Chapter Twenty-Seven — The First Day

The hen did not come on the first day, and Lieselot knew she would not, and stood at the window most of it anyway.

She had slept four hours in the chair by the loft kitchen and woke before light with the print of the chair-back across her cheek and the gas ring cold and the radio still on, hissing the dead air between the night programmes and the farm prices, and she put it off and went down the garden in the half-dark to feed the breeders that were left, the old cocks and the moulting hens and the two late-bred youngsters that knew nothing of any of it, and she did the feeding the way Jules had drilled into her, level scoop, no waste, water changed even though it didn't need it, because the discipline was the thing on a morning like this, the discipline was the only door left between her and the other thing. She scraped the boards. She filled the grit. She did not look at the third perch down, and then she looked at it, the way you press a bruise to make sure it's still yours, and it was still empty, and she went back up to the house and put the kettle on for nobody.

Out the kitchen window the south of the sky came up grey and stayed grey, a flat North Sea grey with the green heap black against it and the dead winding-gear black against it and nothing moving in it but a magpie on the wire and, once, far off and high, a buzzard that her whole body lurched at before her head knew better, because a buzzard at that range was the wrong shape and the wrong beat and was hunting, not homing, and the lurch went out of her slow and left her hand on the cold tap and her heart going like a bird's.

That was the first day. The lurch, and the climb-down off the lurch, over and over, all the long grey hours.

Jules did not come till the afternoon, and when he came he did not come the way he had on the morning of the lossing, fast and grim with his bicycle lamp burning. He came slow, on foot, with his stick, the way an old man comes when there is nothing to be early for. He had a paper bag in his coat pocket and he put it on the table without ceremony — a half-loaf and a wedge of the hard cheese from the shop on the Stationsstraat that still opened three mornings a week — and he said, "You'll have eaten nothing," which was a statement and not a question, and she had eaten nothing, and he cut the bread on the board with Staf's old knife and they ate standing up at the counter the way the house ate everything now, and that was the first kindness, the bread, and like all his kindnesses it came in the shape of a chore done correctly and was not spoken of.

"Anything on the wire," he said.

"Nothing for here. The shorter ones are clocking. The Bordeaux birds came last night, some of them. There was a man on at six off the federation feed, reading velocities." She had listened to it the way you listen to other people's good news at a funeral. "Nothing south of Bordeaux. Nothing from Barcelona. There won't be. Not the first day."

"No." He chewed. "Not the first day. You've got the sum of it. Soonest is tomorrow's last light, and that's the freak. Realistic is the third. You said it yourself the morning they threw them. Don't go unsaying it now to torment yourself. The arithmetic's the arithmetic whether you like the answer or not."

"I'm not tormenting myself."

He looked at her over the bread, the pale old eyes in the wreck of his face, and didn't say anything, which was him agreeing she wasn't, mostly, and reserving the rest. He had a way of granting you a thing while keeping the change.

"Sit at the window if you're going to sit," he said. "You'll wear a groove in the floor doing it standing. The bird doesn't fly faster for you stood up." He lowered himself onto the second chair by the window with the small grunt that came out of him now at every joint, and arranged his stick against the sill, and set his cup on the ledge, and turned his own face south as a matter of course, an old reflex older than the grudge, older than the girl beside him, and the two of them sat and watched the empty grey the way you watch a kettle that has agreed to take its time.

People came to the window all that day, in a way, without coming to the door.

She felt it the way she'd felt the town doing its concert through brick the Sunday after the basketing, only this was the other concert, the older one, the one that didn't care what she'd stood up and said in the lokaal. All down the Pastoorstraat and across the back of the Mijnwerkerslaan and out along the cités the gardens had their men in them, the dozen old fondspelers who still played the long water, each at his own loft or his own kitchen window with his own face to the same southern grey, and she knew without seeing them that they were doing exactly what she was doing, the lurch and the climb-down, the sum and the re-sum, and that it bound her to them this afternoon in a way nothing else could, not the gold on the board nor the brass clock she'd set at the foot of it, because the wait was the one thing the town still did all together and it did not take attendance and it did not check your name against a list.

