Chapter Seventeen — The Open Latch

She bolted the loft from the inside now, since Dries, and slept with the half-six alarm set the way you set a thing to make the dark shorter. So she knew the latch had been thrown. She knew it the way she knew the corn was low or a bird was off its water, in the hand before the head, because she'd done it herself the night before with her own two fingers and felt the cold bolt seat home in its keep, and there is a difference, in the body, between a thing you did and a thing you find done.

The latch was up.

It was not forced. That was the first thing, in the grey before the sun, with her breath going out of her in the cold and the dew not yet off the broom on the heap: nobody had put a bar to the door or a boot to it. The wood was sound. The keep was sound. The bolt had simply been drawn, neat, from the outside, by a hand that knew where it sat — and a hand only knows where a loft bolt sits if it has stood at that door before, on the right side of it, welcome.

She stood with her hand flat on the cold planks and did not open it for a moment. Inside, the birds were waking. She could hear the small dry shuffle of them, the click of a beak on a perch, the soft churr a cock makes turning over in the half-dark, the ordinary morning sound of forty bodies that did not know. She listened for the thing she was afraid of, which was silence, a loft gone quiet the way a house goes quiet, and it wasn't there. They were alive in there. They were only alive in there.

Then she opened the door, and the grey light went in ahead of her along the droppings boards, and she counted.

You learn to count a loft without counting. You learn the loft the way you learn a row of faces, so that what you read first is not a number but a wrongness, a gap where a gap shouldn't be, the same way she'd read the empty place at the wire the day the young cock didn't come off Quiévrain. She had Jules's eye now, four months of it, and her eye went down the perches the way it went, the breeders along the bottom, the cocks in their widowhood boxes, the hens shut off in the far compartment behind the wire, and it caught on the third box from the end before her head had done any arithmetic at all.

The box was open. Not the door — the nest-front, the little wire flap they kept down all season so the cock couldn't get at the hen, the whole engine of the method, weduwschap, the desire to get home to her wound up tight all season by never letting him have her. The flap was up. And the box was empty.

It was the old red cock. The hard one, the eight-year-old, the one Jules had pointed her at the second week and said that's a racer, that's a man, the one she'd basketed for the halve-fond and watched come home like a thing fired out of a gun. Gone. And the hen that was his, the little dark widow they kept him pining for, she was gone too, out of the far compartment, the wire there standing open the same neat way.

She stood in the middle of her grandfather's loft with the cold coming up through the concrete and understood, slowly, the way you understand a thing you'd rather not, that nobody had stolen the red cock.

Somebody had let him out with his hen.

She knew what it meant before she let herself know it. A widowhood cock is a coiled spring; the whole season is the not-having; you keep them apart for months so that when you basket him and show him the hen for an hour and then take her away again and put him in a basket pointed at a hundred kilometres of sky, he flies home through weather that kills birds because the only thing in the world is getting back to her. Give him the hen. Just give him the hen, one night, unwatched, in his own box, and you uncoil the spring. You spend the season in a night. He'd mate, and after that he'd be a soft thing, a contented thing, a bird with nothing left to fly home for, and there was no winding him back inside a fortnight; there was no winding him back at all this side of next year.

The race was Sunday. The fond. The first one long enough that you sent them and didn't see them till morning, the first one across real water.

She let the hen go back where she belonged and she shut the wire and she stood there. The red cock came down off the box to her hand looking for corn, fat and easy and ruined, rubbing his head along her wrist the way they did, pleased with himself, pleased with the world, the best bird in the loft and finished for the year, and she held him and felt the heart going slow and content under her two fingers, no edge to it, no spring, just a warm fed animal that had got, for once, the thing it wanted, and she had to put him down quick because her hands had started to shake and she didn't want to shake him.

She did not cry. She wanted to be clear about that, later, telling Jules. She had not cried. She'd stood in the loft with the ruined cock and shaken, and that was the body, the body did what it did, but she had not cried, because crying was for things that happened to you and this had not happened to her. This had been done to her, by a hand that knew the bolt, and you do not cry at a thing somebody chose.

Jules came up the garden in his good cap because she'd phoned the café and said only can you come, and he stood in the door of the loft and looked at the open box and the red cock down on the floor sunning himself in his own contentment and Jules did not ask what happened. He knew what happened. He'd kept widowhood cocks for sixty years.

