Docherty

by William McIlvanney

  11

  Conn didn’t know what had happened until he saw his mother. He had been weightless since he found his father’s hand. While the men dug his father out, while they brought him up the pit, while they certified him dead, while they brought him home, while they carried him up the stairs of the entry, Conn was with them and was nowhere.

  At the turning of the stairs Tadger gave over his share of the weight of Tam’s body to his own son. He put his hand on Conn’s shoulder.

  ‘Ah’ll tell yer mither, son,’ he said. Then to the others, ‘Come up ahint me.’

  They followed him up and along to the door. He hesitated, then knocked. The door opened on to the first firmness Conn had been aware of since it happened. He saw her from a terrible distance. To him she seemed someone standing on a small solidity surrounded by endless space. She was wiping her hands on her pinny. Her face had that expression of polite inquiry she wore at such times.

  It was already beginning to wilt into doubt by the time Tadger had taken her by the arm and turned her back into the room. She was instinctively pulling away from him as he spoke. His voice was weird, occurring at different pitches.

  ‘Jenny, hen. Noo ye’ll hiv tae prepare yersel’. Ah’m sorry, hen. Ah’m sorry. It’s bad news. It’s the worst news, Jenny. It’s Tam.’

  She was frozen, facing towards the window. She didn’t look towards them.

  She said, ‘No’, as if it was a conspiracy. ‘No. No. No. Ye will not. You will not!’

  The sound of his mother forbidding it to happen broke Conn’s stillness. He said, ‘Oh’, and the small word was a physical release, was the shock that was dammed in him breaking. The enormity of it went through him. It wasn’t possible.

  Tadger said, ‘Aw, Jenny. It’s happened. It’s happened, love. It’s happened.’

  ‘Naw,’ she said. ‘Ah’ll no’ hiv it. D’ye hear me? Ah’ll no’ hiv that.’

  ‘There, Jenny, there. Goad bliss ye.’

  The others still waited outside, and Conn, too, like a stranger. Jenny stood clenched on herself, her hands still wrung in her pinny, as if holding to her the last moment of normalcy. Tadger’s arm rose towards the others and fell. They carried Tam in and laid him on the set-in bed that wasn’t used. Coming to him, Jenny admitted his death into the room. It possessed her frighteningly.

  ‘Aw,’ she wailed. ‘Naw, Tam, naw. Ah, the best. The best o’ them. Why? Nae richt, nae richt. They couldny, they couldny.’

  Her words weren’t like words. They were like sounds a strong wind makes against any object that baulks it. Through her Conn sensed the force of what they were confronting, felt the waste it came from, gauged its mercilessness against her, and he couldn’t stop his tears. His only answer was to wipe his hand across his face and shake his head. He felt the shapelessness of everything. He knew that there was nothing to be done.

  But incredibly there was. For while Jenny moaned on, another voice began to happen in her weeping, as if she was two people. The sound of it shivered through Conn like madness. His mother’s voice had begun to be a conversation. Within the incoherence of her keenings, a small voice was asserting itself like a descant.

  ‘Ach, but we’ll wash ye, Tam,’ it was saying. ‘We’ll make ye clean. Ye canny be left like this. Ye canny be.’

  It gathered strength until she was pulling at his shirt and saw his body battered with bruises.

  ‘Oh my Goad. Oh my Goad. We’ll wipe ye, Tam.’

  ‘Ah’ll help ye, mither,’ Conn said.

  ‘Naw, naw, son,’ she said absently. ‘It’s no’ fur you tae dae. Is it, Tam?’

  Her movements were very gentle, as if she didn’t want to hurt him.

  ‘Conn,’ Tadger said. ‘You go an’ tell Mick and Kathleen an’ Gus’s wife, son. They’ll need tae ken. Harry,’ he said to his own son. ‘Go doon an’ tell yer mither tae come up. Ah’ll wait here till she comes.’

  He signalled the others out and shut the door. Conn waited on aimlessly and then, on his mother’s strength, he went out. It was that same strength that gave what followed shape.

