Chapter Eleven — His Hands

The halve-fond came up off the calendar like the next rung of a ladder you can't see the top of, and the difference she felt in her own body, basketing for it, was that this time nobody had picked the team for her.

Jules had stood back. That was the thing. The first race he'd put six cocks in her hands one at a time and named each as he went, and she'd carried them to the club like a girl carrying eggs she didn't believe were hers. This time he came at seven on the Wednesday morning and sat on the upturned crate by the loft door with his tea and said nothing while she went down the perches, and saying nothing was the whole lesson. She'd worked out by now that Jules taught the way the loft taught — by withholding, by letting you put your hand wrong and feel it be wrong — and so she went bird to bird in the cold dim of the hok with the smell of corn and lime in her throat and read them the way he'd shown her, two fingers along the keel, the breast muscle full or worked, the warmth, the way a bird sat in the cup of her palm either trusting her or wanting out.

She turned down the red-chequer cock that had flown well at Quiévrain, because under her fingers he was still soft from it, still recovering, the muscle gone slack the way a thing goes that's spent itself. She'd not have known that a month ago. A month ago a bird was a bird. Now there was a whole language in the keel of one, and she had it without having decided to learn it, the way you find you've learned the words to a song you hated.

She picked seven. Old cocks, the hard ones, the ones whose hens she'd shut away on the far side of the loft so that the cocks had spent the week at the wire making the small grieving sound that was, Jules said, the engine of the whole sport — desire, racked up and held, a love made into a distance. Weduwschap. Widowhood. She'd thought it cruel the first time he explained it and she still thought it cruel and she did it anyway, because it worked, and because she was learning that a great deal that worked was cruel, in this loft and out of it.

"That one," Jules said, the only word he spoke the whole time. She had her hand on a dark blue cock low on the line, the one off the old hen that traced back, on the breeding card in Staf's writing, to a name she now read with her stomach going cold every time: De Sint, 1958. The blue cock was four generations down off that bird and you could see it in him, the near-black of him, the breadth across the back.

"He's not in form," she said. "He's carrying too much. Feel him." She held the cock out and Jules took him, ran his slow hands over him without looking, the way he did everything, his eyes on the middle distance like a man listening for something a long way off.

"He's carrying," Jules agreed. "But he wants it. Form you can build. Want you can't." He gave the cock back. "Your opa flew the heavy ones that wanted it over the clever ones that didn't. Lost some that way. Won the ones worth winning." He drank his tea. "Your call. It's your loft."

It was the first time anyone had said it to her plainly, it's your loft, and she stood holding the heavy blue cock in the cold and felt the thing she'd been refusing to feel since the form went in — that it was, that they were hers, forty bodies in a brick shed worth more than the house, and that she was good at this, that her hands knew a thing her head had spent fifteen years declining to want to know.

She put the blue cock in the basket.

She conditioned them herself that week, off the feeding cards, and got it nearly right, which Jules let her find out by watching her not be wrong rather than telling her she wasn't. The light mix early to clean them out, the corn and barley, the bird's body kept lean and emptied; then the richer days building, the maize and the peas, the little oily seeds and the linseed the last evenings before basketing so the cocks went into the basket with fat on them to burn over France and a hunger to get back to the hens she'd kept from them all week. She measured it into the troughs in the half-light at half-six every morning and again at four, and the four o'clock feed was the one she'd stopped pretending was just a feed. At four the birds turned south whether she fed them or not. She'd learned to be down there for it, at the wire, watching the forty small hard heads swing as one to the quarter of the sky over the green heap and the black winding-gear, toward the water they hadn't crossed and the race that was coming for them, and she'd stopped telling herself it was the corn and started, without admitting it, to feel it as a kind of company.

She basketed on the Thursday at the club, alone this time. Jules drove her down in his old Opel and stayed in the car.

"You don't need me holding your hand at the table," he said. "Go on. They'll be civil. They're always civil." He looked through the windscreen at het lokaal, the low building behind the café with its one lit window, the men's bicycles ranked against the wall. "Civil's free," he said, which she'd learn was Jules's whole opinion of the club, in two words.

Inside, the long table, the green baize gone shiny down the middle from fifty years of elbows, the master clock on its shelf like a relic in a side-chapel. Fons Beckers had the crates open and the basketing book spread, and the old men were there as they were always there, René and Mon at the bar end with their pils, the smoke standing in the light in flat blue sheets. They turned when she came in with her basket and they did the thing they always did, which was to be civil — a nod, a daar is ze, there she is — and go back to their glasses, and she'd learned to read that too: not warmth, not yet, but the wary courtesy you give a thing that might turn out to matter.

She put her seven on the table and gave the cards to Fons and he read the ring numbers and she stripped each cock and held him while Fons fitted the rubber, the gummiring, the numbered band that was the bird's anonymous name for the race, and entered it in the book against the seal-number, the whole quiet liturgy of it, the way you handed your week's hope across a table to a man with a ledger and trusted the ledger. She did it right. She knew she did it right because nobody corrected her, and at this table not being corrected was the only praise on offer.