"When," he said.

"In the night. The bolt was drawn this morning. Drawn, not broke."

He took that in. He went and crouched at the latch, his knees going off like the building, and looked at it close, the way she'd looked, and ran a thumb along the keep, and didn't say anything for a while. Then he stood and went to the red cock and picked him up and felt him, the keel, the warmth, lifted a wing, set him down again, and his face when he set the bird down was the worst thing she'd seen on it. Not anger. She'd have known what to do with anger. It was a kind of tiredness, the look of a man who has seen the same wrong come round again on a long enough wheel that he recognises it.

"This wasn't Dries," he said.

"It wasn't forced."

"No. That's what I'm telling you." He wiped his hands down his trousers though they weren't dirty. "Dries Bery'd put a boot through that door and not care who heard. Dries'd take a bird, the bird, the one bird, and leave you the door swinging so you'd know it was him — that's a Bery, that's a wound walking, they want you to see it." He shook his head, slow. "This is quiet. This is somebody who didn't want it found till it couldn't be put back. Somebody who knew which box and which hen and where the bolt sits." He looked at her. "Somebody from the club's been in your loft on a friendly Sunday and watched your grandfather do his birds and watched you do yours, and last night he came back and undid you with the door shut behind him so the neighbours slept."

She sat down on the upturned feed bucket because her legs wanted it.

"Who," she said.

Jules didn't answer that straight. He was an old man and he did things in order. He went out into the garden where the light was coming up over the green heap and he stood with his back to her looking at the south of the sky the way they all did without meaning to, and when he spoke it was to the sky.

"You know what the worst of this town is," he said. "It isn't that it's poor. We were always poor, poor's nothing, poor you can stand up in. It's that there's nothing left in it to want except one thing, and so everything you can want, somebody can buy you with. There's no work, so a man'll do a job for the price of a job and never mind whose. There's no future, so a man'll sell next year for this week, because what's next year. There's nothing left but the birds and the talk of the birds, and so a man'll trade his own grandfather to be the one telling the talk." He turned round. "I'm not making a speech. I'm telling you why you'll not find it written on anybody's face. They didn't do it out of badness. That's what'll break your heart if you let it. They did it out of nothing. Out of a town that pays in nothing and so its men cost nothing."

"René," she said.

She watched it land on him, and he didn't deny it, the way Gust hadn't denied it, and she thought she could measure her whole summer by the men who, when she said a true thing, did not bother to put a hand up.

"He's been short," Jules said, after a while, like that was an answer, and it was. "His Annick's wee one's bad and the gas was cut in March, I heard it, everybody heard it. And he was down the loft with your opa a hundred Sundays, René, he knows this hok like his own. He knows the bolt." He stopped. "Somebody put money in front of a man who's been short, and told him a job that didn't even look like a job. Open a box. Let a bird have his hen. Where's the harm — they're only pigeons, sure, they'll have a grand night of it." Jules's mouth went thin. "And that's the genius of it, you see. He didn't kill anything. He didn't take anything. There's nothing to bring to a guard. A man let two birds love each other one night. Find me the crime in it."

"Dries," she said. "He paid René."

"Or Marcel paid him without knowing what Dries does with the money. Or nobody paid him for this — Dries gave him forty francs to do a small ugly thing and never said which one, and René picked the box himself because René knows which box hurts." Jules shrugged, and there was a whole grief in the shrug. "You'll not get to the bottom of it, Lieselot. That's the other thing about this place. Nothing's ever the whole way one man's fault. It's always a town's worth of small nothings, each one too small to hang anybody, adding up to a ruined bird. That's how it cheated Frans Bery and that's how it's cheating you, the same machine, forty years on, and there's nobody at the middle of it to hit."

She heard him say the same machine and she felt the floor of the morning go.

Because it was. She'd been reading the tin for months like it was history, like it was a thing that had happened once, to her grandfather, in a year before she was born, a sealed thing in a sealed box. And here it was again, out in the open, in her own loft, in the cold of an ordinary Tuesday — a result corrupted not by a villain but by a town that paid a short man in nothing and bought his hands. A man who'd been welcome at the door. A bolt that knew the hand that drew it. Staf had been the welcome hand once. Staf had been the man bought with the one thing the town had to offer, which was being the one they told the story about, and he'd opened a thing he shouldn't and undone a man in the quiet so the neighbours slept, and called it nothing, a handful of minutes, where's the harm. René had just done to her the smaller, cleaner version of the exact thing her grandfather had done to Frans Bery, and neither of them had thought of himself as a thief, and that was the horror of it, that the town didn't even need a villain. It only needed men with nothing, and one box that mattered, and the dark.

