Chapter Eighteen — The Colour of a Healed Bruise

The weather came up wrong on the Thursday and was worse by the Saturday, and every old man in the town knew it before the radio did.

You could feel it on the bricks. The wind had gone round into the south and west and then it had stopped going round at all, which was the thing Jules didn't like — a wind that picks a corner and sits in it is a wind with a mind made up — and there was a softness in the air off the church, a wet warmth that wasn't summer, the kind of warmth that comes ahead of a sky full of water. By Saturday afternoon the heap had its head in cloud. You couldn't see the top of the terril from the garden, the green of it gone grey, going up into nothing, and Lieselot stood scraping the boards with the door open and watched the cloud sit down on the one mountain the town had ever built like something settling in to stay.

The race was a fond from Limoges. Six hundred kilometres and a bit, the longest she'd flown a team into, the last hard one before the grote fond — Jules called it the dress rehearsal and then was sorry he'd called it that, because a dress rehearsal is a thing you can do twice and a bird you put on the wing over six hundred kilometres of bad July you might only get to do once.

She'd basketed seven. Six of Jules's choosing and one of her own, and the one of her own was the bird called Sus.

She hadn't named him. Staf had. It was on his breeding card in the dead man's pencil — Sus, blauwe doffer, 1992 — a slate-blue cock two years old, broad in the hand and quiet in the basket, a son of the slate breeder off a hen that went four ways back to De Sint without ever getting close enough to it to be worth money. Not the line's crown. Not anything anyone but her would have looked at twice. Jules had run his thumb down the keel of him a fortnight ago and said he's honest, which was the highest thing Jules said about a bird that wasn't going to win you anything, and Lieselot had heard it and put the cock in her own three on the strength of it, and then quietly taken two of her three out again so it was only Sus, because she'd noticed, the way you notice you've started doing a thing only after you've done it a while, that she went to his box first in the morning. Before the good ones. Before De Late even, in her clean section, kept apart and fed careful and never on the wing this side of Barcelona. She went to Sus first and he came up the wire to her hand without being made to, and she'd thought, don't, the way Staf must once have thought don't, and had done it anyway.

She didn't tell Jules that part. She told Jules he was honest and good for the distance and she wanted to see what he'd do, which was true and was also the kind of true you say instead of the other one.

They basketed at the lokaal on the Friday evening with the rain holding off and everyone pretending it would keep holding.

Gust sealed her clock with the red wax and the brass die, the crest over the keyhole, his dry warm hand on the box, and said fly well the way he said it now, every time, the same two words, and she took them the way she'd learned to take them since the night with the board — as the first coin of a wage she hadn't agreed to draw. The clock that had been Staf's working clock, the honest one, the one with nothing wrong in it, went into the basket of clocks under the seal of a man who'd known for forty years, and Lieselot watched the wax go on and thought of the other clock, the one at home under the loose board, the brass one with the 58 scratched in the base and no seal on it at all, broken open once and kept, and how the only difference between the two clocks in the whole world was that somebody, one Sunday, had decided the difference between them didn't matter.

Fons Beckers loaded the convoy. The men stood about in the yard while he did it, hands in pockets, faces up at the cloud, saying the things they said.

"He'll have it on the nose all the way."

"Headwind from Limoges he'll have it three days."

"Not three days. Don't say three days."

"I'm saying what the wind's saying."

"The wind doesn't know about my electric bill," said René, and a couple of them laughed, the dry short laugh, and Mon said the thing about a fond race being a tax you pay the sky for the good years, and they all knew which good years he meant, and nobody looked at the back of the lokaal where the board was. They never did, out here. The board was for the dark room. Out here in the yard there was only the convoy filling up, basket by basket, a thousand birds from a dozen dead towns going south in a truck to be thrown at the weather in the dark of Sunday morning, and the men watching them go the way men watch a thing they've sent for them so they don't have to feel it for themselves.

