Island

by Alistair Macleod

  He began to gather up his harness from the floor in preparation for the evening chores. I felt that perhaps I should point out that all of our best cattle were still descendants of that long-departed bull but it somehow did not seem a good day for that kind of logic. After he had gone to the barn, my mother said: “He is not having a good day but you realize he did not say ‘No.’ Ask him something definite and volunteer to do the work yourself. He is getting tired. You know that if he gives you his word, he will always keep it.”

  It was true. Whatever uneven moods my father was prone to, he possessed a memory that did not permit him to forget anything and he was always true to his word. In retrospect, it does not seem that we were certain of many things, dwelling in the realm of fluctuating weather and fickle seasons and aggressive insects and indifferent soil; but of those traits we were sure, and we clung to them as the uneasy swimmer to his certain log.

  In the barn it was growing dark. My father moved about the animals with a tired familiarity, leaning against them, pushing them with his shoulder as he moved towards their mangers, talking to them in a sort of abbreviated private language, pulling manure with his fork from beneath them, tightening their halter chains, distributing their feed so that it was within their reach.

  “Okay,” he said before I had time to speak. “I didn’t say you couldn’t, just that I wouldn’t. If you raise the fee, you can have the cow.”

  It was, it seemed, fair enough.

  The fee was probably part of the reason we had stopped using the Agricultural Society bull in the first place. Another was that it took valuable time in a period before the widespread use of trucks and artificial insemination. “He,” the bull, had gone too far away, and it was no longer considered worth it. It was expensive, as I mentioned, and there was also a feeling that paying money for the simple breeding act was a bit too much – as if it were somehow unnatural, a kind of perversion or animal prostitution in which we did not care to be involved; as if there were an uneasy idea that no one should have to “pay for it.” There was also the shrewd and pragmatic observation that after a few years of such selective breeding most cattle already contained “good,” if not exactly royal, blood and further exalted matings were perhaps a waste of time. It was probably a reaction to such spreading ideas that the agricultural representative had come among us in the first place to plant the seeds of the calf club wish.

  In any case, I had achieved the first step. Before the birth of Morag’s present calf, I had already willed her pregnant once again. I entered my name with the agricultural representative and told my fellow schoolmates that I would “go.” The snow had not yet melted, nor had the wild ducks flown north, nor had the first spring lambs and early kittens yet been born, but I was already well into not only this spring but the next as well.

  After the birth of Morag’s “ordinary” calf, there followed the long period of waiting. If she were to deliver the magic calf by early next spring, she would have to conceive in the middle of summer. It took nine months from conception to birth – “just like people,” as we used to say. “Cattle are the only animals that take the same length of time.”

  As the spring passed and the early summer approached, the hectic pace of our lives increased. School drew to a close and during the last few weeks we attended it irregularly. We were needed at home, and whatever we had learned during the year was already in our past. Feverish preparations for the approaching haying season began: the repairing of machinery, the sending away for parts, improvements to the barn and also a myriad of other activities involving gardening, canning and the making of cheese. The short intense summer was upon us and we had no time to lose.

  Meanwhile the animals grew sleek and fat and were distant from us most of the time as we prepared to gather in their winter sustenance. In the early weeks of July we began our haying in earnest; cutting the most mature fields and leaving them to dry, then raking and finally pitching onto the wagons, then driving into the barn and pitching off, and returning again and then again. Always threatened by broken harness and non-functioning machinery and always fearful of the sudden spectre of rain.

  On the evening of the fourteenth of July I noticed the signs in Morag when I was bringing the milk cows home from their pasture by the sea. She was coming into her breeding cycle and it caused a restlessness and tension not only within herself but among the other cattle as well. It was late in the evening when I first noticed it and there was nothing I could do that day. That night the radio told us of the approaching rain squalls which were to hit on the following day.

  “Goddamn it,” said my father, “and us with all that hay out.”

  We had just recently cut a new field, so much of it was still undried. In the morning we were up at five, moving feverishly about our tasks, racing against the weather. At the morning milking Morag’s situation was truly obvious, although my father did not notice. He was not around the cattle much but busy harnessing the horses and shouting directions to animals and people alike. The clouds were already bunching, although they still seemed far enough away, hanging over the ocean and visible from a distance.

  “Hurry up,” he said, coming into the barn where I was milking the cows. “It’s going to rain. We haven’t got all day.”

  “I think we should keep Morag in the barn today,” I stammered quickly, fearful lest he should get away before I broached the subject.

  “What for?” he asked and I could see that he was so harried and preoccupied that he had given my words but little thought.

  “She’s in heat,” I said. “She began last night.”

  For a moment his eyes seemed to cloud over with noncomprehension, but then they cleared and became filled almost with panic, as he understood the significance of my words. It was as if he were trapped by his memory and his word. Trapped by them at this, his busiest time.

  “But there is no time today,” he sputtered. “We have other things to do than just worry about this one goddamn cow.”

  “Okay,” I said. “We will just keep her in and see what the day brings. I didn’t say I wanted to go with her now.”