She knew which of them were cold to her now. She could have walked the street and named them — the ones who'd not had her name in their mouths since the Sunday, who'd turned their faces from her at the bakery, who'd let it be understood that the Maes girl had done a cruel and ungrateful thing, had thrown her own dead grandfather to the dogs and the town with him, had taken the one win Sint-Amandsheide had left and handed it to nobody, to a dead Eisden man and his sour sons. She knew them. And she knew they were at their windows this very hour with their faces to the very sky she was facing, waiting on their own birds out of the very field hers had gone up in, and that whatever they thought of her this afternoon they were not thinking of her, they were thinking of a speck out of the south, the way she was, and the sky did not know the difference between a flyer it loved and a flyer it had turned from, and threw the birds back, when it threw them, on no schedule of anyone's deserving.

She found she could stand that. She found it was almost the thing she could best stand, that afternoon — that the wait was bigger than the feud, and indifferent to it, and would outlast it. The grudge was a thing the town had made and could unmake. The sky was not.

Wendy rang at four.

The phone went in the cold hall and Lieselot let it go three rings before she answered it, because her whole body had gone to the window at the sound of it, stupidly, as if a bird could ring a telephone, and she had to climb down off that too before she could pick it up.

"It's me," Wendy said. The line had the hollow of a phone box in it, coins, the city behind her, a bus somewhere. "I heard. About — the race. Davy's mam said. She said you put your birds in anyway. After all that. After what you said."

"I did."

"Is it back? The one. The famous one."

"It's a Barcelona, Wendy. They don't come the first day. Nothing comes the first day."

"Right." A silence, coins going down, the city humming. Wendy had got out, near enough; Wendy had the boyfriend and the room in Genk and the course at the school that had a train past the city, the whole list Lieselot had built herself for and was now standing in a cold hall not living. "I just — my mam said the whole street's gone funny about you. About what you did with the old man's race. She said people are saying things." A pause, and then the kind thing came out of her sideways, the way kindness came out of everyone in this town, in the shape of something else. "You all right out there? On your own with it?"

"Jules is here."

"That's not what I asked."

And it wasn't, and Lieselot stood in the cold hall with the receiver warm against her ear and the south of the sky out the smeared little hall window, the same grey, nothing in it, and found she didn't have the dry thing ready, the armour, the line that turned the question off. She had spent fifteen years building a self that could answer that question with a shrug and a joke and get off the phone clean. And the self answered, before she could stop it, in a voice that came out smaller and truer than she meant: "I did the right thing," she said. "I know I did. I'd do it again. I just want her to come home."

The line hummed.

"The bird," Wendy said, carefully, like she was learning a foreign word.

"The bird," Lieselot said. "Yeah."

She heard, down the line, the thing she'd heard once before — a small distance closing in Wendy, not unkindly, the way a window closes when the weather turns. Wendy was going to get out and not look back, and that was right for Wendy and Lieselot did not begrudge it her. But she understood, holding the warm receiver, that she'd just said a thing to Wendy that Wendy could not follow her into — I just want her to come home — and that the not-following was the whole of it, was the bus leaving without her in more ways than the one, except that this time she was not standing in the cold kitchen being left. This time she was at the window, on purpose, with a clock on her, waiting for a thing she had chosen to want, and Wendy was the one on the outside of it, in a phone box in a city, with her coins running down.

"I'll let you go," Wendy said. "Your coins."

"They're mine," Lieselot said, and it made no sense, the way the thing she'd said at the door to Wendy in the first week had made no sense, and Wendy laughed, because she thought it was the armour, the dry thing, and rang off, and the line went to the long dead tone, and Lieselot stood holding it a moment longer than she needed to before she put it back on the cradle and went back to the window where the old man was watching the grey for her while she was gone.