  The event was defined in Jenny. Since it happened most to her, the griefs of the others were contained in hers. She gathered the whole thing to her and withstood it. So Mick’s bitterness that his father should die in an aimless accident was mollified into memory of his worth by the simplicity and intensity of his mother’s feeling. When Kathleen came, she was already shattered and it took her mother to teach her how to meet what had happened. With Angus, it seemed to Conn, his grief was for his mother. Conn wondered if Angus would have been able to feel anything without her there.

  The last of her gifts to Tam was the dignity with which she mourned for him. After the undertaker had laid out Tam in his coffin, people came endlessly, relatives and friends and neighbours. Through the next two days, Jenny sat in their midst, enduring her private grief in a public place. They too had their respects to pay to Tam and she accepted that. She made no plea to be left alone, because she was alone.

  Within their muted talk, she communed with her own grief. Sitting beside the fire, she would say, ‘Ach, Ah had the best o’ them. There’s naebody kens the guidness that wis in him as a young man. Ye couldny guess.’ And she would cry again a little. From time to time she would refer to something that had happened in the past and that didn’t mean anything to anybody else. She was making her death-mask of him.

  Conn had never loved her more. He needed her certainty as a compass for his own feelings. For there were confusing crosscurrents around him. Even in the mourning for him his father had managed to generate factions.

  Old Conn with his rosary beads was one. He was saying prayers for a son at last safely Catholic. Conn could understand how his grandfather felt and wondered if perhaps he wasn’t right enough.

  But beyond the old man’s innocence were the rest of his family, some of Conn’s aunts and uncles, and for him their presence was almost sinister. They kept gently badgering his mother about when the priest would be coming. They didn’t ask if Tam had expressed a desire at any time to have a priest.

  The problem bothered Conn. He saw some kind of technical justification for their attitude, yet at the same time felt that it showed no respect for his father, only for their own ideas. It was in watching the unwavering concentration of his mother’s grief that he knew quite suddenly that he was opposed to them. There were two groups here. There were those who were mourning the death of a man and those who were mourning the death of Tam Docherty. Conn knew which group he belonged to.

  For Old Conn’s family Tam Docherty had only become a habitable presence once he was dead. The demands he had put on his life had always been too much for them while he was alive. Now that he was reduced in death, they had come back to claim the body. The body wasn’t for claiming. It belonged to those who had loved the man in it for what he was, not for what he was called. His life meant more than his baptism. He should be allowed to die in the terms he made for himself, not that others made for him. Conn decided that he would be. When the crisis came, he was ready for it.

  ‘Jenny,’ his Auntie Mary said. ‘Ah ken ye canny think the noo, hen. Ye’re a’ at sixes an’ seevens. But arrangements hiv tae be made. D’ye want me tae get the priest fur ye.’

  ‘There’ll no’ be a priest,’ Conn said.

  There was an incredulous pause.

  ‘Son,’ his uncle Alec said. ‘Ah hardly think it’s your place tae settle a thing like that.’

  ‘Who else’s wid it be, like?’ Mick was asking before his uncle had finished speaking. ‘We’re his faimly. An’ whit Conn says is richt. There’ll be nae priest.’

  ‘Why no’?’ Old Conn’s voice was shaking.

  ‘Gran’feyther.’ Mick was patient. ‘Ma feyther leeved withoot a priest. He deed without wan. A’ ma life Ah never heard him wantin’ wan. Noo ye’ve a’ got your religion. That’s your business . . . But ma feyther’s no gonny be some kinna sop fur you. Tae make ye feel better. He wisny that guid at so
othin’ at the best o’ times. He’ll no be stertin’ noo. He’ll get buried the wey he leeved. Jist his raw sel’.’

  ‘But the funeral!’ Auntie Jean said. ‘Ye canny ha’e a funeral like that.’

  ‘We’ll bury him oorsel’s,’ Mick said. ‘Without the mumbo-jumbo.’

  ‘Ah never came across the likes o’ it.’ Uncle Alec couldn’t believe it.

  ‘Ah never came across the likes o’ ma feyther,’ Conn replied.

  ‘Jenny!’ Auntie Mary was drawing the final line between them. ‘Dae you hear this? Hiv ye got nothin’ tae say? These boays o’ yours is blasphemin’. This is ma brither they’re talkin’ aboot.’

  Jenny looked at her.

