Chapter Twenty-Nine — There She Is

The third day was the day, and it gave her nothing all morning, the way the day that is the day always does.

She'd done the loft in the new grey and filled the kettle and Jules had come across the town on his bicycle with the lamp still going against the half-dark, and they'd sat at the table with the transistor between them again and the man's flat voice reading velocities, and on the third day the list had changed its shape the way Jules said it would. The close lofts were long home and out of the reckoning now. What clocked on the third day were the middling ones, the lofts a hundred and two hundred kilometres back from the border, birds that had roosted a second night over France and come up off it into the last of the distance, and each name off the radio walked the field a little nearer to her own end of it, a little nearer the long northern lofts at the wrong end of the wind, where the only sane thing to expect was nothing.

"That's the field walking up to us," Jules said. "Don't listen for her in it yet. She'll be the last of the last, if she's anything." He turned his cup a quarter, the way he did, an old man marking time with a hand that couldn't keep still. "A loft like this clocks at the end of the light or it doesn't clock. You know it. Stop your ears to the morning."

She tried. It was harder on the third day than it had been on the second, because on the second day the far birds had still been a country away and you could keep them abstract, a roost in a poplar she'd never see; and now the man on the radio was reading names off lofts she'd nearly heard of, clubs only a long evening's flight to the south of her own dead wire, and the abstract thing had a wind in it and a clock running and it was coming north up the country toward her one velocity at a time, and she could feel the day narrowing toward its one hour the way a wait narrows toward the thing it's waiting on, until there's only the last of it left and the whole weight of three days standing on it.

At noon she made him eat. At two she went down and scraped boards that didn't need it and changed water she'd changed at dawn, because the loft watched, and she'd learned that the watching was the part of it that stayed true when nothing else would, and she scraped under the third perch down where the hen would land if the hen landed and pressed the empty place the once and left it.

The afternoon went the way the long northern afternoons of the great race had gone for forty years, slow and grey and faces-up.

They came to the window again — the dozen dead lofts down the dead streets, the cold ones and the kind ones, fewer now than two days ago because some had their birds home and some had given up the count, but the ones still in it were still in it, faces to the same south, the town doing the last of its one shared thing. A man two gardens down she could see if she stood, an old flyer with nothing left but this, standing at his own wire with his clock in his fist and his mouth going, komeen, komeen, not to any bird in the sky because there was no bird in the sky, to the south itself, to the empty grey, the way you say a thing to keep it possible by saying it. She knew that prayer now. She'd been saying it herself for two days without moving her lips.

Around five the light started its long Flemish business of going, and the radio's list thinned the way it had thinned the night before, longer gaps, the man saying nothing for whole minutes, and Jules turned it down to almost nothing and they sat in the near-silence of it with their faces to the window.

"Now," Jules said. He said it low. "Now's the hour, if it's an hour. This last of the light. From here to dark is the whole of it for a thousand-kilometre bird." He looked at the grey square of sky over the loft roof. "Watch the south. Not the radio. The radio's for the lucky and we're past the lucky. Watch the south with your own eyes and don't blink it away."

She watched the south with her own eyes.

The light went the way it went in July, the long slow surrender of it, the grey thinning to a paler grey low down over the green heap and the black winding-gear, the high blue going out of the top of the sky first the way it always did, draining off toward dark, and the birds in the loft below the window settling into their evening mutter, the breeders and the youngsters that had never been to Spain and knew nothing of any of it, shifting their feet on the perches, putting their heads in toward their wings. The empty wire took the last of the light. The third perch down was bare.

She did not let herself stop watching to grieve it. She held the watching and held the wanting, both at once, in the two hands Jules had taught her — wanted the hen up out of the south with her whole chest, the way she'd let herself want it in the dark of the night, fully, helplessly, a wanting that was almost the same as the old man's prayer two gardens down — and held it clean of the truth she'd already told on the green baize three days back, did not let the wanting make the truth a thing she'd traded a bird's homing for, did not let the truth make the wanting a sin, kept them apart in the two hands the way you keep the line from kinking, and watched the south, and the light went.

Jules saw it first. Of course he did. Sixty years of standing at a window had made him a thing that saw specks, an old machine for seeing them, and he didn't say anything for a second, only went still in a way she felt before she understood it, his whole ruined body going to a point at the window, and then he said, very quietly, not to startle the sky:

"There."

She looked where he was looking and there was nothing. The grey south, the dead heap, the gear. Nothing.

"There," he said again. "Low. Off the gear. Coming up the line."

And then she had it. Low, the way a thousand-kilometre bird comes in at the end of three days, not high and proud the way they came off a club toss but low and dead-level and beating, working the last of it out of a body that had nothing left, a speck off the black shoulder of the winding-gear, holding the line, coming, a dark mark on the going grey that was not a rook and not a starling and not the thing the eye makes up out of wanting because she'd learned the difference in a season and this had the beat of it, the long low driving beat of a bird coming the last kilometre of a thousand, and she stood up off the chair so fast it went over behind her and did not hear it go.

