Chapter Twenty-Six — The Lossing

The radio in the loft kitchen had a habit of finding France before it found anything closer, and on the Wednesday morning of the release it was a French voice it gave her first, a man somewhere south reading farm prices into the dark, and Lieselot sat on the upturned bucket in the cold with the volume low and the dial nudged a hair off the French, waiting for the Flemish to come up under it.

It was a quarter to five. She had not slept much and had stopped pretending she would. Down the garden the loft was a black box against a sky going from black to the no-colour that came before grey, and the breeders and the hens were asleep in it with their heads in under their wings, all but the perch that was empty, the third perch down, where the hen had sat her whole short life and where there was nothing now but the white smear on the droppings-board and the worn place on the wood her feet had made. De Late was a thousand kilometres south in a crate with the lights of Spain coming up grey over the convoy yard, and there was nothing Lieselot could do for her from a bucket in the dark, and she sat there anyway, because the sitting was the only thing the night had left to do.

The convoy had its own number you could ring, a man at a desk in Halle who took the lossing time off the wire and read it out, and Jules had given her the number on the back of a feed bill in his slow careful hand, bel pas voor zessen, don't ring before six, they won't know before six. The radio would have it sooner. The radio always had it sooner, off the federation feed, the lossings read out one after another like Mass intentions — Bordeaux gelost, Cahors gelost, the morning's birds going up all over the south of France — and last, because it was the longest and the cruellest and the one the whole country waited on, Barcelona.

She turned the dial the hair back toward the Flemish and the farm prices went under and a different voice came up, nearer, flatter, a Hasselt voice reading the weather over the Pyrenees, and she stopped with two fingers on the dial and listened to a man she would never meet tell her what the sky was doing over the mountains her hen had to cross.

Jules came at half five, in the dark, with his bicycle lamp still on though it was nearly light enough to see by, and he leaned the bike on the wall by the kitchen door the way he'd done all season and came in stamping the cold off his boots and did not say anything cheerful, which was how she knew he took it seriously.

"Anything," he said.

"Weather's the thing they keep saying. Over the mountains."

"Aye." He took the other bucket and turned it and sat, an old man folding down onto it joint by joint, and put his hands toward the little gas ring she'd lit for the warmth as much as the coffee. "There's a wind up there this week. Out of the north-west, high up, over the Pyrenees. They'll have weighed it. They'll not loss into a wall, they're not fools, they've thirty thousand birds and the whole of Belgium watching, they'll hold them sooner than throw them at a thing they can't get over." He said it the way he said most things, to settle her and to settle himself, the two of them the same animal this morning. "But a Barcelona's a Barcelona. There's always the mountains and there's always the water, and they have to be crossed if you want the race, and the race is the point. You don't get a clean queen. You get a hard one or you get none."

"And the hen."

Jules was quiet a moment. He had a thing he did when she asked him the bird straight out, a small slowing, because he would not lie to her about a bird and he would not frighten her either, and the truth lived in the gap. "She's bred for it," he said. "She's bred for exactly it. Your grandfather bred toward this race for twenty years — not the club race, not the Sunday race, this one, the long water. She's the nearest thing to De Sint he could make, and De Sint flew it real in '58, whatever the clock did after. The blood crosses water. That's what the blood is." He turned his hands over toward the gas. "But the blood's in a crate with twenty-nine thousand other birds and a wind on the mountains, and bred-for-it isn't the same as home. You know that now. You learned it this season the hard way, off the young cock that didn't come and the old red one they ruined. Bred for it gets her to the start. After that it's her and the sky, and the sky doesn't read pedigrees."

"That's a comfort."

"It's not meant to be a comfort. You're past wanting comfort. You want the truth of the thing, you've spent the whole year getting where you can stand the truth of the thing — don't start wanting it sweetened now, the morning of the lossing, it'd be a waste of the year." He almost smiled, the dry crack of it. "Pour the coffee, jong. They'll not throw them before six and we'll have got cold for nothing."

The lossing came at twenty past six.

The radio said the others first, the way it always did, the shorter races going up into a better morning further north, gelost, gelost, a man's voice that had read it ten thousand times and kept none of it, and then it came down the list to the bottom where the long one lived, and the voice changed by not changing, which was the thing about it, it said the great cruel word in exactly the flat tone it had said all the small ones:

Barcelona International. Gelost om zes uur twintig. Wind noordwest.

Released at twenty past six. Wind north-west.

