Chapter Twenty-Two — Light as a Lie

There was a thing Jules did with his thumb that she had been watching all season and had not been able to learn, and on the Monday with nine days left he finally let her catch him at it.

He had De Late out of the banana-crate box, which he had not liked, the box, had said nothing about and not liked, a hen of that blood roosting on a curtain-rail by a girl's window like a budgie — and he held her on his open hand in the loft, in the early grey, and ran the thumb down the keel and then did the other thing, the thing, laid the bird belly-up across his palm and pressed two fingers into the soft below the breastbone, in under the worked muscle, and held them there a moment with his eyes gone the place they went, looking at nothing in the corner of the loft, and then turned her right way up and set her on the perch and said, "She's not there yet."

"Where's there."

"You'll feel it." He wiped his hand down his trouser, an old habit, the bird hadn't soiled him. "Not full. Full's no good, full's a fat hen on a perch, she'll fly to France and sit down in a field and think she's done a thing. And not gone, not hollow, you don't want hollow, hollow's a bird with nothing left to spend. You want her on the edge. Hard and light and hungry and not knowing it. A bird that thinks she could fly forever because she's never been allowed to find the end of it." He looked at the hen, who looked at the wall. "Three days off, maybe four. You bring her up to it and you hold her there and you don't go past it, because there's no holding her at the top — she comes up to the edge of form and she sits on it for a day, two days, and then she starts coming down whether you like it or not, and the trick of the whole sport, the only trick, is to have her sitting on the top of it on the morning the crates go south. Miss it by two days either way and you've a good hen flying a great race in the wrong week."

"And how do you know which week's the top of her."

"You don't." He said it the way he said the things that mattered, flat, and let the floor open under it. "You guess. You guess off forty years of guessing and you're wrong as often as you're right and the ones who say they're not wrong are lying, the way men lie, to be loved." He picked up the feed scoop. "Your grandfather guessed better than any man I ever stood beside. That's all the gift is. Guessing closer to the truth of a bird than the next man, and never being able to prove you did it, only the result on a Sunday says so, and the result's a liar too, half the time, because the result's the weather as much as the bird." He poured. The corn went into the trough and the loft came off the perches in one soft fall, the noise of forty bodies dropping to feed, and she stood in it and thought: the result's a liar too, and did not say what she was thinking, which was that in this loft, the one time it mattered most, the result had been a liar on purpose, and the man who made it lie had taught the man beside her how to guess.

The feeding had changed and she'd let it change without quite deciding to, which was how the craft got into you, she'd noticed, not as decisions but as a thing your hands did before you'd ruled on it.

For the short races you fed them down — the light corn, the barley, the depurative, a bird emptied out and clean, a sprinter's body. For Barcelona you fed them up, but slowly, and not the way a fool feeds them up, not just more, but the oils now, the small dark seeds, the linseed Jules measured into her palm and made her smell, that's energy a bird can carry over water, that's three days on the wing in a handful of seed, and the fats laid down on the bird the way a man lays in coal before a winter he can see coming. You were building a body for a distance the body could not imagine. A bird that had never flown more than five hundred kilometres in its life, you were stoking it for a thousand and forty, over the mountains it had never seen and the sea it did not know was sea, and the cruelty and the beauty of it both was that the bird did not know. The bird ate the oiled seed off the trough and grew the engine for its own ordeal and thought, if it thought anything, only that the feed had got better, that the new hand was generous, that the loft was a good place to be.

She filled the trough at half six before school and again at four, the old hour, the four-o'clock hour, and on the Tuesday at four she came down the garden with the scoop and they did the thing they did, turned at once to the south, the whole loft swinging its small heads toward the water they couldn't see, and she stood in it the way she'd stood in it the first afternoon, the week he died, when she'd told herself it was nothing, the hour, birds are clocks with feathers. She knew more now. She knew it was the hour and that knowing it was the hour did not make it nothing. They were facing the place the corn came from for forty years and the place she was going to throw them in nine days, the same place, France and beyond France and the long grey under-edge of the world, and they faced it the way the men down the row faced it on the practice evenings, getting used to the size of it before there was anything in it to wait for.

The widowhood was the engine and she had it running now, hard, in the dark before the race.

