Chapter Ten — Widowhood

The young cock came back on the fourth morning, and she did not see it happen, which was the part she'd be ashamed of for a long time.

She'd gone in to do the boards at seven the way Jules had taught her, the scraper cold in her hand and the loft still half-dark, the birds a low mutter in the rafters, and she was three perches along the cocks' side before she understood that the count was wrong in the good direction. She stood with the scraper held out from her body like a thing she'd forgotten the use of and counted again, slower, and there he was, the young red cock from the line, Manneke, the one that had gone out to Quiévrain a week ago and not come back, the one she'd stood at the window for past the point where Wendy's bus had gone and the light had gone and Jules had said, gently, that you learned this part too, that some of them the sea kept and some of them the hawk kept and some of them just decided, out there, not to be yours any more. He was on the end perch with his feathers wrecked and one wing held a hair low and a string of something dried down the front of him, and he watched her with an eye that had been somewhere she would never go, and he did not look like a homecoming. He looked like a thing that had crawled.

She did not touch him. She'd learned that much. You don't haul a bird about that's come in off a hard one; you let him sit, you put water near, you let the loft do the work the loft does. She filled the drinker and set it close and went on with the boards with her back to him and her face doing something she was glad nobody was there to see, and after a while she heard him go down off the perch and heard the small ordinary sound of a bird drinking, and she scraped the same square of board four times so as to have a reason to stay.

That was the thing she couldn't have explained to Wendy if she'd tried, which she wouldn't. That a half-kilo of bird she'd told a dead man she felt nothing for could come in off the sea four days late and wreck her morning by living.

Jules came at eight with bread and a thing he didn't make a speech about, which was tea.

He looked at Manneke for a long time without going near him, hands in his coat, reading the bird from across the loft the way he read everything, and then he said, "He's no good to you this year," which she'd worked out for herself and which still landed somewhere under the ribs.

"He came home."

"He came home." Jules drank his tea. "And he'll moult out wrong from a knock like that, and his form's gone, and you'll not put him across France again before September, and if you've sense you'll not put him across it ever. He's a breeder now, that one. He'll sit in the box and make you better ones." He said it flat, a man doing sums, and then he did the thing that undid her a little, which was to add, looking at the wrecked young bird and not at her, "But he came home. That's the bird telling you the loft's right. A bird won't kill himself to come home to a loft that's wrong. Remember that, when you're losing them and thinking it's you."

"I scraped the boards," she said, which was not an answer to anything, and Jules said, "I know you did," which was.

He set the tea down on the sill and rolled his sleeves, an old man getting ready for work, and said the thing he'd come to say.

"Right. Now we do it properly. Now we do weduwschap."

She'd had the shape of it off him already, in the first week — cocks one side, hens the other, the wire down the middle of the loft like a thing that kept a marriage from happening so it could be spent. But the shape of a thing wasn't the thing, and what Jules did over the next hour was the thing.

He took her down the hen side first, where the hens sat in their own boxes and their own light, and he put his slow hand into a box and brought out the hen that belonged, he said, to the slate-blue cock on the far end of the other side, the one Staf had flown two seasons before he died and never raced again, kept for breeding, kept for exactly this. He held the hen so Lieselot could see her and not so the cock could.

"You keep them apart," he said. "All season. He doesn't see her, he doesn't hear her if you can help it, he forgets what she smells like until he half forgets she's real. He sits in his box alone and the box is the only thing in the world that's his, and he keeps it like a miser, and he hates every other cock that comes near the wire of it. That's not nothing, that hate. You're going to use that. And then—" Jules carried the hen across, slow, and Lieselot followed, and on the far side the slate cock had got up off his perch and gone to the wire of his box and was making a sound she'd heard a hundred times in her childhood and never once heard, "—then, the night you basket him, the night before the long one, you give her back. Ten minutes. Twenty. You let him have her in the box, let him drive her, let him think the season's over and he's won, and then you take her away again and you shut him in the basket still wanting her, and you put him on the lorry, and you send him eight hundred kilometres into Spain wanting her, and he comes home across the Pyrenees and the sea and France with that in him like a stone in a sling."