  ‘Naw. It’s their feyther they’re talkin’ aboot. An ma man. An’ a lot o’ hurt you caused him, Mary, that you should never ha’e caused him. Fur a faimly tae him wis an awfu’ important thing.’

  ‘Jenny. Ah’m no’ here tae argy wi’ ye. Ah’m here tae demand a proper Christian burial fur ma brither. Ah’m waitin’ fur you tae answer.’

  Jenny spoke quietly but what she said wasn’t to be disputed.

  ‘If there’s wan thing he loved it’s his weans. His boays’ll bury ‘im. An’ if Goad disny want ‘im like that, Ah don’t want Goad.’

  Tam lay bland in his coffin, making a quarrel in nature even in death.

  12

  In the house on the day the atmosphere was less that of a funeral than of a polling-booth. The poll was secret. People voted with their bodies, present or absent, but the exact significance of such declarations wasn’t clear. Some stayed away because the whole proceedings were an affront to their sense of propriety, some because they wanted to avoid trouble. Some stayed away because others stayed away. Some came for the sake of Tam, some for the sake of appearances, and some because they wanted to show Jenny she was right. The divisiveness of the whole thing was revealed in the way that one brother-in-law had come but not one of the others, a husband had arrived without his wife, though both had been invited.

  There was no service. There was Old Conn at his rosary, joined by some others. There was silence and consolation of Jenny and hobbled talk. There was the twenty-third psalm, which Tadger had asked Jenny if they could sing. They sang it for themselves rather than Tam, as a way of acknowledging the solemnity of what was happening. There was the undertaker, embarrassed by the amorphousness of it all, finally managing to organise them out.

  The trip to the cemetery simplified things further. Old Conn had said he would go out later. There were others who, though they had gone to the house, felt they couldn’t participate in what would happen at the graveyard. They peeled off outside the house. Only those were left who felt they could go the whole way with Tam.

  At the cemetery gates a large group of men were waiting, and Conn understood why there had been so few men at the corner when they passed it. They were most of them here. He found that moving. The men stood with their bonnets off and followed the cortege into the cemetery.

  At the grave the coffin was placed on the planks. The wind flapped at the motionless figures, ruffled their hair.

  ‘This is where there would normally be a short service, sir,’ the undertaker whispered to Mick.

  Mick shifted his feet, looked up at the people round the grave and the other men clustered beyond them on the pathway. He looked back down at the coffin and made to speak. He had to stop and clear his throat. While he spoke, his eyes remained on the coffin.

  ‘Ah jist want tae thank all of ye fur comin’ here tae see ma feyther buried. There’s nae service because we don’t think he woulda wantit a service. Ah think he would’ve wantit it the way it is. Wi’ jist his freen’s tae see ‘im aff. Ah think a’ he believed in wis folk.’

  Mick hesitated and fell silent. It was Tadger’s voice that went on.

  ‘Yese a’ ken ma poseetion. Ah wis born in the Church an’ brocht up in the Church an’ Ah’ll dee in the Church. But Ah never kent a man inside it or oot that Ah thocht mair o’ than Tam Docherty. He wis a hard wee man. But a guid wee man. Ah thocht the world o’ him. He wis baptised a Catholic but Ah respect his boays fur daein’ whit they think is richt by him. An’ it canny dae him ony herm. If there’s a place efter this that he’s no’ allooed intae it canny be much o’ a place. Whaurever he’s gaun’ll dae me fine. Ah widny want tae be whaur he wisny.’

  Hammy Mathieson said, ‘Ah’m no’ wan fur the talkin’. But Ah jist want tae say Tam Docherty saved ma life. An’ Ah’ll no’ forget it the longest day Ah leeve. In a kinna wey he gi’ed me the rest o’ his life tae leeve fur ‘im. That’s a big responsibeelity. Ah don’t think I’ll be as big a man as that wee man wis a’ his days. But, by the holy Christ, Ah’ll be a better man than Ah wis.’

  There were murmured voices. The business with the cords was slightly confused. It was only then Conn noticed that Angus wasn’t here. He couldn’t believe it. He looked at Mick and Mick’s eyes showed he knew what Conn was thinking about. He made a resigned expression and gave Conn his cord.

  The undertaker was muttering, ‘Oh dear, oh dear!’

