The Big Music

by Kirsty Gunn

  But it’s the road keeps you from disappearing. The grey of it, and thin, with no place much for passing. You have to concentrate on that, don’t you, think about that, the present moment of your driving, or you’ll run into trouble, no doubt about it. That’s what they say up here, remember? When they talk about the journey. And since childhood, for Callum, that memory’s been in him, through all the years of the road being difficult to manage in certain stretches, and it holds him to common sense, concentrating on that, being reminded, as I wrote before, of coming along here with his father, and lagging behind caravans or estates hitching trailers, maybe, or boats, and his father’s frustration, then. His rage.

  Christ, get a move on, man!

  His hands gripping the wheel.

  Christ!

  With those eyes of his trained on distance. For first: Drumochta. Then Bonar Bridge. Dornoch. All the places he was wanting to get past, to get through, to get there, get there. And terrifying, that cry of his: Christ! Like the man would himself put a sword through Christ’s side, Callum used to think, as a boy, he could see it, that image. His father! Christ! Like any second they could die! Like they could crash into the back of something! Drive off the road! His father’s profile as he sat beside him in the car, seeing his father out the side of his eye, not daring to say a word, not wanting to breathe even … For fear of what his father might do.

  ‘Christ!’ Callum says himself now, but he’s smiling too. For the atmosphere of his father, the memory of him is like he’s in the car with him. All those things about him coming back to Callum, rising up in the car around him like the recordings of those piobaireachds he used to play as they drove north, the sound of them filling up all the space between them and no room for anything else.

  ‘Christ, again!’

  And where was his mother then? She was never in the car there with them. It was always only ever him making the journey with his father, enduring that silence of his, or the frightening cries. Having the full sense of him, that man, and his tunes playing top volume off the cassette recorder, no doubt, flying within him all the time – Callum could see the patterns of them played out by his father’s fingers on the wheel. That music of his father’s and wanting out, is how it felt, sitting there beside him. Like the music itself wanted out, into the hills and the water, the rush of notes seeming to be pushing his father onwards, along with the car getting faster and faster, and pulling him along, great pieces of sound, the music, in his mind unfurling like there may as well be someone coming down off the hills now with a set of pipes to call him in.

  How different, for sure, Callum thinks, from how it used to be. And how for a long time by now it’s been different. For it wouldn’t be for nothing that they’d called his mother from the House to ask for help. So there can be no doubt his father’s close to the end, by now, and he must be failing … But still Callum can smile a bit, for all that. Thinking of his father not as now but as then. The Christs! The thinking of the past and the sound of it, all green, grey/green, the great swathes of it, like his father tuning up into that first ‘A’ to match the drone and just beginning. A whole life stretched out in front of you with that sound and his father in the midst of it. Like getting into the tuning practice is what it’s like, the notes of the bass and the treble right there, in place and perfectly in tune – and for Callum there’s the strength of that thought, nothing about age in it or death, only the tune, being perfectly in tune, and though it’s going to take a couple more hours to get up to the House from here, and much easier than back in the old days when the roads weren’t as good, the particular emotion that comes direct out of thinking about his father is fixed ready in Callum and holding him, keeping him steady – ‘A’ to ‘A’ like a clearly tuned pipe to its drone – while it also moves him on, the ground at his back, beneath his wheels, it’s moving him on.

  For here he is approaching the summit and just because the roads may be better than before when he was a boy and faster with the new bridges and the curves around the bends straightened, still. The view in the windscreen’s the same. And out to the sides, it’s all familiar. ‘A’ to ‘A’, indeed. It could as well be that nothing’s changed, and he’s the same scrawny, scared’y kid coming up through Inverness and Ross, all the way up into the hills you had to go then, to the bridge and over before you could come back wide again and down onto the coast. The whole journey right back with him and travelling with him now. And how he used to get sick on it always, remember? That bit of the road there, and on the long rounding part of the ascent that’s behind him now. He still has the memory of the churning in his stomach, all the way from here to where they turned inland at Golspie, the sick taste in your mouth, but at least you were nearly there.

  His father stopping for a whisky then. The hotel bar at The Royal, and –

  Not much more in it now.

  Is what his father would always say. And he’d go inside then, to the bar, and Callum used to sit out on the grass with a bottle of lemonade, maybe, something to take up the time, otherwise just sitting, through the long summer’s afternoon, into evening, and his father happier, Callum could hear it, through the open window of the bar, in his voice. He’d be talking by then, not about money or business or what you read in the papers but in his real voice. There were snatches of it earlier, in the car. ‘Aye’ instead of ‘Yes’. Little pieces of Gaelic, maybe. But it was only when he got up here, with people that he knew in The Royal, back in the part of the country where he’d been born, like an animal off the cold hills back where he belonged,3 that you could hear the difference, Callum could. In his voice, the sound of him. In his ‘Aye’.

  No wonder his father had returned here at the end.