Marcel came at the failing of the light.

She heard the car first, the careful low note of it slowing at the end of the Pastoorstraat where strangers always slowed because the street did not look like it went anywhere, and she knew the note of it now, had learned it across the season the way you learn the cough of a sick bird, and she was at the kitchen door before he was out of it, and Jules half rose at the window and she said, "Stay," not sharp, and he stayed, and watched.

Marcel got out and shut the door quietly and stood by the car a moment looking down the dark garden at the loft, the way he always looked at it, the look of a man at a grave that was also a bank, and then he came up the path with his flat cap in his two hands, off his head, the way he'd held it the first time he came, and stopped a few feet short of her on the wet brick, and she saw that Dries was not with him. The car was empty behind him. He'd come alone, and that was a thing, that was the whole conversation almost, that he'd left the angry one at home and come up the dead street alone at last light to stand in front of a girl with his cap in his hands.

"You'll have nothing," he said. Not a question. He'd done the sum too. Of course he'd done the sum. He was a fondspeler same as the rest of them, came from a loft of them, his dead father the best of them; he'd been doing the Barcelona sum every July of his life. "First day's nothing. I know it. I didn't come to ask is it home."

"It's not."

"No." He turned the cap a half-turn in his hands. He looked older than he had in the spring, or maybe it was only the light. "I came because—" and there he stopped, and she watched a man who had carried a hard clean thing for forty years, a grievance with edges he could hold, come up against a thing with no edges and not know how to take hold of it. He had come for the bloodline, all season. He had come for the birds, or the truth, the two restitutions, and she had given him the harder one, the truth, in front of the whole town, and now there was no birds to demand and no lie to break and no clean grievance to carry up a dead street in his two hands, and he stood on the brick with his cap turning and the thing he'd built his life around dissolved out from under him, given back, too late, in a room that smelled of beer and pigeon and forty years of his father being right.

"My father's name's on a card," he said at last. "On the wall. In your club. In biro." He said biro the way you'd say a wound. "Somebody put it there after. Beside the gold."

"I know. I saw it."

"In biro," he said again. "Forty years they put your grandfather up in gold leaf and they fetch my father down off the wire of the world in a bit of biro on a card that'll curl up off the wall by Christmas." His voice did not rise. That was the thing about Marcel, it never rose; it went lower instead, down to a place where it cost him. "And I'm standing here and I can't — I came to be angry about it, and I get up your street and I look at the shed, and there's a bird of his blood out over that water tonight flown straight, flown clean, with a girl stood at the window for it that's no kin to him and no kin to me, and I can't get the anger to light. Forty years it lit off a match. Now I can't get it to take."

She did not say anything. Jules had taught her that too, without teaching it — when a man is saying the true thing at last, you do not help him, you let the silence carry it the rest of the way.

"Is she good," Marcel said. "The hen. His blood. Out there now." He tipped his head a fraction at the dark south past the loft. "Tell me true. You'd know. You've the eye, they say, God help you. Is she the bird he'd have wanted carrying it across?"

And Lieselot thought of the hen in her two hands at the edge of form, light as a lie and heavier than the town, the heart going under her two fingers like something trying to get out of the country faster than she ever had, and she said, "She's the best I've ever had my hands on. He bred her toward this race for twenty years. If anything of his is worth crossing that water tonight, it's her."

Marcel nodded, slow, and put his cap back on, and that was him done, that was the whole of what he'd driven up the dead street for, to hear that the bird carrying his father's stolen race back across the sea was worthy of it, and she'd given it him straight, and it was both more and less than he'd come for, the way the truth had been more and less than he'd come for all along.