Gust Verhoeven came through from the back room with the wax and the brass die while she was on her last cock, and he stopped when he saw her, and something went over his clean face that she'd not seen there before — not the patience he'd worn at her gate, the patience for a problem. Something warmer, and warier with it, the two together, like a man pleased to see his money and counting it at the same time.

"Maes," he said. "You're basketing."

"That's what it's for."

"How many?"

"Seven."

He looked at the seven cocks in the crate, the dark blue one among them, and she watched him see the blue one, watched him see the breadth across the back of him and know exactly what he was, four generations down off the bird on the board, and his face did the warm-and-wary thing again, harder this time.

"You're flying the line," he said.

"I'm flying my birds."

"Mm." He set the wax to soften by the little spirit lamp the way he did, the small priest-work of it, and he didn't say anything for a moment, and then he said, not to her, to the table, to the room, in the voice a chairman uses when he wants a thing on the record: "Staf Maes's granddaughter, flying the line of the fifty-eight in the halve-fond. There's something." And René down the bar end lifted his glass an inch, and Mon said amai, and the room warmed by a degree, and Lieselot stood there with the last cock in her two hands and understood, the way you understand a draught before you find the open door, that she'd just been useful to something.

Gust sealed the clocks. He went down the table to each loft's constateur in turn, wound and set against the master, and pressed the red wax over the keyhole and stamped the brass die into it, the club crest, and Lieselot watched him do it to Staf's old honest loft clock — her clock now — and felt the cold come up the back of her neck that came every time, because she knew now, the way she hadn't a month ago, exactly what the seal was for and exactly what it had been made to fail to do, once, forty years ago, under another man's thumb at this same table.

Honesty you could feel with your thumb.

She'd felt it the first time and not understood it. She understood it now. The seal was the sport's whole faith, the one promise that held the rest up — that the clock had not lied — and her grandfather had broken it, here, in this room, with the help of a man whose name she carried in her stomach now like a stone, and these men, these civil men, were the church of it, and the chairman setting the wax with such care over her keyhole was the keeper of the seal and also, she was beginning to think, the keeper of the thing the seal was supposed to prevent.

"There," Gust said, lifting the die. The crest sat clean in the cooling wax. "Sealed. Bring her home, then." And he gave her the nod, the chairman's nod, the one he gave across the green baize, and it was warmer than it had ever been, and she trusted it less than she ever had.

> 1958.

> The drum-tape, when Lieselot lays it flat under the kitchen lamp that night and reads it the way Jules taught her to read a result — distance over time, metres a minute, the only arithmetic the sport believes in — gives back more than a time. It gives back a hand.

> Staf is twenty-four and his clock is sealed and on the shelf with all the others and he believes in the seal the way he believes in the pit holding up over his head, which is to say without thinking about it, the way you believe in the ground. He has carried his bird to the table and stripped him and watched the wax go on. The man pressing the die is the club's man at the master clock, Door Vandersmissen, who has done it for the club for thirty years, whose hand the whole town's honesty passes through every Sunday and has passed through for thirty years without a soul giving it a thought, because that is what a club is — a town agreeing, year on year, to trust the same hands.

> The tape does not show a crime. That is the thing the tape gives back that turns Lieselot cold at her own table: it shows nothing wrong at all. It shows a punched time, clean, in the proper column, sealed and witnessed, exactly as a hundred honest tapes show. The minutes that were never there are not on the tape. They are in the gap between the tape and the truth, and the only hand that could close that gap was the hand at the master clock, the club's own hand, the seal's own keeper — and that hand is the club's, not Staf's. Staf could not have made the clock lie alone. No man could. The seal was built to make sure of that. It took the keeper of the seal.

> It took the club.

> The tape ends and Lieselot sits with it under the lamp and the new thing settles into her, cold and exact: it was never one weak old man at his kitchen table. It was the town's own machinery, the hand everyone trusted, turned for one Sunday to a use no one would ever check — because who checks the keeper of the seal? You'd have to suspect the club of itself. And forty years on, the keeper is dead and cannot be asked, and the seal is still pressed every Thursday, warm wax under a brass die, by the next man to hold the chairman's office and the master clock and the records and the honor board with the gold name on it — by a man who sealed her clock tonight and called her flying the line something, and meant it, and was counting it.

She didn't go to the window for the result on the Saturday. She told Jules she had a thing at school, which was a lie, and she walked up past the church and the dead high street and the boarded frituur that wasn't Bram's frituur but was every frituur, and she stood on the bridge over the canal that didn't go anywhere anymore and watched the brown water not move, because she did not want to want it the way she'd wanted Manneke home three weeks before — the young cock standing now recovered on his perch as if he'd never been three hours late off France, as if the wanting hadn't happened — and she'd decided, on the bridge, in the cold, that she would not stand at the wire and let the town catch her wanting a result.

She caved at two and went home and stood at the wire.

The dark blue cock came in fourth off the loft, dropping out of an emptied southern sky onto the boards with the loose, falling-apart drop of a bird that's emptied itself over distance, and she had him and the ring off his leg and into the slot and the key turned, chunk, before she'd let herself think the word come on, and the time stamped clean on the honest drum, and she stood there in the four o'clock light holding the spent cock against her chest, his heart going under her hand like a thing trying to get out of the town faster than she ever had, and she did not name what she felt and there was no one to name it to and that was, she found, the best way to have it.

