‘But I was invited.’
She glared at me. ‘You shouldn’t have come. It’s man’s work. The ring is no place for a woman.’
I kept moving. There was no time to be downhearted and this was no more than I was expecting. ‘You and I, we can do this,’ I told my tup quietly. I had worked hard to get here, practising daily for nine months to handle him safely after being charged and brutally knocked to the ground. It had taken courage, commitment and effort. I suddenly realised how much today mattered to me, and how much I had learned. All the same I was astonished as each category class my tup entered, he won. At the prize-giving I was elated. We had done far better than I’d ever dreamed possible. As well as being awarded Champion Purebred Sheep, we were given an overall First Reserve, a string of rosettes and two silver cups by an independent judge. If only I had known how quickly those bright toys would lose their shine. Sometimes, when I look back, I wish that I had never attended that show.
This felt like such a premature end to his life. He was only three years old. It sickened me all the more to remember the awful sleepless nights caused by the stress of the thinly veiled threats after the show. ‘I can’t do this any more,’ I swore bitterly. ‘I am having nothing more to do with farming or sheep.’ Perhaps it was because I was so hurt, grief-stricken and confused that I kept his death a secret. Yet I also felt a churning sense of anger, aware that it might delight others to know he was dead. Knowledge is currency on the island, and it is a gleeful cold wind that rushes in to blow tall poppies down.
Yet something about the circumstances of the tup’s death left me disorientated and uneasy. Call it a hunch, but whatever it was, it just did not sit right. Animals die, sometimes for no apparent reason. Yet mine were sheared, dosed, wormed, inoculated, fed on herb-rich pasture. My ewes and lambs, in prime health, had also been commended at the show. I checked the field for any possible toxic plant, but there was none apparent. It was all the more mystifying to see the companion lambs in full health in the same field. My suspicions grew as small things bothered me: gates found not as I had left them, other details that didn’t stack up.
Some weeks later, all those small details and others came together and I blamed myself bitterly for burying my tup so quickly. A chance remark someone made left me shocked and suddenly alert, questioning. Rumours do not start with no tinder and no fuel. Those words stayed with me, causing me to wake sweating and anxious in the night, and afterwards I followed up that lead with a longer conversation. Pathological testing to ascertain a cause of death is standard good practice, especially in the case of a pedigree animal. I realised that I had acted in haste.
Quietly, I did some research, talking to breeders, veterinary practices and animal health departments as well as poring for hours over fact sheets and medical reports. ‘The only way you will know is to exhume him,’ the advice came back. ‘But you need to be quick, because the body’s own autolysis and process of rotting and degradation will destroy the tissues needed to establish a cause of death.’ At first, the thought of such a drastic course of action appalled me. Instinctively, I turned from that horror and chose to leave him to rest in peace, reasoning that it would be impossible to lift or drag him out of the ground.
Only later, I changed my mind. It becomes imperative to act when a creeping sliver of doubt persists, because uncertainty is acidic, corrosive. It burns into the connective tissue of your own thoughts, eats away at your peace of mind. That is when you need an explanation to put you out of your misery.
Tupping is a ritual still regarded as the province of the island’s men. My lambs, commanding top prices in the markets for both meat and breeding, have helped me earn my right to my own fistful of soil. But by raising a tup I have been playing with fire. The ram is seen traditionally as the bringer of life to the island with its insemination of the ewes, and its newborn lambs, anchoring the cycle of the seasons, marked by the church, that drives the farming year. Its essence is the sacred phallus that procreates its seed – a symbol of fertility long since wrested from the ancient guardianship of the matriarchal goddesses and priestesses – which continues to be protected by the men with vigilance and circumspection.
I knew it would ruffle feathers to encroach on this domain and that I would need to tread carefully. Yet to carve my own rightful place in this fiercely competitive territory, I also knew I would have to dig deep and discover for myself my own inner strength. It felt important that I was able to finally draw my own boundaries and establish my own set of rules and values for my own practice, if I was not just to continue getting by, but to be able, at last, to thrive. I thought of all I had endured and lived through, in all the years since I arrived, to create a livelihood and viable home.