  The day is fully in by now, the grey rain heft of the morning’s drive sliced down the centre, like a fish opened clean out of the water and the red of the sun and gold coming through it with Callum at the Pass and over it. And something starting for him here. For Callum. Like a story beginning, not the first part, for that’s already been, that part of a piobaireachd set down as ground, but this, another fresh opening broken into – Callum coming into the story now. It’s a particular set of notes commencing, the Leumluath it’s often made as,4 a new way of describing the theme, a variation upon it that’s a reaching out, a lengthening, the way Callum’s drive north is bringing him in.

  For certain roads …

  You get to a part of them and you feel …

  There’s no going back. For Callum, that’s it, that theme’s established5 – how far along he is, this road here become the only road and the season, the autumn by now, the only season. The further north he goes, the colder it is. And the light, the big fish laid out glistening and new … A sense of something torn open to show the day in it. That every minute it seems to enlarge around the car, the road, the man. So he reaches the summit, passes it, and the light is still lifting, it lifts –

  That feeling …

  Darling.

  Of coming back to us now.

  insert/John Callum

  What happened there? This morning, was it?

  When was that?

  What happened?

  When he could hear the dogs barking and it’s woken him –

  What was that?

  There was the early start.

  That was the first thing. The day.

  Yes.

  There was that.

  The first ‘A’ – to sound, the tuning.

  And the light, remember? The paleness of the light and of the sky and being out on the hill …

  But then – what? After the light? The other notes to follow? When his father was there, and Callum was there and he heard how they came in, in the singling and the doubling of the tune.6

  What happened then?

  After the Lullaby, and the hill?

  With the dogs still barking? When it’s not day now. It’s dark now, in this small room – and it’s not his own room …

  This small room.

  He know
s that, at least. How he’s always in the small room now. And how it’s dark. How there’s a lamp on out in the hall and he can see it from here, from his bed, the light of it, but where he is he can’t see where he is lying. And they used to call this the Butler’s Room, didn’t they? In the old days? Though they never had a butler so why call it that? Some joke of his father’s, but his father never told a joke. He never heard him tell a joke.

  Yet here he is and he’s in the Butler’s Room, all right. In the dark. And the dogs are barking so someone’s come in. It’ll be Callum. For, listen! That’s Callum’s dog there, barking louder than the rest –

  Let me out!

  She’ll be jumping up at the wire, to get to Callum, against the side of her pen.

  Let me out!

  So that’s Callum come home.

  And –

  How have you been keeping?

  Callum will say to him, will he not?

  ‘Oh, fine’ he says.

  ‘This and that. I was up at the back loch, in the green pool. The trout were jumping.’ He hears his voice.

  ‘Callum.’

  He hears himself saying the boy’s name.

  ‘And fine, you know’ he’s saying. ‘The Argo, I’ve had it all over the place. Right up behind Mhorvaig one day, I’ve been all over. I’ve been out for hours, every day, for hours. Keeping an eye on things, the animals, the weather.’

  ‘And fine.’

  He says.

  ‘Yes, fine, thanks.’

  Talking to Callum now. Giving him the news. Callum replying –

  Dad.

  Though when did he ever do that? Talk to his son that way? This and that? And why isn’t Callum here now? If he’s talking to him? Why doesn’t Callum come to see him now?

  ‘Eh?’

  Dad?

  If he’s here? If he’s come home? Why not let his dog out, who’s barking for him and come in here now, with the Labrador, to see him? He could come and sit here on the end of the bed.

  Dad?

  Though when did he ever do that?

  Sit on his bed that way?

  And have the dog at his feet?

  ‘Eh?’

  When did he let the boy ever come in? Though he could do it now, Callum.

  ‘Just come in.’

  Or does Callum not know about his father lying in the dark? Lying here and waiting? His father. Whose father? Callum’s? His own father?

  Yes, him.

  That other Callum. The ‘A’ note – because the ‘A’ is always the tune’s note, the Piper’s note.

  Because his father was always called Callum, too.7

  So it must be him, his father.

  The ‘A’, the octave note.

  But Johnnie is Callum’s father, too.

  So the boy …

  Should just come in?

  No, that’s all wrong because his father was up on the hill with him this morning. Remember? He was in the theme, and the singling, and the doubling. He has it written down already. And Callum was there, too. They were all three of them together. The father and the son, there before him on the path this morning, and they were walking together and he was thinking about the lessons, with all the ‘A’ notes and perfectly, perfectly in tune. Thinking about being with his father and his mother away somewhere else in the House, sitting quietly somewhere … In the little Schoolroom at the top of the House, maybe, she was there. Remember? With the striped ball? The toy ship? Only he wasn’t with her, was he? Johnnie? In that place? Where the lovely toys were? With his mother? He was away somewhere else again and with his father, it was his father shouting and the – ‘Play it again!’ The having to play it all over again, that little bit of the tune, for he had it wrong, that bit, the notes were wrong. His father saying to him to – ‘Play it again!’ And the two of them there in his father’s study, the Music Room it was called, and he was just a boy, he was just a boy …

  ‘Again!’