He let the hen back into her own box. The slate cock at the wire went on for a moment and then stopped, abrupt, the way they do, gone back to standing on one foot as if nothing.

"That's the engine," Jules said. "That's the whole secret of the thing. It's not feed and it's not training, those just give you a bird that can. This is what makes a bird that wants. You take the one thing he loves and you keep it from him and you make his whole body into a thing that has to get home, and then you let him out a thousand kilometres away and you trust that what you did to him is stronger than the sea."

Lieselot stood with her back to the wire and watched the slate cock stand on one foot, robbed and not knowing it, and said, before she could not say it, "That's a horrible thing to do to a bird."

Jules looked at her. There was something in his pale eyes she couldn't read, that might have been approval and might have been its opposite, and he said, "It is. Best flyers in the world worked it out, the Belgians, in lofts like this, and the whole world copies us, and it's a horrible thing to do to a bird, and it brings them home." He picked his tea back up. "You'll do it anyway. Everyone who's any good does it. You take the love the bird's got and you point it where it does you good, and you tell yourself the bird's happy enough, sitting in his box being a king. And mostly he is. That's the part nobody likes to say out loud, jong." He said the jong the way the old men said it, the way you'd say it to a boy you respected. "He's happy enough. It still comes home to you wanting something it'll only get if it nearly kills itself getting back. That's weduwschap. That's the trade."

She thought about the wire down the middle of the loft, and about a clock built to tell the truth and kept because it had been made to lie, and about a man who'd taken the one thing a town loved — its hunger to be proud of something — and pointed it where it did him good, and told himself the town was happy enough. She didn't say any of that. She'd got good, that week, at not saying things in the loft. The loft was where she kept the not-saying.

"Show me," she said. "Which ones. For the season."

And that was the morning she stopped pretending she was learning this to spite Gust Verhoeven.

It took the rest of the week, and she was good at it, and she hated how much she didn't hate it.

That was the only way she could think about it: as a thing she'd failed to hate. She'd set out fifteen years to be a person who could stand in a loft and feel a polished little world of bird-eye looking back at her and give nothing, and somewhere in that week the giving started without her permission. It came in through the hands. Jules would put a cock in her two hands and stand back and say nothing, voel, feel, and she'd run two fingers along the keel the way she'd watched Staf do it near the end, and after a while she stopped doing it the way you copy a thing and started doing it the way you read a thing, and the bird went from a half-kilo of warm trouble to a sentence she could half make out — too much fat here, this one's flat, this one's coming up, this one's ready and being wasted on a Tuesday. She'd hand the bird back and say what she'd felt and watch Jules's face for whether she was wrong, and more and more she wasn't wrong, and the not-being-wrong was a thing that filled her up in a place she hadn't known was empty, and she despised it and went back the next morning at seven for more.

She learned the boxes. Which cock owned which box and would fight to keep it, which hen went with which cock, the pairings written in Staf's hand on cards gone soft with handling — the same hand, the same blue-black ink, that wrote I made the clock lie, so that every card she read was a small reminder she'd stopped being able to feel cleanly about any object in that loft. She learned the feed cycle properly, the light corn early in the week to clean them out and the maize and peas and the little oiled seeds toward the weekend to build the fire back up, the Versele-Laga sacks stacked where Staf had stacked them, and she learned not to leave feed down, to give them what they'd eat and lift the rest, because a bird that grazes all day is a bird that's never hungry enough to be anything.

She learned to read the sky, a little, off Jules, who read it like a man reading a face he'd known fifty years. Which way the wind sat and what it would do to a release out of the south. What a sky scoured clean meant and what a soft grey one meant and what you didn't send your good birds into for love nor money.

