by Jane Yolen
Standing before me, her plain black dress covered at the top by a solemn dark shawl, and on her head an astonishing hat covered with artificial black flowers, she was clearly waiting for me to say something.
“Thank you,” I said at last. And it was true, bringing a hat along hadn’t occurred to me at all. I took off the bandeau, and set the proffered hat on my head. It was a perfect fit, though it made me look fifteen years older, with its masses of black feathers, or so the mirror told me.
Lips pursed, she nodded at me, then turned, saying over her shoulder, “Young Mary McDougall did for him.”
It took me a moment to figure out what she meant. Then I remembered. Though she must be nearer sixty than thirty, Mary McDougall had been both midwife and dresser of the dead when I was a child. So it had been she and not Mrs. Marr who must have washed my father and put him into the clothes he’d be buried in. So Mrs. Marr missed out on her last great opportunity to touch him, I thought.
“What do I give her?” I asked to Mrs. Marr’s ramrod back.
Without turning around again, she said, “We’ll give her all yer father’s old clothes. She’ll be happy enough with that.”
“But surely a fee . . .”
She walked out of the door.
It was clear to me then that nothing had changed since I’d left. It was still the nineteenth century. Or maybe the eighteenth. I longed for the burial to be over and done with, my father’s meager possessions sorted, the house sold, and me back on a train heading south.
We walked to the kirk in silence, crossing over the burn which rushed along beneath the little bridge. St. Monans has always been justifiably proud of its ancient kirk and even in this dreary moment I could remark its beauty. Some of its stonework runs back in an unbroken line to the thirteenth century.
And some of its customs, I told myself without real bitterness.
When we entered the kirk proper, I was surprised to see that Mrs. Marr had been wrong. She’d said not many would come, but the church was overfull with visitants.
We walked down to the front. As the major mourners, we commanded the first pew, Mrs. Marr, the de facto wife, and me, the runaway daughter. There was a murmur when we sat down together, not quite of disapproval, but certainly of interest. Gossip in a town like St. Monans is everybody’s business.
Behind us, Alec and Dr. Kinnear were already settled in. And three men sat beside them, men whose faces I recognized, friends of my father’s, but grown so old. I turned, nodded at them with, I hope, a smile that thanked them for coming. They didn’t smile back.
In the other pews were fishermen and shopkeepers and the few teachers I could put a name to. But behind them was a congregation of strangers who leaned forward with an avidity that one sees only in the faces of vultures at their feed. I knew none of them and wondered if they were newcomers to the town. Or if it was just that I hadn’t been home in so long, even those families who’d been here forever were strangers to me now.
Father’s pine box was set before the altar and I kept my eyes averted, watching instead an ettercap, a spider, slowly spinning her way from one edge of the pulpit to the other. No one in the town would have removed her, for it was considered bad luck. It kept me from sighing, it kept me from weeping.
The minister went on for nearly half an hour, lauding my father’s graces, his intelligence, his dedication. If any of us wondered about whom he was talking, we didn’t answer back. But when it was over, and six large fishermen, uneasy in their Sunday clothes, stood to shoulder the coffin, I leaped up with them. Putting my hand on the pine top, I whispered, “I forgive you, Father. Do you forgive me?”
There was an audible gasp from the congregation behind me, though I’d spoken so low, I doubted any of them—not even Alec—could have heard me. I sat down again, shaken and cold.
And then the fishermen took him off to the kirkyard, to a grave so recently and quickly carved out of the cold ground, its edges were jagged. As we stood there, a huge black cloud covered the sun. The tide was dead low and the bones of the sea, those dark grey rock skellies, showed in profusion like the spines of some prehistoric dragons.
As I held on to Mrs. Marr’s arm, she suddenly started shaking so hard, I thought she would shake me off.
How she must have loved my father, I thought, and found myself momentarily jealous.
Then the coffin was lowered, and that stopped her shaking. As the first clods were shoveled into the gaping hole, she turned to me and said, “Well, that’s it then.”
