Chapter Twenty-Four — The Sealing

She carried the tin into the lokaal under her arm wrapped in the green anorak, the way you'd carry a bird to a vet, a thing you didn't want the street to read off you, and the street read it anyway. The Pastoorstraat on a basketing night was the one street in town that still filled. Crates stacked three high outside the door of the club, the wicker ones and the new plastic ones, smelling of straw and ammonia and the rubber smell of forty lofts' worth of birds gone over twice with a damp hand; men in their good caps standing about in the wet with their entry envelopes; the low Saturday-night sound of it, men who had nothing to say to each other any other night of the week saying it now, in the half-sentences, the weather, the wind, Barcelona, this is the big one, this is the queen. She came up through them with the tin under her arm and they made the small room for her they'd made all season, the chair-Staf-left room, nodding her past, and not one of them knew she had the whole forty years of the town under her arm in a biscuit tin, light as a lie and heavier than the road out.

Jules was at the door.

He looked at the shape under the anorak and looked at her face and did not ask. He'd known since the Sunday morning she'd told him, sat at his kitchen table with the rain coming sideways off the heath, and he'd done the thing she'd half-hoped he wouldn't, which was not talk her out of it. He'd gone quiet a long time over his cup and then he'd said, you'll want it on the table, not in your hand, so they can't say you waved a thing about, and that had been the whole of his blessing, a man telling her how to lay the proof down so it would carry — and now he stood at the club door with his cap on and stepped in beside her without being asked, on the loft side, the bird side, and went in with her, and that was the most anybody had done for her all year.

Inside it was hot the way the lokaal got hot, forty men and the gas heater and the old bulb over the green baize, and the trophies on the high shelf catching the light, and the board.

The board was on the long wall where it had always been. Honor board, the club called it, gold names on dark wood going back to before the war, the men who'd won the big ones, and near the top, in the lettering some sign-writer in Hasselt had done in 1958 and nobody had touched since, brighter than the rest because Staf had kept it cleaned: MAES, G. — BARCELONA 1958. She'd grown up under it. She'd been lifted to see it. It was the first reading lesson she could remember, her own surname in gold, the proof that a Maes had once made the whole sky come home to this street.

She set the tin down on the side table by the door, still wrapped, and waited for the clocks.

The clocks came out at nine.

That was the part of the night with the most church in it, and the men went quiet for it the way they didn't for anything else. Gust Verhoeven brought the master clock out from the back room himself, the big constateur, and set it on the green baize under the bulb, and the men brought their own clocks up one at a time and laid them in a row, the brass drums, the little glass faces, some of them sixty years old and worth a wage and wound like watches all week to be ready — and Gust took each one and set it to the master and checked the drum and the printing and then sealed it, dripped the red wax from the little burner and pressed the club die into it while it was soft, the same die, the lead seal going on so that no man could open his own clock between the sealing and the breaking after the race without the broken wax telling on him. The seal was the whole sport. The seal was the reason a man's word about his own bird could be believed by men who'd lie to him about everything else. Gust did it the way he'd done it forty years, the wax and the die, his big slow hands steady, his mouth a little moving the way the old men's mouths moved over the rhythm of a sacred thing, a priest who'd forgotten the words and kept them.

Lieselot watched the wax go on the clocks and thought: that's it. That's the whole of what he broke. Not a bird. Not a race. He broke the seal of the thing that lets these men believe each other, and they put his name in gold for it.

She had brought her own clock up like the others, Staf's clock, the working one, the honest one, and Gust set it and sealed it and slid it back to her without quite looking at her, and she took it, and that was the moment she'd marked for herself, the clock honest in her hand and the wax still warm, because after the sealing the basketing started, and once a bird was in a crate the night was a freight train and you did not stop it.

"Before the crates," she said.

She didn't say it loud. She'd thought all week about saying it loud and Jules had said, don't, the lokaal flat carries further than a shout in here, and he was right, she said it the flat way and it cut the room more than a shout because nobody said before the crates on a basketing night, the crates were the night, and the men's faces came round to her one and two at a time, Gust last, the wax-burner still going in his hand.

"Sit down, girl," Gust said. Not unkind. Tired. "We've forty lofts to basket and a convoyer in Battel at eleven."

