Docherty

by William McIlvanney

  Tam spread his arms and shook his head, as if offering the image of himself to Conn as irrefutable proof of the failure he couldn’t find words to convey. Paradoxically, what Conn saw were the forearms bulging from the rolled up sleeves, the hands that looked as tough as stone. The whole person emitted an aura of impunity as cautionary as an electric fence. Sitting there, self-deprecating man and hero-worshipping boy, they made an irony of each other, Tam imparting to his son a conviction he had no words to counteract, Conn interpreting his father’s silence against itself.

  ‘Ye see that pair auld man through there? He’s leeved a slave an’ he’s deein’ a slave. They can gi’e it ony ither name they like. But that’s whit he is. An’ ye ken why?’ Tam jabbed a forefinger against his own temple. ‘Because they took ower in there. That’s the only wey ye’ll ever bate them, son. By findin’ oot the truth fur yerself an’ keepin’ it in there. Yer gran’feyther’s nearly seeventy. An’ he’s waitin’ tae leeve his furst day as his ain man.’

  Tam sat looking into the fire, his head cocked delicately as if he was listening. He nodded to his own thoughts and, watching him, Conn experienced a moment that had the eeriness of a seance. He became conscious of the shadows emerging from the fire’s meeting with the approaching darkness, and they were assembling themselves around him in the room, like ghosts with whom his father was communing. A minute jet of gas burst from a break in the coal with a sound like a centuries old moan, before it ignited to a separate incandescence within the fire’s burning.

  ‘Yer Uncle James. Ah’ve never telt ye aboot him yet. Hiv Ah, Conn?’ Conn shook his head, his boredom animating for the first time into interest at the prospect of a story, at the thought of hearing about a man instead of all this incomprehensible talk about ‘them’ and ‘education’. ‘He wis fae Cronberry, then. Yer Granny’s nephew. Ma cousin, Ah suppose. Worked in the pits as weel. But a clever, clever boay. Ye ken whit he did? Every day he did his shift in the pits. But at nichts. He studied and he re-studied. Tired tae the marrow o’ his bones he wis. Aye. But every nicht, right reason or nane – the studyin’! It wis a’ . . .’ Tam’s rhetoric lost course for a moment in an absence of facts – ‘the rocks an’ that. You ken. Stanes an’ the earth. Whit is it?’

  ‘Geology.’ Conn felt casually and impressively knowledgeable, a state of mind he was careful not to spoil by dwelling on the fact that he had only learned the word from the teacher the day before.

  ‘That’s the wan.’ Tam paused as if about to repeat it but didn’t bother. ‘Oot in a’ wathers. Wi’ his trooser-legs rowed up. Wadin’ the burns. Lookin’ fur jist the special stane that he wid be efter at the time. Chappin’ them up wi’ a wee mell. Makin’ his notes. The names he had fur them! He could come oot wi’ a name that wid choke a horse. An a’ it wid be wis a wee thing like a causey. Ye’ve nae conception, son. Well. He persevered. An’ he wisny stuffy, either. In fact, he knew that he wis deein’. An’ him jist in his twinties. But he went oan. He wis efter some kind o’ qualification thing. Like letters ahint his name or that. He took his examinations. An’ ye ken. The week he dee’d, the word came through the post. The boy had passed. A certificate kinda thing. His mither his it in the hoose yet. Twinty-seeven when he dee’d. An’ she his a drawer there in her big dresser that she keeps the wey he left it. The first time we’re up, Ah’ll get her tae show ye it. It’s a thing tae see. Jist fu’ o’ stanes every colour o’ the rainbow. Every wan found by James himsel’. An’ every wan wi’ its wee caird, an’ oan the caird the special thing they ca’ it. Names ye never thocht were poassible. By, that’s some drawer. It’s no’ a drawer, son. It’s a monument.’

  There was a silence of some seconds for the legendary James. Tam was remembering holding that certificate in his hands. The name on it was James’s but the official wording was relevant to all of them, an amnesty from the inevitability of the narrowness of their lives. Conn was imagining the drawer. He saw the stones like jewels, heaped fragments of blinding iridescence, having no point in his mind beyond their own beauty, a dead man’s treasure trove.

