Chapter Thirty — The Loft Window

The hen ate on the second morning, which was the morning Lieselot knew she'd keep.

She'd not been sure in the night. A bird could come up out of a thousand kilometres on the last of its heart and then stand on the perch the next day and not take corn, the work having eaten something past the muscle, down into the part of a bird you couldn't read with two fingers along the keel, and go off it in a day and be gone in three with nothing to be done. Jules had told her that the way he told her the hard things, flat, on the way out the gate the night the hen came home, so she'd not lie awake building a thing the morning could take off her. But on the second morning she went down in the grey with the kettle not yet on and the loft cold and the breeders muttering, and De Late was off the perch and down on the floor at the corn, working it the way a hungry bird worked it, the small hard head going, and Lieselot stood in the doorway and watched her eat and did not go in, because going in was the kind of wanting that spooks a thing, and she had learned that too by now.

She let the hen eat. She stood at the door in the cold and let her, and that was the whole of the morning, and it was enough.

The town did not come back to her, and she had not thought it would.

She had known, on the green baize, with the confession in her own voice in the cold air of the lokaal and the brass clock set down by the sealing wax and Gust Verhoeven's face going to the thing it went to, that she was not buying anything back with it — not the town's love, which she'd had pointed at her for one season and given up, and not Staf's name, which she'd taken down off the gold leaf with her own mouth — that the truth was a thing you spent and did not get change from. She'd flown the season out anyway. The hen had come home anyway, late, the bottom of the sheet, nothing on her. And the town went on not coming back, the way she'd known it would, men she'd grown up among turning a quarter at the bakery the way you turn from a draught, not cruel, just closed, a window shut when the weather turns.

What she had not known was that some of it would come the other way.

René came the third evening after the hen was home. He came up the alley behind the gardens the way the bad hand had come the night of the open latch, but he came to the gate and not the loft, and he stood at it in the dusk in his coat with his cap in his two hands the way Marcel had held his at the graveside a hundred years ago in April, and he did not come in.

"I heard she homed," he said.

"She homed."

"Late."

"Last of the light. Day three." Lieselot stood at the gate and did not open it. The key was on her, on the loop of string inside her coat, where it had lived since the morning of the latch, since she'd taken it off the nail it had hung on since before she was born. She had not put it back. "Nothing on the sheet," she said. "She's down the bottom past where they read."

René nodded at that, slow, the way you nod at a thing that's the only true coin going. He had the look of a man who'd not slept well since March, the gas cut and the wee one sick and the welcome hand he'd sold; the look had not gone off him for the season turning. "I came to say," he started, and then didn't, the way they all didn't, the town's whole tongue a thing for not saying, and he turned his cap once in his hands and tried it again from somewhere lower down. "Staf had me down the loft a hundred Sundays," he said. "He'd have fed me at his own table. And I went and—" He stopped. He looked down the dark garden at the loft. "I went and did the thing to his bird. The old red cock. For—" and he couldn't say what for, because what for was money, and a man does not say the price of the thing he sold his hands for to the granddaughter of the man whose table would have fed him.

Lieselot looked at him over the gate in the dusk. She thought of the old red cock, the hard eight-year-old, that's a racer, that's a man, a bird ruined in a single night by a friendly hand for whatever Dries or Marcel or his own black hour had paid, a season spent in a dark, no winding him back this side of next year. She thought of the hen down the bottom of the sheet, and of Frans Bery in the ground at Eisden under a stone they couldn't afford the good lettering on, and of how a town that pays men in nothing buys their hands, which was the thing Jules had said and the thing 1958 had been, the same machine, forty years apart, René's hand on the nest-front and Door Vandersmissen's hand on the master clock the same hand in the end.

"He moults out wrong," she said. "The red cock. But he's alive. He's a breeder now."

René's face did a thing she didn't watch all the way, because some things you let a man keep.