Healing comes sooner with a salve than by leaving a wound open. It is strange how whispers flicker. You can feel their heat at your edges, even if you cannot see their flames. Lying awake at night, I have looked at the stars and wondered what they know. It is like that with all that lies buried.
My father once said to me: ‘The stars are always watching, even when you think nothing is there. They are always there, even in the daytime, when all you can see is clouds. When I die I shall be a star up there. One small star, shining its light over the world.’ His usually troubled eyes were radiant, his whole being fired with an iridescence not, as it often was, fuelled by alcohol. So I know there would have been times when he, too, needed to find a bright light in those skies.
I asked him, ‘Why a star?’
I will never forget the sorrow etched into his face. ‘Because when you are a star, you are free of the earth.’
I think of my father whenever I look up at the stars. But the truth is, he is everywhere. He is everywhere I am and everywhere I look. My father is the light in my eyes and my darkness. He is the fierce, warm sun and cold, dark moon. His death was as disturbing as his life. Even though he died three months after Rab left, I can still feel his presence. I want to say, I forgive you, for your love, anger, despair and violence. I want to break that cycle of trauma that was always yours – a six-year-old child condemned forever to watch his own father, in the Apartheid years in South Africa, hacked down before his eyes. I want to say, it is time to lift that soil that smothered us both. I would love to free myself of him, so my life can move on.
The night my tup died, his words came back to me. I did not want to think that anything might have happened to my beautiful ram that was unnatural. And yet I did not know what to make of the threats thrown at me or what it might mean to ‘silence one in our midst’. I startled at the slightest sound, shadow or movement, my skin prickling with fear. The vulnerability of being a woman living alone suddenly felt real and palpable. As I lay awake at night, I watched the moon waxing a stronger luminescence, gaining in presence and light. It was calming to witness that silent transit, like a rite of passage. It made me dream of living differently. I knew what I had to do.
I am relieved that my procrastination is behind me. I am sick of its shadow. I am ready to lift my own dead and to free myself, at last, from all that lies under that dark, weighted turf.
Above my head, a thin sliver of moon is rising. At first the soil is dark and crumbling, but it gets wetter the deeper I dig until it is like a sodden pit. Mud clings to my legs and feet, so it feels like I am sinking. The blade shears away with a slow, sucking sound as it cuts into the soil, until it catches the edge of something wet. A matted clump of fleece comes away on the edge of my shovel. I put down the shovel and gingerly move closer. There is an awful, sickening smell and for a minute my whole body retches and I have to turn away. I know I am going to have to tie something over my mouth, cover my nose, so I do not have to breathe in that hideous odour. It is impossible to describe. It is rotten, like damp leaves, but also sweet; a frightening, bitter, horrifying stench. In short, it is the smell of a dead body that has been under the ground for six weeks.
It is amazing what happens as all that dark organic matter draws life out of death.
The tup’s flesh is exposed in places. It is too soft and gives way. It is difficult to lever my shovel under his great weight, to work sacks and thick ropes beneath him. The main body structure is still intact, held together by a smear of sodden skin that tears and wet, mired wool that sticks to itself, but it is visibly disintegrating at its extremities. His legs are still tucked neatly beneath him as if he is sleeping, but as I put the shovel under, I shudder as a dark, cleated hoof separates. It is shocking to witness the decaying mass of this once beautiful organism.
It feels too intimate to touch him, even through my gloves. As I heave and roll him over, there is a low sigh as gas releases inside his organs and rumen. To my horror, his body ripples and moans, respiring from its own slow-shifting fluids and liquefying pulp. I turn away, compulsively clutching at the soil above me. I can take only short gasps of breath and hold them until I have to turn my head to gasp another. After a few minutes, I gag. The cloying scent has a nauseating familiarity.