  The man’s richt.’ Tam nodded at the book, ‘A Treasury of Prose and Poetry’, resting on Conn’s knee with his finger keeping the place. ‘Hoo can war help us? We’ll be in the same mogre when it’s a’ by. Poor Mick. He’s daein’ whit he has tae dae. But it’s no’ gonny make ony difference. That’s the thing, Conn. Yer brither’s life’s at stake. An whoever wins, it canny be us. We loast before it stertit.’ Caught in the renewed intensity of an old realisation, Tam looked for hope. ‘Conn. Why will ye no’ see the sense o’ goin’ oan at the schil, son. Why no’?’

  ‘Ah jist don’t want tae, feyther.’

  ‘But whit is it? Why no’?’

  ‘Ah don’t like it.’

  ‘Is it the teachers? His somebody goat it in fur ye?’

  ‘Naw. It’s no’ that.’

  ‘Ah don’t understand ye, son. Ah mean, that’s where ye could make somethin’ o’ yerself. See Mr Pirrie. He’s aff the same kinna folk as oorselves, Ah hear. An’ ye see whit he’s made o’ himself. Noo is that no’ an example fur ye?’

  Clumsily, Tam had activated Conn’s antagonism towards school, which had so far remained in the lethargy of long-established attitudes. Now, mobilising against that name, past convictions mustered confusedly in his head, the more determined for being inarticulate. So irrational as to be anonymous forces, those convictions nevertheless represented areas of real experience for Conn. They related to truths he had earned for himself, no matter how incapable he was of proving his right to them with words, to the fact that nothing he was taught at school took the slightest cognizance of who he was, that the fundamental premise underlying everything he was offered there was the inferiority of what he had, that the vivid spontaneity of his natural speech was something he was supposed to be ashamed of, that so many of the people who mouthed platitudes about the liberating effects of education were looking through bars at the time, that most teachers breathed hypocrisy, like tortured Christians trying to convert happy pagans, that the classroom wasn’t a filter for but a refuge from reality. His indignation came in a welter of incoherent images, a mob of reasons that drowned reason, and the only expression of it all he could achieve was a dogged, sullen silence.

  ‘Mr Pirrie. Noo is that no’ somebody ye could look up tae an’ try tae dae the same?’

  Seeing his father so mistaken in his estimation of himself, Conn couldn’t let it pass. It was all right being silent on the question of staying on at school. He had made up his mind on that one. Nothing short of being taken there in handcuffs every day would have induced him to stay on after he was fourteen. But it depressed him to see the way his father was so misled about the school. Mr Pirrie. Why did his father reduce himself to an admiring boy in front of someone who wasn’t a match for him? Conn struggled to say something he knew. What came out, like a hiccup after long meditation, was:

  ‘Och, feyther. Ye could easy win him.’

  Conn didn’t just mean it physically. There was in him a hazy desire to express the result of some ultimate and ideal confrontation of the two men. The words were an attempt to convey a deep faith in his father, something which had survived in spite of what they had taught him in the school, an unshakeable commitment, not unlike ‘I love you’.

  His father’s response was to burst out laughing, shake his head in a patronising way, and then to seem saddened by his son’s remark. Conn held in his hurt.

  ‘Whit are ye talkin’ aboot, son? Whit’s that got tae dae wi’ onything? Life’s a bit mair complicated than a fist-fight. Ah’ve maybe goat muscles. But maist o’ them are in ma heid. Naw, son. Ye need education.’

  They sat hopelessly together in the darkening room, their shapes unfinished sculptures in the firelight, affirming the worth of each other and injuring each other in the affirmation. Conn turned the book over in his hand. He had always loved the feel of it, bound in soft leather and on the front two circles, one within the other, embossed
in gold, like a medallion, inside which was the figure of a lady in a wide, sweeping dress. But at the moment he resented it. Running his fingers over the braille of that design, it was as if the gesture taught him he was blind, as if the book could only be a tactile object for him, and he and his father were locked out from the rest of it, rejected by the complex patterns of words which it contained. The sensation which his fingers casually imparted to him now was never entirely to leave him, like a burn that mutes all subsequent touches to a partial memory of itself, one of those perceptions that remain precisely because their truths outreach our rational comprehensions, have no need of it, though our comprehension will repeatedly come back to illumine them, intensifying the mystery.