He placed. Down the list, not high — the loft was a long way from the release and the velocity was good but not the day's best — but he placed, in the printed result that came round the club on the Tuesday, a Maes bird in the halve-fond reckoning for the first time in the years since Staf's hands had got too bad to fly.

And the town did the thing the town did with a result.

It came to her sideways, the way everything in the town came, in half-sentences over counters and through doorways. The woman in the bakery held her bread a beat too long and said her opa would be proud, de duifkes, the little pigeons, with a softness Lieselot had never had off her before. A man she didn't know nodded to her on the Pastoorstraat as if they were acquainted. And down the club bar, where she went on the Tuesday for the result sheet with Jules, René leaned to Mon and said it, not quietly, meaning to be heard, the thing she'd hear all season now in one mouth or another:

"She's got his hands."

She's got his hands.

It landed on her like a coat held out behind her that she'd backed into without meaning to, that someone was settling onto her shoulders, heavy and warm and not hers, the dead man's coat, the legend's coat, and the trouble was it fit. That was the trouble. It fit her the way Staf's anorak had turned out to fit her, because it was there, and she stood in the smoke with the result sheet in her hand and felt the whole machine of the town turn one notch toward her — the bakery, the nod, the warm wary chairman, the murmur down the bar — felt it begin to do to her the thing it had done to Staf for forty years, which was love him, and which was the surest way she could think of to make sure no one ever told the truth.

Because she saw it now, sharp, standing there with the line of his hands praised in her own. They didn't want her to fail, the way she'd thought after the funeral, the way it had felt when they nodded at her like a chair Staf had left behind and waited for her to drop the birds. That had been the first read and it was wrong. They wanted her to win. They'd worked it out, the club, the town, faster than she had — that a Maes flying the line, a granddaughter with his hands, a legend renewed, was worth more to them alive than the legend was worth dead and safe in the pedigrees. Gust had stood at her gate a fortnight ago and told her to let the loft go dark, keep him safe where nobody can take him down, and now a Maes bird had placed and the chairman had said there's something into the record, and the wind had changed in the whole town, because a live legend was a better fortress for the secret than a buried one. Let her fly. Let her win. Let the town love her the way it loved him. Build the wall higher. Who'd dig under a wall the whole town was standing on?

She'd thought the temptation, when it came, would come from the Berys, or from her father, or from her own fear. She hadn't thought it would come dressed as kindness, as a coat held out, as she's got his hands, the one thing she'd spent her whole life wanting and pretending she didn't — the town's love, finally pointed at her — and she hadn't thought she'd want it. But she'd had the heart of the spent cock going under her palm at four o'clock and she'd had René's words land on her like a coat that fit, and she stood in the smoke of the club her grandfather had cheated, with the result sheet in her hand and his hands praised in her own, and she wanted it, she wanted all of it, and she understood for the first time, fully and in her own body, exactly how a good man at twenty-four could shave a handful of minutes off a clock and live inside the love it bought him for forty years and never once, in all that time, give it back.

Jules took the result sheet out of her hand and read it and folded it and put it in his coat without a word, and looked at her with his pale watchful eyes, and she could not tell if he'd seen the whole of what had just gone through her or only the look it left on her face.

"Good bird, the blue one," he said. "You read him right." And then, mild, into his pils, not looking at her, in the voice he used for the things that weren't about the weather: "They're warm to you now. They weren't, before." He drank. "You'll want to watch which way warm runs in this town, jong. It mostly runs downhill, toward the thing nobody wants disturbed." He set the glass down. "Your opa was the warmest thing this town ever had. Ask yourself what it kept dry."

She didn't answer. Out past the smeared club window the afternoon was going, the light dropping toward the green heap, and somewhere down the row a man's birds were coming home and a clock somewhere was striking the hour off true, a beat behind the church, the way every clock was a beat behind some other clock — except for one, once, that had been made to run a beat ahead, by a hand the whole town trusted, in a room exactly like this one, and been loved for it ever since.

She put the heel of her hand flat on the green baize where the wax had cooled under the die two days before, and felt nothing there now but the old shine of fifty years of elbows, and thought: it wasn't him. Or it wasn't only him. It was this table, this seal, these hands, this warmth that runs downhill toward the thing nobody wants disturbed — and they're holding it out to me now like a coat, and it fits, and that's how they'll get me, if they get me. Not with the money. Not with the Berys. With the loving.

She'd have to be careful, she thought, what she let the town do to her hands.

She didn't yet know that being careful wasn't going to be enough — that you can't accept a coat by halves, and that the warmer they got, the more it would cost her, by July, to take it off in front of all of them and show them what the lining was made of.

But she knew the warm was a trap now. That was the new thing she carried out of the club that Tuesday, heavier than the result was light: that the danger had stopped being the men who wanted to take the birds, and started being the town that wanted to love her for them.

She went home and fed the loft at four, and the forty turned south as one, and she stood at the wire and let herself, for once, not look away.