She'd separated them the way you separated them, the cocks one end and the hens the other, all season, so that the wanting built. But for Barcelona Jules made her sharpen it past anything she'd done. The cock she'd basket — for she'd basket cocks too, four of them, Jules's hard old widowhood men, on top of the hen, because the long race was a lottery and you didn't put your one good number on a single ticket — the cock she'd basket she now showed his hen for an hour the night before, not the ten minutes of the short races, an hour, let him at the box, let him drive her round it and tread her and crow himself raw and believe, the poor mad machine, that he'd won her back for good — and then took her away in front of him, lifted the hen clean out and shut the wire, so the last thing in his head going into the crate was the thing taken away. That was the speed. That was the whole science of it, dressed up in feed charts and forty years: you took the one thing the bird loved and you put it on the far side of the sea, and you let the love do what fear and feed and breeding could not, which was carry a half-kilo of muscle a thousand kilometres home over open water with no map but the missing.

She'd thought it cruel, in the beginning, in the cold spring, watching a cock pine at the wire for a hen lifted away. She didn't think it cruel now and she'd noticed that, too, the way she'd stopped being able to think it cruel, and was not sure whether that was the craft teaching her the truth of the thing or only teaching her to stop seeing it, which was a different lesson and the one the whole town had passed.

De Late was a hen and you flew the hens on widowhood too, the good fanciers, on the same engine reversed — kept from her cock, shown him, robbed of him. But Jules said no. Jules said leave the hen apart and quiet and let her fly for the loft itself, for the perch and the box and the south window and the new steady hand, because that was a hen, he said, that was the kind of hen she was, off that blood, a hen that came home not for a cock but because home was the thing she did, the way some birds were, the way De Sint had been, the old man's blue-black cock that dropped out of the empty Sunday sky in '58 long after the others because coming home was simply what he was for and he was going to do it whether it won or not.

"That's the danger in her," Jules said. "She'll come for nothing. She'll come for the loft. You can't motivate a bird like that, you can only not ruin her. Feed her right and leave her be and she'll fly her heart out across that water for the plain reason that she's a homing bird and home is south of here, and ask you for nothing, and that's the bird your grandfather spent twenty years breeding back toward, a bird that does the right thing for no reward — and I'll let you sit a while," he said, getting up off the stool, his knees going, "with why a man who could breed that bird needed to make a clock lie."

He left her that. He had a way of leaving her things, on the stool, on his way out, the door shutting on the half of the sentence that mattered. A man who could breed a bird that does the right thing for no reward. She sat in the loft with the hen on the third perch, one foot tucked, the orange eye giving nothing back, and held the two of them in her head, the man and the bird he made, and could not make them fit, and understood that the not-fitting was the thing itself, was the whole tin, was what she'd been handed: that the same hands could breed honesty into a bird and lie with a clock in the same year and love a girl across forty years of it and leave her the choice he didn't have the nerve to make. The hen did not help. The hen was good at the thing he couldn't do and didn't know it, sat on her perch being the answer to a question she'd never been asked, and Lieselot looked at her and thought, not for the first time, that the cleanest thing in the whole rotten inheritance was the one that couldn't talk.

On the Thursday she took the hen up on a toss alone, the long one, the last real one before the basketing, Jules driving her out in the van with the wicker hamper rocking on the back seat and the heath going by, the broom and the birch and the bone-grey afternoon, out past Eisden where the Berys had their dead under a stone they couldn't afford the lettering on, and on, forty kilometres, fifty, to a field with a wire fence and a far line of pylons, and there he stopped the van and they got out into the wind off nowhere and he made her be the one to do it.

"Your bird," he said. "Your hand throws her."

She took the hen out of the hamper. The wind had north in it, a clean cold north, the right wind, a wind that would set a bird's head the moment she was loose. She held the hen the way she held her now, two fingers along the keel without thinking, felt the heart going its quick small going, felt the fat laid in and the muscle hard under it, felt, she thought, for one second, the edge — the thing Jules's thumb found, the not-full, not-hollow, the hard light hungry middle of a bird at the top of itself — felt it the way you feel a thing once and aren't sure you felt it, and then she opened her hands.

The hen dropped, fell a body's length the way they always fell, and then took the air, took it the way they took it, the wingbeat finding itself in three strokes, and went up off the flat field in a tilting climb, banking, taking a bearing off something Lieselot would never see, the slope of the light or the lean of the world or the pull of a perch fifty kilometres north of here, and set her head, and went. North. Home. Toward the dead town and the green heap and the bedroom window, a blue speck shrinking up the cold sky, smaller, gone into the grey, gone before the fence and the pylons had stopped meaning anything, gone the way a thing goes that knows where it's going better than you know where you live.

"There she goes," Jules said. He was looking at the empty sky where the speck had been. "That's the wrong direction to be standing in. We want to be the place she's flying to." He turned and got in the van. "Come on. She'll beat us home, that one, and I want to see her drop."