"Don't run down," Jules said, low, steady, his hand finding her arm without his eyes leaving the speck. "Don't run down yet. Let her come. You go banging out the door now and you'll flush her off the line, she's that tired, she'll spook to a roof and sit and you'll lose your minutes. Let her come to the wire. She knows the wire. Let her find it." His hand tightened. "Quiet, now. She's done a thousand kilometres to find this. Don't take the last hundred metres off her."

So she stood at the window with the chair on its back behind her and her heart going the way she'd felt the hen's go under two fingers a hundred mornings, a thing trying to get out of her chest, and she watched the speck resolve. It came low off the gear and crossed the dead streets, and it was the hen, it was unmistakably the hen, the blue of her gone to nothing in the failing light but the shape of her, the line of her, the bird she'd held every dawn of the season, and she came low and slow and finished, the wings beating short and shallow now, no glide left in her, no height, all the gloss flown off her two days over France, coming home the way the late ones came, the way she'd come in last off every training toss her whole short life and come in anyway, long after the corn was down, long after you'd stopped being able to want her home because wanting hurt too much — and here she was, out of the dark she couldn't see across, out of the open water that took the birds you couldn't follow, late, two days and the third light late, the field long home and the race long decided and her velocity nothing now, nothing, a placing so far down the sheet it would never be read off a radio in any garden in Flanders — and home. Coming. There she is.

She came over the wire and dropped to the board the way a stone drops, no flare, no showing, just down, spent, onto the alighting board outside the trap, and stood there a half-second swaying on her feet with her beak open and her sides going like a bellows, a half-kilo of bird with a thousand kilometres in her and nothing left, and then she went in through the wires to the corn and the water she knew were inside, because that was what the trap was, that was the whole of what a loft was, the place that was inside when everything else was open sky and open water, and Lieselot was down the garden by then, walking fast and not running, into the loft in the last of the light.

She caught the hen.

She did it the way Staf had shown her without meaning to teach her and Jules had shown her on purpose, two hands, no grabbing, the hen too far gone to flush, going only a step and then giving herself up into the hands the way the spent ones did, and Lieselot had her, the warm half-kilo of her, the heart going under the two fingers along the keel like a thing that had tried to get out of the country and had got there and back and was still going, still going, fast and thin and alive, and the keel was a blade under the fingers, the breast burned right down, two days' flying eaten straight off the bone, and she was hot, fevered-hot with the work of it, and her feathers smelled of distance, of weather, of the salt off the water and the dust off France and something underneath it that was just the warm dry reek of bird, of the loft, of home.

Lieselot did not say anything for a moment. There was nothing to say. She stood in the loft in the dark with the spent hen in her two hands and the heart going against her fingers and behind her she heard Jules come down the garden slow on his stick, and the night coming up out of the gardens the way it did, from the ground, and the breeders muttering on their perches, undisturbed, knowing nothing.

Then she did the thing.

She found the leg with her thumb in the dark and the countermark on it, the numbered rubber ring she'd put on the hen's leg three days back at the basketing with her own hands while the truth she'd just told still hung in the cold air of the lokaal — found it by feel, the small rubber band of it, and worked it off over the foot the way you did, gentle, the hen too tired to mind, and held it in her fingers, the little ring with the loft's number on it that was a week of a life and a bird's whole crossing made into a thing you could drop into a clock.

And she clocked her.

The constateur sat on the bench by the window where it had sat sealed since the basketing, the honest clock, the one Gust Verhoeven had set and sealed under his own cold hand three days back with the whole town watching and the truth already spoken on the table behind him — the clockwork drum inside it turning its slow true turn since the morning of the release, counting the real minutes of the real days with no hand on it but time's. She lifted the lid of the slot and dropped the rubber ring in and turned the handle, and the mechanism took it, the drum and the punch, the small hard machinery of honesty doing its one thing, and it struck the ring down onto the paper drum inside against the time, the true time, the third day, the last of the light, hours and hours behind the field — punched it onto the tape, a real mark, a real minute, the bird home at the hour the bird was home and not a minute sooner, and the clock said so, and the clock was not lying.

It was the gesture that, in 1958, in a kitchen in this same town, had been a lie. A young man, twenty-four, the coal already in his lungs for good, had stood over a clock like this one with a clock-keeper's connivance and made the drum say his good bird was home a handful of minutes before his good bird was home, and turned a strong second into a record-book first, and won the great race, and been the town's one legend for forty years on a clock made to lie about a handful of minutes. And here, forty years on, in the dark, a fifteen-year-old girl dropped a real ring into an honest clock and punched a real time onto a real drum, the late time, the nothing time, the time that would win her nothing and put no name on any board — and it was the same gesture, exactly the same, the hand and the ring and the slot and the turn, and it was true. The lie and the truth wore the same body. That was the whole of it. The act Staf falsified, done honest, in the dark, by the only person he ever told.