  Because of the unwillingness of some people to go to the cemetery, only three of the cords were allocated to people actually related to Tam. These were Mick and Conn and their Uncle Harry, who, at the cost of a lot of rancour from his wife and Old Conn’s family and a lot more to come, had said that he had respect for Tam and knew no other way to show it. The other cords were taken by Tadger and Andra Crawford and Hammy Mathieson and two men brought out of the group on the pathway.

  When the coffin had been lowered, the undertaker dropped dirt on it and said the part about ‘ashes to ashes, dust to dust’. The grave was covered and they all walked slowly away.

  It was much later that Old Conn stood alone at the grave. In the gathering dusk he conducted his own small service, conjuring God to accept Tam as a Catholic.

  13

  Although their lives seemed to close over the fact of Tam’s death soon enough, with Conn continuing to work alongside Tadger and his sons in the pit, and his grandfather staying with them because there was nowhere else for him to go, and Jenny somehow managing with only the two wages coming in, Conn was a long time trying to come to terms with his father’s death.

  For some time afterwards people were making remarks to him about it. Somebody in the pit would mention Tam or someone at the corner or Andra Crawford would speak incidentally about him while Conn was in the house. They were all generous remarks, the kind people make about a dead man. Usually they would mention his concern for other people and his guts. Conn accepted them as Tam’s due. They seemed to him to be true but they were not true enough. They were all right for other people but Conn had lived all his life in the almost overpowering proximity of his father’s presence and with him gone, their house seemed at first emptier than any place as small as that had any right to be. Conn found himself wondering how exaggerated his sense of his father had been. He felt that it was very important to be honest in his response to what was happening to him. He trusted no one to tell him what he was experiencing.

  It was an ambivalent time. It was then, Conn was later to feel, that for him things fell apart. The tightness of texture he had always known in his life loosened slowly. He saw things clearly that had only been hazy before. Kathleen’s marriage was a pretence. Jack drank like a fish and she was suffering. He wondered why he had never been fully aware of that before. His father was the answer. He had left his father to notice things like that. He saw his father anew and that was a surprising realisation, to have lived in the same house for so long with a man and find a dimension of him you hadn’t known.

  He saw it now. His father was like one of those animals Conn had read about. When danger threatened, they attracted attention to themselves and drew it off. The danger was the realisation of what had happened. His father’s passion for each of them was such that he couldn’t admit their defeat, the loss of themselves. He accused himself of their failures, he took them upon him. That
was his final drunkenness.

  Conn saw it now – the ruins his father had finally lived among, the weakness he had to protect. He tried to absolve them of his demands by failing to meet those demands himself. The last gift of his fatherhood was that of giving them the chance to disown him. He took the blame for himself to himself. He offered them escape from the force of his need to connect with everyone, to be known to the uttermost for what he was.

  Angus had accepted that escape. Angus must have welcomed the chance to move out of the house. It was the easiest thing he could do. He hadn’t been to the grave because he couldn’t acknowledge truly what his father had been without denying what he was himself. For his father was a dangerous man, even dead. Conn understood that now. He felt it in the way his own life had atomised into contradictory fragments – his recurrent sadness at his father’s death, the sense of release he felt, an increasingly critical attitude towards High Street. There gathered in him a kind of rootless anger.

  One night he went out, not knowing why. The mood stayed banked in him while he walked, while he stood in a pub and drank more than he had ever drunk before, and it wasn’t till he was out in the street again and suddenly saw Angus that the feeling in him found a home.

  Angus was turning away from talking to someone, his hand still raised in a flick of farewell. Conn crossed towards him, and was in front of him before Angus had noticed, and said, ‘Ah want you.’

  Angus’s head jerked up and then was breaking into a laugh when Conn threw the punch. Angus swung clumsily away, just managing to deflect the blow with his wrist.

  ‘Hey!’ He stepped back. Incredulity baffled his anger. He looked down at his wrist, flapping his hand and drawing in his breath. It was the pain that told him what was happening. ‘Whit’s the gemme? Wee brither or no’ wee brither, Ah’ll pit yer nose oot through the back o’ yer heid if ye come that wi’ me.’

  ‘Ye better stert then,’ and Conn made to throw another punch.