I construct a winch with ropes tied to my truck’s solid towbar and steel frame. The decomposing body is heavier than I expected and as the winch lifts it, my truck churns its wheels. And then he lies still in the dark clarity of the moon. It moves me to see him so exposed and, to my surprise, I can see how this aspect of death is fiercely beautiful. It is stark and uncompromising. I know now that death is not just when the heartbeat stops or the brain ceases to function. It is not just when there is no next flutter of breath. It is not when the skin chills, the blood congeals and the vapours and fluids of the body stop moving and assimilating. It is all these things, but it is something else besides.
As I raise my tup, I force myself to go through with what I have started. He is so big that the veterinary bags do not fit him, so I wrap him in the full-size body bag provided by the mortuary. I know I am probably too late to find answers to his cause of death, yet somehow now it does not matter. What matters is that I have done everything I can for him. I drive him on to the early ferry to Oban, stopping at the mortuary for fresh body bags, and then I do not stop until the police pull me over in Glasgow. ‘I’m sorry – I got lost,’ I say as they take my details. I have been kerb-crawling, asking passers-by for directions, and someone has reported me.
‘Is this your vehicle?’ they ask suspiciously. And after the documentation is checked, they examine the rear. They prod the body bag in the back of the truck. ‘What the hell is that?’
And suddenly I feel weary. It is a lot to explain, and halfway through, I begin to wish I had kept it simple. ‘It’s OK,’ I tell them, ‘I have all the proper clearance.’ I show them my exhumation licence and government-approved permission of transit. In the end, they escort me, with lights flashing, to the veterinary site. I have an odd sense of déjà vu: this feels just like going to see my father in the morgue. Pathology, just like the hospital mortuary, is tucked away from view, with little signage. It is little wonder we avoid talking of death if even in its own rightful time and place it is always hidden out of sight.
The police wait outside nervously until the body is unloaded. ‘I suggest you drive slowly,’ one of the officers advises. ‘If you’ve been up all night digging him up, you’re probably more tired than you realise.’ And then they escort me back to the motorway.
When the results come through, it is as I feared and expected. The tissue degradation is such that it is impossible to establish a conclusive result. The unit suggests we take the next step and run an autopsy on the vital organs, which may still remain fresh as they take longer to decompose. ‘There is still a chance we may get lucky.’
But ultimately we have to accept a dead end. ‘Even if we had a better sample, it would be difficult to give an accurate cause of death,’ the pathologist sighs. ‘There are an infinite number of ways a sheep can die. And it becomes even more complicated if it is by a poison. You need to know exactly what you are testing for before you start to get a true result. You could kill a tup just by injecting it with Savlon.’ It seems there is an infinite number of toxins. Almost as many as there are stars in the sky. I draw a line, and accept what fate has decreed.
I have done everything I have asked of myself. I have tried. His exhumation feels important for other reasons, too. Hallowe’en is traditionally the day when you walk between the dead and the living. It is a liminal time when you do not look away, or rush to breathe life into the dead, but accept that we are all soil in the end. It helps to witness this, to know that over time even memory fades and becomes insubstantial.
7
Wild Cry
The geese are calling in the half-light. As a shivering mist drifts through the window, I draw the blankets closer. I listen intently as a dense silence falls over the leaden horizon before a lone voice journeys on, straining. It makes me wonder at its solitary, sky-bound struggle. The sound of its broken cry is disquieting. It expresses a yearning, a hope, fear and something more. In its call I hear an echo of my own. I have a splinter in my heart. Every now and then it quivers, contracts in a spasm or flex of a muscle. I think, how is it that a bird knows when and where to go if there is nothing to follow?
Loneliness makes you search others’ eyes, like a moth seeking a light. I circle, ever closer, drawing as near to that flame as I dare. I am hungry for warmth, kindness, companionship. Not just a passing smile or nod or words about the day or the weather, but words that have meaning. I long to hear my name spoken with love. Need makes my smile too bright, my eyes too wanting or hopeful. I don’t know how, but others sense if your confidence is fragile or broken. They keep a wary distance. It is something we learn to watch for as children. Loneliness frightens even the birds away.
One day I force myself to go out to a small gathering. I know it is time to leave when arguments start to flare. I try to keep out of the fray, but it finds me.