So we walked back to the house where a half dozen people stopped in for a dram or three of whisky—brought in by Alec despite Mrs. Marr’s strong disapproval. “There’s a deil in every mouthful of whisky,” she muttered, setting out the fresh baked shortbread and sultana cakes with a pitcher of lemonade. To mollify her, I drank the lemonade, but I was the only one.
Soon I was taken aside by an old man—Jock was his name—and told that my father had been a great gentleman though late had turned peculiar. Another, bald and wrinkled, drank his whisky down in a single gulp, before declaring loudly that my father had been “one for the books.” He managed to make that sound like an affliction. One woman of a certain age, who addressed me as “Mistress,” added, apropos of nothing, “He needs a lang-shankit spoon that sups wi’ the Deil.” Even Alec, sounding like the drone on a bagpipe, said, “Now you can get on with your own living, Jan,” as if I hadn’t been doing just that all along.
For a wake, it was most peculiar. No humorous anecdotes about the dearly departed, no toasts to his soul, only half-baked praise and a series of veiled warnings.
Thank goodness no one stayed long. After the last had gone, I insisted on doing the washing up, and this time Mrs. Marr let me. And then she, too, left. Where she went I wasn’t to know. One minute she was there, and the next away.
I wondered at that. After all, this was her home, certainly more than mine. I was sure she’d loved my father who, God knows, was not particularly loveable, but she walked out the door clutching her big handbag, without a word more to me; not a goodbye or “I’ll not be long,” or anything. And suddenly, there I was, all alone in the house for the first time in years. It was an uncomfortable feeling. I am not afraid of ghosts, but that house fairly burst with ill will, dark and brooding. So as soon as I’d tidied away the dishes, I went out, too, though not before slipping the final journal into the pocket of my overcoat and winding a long woolen scarf twice around my neck to ward the chill.
The evening was drawing in slowly, but there was otherwise a soft feel in the air, unusual for the middle of March. The East Neuk is like that—one minute still and the next a flanny wind rising.
I headed east along the coastal path, my guide the stone head of the windmill with its narrow, ruined vanes lording it over the flat land. Perhaps sentiment was leading me there, the memory of that adolescent kiss that Alec had given me, so wonderfully innocent and full of desire at the same time. Perhaps I just wanted a short, pleasant walk to the old salt pans. I don’t know why I went that way. It was almost as if I were being called there.
For a moment I turned back and looked at the town behind me, which showed, from this side, how precariously the houses perched on the rocks, like gannets nesting on the Bass.
Then I turned again and took the walk slowly; it was still only ten or fifteen minutes to the windmill from the town. No boats sailed on the Firth today. I could not spot the large yacht so it must have been in its berth. And the air was so clear, I could see the Bass and the May with equal distinction. How often I’d come to this place as a child. I probably could still walk to it barefooted and without stumbling, even in the blackest night. The body has a memory of its own.
Halfway there, a solitary curlew flew up before me, and as I watched it flap away, I thought how the townsfolk would have cringed at the sight, for the bird was thought to bring bad luck, carrying away the spirits of the wicked at nightfall.
“But I’ve not been wicked,” I cried after it,
and laughed. Or at least not wicked for a year, more’s the pity.
At last I came to the windmill with its rough stones rising high above the land. Once it had been used for pumping seawater to extract the salt. Not a particularly easy operation, it took something like thirty-two tons of water to produce one ton of salt. We’d learned all about it in primary school, of course. But the days of the salt pans were a hundred years in the past, and the poor windmill had seen better times.
Even run down, though, it was still a lovely place, with its own memories. Settling back against the mill’s stone wall, I nestled down and drew out the last journal from my coat pocket. Then I began to read it from the beginning as the light slowly faded around me.
Now, I am a focused reader, which is to say that once caught up in a book, I can barely swim back up to the surface of any other consciousness. The world dims around me. Time and space compress. Like a Wellsian hero, I am drawn into an elsewhere that becomes absolute and real. So as I read my father’s final journal, I was in his head and his madness so completely, I heard nothing around me, not the raucous cry of gulls nor the wash of water onto the stones far below.