She got in. The van went north up the heath road behind the bird she couldn't see, and she sat with her hands in her lap, the hands that had thrown her, and looked at the grey ahead where the hen had gone, and thought about the throwing. About how easy it was, in the end, the great thing. You held the bird and you opened your hands and the bird did the rest, the thing it was for, the going and the coming back, the thousand kilometres of sea and mountain folded up small in a body the weight of a letter, and all you had to do, the whole of your part, the human part, was let go at the right time in the right place with your face pointed the way you wanted her to learn — and then stand in a field a long way south of home and watch her leave you, and drive, and wait.

That was the sport. That was the whole sport. You spent the year on the body and the bird spent itself on the sky and at the end you had no part to play at all but the waiting. She thought she had not understood that, in the spring, when she'd hated the smell of the loft and meant to sell. She'd thought the sport was the keeping. It wasn't the keeping. The keeping was just the year you served so you'd have something to throw. The sport was the letting go and the waiting, and the whole town had built its life around the one thing it was worst at, which was bearing the not-knowing, and that was either the bravest thing she'd ever seen a row of broken men do or the saddest, and she could not, driving north through the heath behind a bird she'd thrown into a thousand kilometres of risk she hadn't yet decided the meaning of, tell the two of them apart.

The hen had beaten them home. Of course she had.

When they came up the Pastoorstraat the blue shape was already in the bedroom window, on the curtain-rail in the banana crate, head turned in, settled, as if she'd been there an hour, as if she'd never gone, as if a field fifty kilometres south and a wind with north in it and the whole tilting grey crossing of it had been nothing, a thing she did between perchings, beneath remark. Jules looked up at the window from the gate and made the sound he made, a low breath through the nose, the nearest he came to wonder, and said, "Daar is ze," there she is, the thing Staf used to say of this blood, the late one home, and then caught himself saying a dead liar's words about a bird and went quiet, and put his cap on, which meant he was leaving.

"Nine days," he said at the gate. "Eight, really. You bring her up the way I showed you, the oils Thursday, the hen shown Saturday night, an hour, and you basket Sunday." He looked at her, and she felt the other thing come up under the feed-talk, the thing that had been under everything all season. "She's as good a bird as this loft ever made. She's as good as the one that won the thing nobody can take down off that board." He let it sit. "What you fly her for is yours. I'll not say a word to you about it and I'll not say a word for you either, in there, on the morning, unless you ask me, and if you ask me I'll stand where you tell me to stand." He opened the gate. "But I'll tell you the one thing about that hen and then I'm away to my tea. She'll fly the same race whatever you decide. She doesn't know the difference between an honest loft and a lying one. She'll cross that water exactly as hard for a liar as for a saint, and come home exactly as late, and ask you for nothing either way." He stepped through and shut it behind him. "So she's no help to you, the bird. Don't go looking to her for the answer. She is the answer to a different question and you've not been asked that one. You'll have to find your own, in your own mouth, in there, on the green baize." And he went, up the dark row, getting small the way the street made everything small toward the road out, the only honest man she knew, going home to a cold house to wait, like the rest of them, for a Sunday that hadn't a thing in it yet but sky.

She went up to her room. The hen was on the rail in the window, against the last of the grey, the south of the sky going down behind her to nothing over the green heap and the dead winding-gear. Lieselot put her hand under her, two fingers along the keel, and held her in the going light, and felt the heart and the worked muscle and the fat laid in for the sea, and felt, again, almost, the edge — three days off, four — the bird coming up toward the top of herself on a schedule older than the town, indifferent to the girl, indifferent to the tin under the loose board four feet away, indifferent to 1958 and the clock and the name in flaking gold and the green form with her number on it down in the dark of the box. Light as a lie and heavier than the town, the whole of it, the loft and the legend and the debt and the choice, folded up in a body the weight of a letter and growing strong for the crossing whether the girl who fed her had the nerve to fly her clean or not.

She did not know yet what she would do at the clock.

She set the hen back on the rail and stood at the window with her, the two of them facing south, and let it be true, the not-knowing, the way she'd let it be true at the window the night she entered her, and over the heath the light went and the men down the row called their last birds off the last toss of the evening, komeen, komeen, getting used to the size of the waiting before there was anything in it to wait for, and somewhere out past France and the mountains and the under-edge of the world the great water lay in the dark, the thing she'd throw her into in eight days, the unknowable middle of it, and the bird sat on the rail and faced it and was not afraid, because the bird did not know it was sea — and the girl beside her knew exactly what it was, and was, and faced it anyway, and that, she thought, watching the dark come up out of the south, was the only difference between them that mattered, and it was the whole difference in the world.