  “Okay,” he said, as if he were relieved of an earlier capricious promise. “Take the others down to the shore. We have to get going.”

  What the day brought was a forenoon of furious activity. First we raked the driest hay and then followed with the groaning wagons. The sun shone erratically, but the air was so humid that little actual drying took place. At times the clouds blotted out the sun, and once we could actually see the rain falling out to sea, although it had not yet started to fall upon the land. All morning as we raced about, raising new blisters upon the calluses already formed on our hands, Morag moaned and bawled her passion from the barn. When we came in with the loaded wagons, we could hear her threshing about in the frustration of her captivity and her desire.

  I would have liked to bring her a pail of water to ease her thirst, although I knew that was not what she really wanted – but there was no time even for that. On one or two occasions I thought I heard an answering call from what seemed like a great distance but I could not really be sure. She was safe in the barn anyway, I thought. Safe for me, if not satisfied for herself. Our work intensified, as did the weather which surrounded us.

  When the storm finally broke, it announced itself first in two thunderous cracks and a jagged scar of lightning across the sky, and then the rain seemed to hurl itself down as if pressurized forth from the hanging, laden clouds. Everything and everyone became immediately drenched and to save even the half-loaded wagon of imperfectly dried hay we had to shout to the horses and swing the reins over their already steaming backs. They broke into a gallop then, jolting the wagon behind them until they careened into the still, dignified safety of the waiting barn. Within five minutes it was obvious that the day’s haying was over and that at a future time we would have to begin again with what was now being so thoroughly soaked. But by then the hay would not be the same, but only of the second grade.

&n
bsp; The rain poured down all afternoon; rivulets streamed down the windows and the sides of the buildings and cascaded down the laneways, pushing erratic, insistent trenches through the softened earth. Nothing but the water seemed to move. The ocean was still and we were still ourselves after all our desperate activity. Even Morag’s passion seemed to lull as if she were cooled and covered by the soothing of the rain. It was late that evening before I could venture down to the shore to bring the milk cows home, and by the next morning Morag was ravenously hungry but otherwise in no way outwardly exceptional. The hope for the mid-April calf was gone and would not come again.

  For two days it was overcast and there were sporadic showers, and the cut and sodden hay began gradually to turn black. On the third day it cleared in the afternoon and by the fourth day the sun shone again and we began to pick up where we had left off prior to the storm. We did not pick up at the same place, for part of our crop was gone or greatly deteriorated. I set my sights on the approximate three-week future and rationalized that a mid-May calf would, after all, not really be so bad.

  I was ready in August because I had mentally noted the earlier date. We were still at our haying, although many of the fields had now been cleared. We were all thinner and more irritable and beset by various nagging injuries which bore witness to the activities of our past days and weeks. A thumbnail torn off by a running rope, a back spasm caused by lifting too heavy a pitch, a swollen jaw caused by the unexpected disturbance of a wasp’s nest within the deepened grass, a purplish plate-sized bruise on the thigh caused by the kick of a horse irritated by flies.

  When I recognized the August signs in Morag, it was in the morning and the day promised to be clear and hot. We were on the home stretch of our summer’s haying and things were not as desperate as they had been in the earlier month. I mentioned the situation to my father and he said that I should keep Morag in the barn that day. That evening, after we had done a reasonable day’s work, he said, I could be free to go on my five-mile journey. All day as we worked I was intent on my future mission. I was actually a bit afraid as the time drew closer, contemplating the twists and turns of the road I must go, and realizing even then how erratic it might be. From the barn Morag moaned and bawled, her voice sounding like the theme music for the day’s production. The answer seemed to come from far away.

  In the evening, after the other milk cows were stabled, I placed a halter on Morag’s head, looped an additional length of rope around her sweeping horns and prepared to set off.

  “Don’t wrap the rope too tightly around your hand,” said my father, “because if she bolts she might pull your shoulder out of its socket.” He was on his way to finish the last hay load of the evening.

  “Okay,” I said, doubling the rope within my hand.

  The five-mile journey was on a narrow dirt road which followed the erratic indentations of the sea. It was apparently the original path followed by the first settlers in the 1770s when they walked along the shore on their way to their new lands. Now it was almost a private road, rarely used by any automotive traffic because it was so narrow and so dangerous, but used by people on missions such as mine, by people on foot, or those on horseback; sometimes by lovers, sometimes by drunkards or a variety of others who did not appreciate detection. At times it clung to the cliffs and in certain places the edges of it had crumbled and fallen down into the sea some two hundred feet below.

  As we began the journey, Morag moved rapidly and I was forced to run to keep by her side. I could feel the strength of her head and shoulders almost surging back along the rope like a current and thought uneasily that if she were to lunge I would not be able to control her. Contrary to what I had been told, I wrapped the rope around my hand, figuring that if she had to drag me, she at least would not escape. We covered the first mile rapidly and both of us were breathing heavily. She will soon tire, I thought, and then she will be easier to handle.