So it was with a start that I came to the final page, with its mention of the goggle-eyed toad. Looking up, I found myself in the grey gloaming surrounded by nearly a hundred such toads, all staring at me with their horrid wide eyes, a hideous echo of my father’s written words.
I stood up quickly, trying desperately not to squash any of the poor puddocks. They leaned forward like children trying to catch the warmth of a fire. Then their shadows lengthened and grew.
Please understand, there was no longer any sun and very little light. There was no moon overhead for the clouds crowded one on to the other, and the sky was completely curtained. So there should not have been any shadows at all. Yet, I state again—their shadows lengthened and grew. Shadows like and unlike the ones I had seen against my father’s study walls. They grew into dark-caped creatures, almost as tall as humans yet with those goggly eyes.
I still held my father’s journal in my left hand, but my right covered my mouth to keep myself from screaming. My sane mind knew it to be only a trick of the light, of the dark. It was the result of bad dreams and just having put my only living relative into the ground. But the primitive brain urged me to cry out with all my ancestors, “Cauld iron!” and run away in terror.
And still the horrid creatures grew until now they towered over me, pushing me back against the windmill, their shadowy fingers grabbing at both ends of my scarf.
Who are you? What are you? I mouthed, as the breath was forced from me. Then they pulled and pulled the scarf until they’d choked me into unconsciousness.
When I awoke, I was tied to a windmill vane, my hands bound high above me, the ropes too tight and well-knotted for any escape.
“Who are you?” I whispered aloud this time, my voice sounding froglike, raspy, hoarse. “What are you?” Though I feared I knew. “What do you want of me? Why are you here?”
In concert, their voices wailed back. “A wind! A wind!”
And then in horror all that Father had written—about the hands and feet and sex organs of the corpse being cut off and attached to the dead cat—bore down upon me. Were they about to dig poor father’s corpse up? Was I to be the offering? Were we to be combined in some sort of desecration too disgusting to be named? I began to shudder within my bonds, both hot and cold. For a moment I couldn’t breathe again, as if they were tugging on the scarf once more.
Then suddenly, finding some latent courage, I stood tall and screamed at them, “I’m not dead yet!” Not like my father whom they’d frightened into his grave.
They crowded around me, shadow folk with wide white eyes, laughing. “A wind! A wind!”
I kicked out at the closest one, caught my foot in its black cape, but connected with nothing more solid than air. Still that kick forced them back for a moment.
“Get away from me!” I screamed. But screaming only made my throat ache, for I’d been badly choked just moments earlier. I began to cough and it was as if a nail were being driven through my temples with each spasm.
The shadows crowded forward again, their fingers little breezes running over my face and hair, down my neck, touching my breasts.
I took a deep breath for another scream, another kick. But before I could deliver either, I heard a cry.
“Aroint, witches!”
Suddenly I distinguished the sound of running feet. Straining to see down the dark corridor that was the path to Pittenweem, I leaned against the cords that bound me. It was a voice I did and did not recognize.
The shadow folk turned as one and flowed along the path, hands before them as if they were blindly seeking the interrupter.
“Aroint, I say!”
Now I knew the voice. It was Mrs. Marr, in full cry. But her curse seemed little help and I feared that she, too, would soon be trussed up by my side.
But then, from the east, along the path nearer town, there came another call.
“Janet! Janet!” That voice I recognized at once.
“Alec . . .” I said between coughs.
The shadows turned from Mrs. Marr and flowed back, surrounding Alec, but he held something up in his hand. A bit of a gleam from a crossbar. His fisherman’s knife.
The shadows fell away from him in confusion.
“Cauld iron!” he cried at them. “Cauld iron!”
