Chapter Nineteen — Faces Up

The fond from Cahors came home into a good wind on the last Sunday of June, and the town turned up its face to her birds the way it had once turned it up to Staf's, and she stood in the garden under all those faces and learned what the wanting felt like, finally, from the inside, and it was the worst thing that had happened to her since the tin.

She had not slept. You didn't, the night before a fond came back; Jules had told her that the first week and she'd thought it was an old man making the sport bigger than it was, and now she knew it for the plain fact it was. Six hundred and forty kilometres of France between the loft and where they'd thrown the birds up at dawn in a field outside Cahors, and a night in the crates before that, and a hard week of weather over the middle of it — and you lay in the dark doing the only arithmetic the sport ran on, distance over time, the metres a minute a bird would have to make to be worth anything, and you couldn't make the bird fly any faster by lying awake but you lay awake anyway, the way the town prayed at funerals to a God it didn't believe could do anything either. It was the same muscle. Useless and you used it.

She'd lost one to Cahors. Not De Late — De Late was a hen, kept apart, not even basketed for the long ones yet; you didn't throw the loft's whole future at six hundred kilometres in June to find out what June weather did to it. The one she lost was a three-year-old cock called Wit, a good honest bird with a white flight feather that gave him his name, nothing special on paper, the kind of bird a loft has six of and notices the absence of like a tooth. He'd gone over with the team a fortnight before on the fond from Brive and come back hard, late, off the front of nothing, and she'd brought him on and basketed him for Cahors because Jules said he had it in him and Jules was right about birds the way the church was right about Sundays.

He didn't come.

She'd stood at the wire through the whole of Saturday evening with the seven that did come settling and crooning behind her and the one place on the landing-board staying empty, and she'd done the thing you weren't supposed to do, which was keep the corn down past dark in case, which only fed rats and told the loft you'd lost your nerve. And she'd thought about Wit out over the dark of France somewhere with the white feather no use to him in the night, down in a hedge or a field or worse, and she had not cried, because she didn't, but she'd stood there past the point of any sense in standing there, and that was its own kind of crying, the duivenmelker kind, the kind that wore a coat and watched an empty board and said nothing.

So she'd come to Sunday already hollowed out, already paid, and she'd thought the worst of the week was behind her.

She'd had that exactly backward.

They started coming an hour before she'd let herself believe it.

Jules was there by half-seven with his flask and his stool, because Jules came for a fond the way he came for nothing else, and he set the stool against the back wall where he always set it, in the shade, out of her eyeline, so she'd watch the sky and not the old man, and he poured a coffee and didn't offer her one because she'd learned to bring her own. The morning was bright and high with a wind out of the south-west, a homing wind, a wind that pushed a bird the last hundred kilometres like a hand in the small of the back, and she knew now to feel it on her face and read it before she read the sky, and she felt it and her stomach did the thing.

"Good wind," she said.

"Mm," Jules said, which from Jules was a speech.

The first one came in low off the heap so fast she didn't see it as a bird at all, only a hardness in the air over the green slope of the terril, a thing flung, and then it was over the gardens and it threw its wings up and dropped and she had it — one of the old widowhood cocks, Den Donker, the dark one, four years and hard as a hod — and her hands were on him before the rest of her caught up, stripping the rubber ring off the leg, the small warm leg, and into the slot of Staf's honest clock and the key over and the chunk of the drum biting the time, eight forty-one, and the cock gone in past her to his box and his hen and the whole of it done in less time than it took to think it.

"Velocity on that," Jules said, not getting up.

She didn't answer. She was already back at the wire.

They came then the way they come when a wind is right and a loft is on form, not in a string but in a clutch, two and three out of the same quarter of the sky so you had to clock one with the next already dropping, and her hands learned a speed she didn't know they had, ring and slot and key and chunk, ring and slot and key and chunk, and somewhere in the middle of it she stopped thinking the numbers and just did the thing, the way Jules said you had to, the way Staf must have done it for fifty years in this same garden under this same sky, the hands gone ahead of the head, the head no use anyway, and a kind of joy came up in her so clean and so total that she had it for whole seconds before she remembered to be ashamed of it.

Seven home by nine. The two she'd half-given up on by half past. And then the wire empty and the board quiet and the wind still pushing south-west, and Jules sitting against the wall with his cold coffee saying nothing, and her standing in the wreck of corn-feathers and droppings and her own thudding heart, and she knew before he said it.

"That was a race," Jules said.