Lieselot put Sus's basket up to Fons last. The cock sat low and easy, his eye gone to a black bead in the bad light, and she had her two fingers along his keel one more time without deciding to, reading the warm worked muscle of him, the silk of the feather, the heart going its fast small going under her hand like a thing trying to get out of the town faster than she ever had. Then Fons took the basket and slid it home and shut the door on it.

"Bring him back, Fons," she said, which you weren't supposed to say. It was bad luck and worse manners; the convoyer brings them to the start, the sky brings them home, and a duivenmelker who can't carry that between the two is a duivenmelker who's going to have a hard life. Fons looked at her, an old man with a clipboard, and didn't tell her off.

"I bring them to Limoges," he said. "That's all that's mine."

It rained Saturday night the way it had been threatening to since Thursday, a real rain, the gutters going and the bricks black and the church bell coming muffled through it as if even God's clock had got the cold. Lieselot lay awake and listened to it and thought about a truck on a motorway somewhere south of here full of birds in the dark, and about the sky over the Pyrenees they hadn't even got to yet, and about Sus low in his basket with his eye gone to a bead, and she got up twice and stood at her window looking at the rain coming down past the streetlight and told herself it would clear by morning where the birds were, that it always cleared somewhere, that the weather here wasn't the weather there.

It did not clear by morning where the birds were. Fons rang the lokaal at six and the lokaal rang round, and the word came up the street the slow way bad word comes, mouth to mouth: held. The lossing held over. Too thick to throw them into. They'd sit another day in the baskets in the south, fed and watered and going stale, and the men in the gardens looked at the sky that had cleared, here, gone a clean rinsed blue, here, where there were no birds, and said nothing, because there is nothing to say to a clear sky over an empty garden.

They let them up Monday morning. Eight o'clock, late, the weather only half cleared down there, a headwind out of the north sitting against them the whole long way home. A thousand birds thrown at six hundred kilometres of wind in one roar, and then the wait.

Jules came round Monday afternoon with his flask and his stool and his radio that got the union frequency, and they set up at the loft window the way they always did, and Lieselot understood without being told that this was a wait that was going to be different from the others, because Jules had brought two flasks.

"They'll not have it today," he said, settling the stool. "Not into that. The good lofts down south might steal one in tonight if the wind drops, the ones near the coast. Us, we're a long way back. We're a morning bird at best, this one. More like two mornings."

"Two."

"Or three." He said it the way you say a number you don't like but won't lie about. "It's a hard one, Lieselot. I told you. You don't put them on the wing into a wind like that and get to choose when they're back. The wind chooses." He poured the tea. "You watch the sky, you don't watch the clock. The clock's a liar on a day like this. It'll tell you four hours is a long time and it isn't. It'll tell you they should be here and they shouldn't. You watch the sky and you let the clock alone."

So she watched the sky.

The first afternoon, nothing. Of course nothing — six hundred kilometres into a headwind, no bird in Belgium was home that nobody, that evening the radio said a loft on the coast had clocked one at half seven, one bird, and the whole union went quiet down the airwaves the way a church goes quiet, because if the coast was only just getting them at half seven then everybody inland was a long, long way off, and Lieselot heard the men's silence come down the radio and understood it was the silence of a thousand gardens all doing the same arithmetic at once and not liking the answer.

She slept three hours and was at the window before light.

Tuesday they came.

Not all at once. They came the way fond birds come off a bad race, in ones, hours apart, beaten — you could see it before they dropped, the way they came in low and heavy and crooked over the roofs, not the clean fast snap of a vitesse bird coming home fresh but a thing that had been three days getting here and had used itself up doing it. The first of hers came at twenty past nine, a yellow cock of Jules's pick, and he hit the board hard and went straight in to the water and stood in it to his hocks and drank like he'd flown over a desert, which in a way he had, the desert being the air, six hundred kilometres of it pushing back. Jules clocked him. The chunk of the key, the time onto the drum, the honest sound.

"One," Jules said. "Good lad. There's one."