"My father waited at a window like that," he said, turning to go. "Three days. In '58. He knew his bird had won. He knew it the way you know your own hand. And he stood at his window three days for the result to come down off the master clock and tell him he was a hero — and it came down and told him he was second, by a handful of metres a minute, to a Maes." He stopped with his hand on the car door. "He never stood at the window after that. Twenty-odd more years he flew, and he never once stood at the window for a bird. He'd send the boy out to watch. Me. I'd watch and shout in to him and he'd not come. Said he couldn't stand the waiting. But it wasn't the waiting." He got the door open. "It was that he'd waited once, sure as he'd ever been of anything, and the clock had made a liar of his certainty, and he'd not give it the chance again."

He got in and shut the door, quiet, and the car backed careful down the dead street and was gone, and Lieselot stood on the brick in the dark a while with the cold coming up out of the ground through her socks before she went back in, where Jules sat at the window with his face to the south he could no longer see, holding her cup of cold coffee in his two hands to keep them warm.

"You heard that," she said.

"I heard it." He didn't pretend he hadn't. "Frans Bery at his window three days, sure as his own hand, and the clock telling him he was nothing." Jules turned his cup. "And then never standing at a window again. Twenty years. A flyer that wouldn't watch his own birds home." He shook his head, the slow weight of it. "That's the worst of what your grandfather did, jong. Not the minutes. Not the gold. He took the watching off a man. He made a man unable to stand at his own window. There's no biro card mends that."

She sat back down in the second chair, in Marcel's empty place near the glass, and the last of the grey was going out of the sky now, the green heap losing its edge against it, the dead winding-gear gone to a black bone, and somewhere out under all of it, a thousand kilometres south and west, over France in the dark, the hen would be down now in some strange roost, some farmer's barn or a poplar at the edge of a field she'd never seen, her head in under her wing, the night between her and the last of the water, waiting for the sun the way the honest things wait.

"He could've left it buried," Lieselot said. The thing had been sitting in her all day, under the lurch and the climb-down, and it came out now at the dark window where it was safe to say. "Staf. He could've burned the tin in '88 and died a hero and let me sell the birds and get the bus out and never know any of it. Frans was dead. Nobody'd have ever — the official's dead, you said. Gust would've taken it to his grave. He could've left it all buried and clean and I'd have got out of here in September and never once stood at a window for a pigeon in my life." She looked at the empty perch she could no longer see. "Why'd he leave it. Why hand me the whole rotten thing and tie me to it with a season. Was it cruel or was it the other thing. I can't get it to settle which."

Jules was quiet a long time. The light went all the way out of the window while he found it.

"I think," he said, "he couldn't give it back and keep you loving him. Both. He'd worked that much out, lying up there dying. He could've the love or he could've the truth, he couldn't have the both off you, and he was greedy enough and honest enough at the same time that he wouldn't choose — so he did the coward's brave thing, which is he left the choosing to you. Handed you the tin and the season and got out of the way and died before he had to watch your face do whatever it was going to do." Jules set the cold cup down on the sill. "That's not cruel, jong. It's not clean either. It's a man who loved you and lied to everyone, and couldn't carry the both into the ground, and trusted you to be braver than he'd been. And you were." He found her in the dark, the pale eyes. "You were. You stood up in that lokaal and you were braver than the man who taught you everything you stood up there knowing how to do. Now sit at the window. The bird's down for the night. There's nothing to watch but you'll watch it anyway, the both of us, because that's the loft we keep now. The honest one. And the honest one watches even when there's nothing coming, because the watching's the part that was true all along — it was only the clock he made lie. He never once faked the watching."

She sat at the window in the dark beside the old man, and out the glass the south of the sky was black now and had no bird in it and would have none for two days, and all down the dead street the other windows were lit and watching the same black south, the cold ones and the kind ones, the dozen old men who still flew the long water, every lamp in Sint-Amandsheide that had a bird out over France burning into the same patch of dark, the whole town up at its windows doing the one thing it still did together — and somewhere far under that black, over the water, the future was down for the night in a strange tree, with the worst of the crossing still to come and the daylight still to find, late, late already, and not coming yet, but going to.