She closed the clock.

Jules was in the loft doorway by then, leaning on his stick in the dark, and he didn't say anything for a while either, and neither did she. She stood with the spent hen still in one hand and the closed clock under the other and the heart of the bird going against her palm, slowing now, slowing toward the long after-rest of a bird that's done a thing it should not have been able to do and come back from it, and the two of them stood in the dark of the loft with it.

"She's clocked," Jules said at last. Quiet. Not a question.

"She's clocked."

"At what."

"Last of the light. The true time." Lieselot didn't look up from the hen. "It'll be nothing. Down the bottom of the sheet. Past where they read."

"It'll be nothing," Jules agreed. He said it the way he gave her the hard things, plain, no softening, because the softening was the lie and she'd taught him too, by now, that she'd rather the plain hard thing. "She's two days behind the field. There's no placing in it worth the ink. The race went to a loft at Tienen two days ago and the town'll never hear her name." He moved his stick, the small old adjustment. "And she's home."

"And she's home."

"There's the whole of it," Jules said. "Right there in your hand. That's the whole of the thing." He looked at the hen, the pale old eyes in the wreck of his face finding her in the dark. "She went out across the water you can't follow, the open water, the thing took your grandfather's nerve and Frans Bery's nerve both, the not-knowing of it, the bird gone into the middle of the wait where you can't see — and she came up out of it. Late. Beat to nothing. Nothing on the sheet. And up out of it. That's not a win, jong. Don't you ever let the town tell you that was a win. It wasn't a win." He let a breath go, the long rattle of his chest. "It's better than a win. It's the thing a win was always only pretending to be."

She held the hen. She felt the heart going down toward rest under her fingers.

"She doesn't owe me this," Lieselot said. She said it to the hen, mostly, to the warm spent body of her, working it out as she said it the way she'd worked the other thing out in the dark of the second night. "I said it the other night. I'd have done the same if I'd known for sure she was at the bottom of the sea. I didn't tell the truth to buy her home. She doesn't come because I was honest." She turned the hen's leg in her fingers, the bare leg where the ring had been. "She comes because she's a homing bird and the wind let her and the water let her and her own heart held out the last of it. That's all. It's not a reward. If she'd gone down over the Pyrenees it wouldn't have been a punishment. It's the wind and the water and the bird." She looked up at Jules in the dark. "I'm not going to read it. The coming home. I'm not going to read it for a verdict on the truth. The truth was true three days ago with the clock honest on the table. This doesn't make it truer."

"No," Jules said. "It doesn't."

"It just comes," she said. "Late. The way the truth came late. The way—" and she stopped, because the next name was the one that mattered, the one the whole thing turned on, and she made herself say it plain. "The way it came too late for Frans. He never got his bird home to an honest clock. He won the thing and it was took off him and he never stood at a window sure of an answer again, twenty years of it. Frans is in the ground and the win's his now and he's not here to have it. It came. It came too late for the man it was owed to. But it came."

Jules didn't answer that. There was no answer to it. Late, but coming, turned all the way over to its hardest face — the restitution that arrives after the man it's owed to is dead, the truth that comes when it can do nothing for the one it was stolen from, the win handed back to a grave. That was the cost the town had been afraid of and the cost she'd paid on the green baize three days back with her own mouth, and here was the bird home to prove the cost was real and to prove that paying it had bought no one a single thing back from the dead. The hen home changed nothing about that. She came up late out of the water she couldn't see across, and a dead man's name was a true name now, and neither of those things undid the other, and Lieselot stood in the dark of the loft holding both of them at once in the two hands Jules had taught her, the spent hen and the hard truth, and did not let either one poison the other.

She put the hen up on the third perch down with her own hands, set her on it gentle, two hands, no grabbing, and let go, and the hen took the perch and stood on it swaying a second and then folded down onto it and put her head in under her wing among the others that had never left Flanders, and was home, asleep on her own perch in the dark, the late one, the one that came in last and came in anyway, the most valuable thing in the town and a bird worth nothing on the sheet, both at once, asleep.

Lieselot stood at the loft window then, the one Staf had lifted her to when she was small so she'd be first to see the speck — stood at it from the inside now, in the dark, with the clock closed honest on the bench and the spent hen on the perch behind her and the south of the sky gone full dark out the window where there'd be no more birds tonight because a bird doesn't fly in the dark.

She looked at the south anyway.

Daar is ze, she said, not out loud, the way Staf had said it low to himself the once or twice when the 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 the wanting hurt too much, coming home anyway, out of the dark you couldn't see across, late, the field long home and the race long lost and nothing on the sheet, and home.

There she is.