Jules sat very still on his bucket with his cup in both hands and did not drink. North-west was the wind they'd been afraid of all morning, the wind that would be a headwind over the mountains, the wind that would hold the birds low and make them climb into it and cost them more than the distance ever could, the wind that turned a thousand kilometres into something longer than a thousand kilometres in the only measure that mattered, which was what it took out of a bird's body to get across it. He did not say any of that. He said:

"They threw them. So the mountains were crossable, or they judged so. That's something. They don't throw if it's a wall."

"North-west," Lieselot said.

"North-west," Jules agreed, and that was all either of them said about it, because there was nothing in the world to be done about a wind, and the saying of it twice was the whole conversation, an old man and a girl in a cold kitchen agreeing that the thing was hard and would not be helped.

She got up off the bucket and went to the kitchen window and looked down the garden at the loft and past it at the south of the sky, which was grey now and getting light and had nothing in it, would have nothing in it for two days at the soonest, three more like, and she stood there and made herself do the arithmetic she'd been not-doing since four, the arithmetic Jules had taught her at this window in April, the thing that turned a wait from a sickness into a craft. Released six-twenty. A thousand kilometres, near enough. A good Barcelona bird flies the daylight and roosts the dark and flies again — they don't fly the night, mostly, not the first night, they're not owls, they put down somewhere over France and wait for the sun. So the soonest she could be here is tomorrow's last light, and that's the freak, that's the once-in-a-decade bird, that's not a hen with a headwind to climb. Realistic is the day after. The third day. And the third day's last light is not late. The third day's last light is on time, for a bird that crossed that water against that wind. The thing to be afraid of is the fourth day. The fourth day you stop doing arithmetic and start doing the other thing.

She did not say the other thing's name even to herself.

The page in the tin gave the lossing morning its own paragraph, two lines of careful pencil before the ink went bad — the wind was wrong that year too, and I stood on the step and did not yet know — and she had read it so many times it ran in her now without the page, ran the way memory runs, as if she had stood on the step herself.

1958. The wind is in the north-west on the morning they throw them, and Staf stands in his garden at twenty past six with the radio brought out onto the step on its long flex, and the whole street is out the same way, men on their steps with their cups, miners on a Sunday off, and the word goes down the row house to house the second it comes off the wire — gelost, Barcelona gelost — and a man two doors down, old Cornelis who is dead these thirty years, lifts his cap and holds it a second like he's at the graveside of something, because the throwing of the birds at Barcelona is the nearest thing this Catholic street has to a thing it believes in without being told to.

Staf does not lift his cap. Staf has a hen in that field — no, a cock, De Sint, the dark blue cock that is almost black, the best bird this street has bred in fifty years — and Staf is twenty-four and the coal is under his nails for good and he has not slept and he stands on his step with his cup going cold in his fist and his young wife Mariette in the doorway behind him with her arms folded against the morning, and he does the arithmetic too, the same arithmetic, released six-twenty, a thousand kilometres, the daylight and the dark and the daylight, the soonest and the realistic and the thing to be afraid of, the exact same sum his granddaughter will do at the exact same window thirty-six years on, in a town that by then will have buried the mine that is at this moment, this 1958 morning, the loudest healthiest thing for thirty kilometres, the winding-gear turning, the pit in full cry under their feet, forty-four thousand men down the hole and the whole of Limburg black and rich and certain it will last forever.

The wind is in the north-west. Staf weighs it the way Jules will teach Lieselot to weigh it, and he knows what it costs a bird, and he wants this race the way a poor man wants one thing in his life, the one Saturday that lifts him out of being one more pair of hands in the dark — and somewhere south, in the same field, thrown into the same north-west wind at the same twenty past six, is a blue hen out of a coal-scuttle loft at Eisden that he has held in his own two hands and knows, knows the way you know a knife is sharper than your own, is the better bird.

He does not know yet that he will cheat. That is the thing the page in the tin will never quite explain to her, and the thing this morning on the step holds and will not say: that the man standing on the step at twenty past six in 1958, doing the sum, wanting the race, is not yet a liar. The lie is three days off, in the dark, with Door Vandersmissen's hand on his arm and the town's hunger in his ears. This morning he is only a young man with a good bird and a hard wind, the same as every other man on the row, the same as his granddaughter will be — clean, still, on the near side of the thing, with the whole sky out in front of him not yet decided.