"It'll take five minutes."

"Then take it after."

"It can't be after." She had the tin off the side table now and she was unwinding the anorak from it with her two hands while she talked, slow, the way you undid a thing you wanted them to watch you undo. "It can't be after because after the crates are closed there's a bird of mine in one of them, and a bird of mine in one of them with this not said is the same lie as 1958, only it'd be mine." She got the lid up. She did not look down into it; she knew it by heart, the dark of it, the brass, the yellow paper. "And I'll not put a bird of mine in 1958's crate the way my grandfather did. So it's before the crates or it's not a true thing, and I came here to do a true thing."

The room had gone the particular quiet of a room that doesn't yet know what kind of trouble it's in.

She set them on the green baize one at a time, in among the sealed clocks, where the men could see them with the bulb on them, and she named them the flat way as she set them, because Jules had said name each thing as you lay it, make them watch your hands, a thing on a table with no name is just a thing.

"This is my grandfather's clock from 1958," she said, and set the brass one down. It was an older make than the ones on the baize, a heavier drum, and on the underside, if a man turned it, the year was scratched into the brass in a hand none of them would know, 58, and two or three of the older men leaned without meaning to, the way men lean at a thing that's the same as their own thing and wrong. "Not this season's. The one he clocked his bird into at Barcelona in 1958. He kept it. He was meant to give it back to the club after and he kept it forty years."

"Lieselot." Gust had put the wax-burner down.

"This is the drum-tape out of it." The yellowed strip, brittle, the punch-marks in it gone brown, and she laid it flat beside the clock and weighted one end with the clock so it wouldn't curl. "The times printed off the night of the race. And this"—the logbook page, the one Marcel had given her on a wet step in May, a man handing over the one thing that proved his own father right—"this is Frans Bery's own record. In his own pencil. His bird's true home time. The man who flew out of the coal-scuttle loft at Eisden that none of you ever let in the front room of this club."

Somebody said the name low. Bery. Like a thing pulled up out of a long way down.

"And this"—last, and she stopped and made herself slow, because this was the one that was Staf's own hand, the one with his thumb-grease on it and his lung-cough in the slant of the letters, the one she'd read at one in the morning in April and not slept after—"is what he wrote. In his hand. He left it to me with the rest, in a tin, sealed, six years in a notary's safe, to open alone. I've opened it. I've read it a hundred times." She set the confession down on the green baize among the sealed clocks, under the gold board with his name on it, and stood up straight, and the room had got so quiet she could hear the gas heater and a bird somewhere out in the crates shift and resettle in the straw. "And I'm going to read you the middle of it. The part that matters. And then you can do what you want."

Gust came round the table. Not fast. A big old man in his good cap coming round a table the slow honest way, putting his hand flat on the baize beside the brass clock, not over it, beside it, a man not yet sure whether he was stopping a thing or steadying himself against it.

"You don't know what's in that," he said, quiet, for her, almost only for her. "A man writes things, sick, at the end. It's not—"

"You were thirty," Lieselot said.

The hand on the baize went still.

"You were thirty in 1958. You were a measurer. You told me yourself, on the heath in May, you saw his bird drop into the loft that afternoon and you saw the time go up on the board that night and you knew the one didn't fit the other and you said nothing, because a thing's true when the club says it's true, that's what you told me." She held his eye and it cost her and she did it. "So you do know what's in it, Meneer Verhoeven. You're the one man in this room who's known for forty years. I'm only the one reading it out."

He didn't deny it. She'd been ready for the denial, she'd built herself for it all week, the chairman saying the girl's overwrought, her grandfather's dead, look at the state of her — and it didn't come, and the not-coming was worse and better than the denial, because it landed in the room without her having to win it. Gust Verhoeven stood with his hand on the green baize beside the clock and his mouth a little open and forty years came up into his face all at once and made him, for a second, an old man instead of a chairman, and he didn't say it wasn't true. He said:

"It'll take the board off the wall."

"I know."

"It'll take him off it. Forty years. The only one this town ever—" His voice did a thing she'd not heard it do. "You'll take the one thing off the wall this whole street comes in here to stand under. You know what's under that name? Nothing. The mine's shut. The young's gone. Forty years that name's been the one thing in this town that says we were somewhere, we were on the map, a man off this street stood at the top of the whole world one Saturday — and you're going to read a sick man's bit of paper and take it down, and what'll you put up instead, girl? What goes up where the gold comes off?"

