Veil of Time

by Claire R. McDougall

  If I don’t make my choice before this year is ended, I’ll find myself on the operating table and then the choice will be made for me.

  Jim looks at my desk strewn with papers and stacks of books. He notices the piles of paper on the floor. “How’s the work going?”

  I shrug. “I have the material. I just need to organize it. Problem is, it’s hard to be impartial when you know a witch personally. Two witches now. Another one has appeared, only this one is young.”

  I look at the disbelief on Jim’s face and say, “We don’t have to talk about this if you don’t want to.”

  I rifle in my bedside drawer and find a bag of jelly babies. Jim picks out a green one and bites the head off. “Don’t hold back on my account.”

  “This new witch is really young. Her name is Iona, oddly enough.”

  “Not odd at all,” he says. “The old Gaelic name for the island of Iona was Eilean nan Draoidhean, the Isle of the Druids.”

  I bite the head off a red jelly baby. “You’re joking.”

  My mind runs back to the look on Sula’s face when she heard the bells of the Christians. How else would she feel towards the Christians who had usurped her sacred isle?

  “Marcus said that Iona was Aegyptius.”

  “Gypsies,” he says. “That’s where we got the word. Today they’re just Tinkers.”

  “She is like a ghost,” I say. “Pale, otherworldly in a way that Sula wasn’t.”

  Jim reaches for another jelly baby, a yellow one this time. He doesn’t bother dismembering the thing, just throws the whole baby into his mouth.

  He says, “Wasn’t? What happened, did she die?”

  I shake my head. “No, we’ve left Dunadd and moved to a place called Glashan. Have you ever heard of it?”

  “Aye,” he says, “it’s not that far from here. Of course, they built a hydroelectric dam up there in the 1960s.”

  I smile, because this Loch Glashan is another thing I shouldn’t have known about. “We’re living in a crannog—a word, by the way, I didn’t know until Illa told me.”

  He looks away, embarrassed, but I can see him smiling. Sooner or later the facts, I hope, are going to overwhelm him.

  “If you like, I’ll drive you over there,” he says. “But the road is a bit iffy these days.”

  I am excited to go and start moving towards my coat. “My car would be better, then.”

  He laughs. “No, I’m not going in a car with you. It’s not safe.”

  I stop by the door, put my hand on my hip, and tut. “Fine.”

  He pauses. “But there’s no crannogs left there now, you know.”

  Of course there aren’t, but it catches in my throat nevertheless. Houses of sticks and mud weren’t going to last to tell their stories like the buildings at Dunadd. I have lived with these people, and suddenly I have to see them as wisps of air, barely that, not even a mention in a history book.

  It takes me a week to work up the courage to go, a week of nights alone in my springy modern bed. A whole seven days without one glimpse of Fergus. Winnie has become restless and wants to be out at night. Graeme calls and wants to know what I’ve been up to. Fergus is what I have been up to, but I can’t tell him that. If I did, he would hear in my voice how much I want to get back there.

  I sit in the car with Jim, waiting for him to turn on the ignition. My fingers are drumming on the dashboard.

  He says, “We don’t have to go out to Loch Glashan, you know.”

  I clear my throat. “No, I want to.”

  A week away from Christmas and the roads are a dull, grey brown and bowed down under sogging vegetation. Jim and I seem to be the only ones about, driving past houses smoking from their chimneys, Christmas trees lit in the windows. The skeleton trees manage only a few spindly fingers over the road.

  “What do you do for Christmas?” I ask Jim.

  He takes his eyes off the road only long enough to glance at me. He shrugs. “Remember, I do still have two daughters. I get asked down to England, to whichever one is not entertaining their mother.” He’s quiet for a minute. “I wouldn’t want to see her, not now, not after all these years.”

  “Is she still with the bloke she ran away with?”

  He laughs. “God, no. But she is married, which is more than I can say for myself.”

  I don’t push it any further. Maybe he will go south for Christmas, and maybe I will be ringing in the bells with only Winnie for company. Graeme is to spend Christmas with his dad in Glasgow, where there’ll be festive lights to ogle over, and Oliver’s parents will provide Christmas hats, Yule log, brandy-lit plum pudding. We spent a dismal Christmas there last year with the vestiges of a marriage still hanging on like a broken tree ornament.

  Along the rough forestry road to Glashan, Jim’s low-hanging car dips with a splash into potholes. We are driving up through rows and rows of Scandinavian conifers, such a different look from the oak forests that covered the hills the last time I was here. Sight of the loch comes and goes until we pull over by the new dam. The slam of the car doors echoes off the water. It is not until I am standing by the imposing concrete wall that I realize it has been erected directly across the bay where our crannog once stood. Gone is the smell of smoke and dung; all the tilled fields have grown back in now. There’s no shore here for a young girl to run along, no curraghs to cast from; just a wall of water and below it a great drop.