So they turned to go back again towards Mrs. Marr, but she reached into her large handbag and pulled out her knitting needles. Holding them before her in the sign of a cross, she echoed Alec’s cry. “Cauld iron.” And then she added, her voice rising as she spoke, “Oh let the wickedness of the wicked come to an end; but establish the just: for the righteous God trieth the hearts and reigns.”
I recognized it as part of a psalm, one of the many she’d presumably memorized as a child, but I could not have said which.
Then the two of them advanced on the witches, coming from east and west, forcing the awful crew to shrink down, as if melting, into dark puddocks once again.
Step by careful step, Alec and Mrs. Marr herded the knot of toads off the path and over the cliff’s edge.
Suddenly the clouds parted and a brilliant half moon shone down on us, its glare as strong as the lighthouse on Anster’s pier. I watched as the entire knot of toads slid down the embankment, some falling onto the rocks and some into the water below.
Only when the last puddock was gone did Alec turn to me. Holding the knife in his teeth, he reached above my head to my bound hands and began to untie the first knot.
A wind started to shake the vanes and for a second I was lifted off my feet as the mill tried to grind, though it had not done so for a century.
“Stop!” Mrs. Marr’s voice held a note of desperation.
Alec turned. “Would ye leave her tied, woman? What if those shades come back again? I told ye what the witches had done before. It was all in the journals.”
“No, Alec,” I cried, hating myself for trusting the old ways, but changed beyond caring. “They’re elfknots. Don’t untie them. Don’t!” I shrank away from his touch.
“Aye,” Mrs. Marr said, coming over and laying light fingers on Alec’s arm. “The lass is still of St. Monans though she talks like a Sassanach.” She laughed. “It’s no the drink and the carousing that brings the wind. That’s just for fun. Nor the corpse and the cat. That’s just for show. My man told me. It’s the knots, he says.”
“The knot of toads?” Alec asked hoarsely.
The wind was still blowing and it took Alec’s hard arms around me to anchor me fast or I would have gone right around, spinning with the vanes.
Mrs. Marr came close till they were eye to eye. “The knots in the rope, lad,” she said. “One brings a wind, two bring a gale, and the third . . .” She shook her head. “Ye dinna want to know about the third.”
“But—” Alec began.
“Och, but me know buts, my lad. Cut betwe
en,” Mrs. Marr said. “Just dinna untie them or King George’s yacht at South Queensferry will go down in a squall, with the king and queen aboard, and we’ll all be to blame.”
He nodded and slashed the ropes with his knife, between the knots, freeing my hands. Then he lifted me down. I tried to take it all in: his arms, his breath on my cheek, the smell of him so close. I tried to understand what had happened here in the gloaming. I tried until I started to sob and he began stroking my hair, whispering, “There, lass, it’s over. It’s over.”
“Not until we’ve had some tea and burned those journals,” Mrs. Marr said. “I told ye we should have done it before.”
“And I told ye,” he retorted, “that they are invaluable to historians.”
“Burn them,” I croaked, knowing at last that the invitation in Latin they contained was what had called the witches back. Knowing that my speaking the words aloud had brought them to our house again. Knowing that the witches were Father’s “visitants” who had, in the end, frightened him to death. “Burn them. No historian worth his salt would touch them.”
Alec laughed bitterly. “I would.” He set me on my feet and walked away down the path toward town.
“Now ye’ve done it,” Mrs. Marr told me. “Ye never were a lass to watch what ye say. Ye’ve injured his pride and broken his heart.”
“But . . .” We were walking back along the path, her hand on my arm, leading me on. The wind had died and the sky was alert with stars. “But he’s not a historian.”
“Ye foolish lass, yon lad’s nae fisherman, for all he dresses like one. He’s a lecturer in history at the university, in St. Andrews,” she said. “And the two of ye the glory of this village. Yer father and his father always talking about the pair of ye. Hoping to see ye married one day, when pride didna keep the two of ye apart. Scheming they were.”
I could hardly take this in. Drawing my arm from her, I looked to see if she was making a joke. Though in all the years I’d known her, I’d never heard her laugh.