They came through the morning. By noon she had four of the seven. By two she had five. Each one the same — low, heavy, crooked, then the water, then the corn it was too tired to eat — and each one she caught and stripped the gummiring off and Jules clocked, and each one that dropped she felt the thing in her chest that she'd spent fifteen years building herself not to feel, the lift of it, there, there's one, and then the going-down after, because a bird home is a bird home but a bird home means the sky behind it is emptier by one and there are two still in it.

The fifth was the slate cock's brother, and Jules looked at the two missing and looked at the sky and didn't say anything for a while.

By the afternoon the radio had gone past the union's good lofts and was reading the back-of-the-field times, the slow ones, the ones nobody won anything on, and Lieselot understood that the race was decided now, that somewhere a man on the coast had a velocity that would put his name in a paper, and that what she was waiting on now was nothing to do with the race at all. The race was over. This was the other thing. This was just whether they came back.

The sixth came at half four. A hen. Crooked over the heap and in.

"Six," Jules said. "Six of seven, Lieselot. That's a good day's work in that weather. That's better than half the club'll do."

"There's seven."

"There's always one more than there is," Jules said, which was an old man's thing to say, and was true, and she hated it. "You count what's on the board. You don't count what's in the sky. There's nothing in the sky belongs to you. There never was. You feed them and you fly them and you watch, and the sky gives back what it gives back, and a man who counts what's in the sky is a man who's going to be poor his whole life over a thing he never had."

She knew which one was missing. She'd known since the fourth one came and it wasn't him.

1958.

Staf is twenty-four and the rain has come up out of the south the same way and the bird he is waiting on is not De Sint.

De Sint is home. De Sint came Sunday at the edge of the light, the bird of the town, the strong one, the one everyone watched — came home a second, a strong second, the best metres-per-minute in the heath and the second-best in the race, which is to say nothing, which is to say a man who is nearly the best in the world is a man nobody will remember, and Staf has done his sum three times at the kitchen table and the sum keeps saying second and second is nothing.

But there is another bird. A yellow hen of his own breeding, not the crown, not the one the town watched, a small honest hen he put in on his own account for the distance because he wanted to see what she'd do — and she has not come. Sunday, no. Monday, no. He stands at the loft window with the coal under his nails for good now and the cough he hides going in his chest, and he watches the south of the sky go down the way it goes down in July, and the yellow hen is not in it.

The town is at his gate by Monday evening. The town has heard about the second. The town does not want a second. The town has had nothing but seconds since the pit opened, a town full of men who went down a hole and came up second to the men who owned the hole, and they have come to Staf's gate to be told, this once, that one of them was first at something, and Staf stands at his own window with a clock on the table that says second and a yellow hen that says nothing and a town at his gate that wants a first, and the rain comes on again out of the south.

That is the night Door Vandersmissen comes round. Not the night of the offer. A night before it, a small night nobody will ever write down, the night the yellow hen doesn't come — and Door stands in the kitchen with his cap in his hand and looks at the clock that says second and says, low, a town like this, Staf, it can stand a lot. It stood the firedamp and it stood the foreigners and it stood the prices. The one thing it can't stand is to come second in front of the world when it had a chance to come first. You'd be doing them a mercy. And Staf says nothing, because the yellow hen is not in the sky, and a man standing at a window with one bird gone already does not have a great deal of faith left over to spend on the bird that's home.

The yellow hen never comes. Not Tuesday. Not ever. Six hundred kilometres of weather and she is somewhere under it, in a hedge, in a field, on a wire in the rain, a small honest bird nobody will remember either, and the only thing Staf has to show for the whole of that July is a clock that says second and a town at his gate, and the fear that comes up in him that night is not a fear of being caught, it has nothing to do with being caught, it is the fear of being nothing — of standing at a window his whole life waiting on birds that don't come, in a town that came second, having been, for one Sunday, that close to first and let it go.

He does it for the town, he tells himself. He will tell himself that for forty years.

He does it because the sky took the one bird and he could not stand to let it take the other.