"The truth," she said. "Late."

She read it.

She'd thought she'd shake and she didn't, much; her hands had got steady off a season of holding birds you couldn't drop, and she held the page in the bulb-light and read Staf's middle paragraph in the flat voice, the lokaal voice, the one the season had grown in her, and it came out into the hot room plainly, a dead man's words in a dead man's grammar, the way he'd talked, the words a miner used and no more.

She read that his bird, the cock he'd called De Sint, had come home that afternoon in 1958 a strong second on the day, a hero's result, a bird he could have been proud of all his life. She read that Frans Bery's blue hen had beaten him true by a margin so small it was nothing, a handful of metres a minute over a thousand kilometres, the smallest true thing in the world. She read that Door Vandersmissen, who'd had the seal that year and was forty years in the ground at Sint-Amand, had come to Staf in the dark with a way to close that handful of minutes, and that Staf had let him. She read the sentence she'd read a hundred times, the one with his cough in it: I made the clock say my bird was home before he was. I did not race a better bird. I made a clock lie about a few minutes and let a man with no standing carry the loss of it, and I let this town love me for it forty years, and that is the worst thing, that I let them love me for it. She read his last line of that part, which was not an excuse and she was glad of that, which was the only thing in the whole page that wasn't flat: Lieselot, I could not give it back while I lived because I had not the nerve, and a thing given back in the dark is not given back. Do it where it can be heard or do not do it. I leave you the doing because it is the only thing I have left that is true to leave.

She put the page down on the green baize.

"Frans Bery won Barcelona in 1958," she said into the quiet. "Not Maes. Bery. His name should be on that board and my grandfather's shouldn't, and the man it was took from is dead now, in the ground at Eisden under a stone his sons can't afford the lettering on, so it's too late to give him anything he can hold." She looked round at them, the caps, the clocks, Gust's slate face, the gold name over all their heads. "But it's not too late to say it. That's the whole of why I had to say it before the crates and not after, in here and not in a garden in the dark, with all of you and not just one — because a name's not a private thing, a name lives in the town's mouth or it doesn't live at all, and his has been rotting in your mouths forty years as the bad loser, the incomer who cried robbery. So. I'm giving it back where it was took." She put two fingers on the brass clock, the way Staf had put two fingers on a keel, reading a thing. "Here's the clock that lied. It's the club's now, not ours. Do with it what you should've done with it in '58."

There was a long time then when nobody did anything, and that was the part she hadn't been able to picture all week, the after, the no-one-moving, and it turned out the after was just men in a hot room with their caps in their hands and the gas heater going and a thing on the table none of them wanted to be the first to touch.

Marcel Bery was at the back by the door. He'd come, the way she'd asked, in his good cap, with Dries a half-step behind him with his weight going wrong the way it went, and the two of them stood in the door-cold and did not come forward, and when she'd finished and the room had gone quiet Marcel did not say a word. She looked at him over all their heads and he looked back at her and there was nothing on his face she could read as winning, nothing she could read at all except the thing she'd put there, his father's name said out loud in this room at last, in front of every mouth that had made it small — and it was not enough, she could see that, it would never be enough, you could not make forty years come right with four pieces of paper on a Saturday night, and his face said that too, said too late, said he's in the ground, said the thing the whole book of it had been turning toward, late, but. He gave her, after a while, one small movement of the head. Not a thank you. Lower than that and higher than that. A man acknowledging a debt got paid in the one coin that was left, which was worth everything and bought nothing.

Then she did the second thing, the thing the town would understand least and that mattered most, and she said it to Gust because Gust was the one who'd have to allow it.

"I'm still flying her," she said.

Gust came up out of wherever he'd gone. "What?"

"De Late. The hen. She's entered, the form's in, the clock's sealed — your wax." She nodded at the row of sealed clocks, Staf's honest one among them with the red die-mark still soft-bright. "I'm basketing her tonight with the rest. Clean."