"I'll not have him die owing," René said, low, and that was the whole of it, that was as near as the town ever came to the word, a man at a gate saying he'd not die owing, and then he put his cap back on and turned and went down the alley in the dark, and Lieselot stood at the gate a while with the key against her chest and did not call him back and did not, either, hate him, and could not have told you which of those was the harder.

Marcel came on the Sunday.

She heard the car before she saw it, the grey Opel coming slow up the Pastoorstraat the way it had come in April, and she went out to the front because she'd not have him come round the alley to the loft, not him, the loft was hers and he'd been into it enough in her mind for a season; if he came he'd come to the front door like a man.

He didn't get out at first. He sat in the car at the kerb with the engine off and looked at the house, and Lieselot stood in the doorway and let him look, and then he got out, slow, a hard man in his fifties with forty years of something gone out of him in a week, and he came up the path and stood at the bottom of the step, and Dries was not with him. The car was empty behind him. That was a thing she read and held: Dries was not with him.

"You homed your bird," Marcel said.

"Day three."

"I heard." He stood with his hands at his sides, no cap in them this time, nothing in them. "Down the bottom of the sheet, they said."

"Nothing on her," Lieselot said. "The race went to Tienen two days before she was over the border."

Marcel nodded. He looked past her at the dark of the hall, and then he looked at the south of the sky over the roofs the way every man in this town looked at it without choosing to, the gear and the green heap and the grey going, and when he spoke it was not to her exactly.

"My father never homed a bird to a clock he could trust again," he said. "After '58. Twenty years he flew. He'd stand at the window and the bird would come and he'd catch it and clock it and never once know, the rest of his life, whether the clock that took his time was a true clock or a clock somebody'd had a Sunday with. You took that off a man." He was not looking at her. "Not you. Your—" He let it go. "He never stood sure at a window again. Twenty years. And then he was in the ground at Eisden and the thing was still his and not his, and I had a page out of a logbook and a certainty and a brother who wanted it to have hurt, and that was the whole of the inheritance, a wound and no name on it."

"You've got the name now," Lieselot said.

"I've got the name now." Marcel's mouth did something. "On a card, in biro, beside forty years of gold leaf. In the back of a club room in a dead town." He looked at her then. "It came too late for the man it was owed to. You know that. You said it yourself, in there, with the clock on the table — you said it before I could. Frans is in the ground and the win's his now and he's not here to have it. You took the words out of my mouth so I'd not have to be the one to say them and be a hard man saying them." He shook his head, slow. "That was either the cruellest thing anyone's done to me or the kindest, and I've not worked out which, and I don't think I will."

Lieselot stood in the doorway and held it, the two hands, the way Jules had taught her, the spent thing and the hard thing, and did not let either one off the hook.

"Do you want the birds," she said. Plain. Because it was the question that had ridden the whole season, the third option, the bloodline to Eisden, Den 58 out of the Maes garden and into a dead man's son's, the only restitution that ever mattered to Dries, and she'd held De Late up in her hands a hundred mornings knowing she might have to hand her over a gate to a man with a forty-year wound, and she'd rather ask it on the step and have it answered than carry it another night. "The line. Den 58. You can have it. I said the truth on the table, that's done, that's not a thing you bargain back. But the birds — if it's the birds that's the restitution, you can have the loft. I'll not stop you. It's the one thing I've got that's worth what was took off your father, and if it's that or nothing, take it."

She said it and she meant it and it cost her the whole of the thing she'd come the season into being. She stood in the door and held her face shut over it and waited.

Marcel looked at her a long time.

"No," he said.

He said it slow, and then he said the rest of it, looking at the south of the sky and not at her, because the men of this town can only say the true things to the weather.

