Chapter Twenty-Eight — The Second Night

The field came on the second day, in the afternoon, the way it always came, all at once after nothing.

She had got through the morning of the second day the way she'd got through the whole of the first, by chores, by the level scoop and the changed water and the scraped boards, by going down the garden in the grey before light to the breeders and the youngsters that knew nothing, and doing the loft right, because the loft was the one place she could still make come out true by hand. She did not let herself stand at the window of a morning. She made herself eat the heel of Jules's bread standing at the counter. She made herself wash the cup. And then at eleven the federation feed came alive on the transistor and a man's flat voice was reading velocities off Barcelona, and the second day stopped being a day and became a list.

Jules came up the garden when he heard it start. He'd taken to sleeping a few hours in Staf's chair in the front room and going home to his own birds at first light and coming back, an old man ferrying himself between two waits, and he came in now with the cold still on his coat and sat at the table and got the little radio between them and turned it up a hair, and they listened the way you listen to a doctor list off a ward — this one, not this one, this one.

It was the good lofts first, the ones close in, the famous names from down by the French border who were three and four hundred kilometres nearer Spain and got their birds back while the long northern lofts were still standing at empty wire. A loft at Tienen clocked at a velocity the man read out twice. A loft at Sint-Truiden. Then nearer, a name Jules grunted at, a man he'd flown against forty years, an Eisden loft — and Lieselot's whole body went to the south of the sky at the word Eisden before her head told her it was only a place, only a club, not him, not the Berys, just a man with a fast bird and the luck of the draw on the wind.

"That's the field opening," Jules said. He said it without looking at her, into the radio, the way he gave her the hard things now, sideways, so she could take them without having to be seen taking them. "From here on they'll come all afternoon. The clever ones first, the lucky ones, the ones the line took kind." He turned his cup. "Ours is a thousand kilometres and the wrong end of the wind, jong. We don't open with the field. We never did. Your grandfather never once clocked a Barcelona on the day, not in his life, and he won the thing." He stopped. The plain fact of it sat between them, what won the thing meant now, what it had cost to make those two words true, and he let it sit and did not soften it. "She'll not be in this list. Don't listen for her in this list. You'll only learn the list off by heart and break your own heart with it. Listen for the shape of it. The shape says: the close birds are home. That's all today's good for telling you. The far birds are still out."

She listened for the shape of it. It was hard. The names came down off the radio like coins into a slot, chunk, chunk, each one a man somewhere out across Flanders catching a bird at his own wire, stripping a rubber ring, dropping it, a week of his life made in the time it took, and not one of them was her wire and not one of them was her bird, and she sat at the table with her hands flat on the wood and made herself hear the shape and not the names. The close birds are home. The far birds are still out. The far birds were still out over France somewhere, climbing up off their second roost into a second day's flying, and one of the far birds was a blue hen with a clean keel and a heart that went under two fingers like a thing trying to leave the country, who'd come in last off the training tosses her whole short life and come in anyway, and the man on the radio did not know her name and would not say it, and that was right, because she had a thousand kilometres still to do and the worst of the water still under her.

People came to the window again, all that second afternoon, the way they had the first — the dozen old lofts down the dead streets with their faces to the same grey, the cold ones and the kind ones, the town doing its one shared thing without taking attendance. But it was different on the second day, and she felt the difference, sitting where she could see the strip of sky over the loft roof. On the first day they'd all been waiting on nothing together, level, the sky equal to all of them because it had given none of them anything yet. Now the field was clocking. Now some of those windows had their bird home, had a man's week made, had the radio saying his name; and some did not; and the wait that had bound the whole street together yesterday was coming apart today into the made and the unmade, the way it always did, the way it had in 1958 and every July since, the sky sorting the town into the lucky and the still-waiting, and not caring which window had been kind to her and which had turned.

She found she could still stand it. She'd found that on the first day and it held on the second: the sky did not know the feud and did not keep the score and threw the birds back, when it threw them, on nobody's deserving. A man down the Mijnwerkerslaan who hadn't had her name in his mouth since the Sunday got his Barcelona cock home at three o'clock and she heard the small commotion of it three gardens off, a door, a voice, a woman called out to come and see, and she did not begrudge it him. She sat at her own window with her own empty wire and did not begrudge a cold man his bird, and understood that this was new in her, this not-begrudging, that the old self she'd built for fifteen years would have made a hard dry joke of his luck to keep the wanting off her own face, and she had no joke today. She just wanted her hen home. There was nothing dry left in it to hide behind.

The light started to go out of it around eight, the long Flemish July dusk that took its time, and the radio's list thinned with the light, fewer names, longer gaps of the man saying nothing, the close lofts all home now, the field gone quiet for the night.