‘You think you’re better than me.’ It always starts in the same wearisome way. These words are flung as an accusation, not a question or even a statement of fact. I do not know why this particular unwarranted challenge is invariably chosen to pick a fight. But I am learning that it masks some fear or insecurity. I have given no provocation. I am simply trying to reach the door.
‘Please, I am just trying to get past you. Will you let me?’ I ask. The man’s eyes are glazed, but radiating anger. I remember that sour look. As the memory floods back, I feel something snap inside me. I want to tell him, you had already decided to hate us, even before you met us. Long before I entered my tup into the show. I think of those early bitter resentments; the whispers of a longstanding dispute. We hoped those feelings would slowly dissipate but instead they have festered like an old wound. I bite my lip. It makes no difference what I say.
Perhaps he reads my eyes. Whatever it is, something acts as a trigger. I hit my head as his hand lunges at me, pitching me back against the wall. As I stagger, he comes at me again, and it is only then that I realise how drunk he is. Suddenly I am screaming, ‘Get your hands off me!’ and he is yelling back at me. And then someone shouts, ‘Hey, that’s enough – no fighting in here.’ Recoiling, I make my escape. It is a relief to sense the cool air and quiet fields outside. I welcome the darkness, but after a few paces, it unnerves me. I can still hear his voice in my head slurring that word again. ‘Bitch.’ I start walking briskly home down the road.
Violence is not always predictable. Drink gives it licence. Sometimes it just happens because it can. There is too often trouble and no one wants to hear of it. ‘It is yours, a private quarrel’ is the island way. But with no help or support, I feel unable to deal with it alone. After that night, I start to avoid community events. It means I am all the more isolated. But it feels safer.
I miss Cristall. Every day, the ache of her absence hits me anew like a stinging slap. Our daily lives were so intertwined, I still feel her shadow moving about me. When she was alive I did not seek others, simply because she was everything to me. I worry it is too long a grief, but grief has no timetable and no notion of social norms or etiquette. It i
s a wave that breaks over your head and rolls you under slowly, holding you down.
Absence teaches you to look harder for glimpses of what is remembered deep in a heart. It is impossible to forget. Everywhere I go I am surrounded by her. I walk daily through woodland where her ashes rest, under trees she gave me and planted with me. And I am grateful that she is everywhere; in the garden, shoots and roots that we nurtured together now provide shelter for wildlife and birds. As the balsam buds, its scent makes me sense her passing by. Sometimes I talk to her, and it feels natural to do that with Isla at my side. It is a daily reality, at times bittersweet and at others a source of comfort. The truth is, I do not move on. I look for her in everything.
And there is a beauty in this. It feels as if the landscape is alive with her spirit. Some days, I feel she is so close she is in each flitting wing, or drift of light, or rustling leaf. I try to cope with my grief, but each day that wave keeps on rolling and breaking. Each day it gets harder to face the empty horizon alone. Drowning is easier than you think. It can happen slowly, in full consciousness, with your eyes open. It can clamp weights to you, so that even as you fight, you lose your buoyancy, slowly tiring as they drag you down.
Listening to the lone cry of the geese as I lie in bed, my body feels heavy, cold, inert. I feel myself caught in the muffled snare of their wings. For some minutes, I struggle to move, but I can’t. Move! I tell myself. And then I say it out loud, and louder, again and again. Eventually I haul myself out of bed.
The next day, I set my alarm. As I open the door, I whisper to Maude, ‘Will you help me?’ Sometimes you just need a friend to stand by you. I pull on my boots and we set off on a sedate jog across the croft. From that day on, I start running every morning, and sometimes in the evening, too. I run in the dusk or dawn, when the island feels softer. I run to force a warmth back into my heart. And it feels as if the landscape throws up its bright gifts to meet me. When you run in darkness, or in the gloaming, the wildlife is less timid, stiller, so you become more aware of its presence. The glistening rocks, wet grass, or rasp of the rushes against my legs make me feel whole, connected and present. Outside, in nature, I notice that I do not feel lonely.
I Am an Island Page 18