And the cocks came up. That was the thing she couldn't get over and wouldn't say. Under her hands and the wire and the horrible clean trade of the widowhood, the cocks came up into form like something rising, the muscle hardening, the feather going tight and silky, the eye getting that wet bright look that Jules said you couldn't put there, you could only let it come — and one morning toward the end of the week she threw a cock to the sky off the back of the garden, a short toss, ten kilometres out and back the way Jules said, build them up, don't be brave, and she watched him go up hard and circle once high over the dead winding-gear and the green heap and then snap home, drop out of the morning straight to the loft like a held breath let go, and she heard herself make a sound. Not a word. A small sound. And then she caught herself making it and looked round quick to see if Jules had heard, and he had, and he had the grace to be looking at the sky and not at her.

"There," he said, to the sky. "Now you've a problem."

"What problem."

"Now you'll want to be good at it." He picked up the empty basket. "That's the problem. There's no coming back from that one."

Wendy came on the Saturday, on her way to the bus, in her coat and her good shoes, and stood in the garden in her finished way and looked at Lieselot in Staf's anorak with a feather stuck to the sleeve and pigeon on her hands and something on her face that Wendy clearly hadn't planned to say and said anyway.

"You stink," Wendy said. "You actually stink of them now."

"Corn and lime," Lieselot said. "It's nice if you grew up in it."

"You hated it." Wendy said it almost gently, almost like a thing she was sorry to have to bring up. "You used to hate it. You used to do the thing where you wouldn't even say pigeon, you'd call it 'the shed,' like if you said it normal you'd catch it." She looked down the garden at the loft, at the wire, at the birds settling in the back of it. "There's a bus at half eleven. Davy's got people coming back to his after. His brother'll run us. You haven't come to a single thing since—" She stopped, the way she always stopped before the dead man, and changed it. "You haven't come to anything. You're fifteen, Lies. You're going to be the girl who didn't come to anything."

"I've got a race Sunday."

She heard it come out of her mouth. She heard exactly how it sounded. Wendy heard it too, and something happened in Wendy's face, not unkind, just final, the way a window closes when the weather turns — the same thing that had happened in the kitchen the day of the will, only further along now, a window most of the way shut.

"A race," Wendy said.

"It's the halve-fond. Five hundred kilometres. I'm basketing my own team for the first time, Jules says I can pick three of my own on top of his." She knew she should stop. She watched Wendy watching her not stop. "They go off from down in France somewhere and you don't know if they'll—" She heard the want in her own voice, the actual want, naked, and she did the only thing she had left, which was to make it a joke, flat, armour. "It's very exciting, Wendy. It's basically a rave."

Wendy didn't laugh. That was how Lieselot knew it had gone too far to be saved with the dry thing.

"You're turning into one of them," Wendy said.

She didn't say it cruel. That was the worst of it. She said it like a diagnosis, like a thing she was almost frightened of on Lieselot's behalf — the old men in the gardens, faces up, the whole closing-over of the town that they had spent their childhoods swearing to each other they'd get out of before it set around them like the green heap setting around the slag. One of them. The ones who stayed. The ones who'd had a notion and let the town keep them, who flew birds out of the back of a dead town because it was the one thing it still did, faces up to a southern sky every Saturday, waiting.

And the thing Lieselot couldn't say — couldn't have said to Wendy, couldn't have said to herself standing there with the feather on her sleeve — was that one of them had stopped being only the worst thing in the world. That it had got a second meaning in under a fortnight, a meaning that was a cock snapping home like a held breath, a meaning that was a wrecked red bird coming in off the sea four days late to live, a meaning that was her own two hands reading a sentence off a half-kilo of warm trouble and getting it right. She'd hated them her whole life for staying. She had not, until this week, understood that there might be something there worth staying for, and the understanding was the most dangerous thing that had happened to her since the tin, because the tin she could hide under the loose board, and this she could not hide anywhere, it was in her hands.