The result came up the town the way a good result always did, faster than the bad news the town actually ran on, and by noon the gardens knew, and by two the club knew, and by the time she walked down for milk in the afternoon she was someone different than she'd been at breakfast.

It was Den Donker had done it — the dark cock, four years, off the front of the whole region. When Sus Gielen worked the distances and the velocities that evening and the union sheet came through on the club fax that the lokaal was so proud of, Den Donker had made the best metres a minute of any bird in the union that flew Cahors, and a velocity that put the Maes loft not fourth, not ninth, but first. First in the club and first in the union and somewhere down the printed national list a number with the name Maes against it that men in towns she'd never been to would read on Tuesday and say, who's that, and be told.

First.

She stood in the shop with the milk going warm in her hand while Mevrouw Daniëls who'd known Staf sixty years came round the counter to take both her hands in both of hers, the way you do at a wedding or a grave, and said, amai, Lieselot, your opa, with her eyes wet, and meant it as the highest thing the town had, which it was. And out on the Pastoorstraat men who'd nodded at her since April the way you nod at a chair a dead man left behind now stopped and turned the whole of their bodies toward her, René from the bar and old Cyriel who never spoke and a man whose name she didn't even know, and lifted their caps, actually lifted them, the way she'd only ever seen done to a hearse and to the host going by, and one of them said De Maes, hé, the Maes, with the de on it, the way you said a thing that was an institution and not a girl.

The town turned up its face to her.

That was the thing she'd think about after, walking home with the warm milk: that it was the same face. The exact same face the whole back of the street tipped up to the southern sky every Saturday, the face Staf had lifted her to the loft window to make, the face she'd grown up inside and hated like a childhood smell — and now it was turned at her. At her birds. At the speck of a dark cock she'd brought to form herself with her own two hands over three weeks of half-six mornings, that she'd thrown to a French dawn and called home faster than any man in the union. Every face in town tipped up, and her at the centre of where they were looking, the way Staf had been at the centre of it for forty years, the one warm place in a cold town, the one thing it was proud of.

She wanted it.

That was the whole of it, walking up the Pastoorstraat with the milk. She'd spent fifteen years building herself so the town could never catch her wanting anything, because the thing the town did to the people it caught wanting — to her father, to anyone who'd had a notion and stayed — was laugh. And here was the town not laughing. Here was the town with its cap in its hand. And the want came up in her so hard and so fast it frightened her worse than Dries Bery had frightened her bolting the loft door from the inside in the dark, frightened her worse than the empty place on the board where Wit didn't come, because those were things done to her from outside and this was a thing that had been hiding inside her the whole time, wearing her own face, and it had only been waiting for the town to turn around.

She wanted to be loved like that. She wanted it for the rest of her life. She wanted to be twenty-five and the best loft in the union and have old women take her hands at the grave-and-wedding angle and mean your opa as the highest thing, and have men lift their caps, and be De Maes, the institution, the one warm place, forever.

And she knew exactly what it cost.

She didn't go in. She stood in the garden with the milk and the seven home cocks crooning fat and finished behind the wire, and the dark cock somewhere in there among them not knowing what he'd done, and the place on the board still empty where Wit wasn't, and she did the arithmetic that wasn't distance over time.

Gust had laid the price out for her on the green baize weeks ago — the warmth and the lie off the same board — and she'd understood it then the way you understand a sum on paper. Now it had a velocity on it. Now she'd stood in the shop and felt the want come up through the soles of her feet, and she understood the thing Gust hadn't said, the thing under his confession: that she wasn't being seduced by Gust, nor by the town's caps. She was being seduced by the work. By her own hands. By the fact — and this was the part that went down into her like cold water — that she was good at it, that she had the real thing that couldn't be taught, and that the better she got the deeper in she went, because the gift and the lie were the same inheritance, handed over together, in the same tin, written in the same ink.

Staf had stood in this garden, twenty-four years old, with the town's face about to turn up to him for the first and forever time, and a clock on the table that could be made to lie about a handful of minutes, and a hunger in him to be something in a town where a man was only ever his shift. She'd thought, reading the confession, that she could never understand the weak hour. Just bear the nearly, she'd thought at him in the dark, arguing with a dead man. Your bird was that good. Bear it.

She stood in his garden now with the town's cap in its hand and she understood the weak hour all the way down, and the understanding didn't make her forgive him. It made her afraid of herself.

Jules came down for the cocks in the evening to help her settle the team for the week and to do the thing he did after a big one, which was handle every bird that had flown and read what the race had taken out of it, two fingers along the keel, the muscle gone deflated and worked, the warmth, what he called the bird's honest tiredness, so you knew what you had left to fly with.