  So, in later years, holding again this book, Conn as a man was to understand this evening better, and so many others like it. He would realise how much it had meant to his father, to have this, the only book in the house, given to him at the corner by somebody whose possession of it remained unexplained. He would understand the balm his father felt in listening to the words Conn read from it, those extracts which were often incomprehensible to both of them but which had another meaning for his father, the statement that there were men who understood what was happening to them, that somewhere out there there was meaning. He would even appreciate his father’s respect for that leather parcel of words, so that, passing it to his son, he handled it as if it was TNT. But all these laggard insights would only deepen the mystery of what the book had been for both of them, conceal in more impenetrable shadows what it was they had really been trying to say in those evenings of stumbling talk among the carefully cultivated words of strangers.

  For Conn later understood what was so obvious, that his father couldn’t have afforded to keep him on at school anyway. It had never been a serious possibility. It did, in fact, take all of Tam’s tenacity not to accept exemption for Conn, by which he would have been able, due to financial stances, to start work at twelve. So why had his father taken so much trouble so often to try to convince him of the wisdom of staying on? Was he perversely hoping that Conn would convince him that it was better to leave, and so assuage his guilt? Or did he console himself with attempting to establish in Conn at least the principle of continued education if he couldn’t present to him the fact of it? Was he teaching Conn to condemn his own inability to keep him on at school by way of an apology?

  It was to seem to Conn that those evenings, so apparently incidental at the time, their content totally unmemorable, contained the baffling essence of his relationship with his father, that their shy attempts at thought and hobbled gestures held a communication which no eloquence could have paraphrased, and the irrelevant book, which had fallen accidentally between them, was a bridge across which they had trafficked with themselves. The constraint and hurt that traffic had sometimes involved wasn’t to be regretted, because it was real.

  ‘Read us somethin’ else, son.’

  Conn crouched forward in his seat, holding the book almost vertically towards the fire. He flicked the roughly cut pages, looking for a bit that wasn’t too big. The heading ‘Nature’s Records’ attracted him. He read aloud:

  ‘Nature will be reported. All things are engaged in writing their history. The planet, the pebble, goes attended by its shadow. The rolling rock leaves its scratches on the mountain: the river its channel in the soil; the animal its bones in the stratum; the fern and the leaf their modest epitaph in the coal. The falling drop makes its sculpture in the sand or the stone. Not a foot steps into the snow or along the ground, but prints in characters more or less lasting a map of its march. Every act of the man inscribes itself in the memories of his fellows and in his own manners and face. The air is full of sounds; the sky, of tokens; the ground is all memoranda and signatures, and every object is covered over with hints which speak to the intelligence.

  R. W. Emerson

  Representative Men’

  The room had now abandoned the definition of its contours to the darkness. Only the fire salvaged them a space. But Tam made no move to light the mantle. His face was tightened on itself in concentration, as if the words were a knot he couldn’t unravel.

  ‘Read that again, Conn.’

  While someone released a flare of laughter in the street outside, Conn read again, wishing his mother and Angus would come back, the strangeness of some of the phrases occurring like discomfort in his mouth, and his father listened in utter stillness, as if they were the pagan scriptures.

  8

  The two columns passed each other in the street. Some of the men going out waved and shouted, ‘Leave some mam’selles for us.’ ‘Whit size dae ye take in a German? Ah’li bring ye wan back.’ They were clean and brisk. The men coming back were mud-stained and walked as if they were still up to the ankles in foot-sucking clay. Their smiles and gestures happened far in the wake of the remarks they were meant to answer.

  Together, the two columns were like parts of the same conveyor-belt. It was like being back in the factory, Mick thought. But he didn’t think it for long. Today it wasn’t his war. The day after tomorrow it would be again. That was soon enough.

  He levered water from the pump in the yard and savoured it. Water was a marvellous thing. Stripped to the waist, he luxuriously splashed his body, finding delight in the simple fact that it was still all there. He dried himself with a towel that felt like sand-paper, lovely agony, and went back up the stairs.

  This time in Bethune they were billeted in a loft above an archway leading to a carter’s yard. The only two still left in the place were Danny Hawkins and Auld Jake.

  ‘You took yer time,’ Jake said. ‘Whit were ye daein’? Coontin yer fingers?’

  ‘There’s only wan thing Ah coont,’ Danny said. ‘Every mornin’, first thing. Ah check tae see ‘e hisny desertit. An’ he’s always there. Standin’ tae attention. A regiment o’ wan.’

  ‘Ah like it here,’ Mick said. He was dressing beside the one small dusty window.