  After the first mile the road began to climb steeply and the small rocks rolled beneath our feet, but still she did not seem to slacken much.

  In one way this is good, I thought. At least we are getting there in a hurry.

  I had had an earlier vision of her standing stubbornly in the middle of the road while I tried in vain to urge her on. This was obviously not going to be the case – at least not for the first two miles. After the climb the road passed through a sort of upland plateau for perhaps three hundred yards and then became a series of hairpin turns. Suddenly and unexpectedly it dipped and rose and twisted in such a manner as to make it impossible to see what was ahead. It was in the middle of the second turn that we saw him, or perhaps heard him first. There was a low rumble in his throat, which he continually repeated as he approached us, coming down the hill.

  The hill at this spot rose from the cliff edge of the sea which was on our right and ascended steeply before levelling off into another plateau. On that plateau I could now see a herd of cattle in the distance and he was coming from them and rapidly bearing down on us. He weighed perhaps a ton, with immense shoulders and an enormous chest. He was mostly white but his head and neck were a brindled grey which shaded at times almost into blue. He carried his head low as he moved and moaned towards us with strands of bead-like saliva falling from his lower jaw. His horns were thick and yellowed, and spiralled downward and outward like those of a mountain sheep. No formal heritage was visible in the way he looked or the way he moved, and there was nothing like him in any book entitled Standard Breeds of Cattle.

  He was approaching quickly now, coming down the hill towards us, the grade of the hill seeming to give him added momentum. He was walking very rapidly and determinedly with that low moaning rumble in his throat, but he was not running. He was not running at all like those bulls run in the jokes about bulls after cows. None of us, I knew, were in any joke. At the base of the hill beside the road there was a rail fence, which formed a separation, but I could see that the rails and the posts were rotten and that they represented perhaps more the idea of a fence than the fact of one. I thought that with his size and speed and the downward grade of the hill he would perhaps jump over it, but instead he merely walked through it as if it did not exist at all. The whole section of the fence parted to his progress like the furrow before the breaking plough or the water before the ongoing ship. The edges of the rotted, broken rails seemed to cling to his flanks as he passed through their destruction but they had no effect upon his movement. He continued to bear down upon us rapidly but also unhurriedly, as if he were very certain of everything and very much in control.

  In romantic retrospect, I see myself sometimes as one of those “guides” in the Gothic novels, attempting to guard my tremulous female figure from the lascivious, slobbering male who, in the fulfilling of his desires, will cause irrevocable pain. Or by another extension the “concerned father” who will do almost anything to keep his vulnerable daughter from the one he knows to be not right for her. Defence against the figure “with but one thing on his mind.”

  But in the reality of that evening’s dusty road, she swung her head toward him with swift and arching strength. Her sweeping horns seemed almost to whistle through the air and she lifted me, with the rope wrapped tightly around my hand, completely off my feet. As if I were some slight and ridiculous irritant she could no longer tolerate. She swung my body almost into his looming head and I could see, as under a microscope, the dark and deepened liquid of his eyes, the gnarled, yellow rings at the base of his horns, his grey-blue jowls and the strings of beaded saliva trailing from his jaw. I could smell the sweet, heavy hotness of his grass-filled breath as their muzzles touched, and for an instant I thought I might lose my own life if either horned head should swing in the wrong direction. Then with a moan he swung behind her and reared up massively, his heavy shoulders silhouetted and rising into the evening sun which was settling now to the waiting sea. It seemed in that moment as if Morag were approaching her answer even as I was to be denied mine.

  “Is that what you w
ant?” came a voice near at hand.

  “No,” I said or perhaps sobbed, “no” almost before noticing where the voice came from.

  “Christ,” he said, sliding from the back of the horse almost in one motion.

  He too had come upon us suddenly and unexpectedly around the hairpin turn. He was apparently coming from the village, judging from the two rum bottles which protruded from his faded blue overalls, and it seemed he had not been hurrying because the huge, black horse which immediately began to crop the roadside grass showed no signs of perspiration. He was an old man then, deep into his seventies, and was my grandfather’s cousin and therefore also mine. He was a tremendously big man and had lived the kind of reckless life that big men sometimes lead in such communities – perhaps because there was often no one to stop them from doing almost anything they wanted. He was to die at a future time, late at night and in mysterious darkness, falling or pushed from the rickety balcony outside a bootlegger’s second-storey door. His neck was broken when he was discovered and his money gone and someone had cut the reins of his black horse and its companion as they stood hitched to the steel-wheeled wagon and waiting as on so many other nights. They had galloped home then, wildly through the night, the sparks flashing from the steel of their shoes as they swung the wagon behind them, lifting it off its wheels in the tightest turns and suspending it for seconds over the cliff’s edge and above the darkened sea. The people who lived along the road had been awakened by the sound of the rushing horses and had recognized them from the sure-footed terror of their hoofbeats in the same manner that their descendants now recognize the individual motor sounds of different cars. They had heard the sounds before and did not know that on this occasion the black horses were careening through the night, driverless and without a human guide.