"I'll go to Gust," she said, and heard how young it sounded the second it was out.

Jules looked at her almost kindly. "And say what. That a bird got out of his box. That a latch was open in the morning. You've no boot-print, no broken door, no witness, and a club full of men who'll tell you a wire works loose, a hen squeezes through, it happens, the girl's overwrought, her opa not cold." He shook his head. "And Gust — Gust'd be sorry. He would. He's not a hard man, Gust, that's what makes him dangerous. He'd be sorry and he'd say let's not make a thing of it, no need to drag the club through it, no proof, and he'd mean every word, and at the end of it your bird's still ruined and now you're the one who made trouble in the lokaal over a pigeon. You'd hand him the thing he wants, which is you, loud and wrong and easy to wave away." He came and stood over her. "No. You say nothing. You let them think you don't know, or you don't care, or you're too green to read your own box. You let René look at you across the bar and not know what you know. And you fly Sunday with one less than you meant to, and you fly the rest of them so hard it's an answer."

"That's not justice."

"No," Jules said. "It's pigeons. Justice you do at the end, the once, in front of everybody, and you'd better be right and you'd better be ready, because you only get to do it the one time. The rest of the time you keep the birds. You hear me? Whatever else, whoever's in your loft in the night, whatever this town costs you — you keep the birds, and you keep them honest, and that's the whole of what you can do till July." He put his old hand on her shoulder the way Gust had, the same gesture exactly, and it was a different thing entirely, and she felt the difference go through her like warmth off a wall that was actually warm. "You've still got her," he said quiet. "They didn't touch her. Whoever it was knew the box that'd hurt the most and they still left her be — too clever, maybe, or too feared, or they only had the one job in them. But she's down the back behind the wire and she never knew a thing went on. Go and look."

She went down the back. De Late was on the third perch in the half-dark with one foot tucked, the orange eye banking the grey light of the door, and she watched Lieselot come the way she watched everything, giving nothing, the whole sky in a circle the size of a shirt button and the night's small ruin gone clean past her, and Lieselot put two fingers under the keel and felt the heart going quick and high and clean and wanting, the spring still wound, still all there, and she stood in the cold and held the one bird they hadn't found, the one they'd built to win 1958 again, and understood that the only thing in the loft worth most was the only thing worth most to ruin, and that whoever knew the bolt knew that too, and had, this time, for whatever reason a bought man has, walked past her.

This time.

She bolted the loft. She drew the cold bolt home and stood and listened to it seat in the keep, and then she did a thing she had not planned, which was take the loft key off the nail by the back door where it had hung since before she was born, where every man who'd ever been welcome down the garden knew it hung, and put it in her pocket. A small thing. A thing that said, more than anything she could have said to Gust or René or any of them: no more friendly hands. The door her grandfather had left open to the town for forty years, the open door that was the same as the open clock, the welcome that was the road in — she shut it, and kept the key on her body, and felt the weight of it against her hip the way she'd felt the logbook page there, the small hard freight of a thing you've decided to carry alone.

Down the row a clock struck, a beat behind the church, and somewhere a man with nothing in his hands and a sick child and a cut gas line was getting up in the cold to do whatever the town would pay him for that Tuesday, and she did not hate him, which frightened her more than hating him would have. She went up the garden with the key in her pocket and the south of the sky going pale over the green heap, and she thought: there is nobody in this town clean enough to stand beside me when I do it, except an old man who can barely get up off his knees.

And then she thought, going in to make the coffee she would not drink: then it'll have to be me. Alone if it has to be. With the door shut and the key on my hip and one less bird than I meant, in front of all of them, the once.

She'd been telling them I'll think about it since June. She did not know, standing in the cold kitchen with the key warming in her pocket, the morning she would stop saying it. But she knew now, the way she'd known the latch was up before she opened the door, that she had already, somewhere under the floor of herself, begun to set the time.