He handled Den Donker last, the dark cock, the one that had turned the town's face. He took him up out of the box and ran the two fingers down the keel and held him a long moment with his eyes gone somewhere else, the way Staf used to, the old men's silence with a bird, and then he put him back and looked at her across the loft in the bad light.

"You know what you've got there," Jules said.

"A tired bird."

"A loft." He wiped his hands on his trousers. "You've got a loft, Lieselot. Not a few good birds you got lucky with. A loft. That cock'll breed you ten more like him off the line and De Late's better than him and there's two yearlings in there'll be better than her, and you brought them to that today, you, with your hands, off Staf's blood — and there's not a man in this union, nor in the next, who'll be able to say in five years that the Maes loft was Staf's loft flown by a girl. It'll be yours. They'll say Maes and mean you."

He said it plain, no warmth in it, the way Jules said things, and it was the kindest thing anyone had said to her since the tin and it was also, she understood, the most dangerous, because Jules of all of them wasn't trying to buy her. Jules didn't want the secret kept. Jules half-knew the secret and his arc, if a man like Jules had an arc, bent slowly toward the truth. He was telling her she was good because she was good. He was holding the gift up to the light with no lie wrapped round it at all.

And it was the gift, clean, with no lie on it, that she wanted most of anything in the world right now standing in the loft her grandfather built. That was the trap shutting. Not Gust's warmth. Not the town's caps. This. A true old man saying they'll say Maes and mean you, and meaning it clean, and her wanting it so badly it was hard to breathe, and knowing that to keep it she had only to do nothing, to say nothing, to let the dead keep their Sunday and fly her brilliant honest-feeling birds all the way to the top of a board built on a stolen handful of minutes.

"Wit didn't come," she said, because she had to say something that wasn't the want.

Jules looked at the empty box.

"No," he said. "He didn't." He latched the box anyway, the way you did, the loft made ready as if every bird were coming. "You fly the fond, you lose birds over the sea and the mountains and the dark, and you do it again the next week. That's the whole of it. There's no version where they all come home." He picked up his stool and his cold flask. "You did right by him. You basketed him because he had it in him, and he did, and the weather took him, not you. Don't carry it as yours. The sky's the sky."

He went up the garden in the last of the light, slow, an old man who'd buried a wife and a friend and fifty years of good birds and still came out for a fond, and at the loft window she watched him go, the way Staf had stood her at that window to watch the south, and she didn't watch the south. She watched the man. The one clean adult in the whole of it, going home to a tidy lonely kitchen, who'd told her she had it because she had it, and had no idea — or every idea, and was too gentle to say it — that the truest thing he could have said was the worst thing she could have heard.

The wind held south-west into the dark. She locked the loft and the seven home cocks shifted on their perches and went quiet, and the place where Wit wasn't stayed a place where Wit wasn't, and somewhere past the dead winding-gear and the green heap the south of the sky went down to nothing the way it did, over France, over the long water beyond it, where the birds went and some didn't come back.

She'd thought, in April, that the choice was a hard one because it was three ways and all of them cost. Sell the birds. Give them to the men her grandfather robbed. Or stand up in a room full of men and take the town's one true thing away from it.

She knew now it wasn't hard because it was three ways.

It was hard because there was a fourth thing, and the fourth thing wasn't a choice at all, it was a slope, and she was already on it, and it went down so smooth and so warm — fly, win, be loved, be Maes, be the one warm place in the cold town, and never once have to do anything but the work she'd turned out to love — that you could go all the way to the bottom of it without ever deciding to, the way her grandfather had, the way the whole town had, forty years of good men standing in their gardens with their faces turned up, choosing nothing, letting it lie, and calling the slope a life.

She stood at the loft window in the dark and felt the want of it still, the warm pull of the town's turned-up face, undiminished, not going anywhere, hers now to carry the rest of the season — and underneath it, the first thing she'd let herself feel all day that wasn't the wanting, came up small and cold and entirely her own: that the only way to stop the slope was to do the one thing on it that nobody, not Staf, not Gust, not the whole town for forty years, had ever once had the nerve to do.

She thought: I'm going to win Barcelona. The thought came up out of the want, sweet and certain, De Late the cleanest bird off the line at the very peak of her, the legacy hen, 1958 with feathers on, hers to throw to the Spanish sky and call home and put up on the board beside his name in new gold the town could afford to mean again.

And right behind it, in the dark, in the cold, in her own voice and no one else's, the answer she'd been refusing since the night she opened the tin:

And if I do, I'll have to tell them first.