"That's the day done," Jules said. He reached and turned the radio off, the small mercy of the silence after it. "They're down for the night, the far ones. Yours among them. She'll be roosting somewhere in France this minute with the third day in front of her." He looked at the dead grey square of the window. "Third day's the day, jong, for a loft like this. If she's coming, it's tomorrow, the last of the light, the way they come from a thousand kilometres. You know this. You said it to me at the start." He pushed himself up out of the chair on his stick, the joints going. "You should sleep. Real sleep, in a bed, not the chair. There's nothing comes in the dark. A bird doesn't fly at night. You can leave the window an honest leaving and not lose a thing by it."

She did not move from the window.

"I'll sit a while."

He looked at her. The pale old eyes in the wreck of his face. He'd been going to argue it, she could see, the sensible old-flyer thing, the bird doesn't fly faster for you sitting up, and then he didn't. Something in her face stopped it. He stood with his hand on the stick and read her the way he read a bird, in the hand, without words, and put whatever he'd been going to say back down.

"It's not coming tonight," he said instead. Gently. Making sure she had it. "You understand that. You're not sitting up to catch her. There's nothing to catch tonight."

"I know."

"Then what are you sitting up for."

And it was Wendy's question, near enough, the one from the cold hall yesterday — that's not what I asked — and she found she had the answer to it tonight where she hadn't had it then, found it came up in her plain and finished, a thing she'd worked out somewhere in the long grey hours without noticing she was working it.

"I did the thing already," she said.

Jules waited.

"In the lokaal. With the clock on the table. I did it already — gave it back, said it out, the whole rotten true thing, in front of all of them, and I knew when I did it the bird might not come. I knew it could go down over the water and never come up and I'd have given away the town's whole — everything — for nothing anybody could see, for a name on a card in biro and a girl at a window with no bird. I knew that. I weighed it. And I did it anyway, because it was the right thing to do whether she came home or whether she didn't." She kept her eyes on the dead window, on the south she could no longer see. "So I'm not sitting up to catch her, like she owes me coming back for being honest. She doesn't owe me that. Nobody promised me that. I'd do the same again if I knew for certain she was at the bottom of the sea right now. That part's done and it doesn't get undone by whether she comes." She stopped. The thing had come out of her truer and steadier than she'd known it was in her. "I'm sitting up because the loft watches. That's all. The honest loft watches, even when there's nothing coming. Even when the bird owes it nothing. You said it yourself the first night. The watching was the part that was always true."

Jules was quiet a long moment. Outside, the last of the dusk went out of the window-square and the loft roof lost its line against the sky and the dark came up out of the gardens the way it did, from the ground, the way cold did.

"Your grandfather couldn't have said that," Jules said at last. "Not at fifteen. Not at seventy." He moved his stick, a small adjustment, an old man settling a thing. "He waited on the clock to tell him he was a hero. Frans Bery waited on the clock to tell him he was a hero, and it lied, and he never stood at a window again, twenty years of it, because he'd waited once sure of the answer and the answer'd been took off him. The two of them, the cheater and the cheated, both of them waiting on the clock for the verdict, both of them ruined by it the one way or the other." He found her in the near-dark, the pale eyes. "You're the first one of the whole lot of them to sit at the window not waiting on the verdict. Already gave the verdict yourself. Already did right with your own hands and your own mouth before a single bird was up. Whatever comes up out of the south tomorrow — and something might, and it might not — it can't tell you whether you did right. You took that out of the sky's hands. That's the thing your grandfather couldn't do and Frans couldn't do." He let a breath go. "That's grown, jong. That's the whole of grown, right there. Doing the true thing and then letting the sky be the sky."

She didn't answer. There was nothing to answer. She sat with her hands flat on the cold sill and the dark full now in the garden, the loft a darker block in it, the breeders asleep on their perches down there with their heads in under their wings, and somewhere a thousand kilometres south, down for the night in a poplar at the edge of a field she'd never see, the hen with her head in under her own wing, the worst of the water still in front of her, and the third day still to find.

Jules went home at eleven, to his own birds and his own wait, ferrying himself back across the dark town on his bicycle with the lamp going, and she sat on at the window after he'd gone.

She did not put the lamp on. She'd learned that much in two nights — that the dark of the room let the dark of the sky in, made them the one dark, so that sitting in it she was almost out in it, almost over the water with the hen, and the lit room only threw her own face back at her off the glass and shut the south out. So she sat in the dark and let the south be the room.

