saturday faces-up thinned out, and by noon it was just the two of them in the wet grass, her and Jules, and one bird that wasn't a speck yet.

It was the young cock. She didn't say it. She knew which one it was the way she now knew all of them, which was the trouble, which was the whole trouble with the last two days — that she'd gone and learned them, learned the nine, and one of the nine was a young cock of the line, a yearling, dark, with a way of sitting square on the perch like he'd been built for it, and Jules had said he's the best young thing in this loft, this one, mark me, this is a bird, said it two evenings ago handling him in the lamplight with a thing in his voice she hadn't heard before, and now the young cock was a hole in the sky to the south where seven birds had come out of and he had not.

"He'll come," Jules said.

"You don't know that."

"No," Jules agreed. He didn't dress it up. "I don't. He's young. Young ones break off, chase another flock, sit on a barn for an hour because a hawk put the wind up them. He could be sat on a roof in Diepenbeek getting his nerve back this minute. He could come in at four o'clock and you'd think nothing of it next week." He poured the last of the tea and it came out cold. "Or the west pushed him over the water somewhere he shouldn't have been, and a peregrine had him, or he flew into a wire, or he's sat in a strange loft eating a stranger's corn and forgetting us." He drank the cold tea. "You wait. That's the answer to all of it. You wait, and the sky tells you, and it tells you in its own time and not yours, and there's nothing you can do to it but stand here and let it."

Lieselot stood there and let it.

The afternoon went the way afternoons in that town went, the light getting long and thin and gold along the brick the way it had the day she'd watched the birds turn south for a man who wasn't coming, and she stood with her face to that same quarter of the sky and waited for a bird, and somewhere in the standing the thing she'd been guarding against for two days got past her without her noticing the moment it happened, the way the worst things do.

She wanted him to come.

Not for the loft. Not for the season or the will or to spite her father or because every adult wanted her to fold and she wouldn't be folded. She wanted the young dark cock to drop out of that emptied sky and slap the board and be a bird in her hands, wanted it with a plain hot stupid want that had no list in it and no plan and no train past the city, wanted it the way she'd spent fifteen years training herself not to want anything where the town could see, and the town wasn't even here, only Jules, and Jules was looking at the sky and not at her, and so she let herself want it, in the privacy of an empty garden, with her grandfather three weeks in the ground and a tin upstairs she still hadn't read.

The bus to Genk had gone at eleven. She'd heard it, faintly, the diesel cough of it pulling off from the square, taking Wendy and the pool and the boys and the map of out, and she hadn't moved, and the not-moving had been, she understood now, standing in the gold light, a kind of choosing, though she'd have died before calling it that.

At four o'clock the light did its trick. Jules said "daar" and her heart went up like a thrown bird, and she followed his hand, and there was a speck low over the green heap, resolving, getting an edge, getting the rumour of wings, coming on hard and straight—

—and it broke left at the last and dropped two gardens down, into Mon's loft, Mon's bird, the wrong shape, the wrong colour, a stranger come home to a stranger, and the slap of a board that wasn't hers, and Mon's voice raised in the satisfied way of a man whose week had just been made.

Jules let his hand back down to his knee.

The place at the wire where the young cock should have been stayed empty. She found she'd been looking at it without meaning to, the gap on the loft board, the foot of clean grit-board where a dark square yearling ought to be standing with his beak open and his heart trying to get out of him, and there was nothing there, just the board and the dark behind it and the seven home birds gone quiet on their perches, and the eighth a roof somewhere in Diepenbeek if she was lucky and a smear of feathers under a wire if she wasn't, and the south of the sky going down slowly toward the colour of nothing over the one green mountain the town had built and was busy losing.

"Light goes at half eight, this time of year," Jules said, getting up off his stool, folding it, his knees cracking like wet wood. He didn't tell her to come in. He didn't tell her he wouldn't. "A young bird that's not home by dark mostly comes at first light. Mostly." He looked at her, and at the anorak that was Staf's, and at her face, and didn't say anything about any of it. "I'll be back at six tomorrow. You want to be out here at first light, you be out here at first light. He'll either be on that board or he won't, and you standing here all night won't move him one wingbeat closer." He put a hand on her shoulder, the slow ugly hand, just for a second, the weight of it. "But you'll stand here anyway," he said. "I know. I always did too."

And he went up the garden and out the side gate, and Lieselot stood at the loft with her hand on the cold bolt and her face to the south, where the light was going, where the young cock wasn't, and waited — for a bird, for the dark, for the first thing in her life she'd been caught wanting and couldn't make herself stop — late, but, she told the empty sky, the way you tell a thing to keep it true, coming.