  ‘Ah don’t want ony medals,’ Danny was saying. ‘Ah jist want ma auld man hame wi’ me. He’s gonny hiv his work cut oot when this is by.’

  Mick buttoned his shirt. This place reminded him of the Foregate in Graithnock except for the noise. Danny hated the noise. It went on day and night.

  ‘Come oan, Mick,’ Danny said. ‘Let’s get oan wi’ it. Ah jist want tae pu’ some wumman ower ma heid an’ forget aboot it.’

  ‘You go oan. Ah’ll see ye roon there.’

  Mick watched Danny walking up and down. He wondered how many folk from High Street would recognise him now. Sometimes Mick himself wasn’t sure he knew him. Terror had reduced him to what Jake called ‘a porter fur his prick’ and whenever they got a few days from the trenches Danny spent the time plunging off in whatever direction it pointed. Mick felt the life in the trenches that was waiting to ingest them again intrude briefly like a horrible machine but he didn’t want to think about it. This place, with the sun-motes in its stillness, was to be taken as itself, like an antidote. Only, noticing Danny, he couldn’t help wondering how the war was reducing himself, into what simplified shape he was being whittled.

  Like the wood in Auld Jake’s hands. Mick couldn’t make out what it was going to be yet. An animal of some kind, because Jake only made animals. He had been a farm-labourer. He sat in the only chair in the place, beside the small window to have the best of the light, carving patiently at the wood.

  ‘Come oan, Mick,’ Danny said.

  ‘Naw, you go oan. Ah’m gonny take a walk furst.’

  ‘Whit fur? There’ll be a queue a mile long. Well Ah’m awa’. Ah’ll see ye.’

  ‘Don’t come moanin’ tae me wi’ yer coack in a soack,’ Jake said.

  Mick finished dressing and didn’t want to go out just yet. He didn’t want to displace the stillness of the room, the peace it gave him. He checked that he had the letter on him. Then he sat down on the old mattress that was his bed.

  ‘Whit’s that gonny be?’ he asked.


  ‘Hedgehog.’

  ‘Why dae ye jist make animals, Jake?’

  ‘Ah like them. Ye learn tae make somethin’, some o’ whit it’s goat micht jist rub aff oan ye.’

  ‘Whit’s a hedgehog goat?’

  ‘Caution. Disny take too many chances, this bugger.’

  ‘Whit aboot yon badger ye made?’

  ‘Well. Hoo mony badgers huv you seen?’

  Mick laughed. He lit a cigarette.

  ‘Whit age are ye, Jake?’

  ‘Ah’m foarty-wan. Comin’ oan fur ninety.’

  ‘An’ ye’ve been in fae the stert.’ Mick shook his head, smiling.

  ‘Whit’s the secret o’ yer long life?’

  Mick was trying to coax Jake out because he had only once heard him talk at any length and it had been good. Jake, cultivator of long country silences, felt a conversation emerge.

  ‘Releegion,’ he said.

  ‘Whit church did ye go tae?’

  ‘The holiest place Ah go tae is ma bed. Naw. Ah mean Ah’m that feart, it’s a releegion wi’ me.’

  ‘Oh, if that wis whit it wis, we’d a’ leeve furever. We’re a’ natural cowards.’

  ‘Aye, but youse boys is amateurs et the gemme. Ah’m a devout, devout man. Ah’ve hud tae be.’

  ‘Hoo dae ye mean?’

  ‘Ah’m mair feart than you, that’s a’. It’s hard tae think o’ onythin’ Ah’m no’ feart fae.’

  There must be some things.’

  ‘Oh, Ah huv lapses, richt enough. We’re nane o’ us perfect. But Ah’m workin’ oan them. There used tae be a lot o’ things Ah wisny feart fae. A cat, a moose, a tablespinfu’ o’ waiter. A needle in a heystack. Ah wisny a very releegious man. But Ah’ve studit a bit an’ thocht a bit. An’ a cat can sit oan yer face when ye’re sleepin’. Snuffed oot. Watch oot fur the cats.’

  Mick laughed. Outside, the noise was unceasing of the rattling of a gun-carriage or the whine of a despatch-rider’s motorcycle or the guns rupturing the air in the distance or the throb of an ambulance, leaving empty, coming back loaded with injured – what Jake called the butcher’s van. Inside, Jake’s philosophy was an ironic descant.