"You just—" Gust looked from her to the board to the brass clock on the baize and back, a man whose whole night had come apart in his hands. "You just stood there and took the win off your own grandfather and you're going to fly his bird at the same race—"

"Not to win it back." And this was the thing she'd had to get clear in herself on the heath, opening her hands into the cold, the thing she couldn't have said in April and could say now. "I'm not flying her to win 1958 again. That's what flying her for the gold would be — re-winning the lie, putting the name back up by the back way. I'm flying her because she's a good hen and she's bred to cross that water and a bird like that wants flying, and not flying her to punish a dead man's name would be its own kind of lie, a softer one. The blood's clean. Whatever the count did, the bird flew it true — De Sint flew a real race in '58, it was only the clock that lied about him. So I'll fly his daughter's daughter's daughter honest, on an honest clock, in front of all of you, and she'll come or she won't, and either way it'll be the first true thing flown out of the Maes loft in forty years. That's not winning. That's just flying a bird the way you're meant to. It's the only honest way I've got left to love her."

She picked the brass clock up off the baize — the club's now, but hers to move this once — and she set it down at the foot of the honor board, under the gold name, where they'd all have to step round it, and left it there.

"You can take the name down or leave it up," she said. "That's the club's, not mine. But the clock stays where everyone can see it till you decide, so whatever you decide, you'll have decided it looking at the thing, and not in the dark."

They basketed her last.

That was the convoyer's doing, or Gust's, or just the way the night had gone strange — the forty lofts called up one at a time to the table with their birds, the rubber countermark rings slipped on, the leg-band numbers read out and written down, the birds passed into the long crates for the lorry to Battel and the lorry from Battel to the convoy and the convoy over the mountains to the start, and the Maes loft called last, when the room had thinned and the cold come in off the street through the propped door and most of the caps gone home to talk about what they'd seen and not yet decided how to tell it.

She brought the hen up in her two hands.

She'd done it a hundred times now but she did it slow this once, the two fingers along the keel out of habit and not habit, the hard light not-full of a bird at the top of herself, the heart going under her fingers like something that meant to get out of the town faster than she ever had. The orange eye took in the bulb and the men and the gold name on the wall and gave nothing back, the polished button of it with the whole sky banked in it, the same eye that had looked at her in a cold kitchen the week Staf died, when she was a girl who could look at a bird and feel nothing and meant to keep the line going. She hadn't kept the line. She was the end of that line and the start of another and she knew it, holding the hen up to the table under her grandfather's gold name with the clock that lied set at the foot of it, and she slipped the numbered rubber ring onto the bird's leg the honest way, the small ring that would come off her leg in three days' time, God willing, on a different clock, in a garden, and tell the true time at last.

The convoyer wrote the number down. "Maes loft. One bird. De Late." He looked up at her, an outside man from Battel who didn't know any of it, who'd just driven through a town's whole forty years without feeling a bump. "She a good one, then?"

"She comes home," Lieselot said. "Late. But she comes."

She put the hen into the crate herself, into the dark and the straw with the strangers' birds, all of them about to be carried south in the night toward the water none of them had crossed, and she did the thing she'd watched Staf do at this table when she was small and hadn't understood, the thing she understood now: she kept her hand on the crate-wire a second after the bird was in, in the dark, the way you keep a hand on a thing you're sending where you can't follow.

Then she took it off the wire and let go.

Outside, the lorry started up in the wet, and the crates went up into it three high, and the men who were left stood about in the door-light watching forty lofts' worth of birds be carried off toward the south of the sky, faces up out of long habit though there was nothing yet to see, only the black winding-gear at the end of the street and the dark over the heap and the road out that the lorry took, getting small, the way the town made every sound get small as it went toward the edge of itself. Lieselot stood among them with the empty anorak over her arm and her grandfather's honest clock sealed and warm against her side, and behind her in the lit room the brass clock that lied stood at the foot of the board under the gold that might come down or might not, and she had done the thing, she had loosed the name into the open where it could be heard, and there was no bird in the sky yet to tell her whether the doing was rewarded or punished, and she understood, standing in the wet with the lorry's lights going round the bend, that there never would be — that the doing was done, complete, true whether the hen came home in three days or never came at all, a thing she'd let go of at the right time in the right place with her face pointed the way she meant it, and the rest of it now, the whole thousand kilometres of it, was the sky's business and the sea's, and out of her hands.