Around one she made tea she didn't drink and stood at the back door with it, in the cold coming up off the bricks through her socks, and looked at the loft. Den 58 was in there. Half the loft came down off De Sint, off the bird that won a lie in '58 — the breeders, the youngsters, the whole near-pure line bred toward across forty years, the line worth more than the house, that Dries wanted carried off to Eisden and the Antwerp man wanted kept whole behind glass and Marcel wanted given back by right and the club wanted left where nobody could take it down. The most valuable thing in the town was a brick shed at the bottom of a miner's garden, full of sleeping birds, and the best of them was over France in the dark and might be at the bottom of the sea, and she stood in the cold with the tea going cold in her hands and found she did not think of De Late as worth more than the house. She did not think of her as Den 58, or the legacy, or the bloodline, or the thing the season had hung on. She thought of her as the hen that came in last and came in anyway. Daar is ze. There she is. Staf's two words, the only soft thing he'd had in forty years, and she understood standing in the cold doorway that they weren't about winning. He'd never said them at a win. He'd said them low, to himself, the once or twice, when the last bird he'd given up on dropped out of an emptied sky long after the corn was down. There she is. Not the fast one. Not the first one. The late one, that you'd stopped being able to want home because wanting hurt too much, coming home anyway, out of the dark you couldn't see across, late, but coming.

She went back in and sat at the window.

Toward three, in the worst part of it, the part where the body's faith goes thin and the arithmetic turns ugly, she let herself think the other thing, the thing she'd kept the chores between herself and for two days.

She let herself think: maybe this is the price.

Maybe you don't get to take a whole town's one win off it, off a dead man who loved you, off the men at their windows, hand it to a grave at Eisden and a name in biro, and keep the bird too. Maybe the sky keeps a count after all. Maybe the hen was already down over the Pyrenees, already taken by the Gulf weather Jules called the Gulf of Lion, the open water where birds went and you couldn't follow, and maybe that was the bill come due for the lokaal, the cost of the truth, the thing that made it real — the right thing done and the sky taking the bird in payment so she'd know forever what right cost.

She sat with that a long while in the dark. It was a powerful thought at three in the morning. It had a shape to it, a justice to it, the kind of shape the mind hands you when it's tired and frightened and wants the world to mean something even at your own expense.

And then she put it down.

She put it down deliberately, the way Jules had taught her to put down a frightened bird, two hands, no grabbing, set it on the perch and let go. Because it was the same lie. It was the clock-lie wearing the other coat. To say the sky took her in payment for the truth was to say the truth was a thing you bought a bird's safe homing with, a thing you'd done to be paid for in feathers, and if you'd known the price you might not have paid it — and that was just 1958 turned inside out, just Staf's bargain run backward, the sky made into a clock you could read your own deserving off. She would not give the sky a clock. The hen would come or the hen would not come, and it would mean nothing about whether she'd done right, because she'd already done right, with the clock honest on the table and her own mouth, before the hen was ever in the air. If the hen came it would not be a reward and if the hen drowned it would not be a punishment. It would be the wind, and the water, and the bird's own heart and wing, and the plain mercy or the plain hardness of a sky that did not keep her count. That was the whole of what she'd taken out of the sky's hands in the lokaal: the right to read herself off the weather. She would not take it back at three in the morning because she was tired and frightened and wanted the bird so badly her chest hurt with it.

She wanted the bird home. She let herself want it, fully, the way she'd never let herself want a thing out loud in her life — wanted the blue hen up out of the south at last light, the speck resolving, the drop, the catch, the warm half-kilo of her in two hands. She wanted it so much that wanting it was almost the same as praying, which was why people prayed, which worked about as well. And she held the wanting in one hand and the truth in the other and did not let either one poison the other, did not let the wanting make the truth a bargain or the truth make the wanting a sin, and that was the new thing, that was the grown thing Jules had named — to want with your whole chest and to know the wanting bought you nothing, to do right and want hard and keep them clean of each other in the dark.

The light came up grey and slow at the end of the second night, the third day's grey, the same flat North Sea grey with the black heap against it and the dead winding-gear against it, the day that was the day if it was any day at all.

She had not slept. She stood up off the chair stiff as an old woman, the print of the sill across her forearms, and went down the garden in the new grey to do the loft, the level scoop, the changed water that didn't need it, the scraped boards, because the discipline was the door and the loft watched even when there was nothing coming, and she scraped under the third perch down where the hen would land if the hen landed, where the hen had not landed for two days, and did not press the bruise of the empty place, and did press it, the once, because it was still hers.

Then she filled the kettle for the two of them, for Jules coming back across the town on his bicycle, and put it on the cold ring and lit it, and stood at the kitchen window with her face to the south of the sky where there was nothing yet and would be nothing for hours, the close field all home, the far birds still climbing up off their roosts into the third day's flying — and somewhere out under all that grey, a thousand kilometres and the worst of the water behind her now, the hen was up off her poplar and turning north into the last of it, the worst of it done, the whole long water still to cross but turned for home at last, late, late already, two days late and the third light coming, and not home yet, and going to be, the way the honest things wait and the late ones come — daar is ze — not yet, but coming.