"Dries wants them," he said. "Dries'll always want them. He wants Den 58 in his garden at Eisden so men drive over to buy a Bery bird, and that's not a correction, that's interest, that's a thing my brother wants because the wound never got fed and a wound that never gets fed wants to eat. I told him no. I told him this morning. That's why he's not in the car." He let a breath go. "A man came up the Pastoorstraat forty years ago — your grandfather — and made a result and made himself a legend and made my father nothing. And if I take the birds, I'm a man who came up the Pastoorstraat and took a loft off a fifteen-year-old to make my dead father something. It's the same road. It runs both ways and it's the same road." He looked at her finally. "I don't want the birds. I never wanted the birds. Dries wanted the birds. I wanted my father's name said out loud in the room where they took it off him, by somebody the town would have to believe, and you went and did that, in your own mouth, before I had to threaten it out of you. That's done. The birds are yours. Staf bred them and you flew them and your name's on the entry, clean, and the line stays where the man who built it put it." He turned to go, and then he didn't, the way they all didn't. "Keep them honest," he said, to the car, to the street. "That's all anybody's owed now. There's no one left to owe more."

He got in the grey Opel and started it and went down the Pastoorstraat slow, the way Wendy had gone in her good shoes a hundred years ago, getting smaller, the town making everything smaller as it went toward the edge of itself and the road out, and Lieselot stood in the door and watched the car go and did not know, for a long minute, whether she'd won anything or lost anything, and then understood, the way she'd understood about the hen, that winning and losing were the wrong shape for it, that there were things you did because the other road was the same road, and that was the whole of it, and you didn't get a sheet at the end with your velocity on it.

Bram came round Sunday evening, sober, which was its own kind of weather.

He stood in the kitchen the way he stood when he had a thing to say and three pils were the usual road to saying it and he'd not taken the road, and so the thing came out bare and badly, which was the only way it could have come out true.

"I'd have sold them," he said. "You know that. I'd have signed them to the Antwerp man in April for what I owe and had over, and I'd have put you on a train to your mother in Genk and told myself I was giving you out, and you'd have gone, and the birds would be in a loft up by Antwerp behind a man who buys lines, and Frans Bery'd be in the ground at Eisden with the thing still off him." He looked at the cold range, not at her. "Da left them to you and not to me. I asked you why, in May. You didn't know. I didn't know. I was hurt about it the way I'm hurt about everything, the easy way, the way a man's hurt who's made being passed over his whole— " He stopped. He'd never got near this far. "He left them to you because he knew I'd sell them and you wouldn't. That's the why. He knew which of us would do the hard thing. He knew me forty-six years and he knew I'd take the money, and he knew you a season's worth, in the corner of his eye, while he was dying, and he knew you'd not." Bram's hands were flat on the table. "And he was right. And I'm not going to be in your way. That's the most I've got, Lies. I'm not going to be in your way. I know it's not much."

"It's not much," Lieselot said.

Bram nodded, because it wasn't, because she'd said the true thing and he'd rather the true thing, he'd taught her that without meaning to the way Staf had taught her the keel, by being a man you had to learn to read past.

"No," he said. "It's not." And he stood a while longer in the kitchen with his sober hands flat on the table, and then he went out, not to the café, she heard later, just out, up the Pastoorstraat and back, a man walking off the thing he couldn't drink off for once, and that was Bram's whole turn, the small true one the season got out of him, a man not standing in his daughter's way and saying so plainly and not pretending it was more than it was.

She did not call her mother to say the hen was home. She thought about it, the phone box at the dead high street, the card in the drawer four years, Salon Christiane, Coiffure Dames, Genk, bel maar, wanneer ge wilt, the back room that got the morning, the good school, the sciences and the languages, the train, the whole of the out she'd built herself for fifteen years to want. She thought about it and didn't go.

It wasn't that the out had closed. That was the thing she'd worked out in the night, second-dark, the hen not yet home and her holding the choice free of the outcome in the two hands: the out hadn't closed. She could go yet. She could finish school in Genk in the back room that got the morning and be a girl from a town that wasn't this one, and the loft would have to go to the club or the Antwerp man, the will said fly them this season and she'd flown them this season, the season was done, the door was open both ways.