"Maybe," she said.

Wendy looked at her a second longer. Then she did the kind thing, the last kind thing, which was to not say any of the rest of it. "Right," she said. "I'll ring you." She would, twice more, and then it would thin out the way these things thin, not a fight, just a frequency that fell off, a girl getting on a bus and the town making her smaller as she went toward the edge of it. "Good luck with your—" Wendy tipped her head at the loft. "Whatever it is. Your rave."

And she went off down the Pastoorstraat in her good shoes, her heels going on the brick, getting smaller, going somewhere that wasn't this, the way Lieselot had spent her whole life planning to go and was now, with pigeon on her hands and a race in the morning, watching someone else do.

Jules came at four, because four was the hour, and found her on the hen side with a card in her hand.

She hadn't heard him come in. She was standing at the wire looking at the slate hen in her box, the one that went with the cock she'd send Sunday, and she was thinking — she made herself think it, looked straight at it the way she made herself look at things now — that on Saturday night she'd take this hen across the loft and give her to the cock for twenty minutes and let him think he'd won, and then she'd take the hen away and shut the cock in the basket wanting her and send him into France, and she'd do it because it worked, because the Belgians worked it out in lofts like this and the whole world copied them, because it was a horrible thing to do to a bird and it brought them home. And she was thinking about Staf, who knew a thing about taking the one thing a creature loved and pointing it where it did you good. She was thinking about whether everyone in this whole sport was, underneath, doing a version of the thing he'd done, and whether the only difference was the size of it and who paid — and whether that was a true thought or just the thought she reached for so she could go on standing in his loft loving his birds and not have to hate him cleanly.

"You'll want to leave that pair an hour, not twenty minutes," Jules said, behind her, of the card. He'd read it off her over her shoulder, the way he read everything. "First long one of the year, you give the cock a bit more. Let him really think it's his. Cruel to be kind." He took the card and looked at it and put it back in its slot. "You all right?"

"Verhoeven wants me to give the line to a good loft," she said. It came out sideways, the way the true things came out of her now, attached to something else. "Said the bloodline would live, the champion'd stay safe in the pedigrees. Said some things are better kept than flown."

"He did."

"You think that too? That some things are better kept than flown."

Jules was quiet a moment. Out in the garden the light was doing the long gold thing it did at four, going thin along the brick, and somewhere down the row a clock struck the hour off true, a beat behind the church, and an old man's voice rose up calling a last bird home, komeen, komeen, and the whole town did the one thing it still did together.

"I think," Jules said slowly, "that men who say a thing's better kept than flown have usually got their own reasons for wanting it kept." He looked at her, the pale eyes steady. "And I think your opa didn't leave you forty birds and a brick shed so they could go and sit safe in some clever man's pedigree where nobody'd ever fly them across the sea again. A bird that's not flown isn't kept, jong. It's just a thing in a box, slowly forgetting it could ever have got home." He picked up the scraper she'd left against the wall and handed it to her, handle first, the way he did, the way it was starting. "Boards," he said. "Then we pick your three. You've a race tomorrow."

And as he said it, on the turn of four, the birds did the thing they did — swung all at once to the south of the sky, every small hard head toward the water they'd be crossing before the summer was out, toward France and the long sea beyond it, toward the race that was coming and the one underneath it that was older and worse, the same race, the one Staf had won on a clock made to lie and that she'd been entered in now, signed in his ink, her three birds going in on top of Jules's, her hands the ones that would basket them, the only honest thing she had to send.

She took the scraper. She did not tell herself it was the corn.

She thought, instead, watching the slate cock stand robbed and kingly on one foot at the wire of the box that was the only thing in the world that was his: I'm going to be good at this. God help me. I'm going to be good at the worst-loved thing in the world, and somewhere under the loose board is the reason I shouldn't want it, and I want it anyway, and tomorrow I send them into France and find out what kind of flyer a liar's hands can make.