  For the notes were wrong. They were all wrong.

  So – ‘No! Play it again! And again!’

  That Callum.

  The father.

  His hand with a cuff, the green of it, the rough tweed.

  ‘Again!’

  His father shouted.

  ‘Again!’

  He must play it again!

  Though he’s not a boy now.

  His father dead for forty years. His mother thirty.

  And his son is not here, his Callum.

  He never let him come in.

  He’s alone in the House.

  He’s alone here.

  In the dark.

  first variation/The Grey House: an account

  The foundations of the building, which in turn extend to form the central part of the house which is now the main sitting room and the little study annexe off to the side – these date from the mid-1700s. That’s when John Roderick MacKay or ‘First John’ Sutherland, of the parish of Rogart, the great-great-great-great-grandfather of this present Callum, six generations before he was born, formally put up a place on this flat part of the land, near the end of the strath between the two hills – Mhorvaig and Luath.8 This area takes more shelter than the surrounding landscape, lying as it does also in the lee of Ben Rhuar and so is fronted away from the worst of the winter winds. The place before then was no more than a sheiling, a bit of a byre for some sheep and an enclosure where a shepherd might stay.

  This was in the days of the great cattle drives over from Rogart all the way through the rest of Sutherland, passing through the strath here at Ben Mhorvaig and down into Easter Ross and onto the Black Isle for the Autumn Markets.9

  In these days there were few places for men and beasts to shelter. There were byres such as the one mentioned above along the route, but for the most part the shepherds and drovers would manage by knowing certain crofters as they made their way south and staying with various families as they moved their herds across the hills and down onto the flat lands below, where there might be some grazing. If there were enemies, old feuds, some marriage that had gone sour or a marriage that should have never happened at all … Well, there’d be no shelter for that man. He must make do, then, at the base of a tree, or in some kind of little dug-out into the side of a hill, some place the deer might have used for shelter in heavy snows, or taking refuge in a little wood, maybe, such as that group of rowans that are down by the Black Water near this House of which I’m writing.

  Anyhow, enough to say that as the years passed old John’s son, Roderick Mor, he was called, John MacKay Sutherland’s grandfather’s grandfather,10 seemed to have been a great tacksman on the Sutherland Estate, back in the time when to be fair and reasonable and sound at that kind of work, which might be unfavourable in a great many places in the Highlands, could go fairly to a man’s advantage. For in that period of employment he earned certain privileges to work a piece of land which was not seen to be of any use to the estate as it was way up high on the hill, and half of it in scree, but which in turn he was able to clear somewhat of the rock and to drain the boggy south side and could extend it then to form a kind of ‘corridor’ that sat between one side of the county to another and which would much later become the main route from the east south, not only for the black cattle but also for the sheep. So he had the foresight then to see land not only as a piece in itself but as a part of a bigger pattern, something that could be seen as a particular section of the entire region, connecting it, one part to another and not just of someone else’s portion. As though it were a small estate, though not like that, not so grand – but nevertheless a part of the country that would be his own.11 Roderick Sutherland could see that. And he had the wit, too, and foresight, you could say, to build on the small base of stone and flattened land that had always been there as a dwelling place, and to mark up the sides of its walls into more of a croft house, a longhouse, than a mere byre. This way, he could offer those passing through something like proper accommodation, a place to sleep, to shelter, and in time he arranged
this in such a manner so as to be like some form of hostelry, taking a kind of a tithe from the shepherds who passed through and stopped there in the form of those animals they couldn’t keep on the move south so that over time this meant he could build up a flock of sheep more than the one or two he’d always managed to keep for himself. And he was able to manage it, too, that those same shepherds, who’d paid him in tithes of a newborn lamb or a ewe injured or old or in other ways animals not good anyway for the journey, could take in turn his own beasts to market on his account, and sell them there for him – so he could spend his time in something like leisure then, in the summer months, later. Only it was music that was his leisure, and some might say that art of any kind will give you no leisure at all, only a kind of endless restlessness and yearning. To find and make more and more time for it. To make it better, clearer. To create the space for its devotion and study and practice. And certainly this was how the music developed at the House and became strong and was refined – because of the way it was worked into the day and the life and the routine there. That art might become part of work, was how it started, part of the life of the Grey Longhouse, as it was called then, and in time to become the work itself – to be an end in itself. But not like any other work that people from around there knew, for this same end held within it its own beginnings, with always more to discover, more ways in which by attending to it one might learn and grow. So the Sutherland family described the music that was their art. By then they were able to afford to set aside dedicated time for playing, composing, to be autonomous that way – and there is evidence, from fragments of tunes that survive from this period, and indications of a rudimentary kind of piping school that would be built on and developed to the full over the succeeding generations12 – the playing and its development, its processes, connected only to itself. Needing nothing else for its completion or beginning. Only its own first few notes to start it and then it was real.