It was that out had stopped being the same as free. Her mother in the hall in Genk, four years out and not one ounce lighter, no clock on her door — she'd heard it down the line in May and not had words for it and had words for it now: that you could get out of the town and not get out of the thing, that flight was not the same as choosing, that her whole life's want had been a kind of running and running was a thing you did instead of deciding. She'd decided now. She'd stood on the green baize and decided, with the clock on the table, before a bird was in the air, and the deciding was the freedom, not the train. You could carry a loft to Genk in your chest the way her mother carried a town she'd left, the unflown thing heavier than the flown one. She'd rather the loft she chose than the out she fled to.

Whether she stayed, in the end, or went — she didn't know yet, and it had stopped being the question. The question had been who. The out had only ever been a way of not answering it.

On the eighth day after the hen came home it was a Saturday, and at four in the afternoon Lieselot was down the garden at the loft.

The town was out in it the way the town was always out in it on a Saturday, the dozen lofts down the dead streets, the faces up, an old man two gardens down with a stopwatch in his fist and his mouth going, komeen, komeen, not yet to any bird but to keep the thing possible by saying it, the whole back of the street tipped to the same south, the town doing the last of its one shared thing, the thing it still did together when it would not look at her at the bakery, because the wait was bigger than the feud and the southern sky was bigger than the both. There was a club race on, a little vitesse from northern France, the close birds due any minute, and she had three of her own in it, ordinary birds, no legacy in them, just birds she'd conditioned with her own hands and basketed at the lokaal where they still sealed her clock under Gust's cold thumb because the rules were the rules and a clock got sealed honest whether the man sealing it would meet your eye or not.

She had her hand on the loft door and the light was doing what the long July light did at four, going gold and thin along the brick, and inside the wire the birds were settling, the low collective mutter, the shift of feet, De Late on the third perch down with her keel filling back out, eight days of corn going onto the bone the work had stripped, the most valuable thing in the town and a bird worth nothing on any sheet, both at once, alive.

And then all at once — not one by one, all at once, the way a field of corn lies down under a gust — they turned. Every bird in the loft swung its small hard head to the same quarter of the sky, the south, out over the roofs and the dead winding-gear and the green heap, out toward France and the long water beyond it, and went still.

She stood with her hand on the door and did not move.

It was the hour. He'd fed them at four for forty years and birds are clocks with feathers, and her own three were due off the toss and the loft knew it, the corn-rattle hour, the come-home hour. It was the hour. It was nothing, the way it had been nothing in April when she'd stood here with her hand on this same bolt three days after he died and the forty birds had turned south as if he were out there still, late, but coming, and she'd locked the loft and told herself it was nothing and that had been the first lie she'd told that week and it had been to herself and it had been small.

This time she did not tell herself it was nothing.

This time she stood at the loft window — the one Staf had lifted her to when she was small, there, little one, there, do you see him, so she'd be the first to spot the speck — stood at it from the inside now, on purpose, the key on its string against her chest, the clock honest on the bench, the late hen on the perch behind her with her head coming up toward the south with the rest, and she looked at the south of the sky with her own eyes, not because she had to, not because a dead man had tied a season to her hands, not as the heir of a thing built on a stolen handful of minutes, but because she'd chosen it, the watching, the wanting, the loft, the truth, the birds, the town's real love and not the wage it paid for silence — chosen what she'd honor and refused the rest, the lie, and the out that was only flight — and because down there, somewhere over the gear, a speck would resolve out of the going light any minute now, an ordinary bird off an ordinary toss, hers, coming the way they came, low and driving and finished, out of the open water you can't follow, late, the way the late ones always came, the way the truth came, the way restitution came too late for the man it was owed to but came.

Daar, she said, low, the way Staf had said it, to no bird yet, to the south itself, to keep it possible by saying it. There.

Late, but coming.

THE END