The radio on the step says it again for the ones who missed it. Barcelona gelost. The street turns south as one, faces up, cups going cold, into a sky that will hold its birds for three days and tell no one anything. It is the last morning Staf Maes stands in that crowd as one of them and nothing more.

By nine the town was at its windows.

She knew it without going up the street, the way she'd known the street had her in its mouth the Sunday after the basketing — you could feel the town doing a thing in concert even through brick, even with the curtains shut. Barcelona morning did not care about the board or the gold or what the Maes girl had stood up and said in the lokaal. Barcelona morning was older than the feud and bigger than it. Every loft in Sint-Amandsheide that had thrown a bird into that field — and there were a dozen, the dozen old men who still played the grote fond, half of them cold to her now and one or two who'd not have her name in their mouths — every one of them was at a window or in a garden this morning with his face to the south, and they were all, the kind and the cold alike, waiting on the same sky, doing the same arithmetic, holding the same fear, and there was nothing she'd said in the club that could touch that, because the wait was the one thing the town still did together, the last thing, older than the mine and likely to outlast the grudge.

Bram was up. He came down in his vest and stood in the kitchen doorway and looked at the radio, then at her at the window, and didn't ask, because by now he'd learned the shape of it off her, when there was news and when there was only weather.

"Threw them at twenty past six," she said, to spare him the asking. "North-west wind."

"That bad?"

"It's not good. It's a Barcelona. It's never good." She heard Jules in her own mouth and let it stand, because it was true, and because it was a thing to say to a father that wasn't the other thing. "Two days at the soonest. Three more like."

Bram nodded slowly. He filled the kettle he didn't need, the way she'd filled it for him the Sunday before, and they stood in the kitchen with the gas going and neither of them said the thing, which was that there was a Maes bird out over the water again, the same water, the same race, and that this time when it came home — if it came home — the clock it dropped its time onto would be honest, and the name it flew under was a name the town was angry at, and whether it placed first or last or didn't place at all, nobody would be putting any Maes in gold on any wall over it, not now, not ever again. They didn't say it. Bram made the coffee nobody wanted and they drank it standing up, and out the window the south of the sky stayed grey and empty, and somewhere under it, a thousand kilometres off and closing at the rate a tired bird closes into a wind, the hen was flying.

She went down to the loft in the afternoon, not because there was anything to do but because the body wanted to be near the empty perch the way the body wants to be near a thing it's lost, and she scraped the boards that didn't need scraping and topped the grit that didn't need topping and stood in the warm reek of the breeders, the corn-and-lime-and-bodies smell that had been the smell of the whole year, and looked at the third perch down with nothing on it.

The breeders watched her with their orange eyes, the polished buttons of them, the whole grey sky banked in each one, and gave nothing back, the way the birds always gave nothing back, the way she'd once meant to give nothing back herself. She put her hand flat on the perch where the hen's feet had worn it and felt the small smoothness the years had put in the wood and thought, not in words exactly but in the shape under words, that the thing was done now and out of her hands and had been since the lorry took the bend. She'd loosed the name in the lokaal where it could be heard. She'd basketed the hen clean, on an honest clock, under the gold that lied. She'd put the brass clock at the foot of the board where they'd have to step round it. There was nothing left to do that was hers to do. The doing was finished. What was happening now, out over the mountains and the water, was not the doing — it was only the world deciding what it would hand back, and the world's handing-back was not the same thing as whether she'd been right, and she knew that, she'd got herself where she could stand to know it: the rightness was already complete, sealed three days ago with the wax still warm, and the hen could come home in the last of tomorrow's light or could go down in the Gulf in the dark and never be seen by anyone again, and it would not make the thing in the lokaal one degree more right or more wrong than it already, finally, was.

She knew it. She could stand it. And she stood at the loft window all the same, the way Staf had lifted her to stand at it when she was small to be the first to spot the speck, the way she'd stood at the corner of the Pastoorstraat the Sunday before with her face up at nothing — and she found her hand on the latch and not turning it, just resting there, the cold brass of it under her fingers, the loft window facing south, the south of the sky going long and gold the way April light had gone the day she'd first watched the forty birds turn to it, and nothing in it, nothing for two days, and her there anyway, on purpose, with a clock on her, waiting the way the honest things wait — for a thing that had gone out across the unknowable water that morning into a wind out of the north-west, and was somewhere over France now in the last of the light, putting down to roost in a strange tree in a strange country, a thousand kilometres still to come and the worst of it crossed, late already, and coming.