Lieselot read it off the tape and the confession both, after, in the dark, the parts she'd read and re-read until she knew them the way you know a prayer you've stopped believing — but she didn't need the tape that Tuesday at the window. She had it without the tape. She had it in her own chest, watching the south of the sky go down over the green heap, the empty place at the wire where Sus should be and wasn't.

The sky went the long way down it goes in July. It went gold and then it went the colour she would not have a word for if she'd had a hundred years to find one — not red, not grey, a low bruised colour over the heap, the colour a bruise goes four days on when it's nearly better and you press it anyway just to feel that it still hurts, that colour, the whole western sky the colour of a healed bruise pressed, and into it no bird came.

Jules stayed till it was full dark and there was no use in either of them being at a window you couldn't see out of.

"Leave the trap open and a light on it," he said, getting up, his knees going. "Sometimes they come in the dark on the long ones. Worse than this have come in the dark." He folded the stool. He didn't say he'll come. He'd never once lied to her about a bird and he didn't start now, at the end of a hard one, when it would have cost him nothing and meant nothing and she'd have known. "Six of seven into that wind," he said instead. "You did right by them, Lieselot. The ones that came, they came to a loft kept right. That's all that's ever yours — that they had a home worth flying to. The rest is the sky."

He went up the garden in the dark, an old man who'd lost more birds to the south of the sky than she'd ever own, and she stood at the window with the trap open and the bulb on it throwing its yellow square out into the wet, and she did not tell herself it was the corn, and she did not tell herself he'd come, and she stayed.

She understood the thing she had not understood before, standing there.

She'd had it the easy way until now. Staf cheated, and cheating was a thing a bad man did or a weak man did, and she'd been able to hold him at the length of how could you, which is a length you can hold a man at and still feel clean yourself, still feel you'd have done the other thing, the hard right thing, in his shoes — because you've never stood in his shoes, you've only stood near them and felt superior. She'd been angry at him that clean way. She'd argued with him in the dark that clean way, the dead man and the live girl, you loved me and you lied to everyone, and the you lied had always had a clean floor under it, the floor of I never would.

The floor was gone now. Standing at the window with the bruise-coloured sky gone black and the empty wire and Sus not coming and the want in her chest she'd built herself a whole life not to feel, the want for one slate-blue ordinary cock that wasn't worth money and wouldn't win her anything and went up the wire to her hand in the mornings — standing there she felt, for the first time, all the way down, what it would be to have a clock on the table that said second and a town at your gate and a sky that had just taken the one thing you loved out of it, and a man in your kitchen with his cap in his hand saying you'd be doing them a mercy. She felt how a person could do it. Not a bad person. Not a weak one. A person standing at this exact window with this exact hole in the sky, terrified of being nothing, offered a way to make the loss mean something instead of nothing — offered, for a handful of minutes that were never really there, a first instead of a second, a something instead of the long bruised nothing of a sky that doesn't give your birds back.

She'd thought knowing the inside of it would make her softer on him. It made her afraid of herself instead. Because she was the kind who went to one ordinary bird's box first in the morning and didn't tell anyone, the kind who'd just said bring him back, Fons, against all the manners of the sport, because she couldn't carry the wait clean either. His to the bone, Gust had said, and meant the gift, the hands, the eye. It ran deeper than the hands. She had the hole in the sky too.

She left the trap open all night and the bulb burning, and stood at the window long past any use, watching the black square of the south where no bird came. Sus was somewhere under the weather, in a hedge, on a wire in the rain, a small honest bird nobody would remember — taken the way the yellow hen was taken forty years ago, the same sky, the same race almost, the same window. And the question that came up in her then was not whether she could forgive Staf. It was whether, when her own clock came to lie to her — and the season was built to put exactly that offer in her hands — she'd have anything in her stronger than the want and the fear and the empty bruise-coloured wire to make her set it down.

She turned the bulb off near morning. Left the trap. Went up the garden in the grey light to get an hour's sleep before she had to want him home all over again.

He didn't come Tuesday.