  Across the loch, the outline of hills has not changed, nor has the peaty color of the water, but the place feels very empty. An oystercatcher flits across the water, casting its shrill intermittent call back at us.

  I say, “There used to be wolves, you know. I can hear them at night.”

  We walk along the edge of the loch to a mound of stones just breaking the surface of the water. “They excavated it,” says Jim, “and found a lot of leather and spatulas, a midden of course.”

  I think of the satchel Fergus brought for me from the tanner along the loch, finely crafted, light tan, with a running thread of darker leather through the flap, like something you’d find at a craft fair these days. I could walk around with that satchel at any Highland Games and no one would be any the wiser.

  And then, of course, there would be traces of a midden, the ever-present midden. It’s all I can do to stop myself objecting to them chucking stuff over the side of the crannog, but I am bringing my sense of a planet sinking under a burgeoning population to these people and their counterparts all over Europe barely making a mark. The forests back then haven’t been cleared, the seas polluted; no holes in the ozone. Everything is ticking along as it should and will do for almost another thousand years.

  It has started to rain, but we pull up our hoods and walk down to the gravelly shore where the tideless water is repeating itself in pointless waves. Some old man’s curragh must have once sat upturned here with its hide skin catching a glare off the sun. I picture Fergus pulling up the curragh to this pile of stones in the water, which in my imagination is back to being its old crannog self. It hits me with a pang, as though that life back then were my real life and this projection into the future the phantasmagoria.

  Jim fishes in his trouser pocket and hands me a hankie.

  On the way back home, the wipers are having trouble keeping up with the downpour.

  Jim asks, “Are you sure you’d never heard of Loch Glashan before?”

  I shake my head.

  “I wish,” he says, “there were some way of testing it all, but I suppose there’s not.”

  When we get back to Dunadd, he wants to drive me round to my cottage.

  “No need,” I say. “I won’t melt.”

  I’m too distracted, too much still at Glashan to make small talk over tea and biscuits. I haven’t been taking my pills, but so far it’s been to no effect. I keep waking up in a room that does not smell smoky, keep pushing my spectacles onto the bridge of my nose and carrying on with my notes.

  Winnie meets me on the way back to my cottage, jumping over puddl
es ahead of me. Here I am, a witch with my defamation of the church and my own black cat. I round the final wall of the farm and notice something bedraggled sitting on my doorstep. Winnie runs off to investigate, but I need not look any further to know my own child.

  “What are you doing?” I call to him.

  He smiles with rain running off his chin. “Having a shower, apparently.”

  I let him and his duffel bag in, strip off his duffel coat, and hang it over the bath. I bring him a towel and kiss his cheeks as I rub his hair dry.

  “I thought you were going to Grandma and Granddad’s for Christmas.”

  I stop rubbing to hear his answer.

  He says, “But you were all alone.”

  I hold him to me, feel his breathing against my chest. “I was all alone. Thank you.”

  Looking like he has just come from a bath, his face shining and his hair standing straight up from his forehead, he seems like my little Graeme again. I don’t have a fire to sit him down beside, so I pull a tartan blanket off my bed and wrap it around him on the sofa, put a hot water bottle between his feet.

  “Where’s your ring?” he says.

  Fergus has it. I look at my bare finger, still indented where the wedding band used to sit.

  He looks at me with his father’s grey eyes. “You and Dad aren’t going to get back together again, are you?”

  I shake my head and stroke his cheek for the little boy that he still is.

  As I make him hot chocolate, he calls to me in the kitchen. “No Christmas tree either.”

  “Oh well,” I say, “Our Little Lord Jesus was probably born in midsummer. You don’t hold a census in bleak midwinter. Perhaps we could get a palm tree. It was the church that plunked him down in winter.”

  I hear him laugh. “Why did they?”

  “To quash the winter solstice celebration. Why are you smiling?”

  “Nothing,” he says, tugging the blanket up around his shoulders. “It’s just that you’re getting awfully militant in your old age.”

  I run my hands through my hair. I suppose he’s right.

  He says, “It must be the witches that have done it to you.”

  I nod. “Must be.”

  I want to tell him that I’ve known a few witches in my time, but he wouldn’t understand about “my time.” I let it drop, bring him his hot chocolate, and sit with him, share his blanket. We watch his choice of television programs until we both fall asleep.

  Graeme is at the table eating cornflakes the next morning when Jim makes an appearance at the window. He says he’s come to say good-bye before he leaves on his trip down south for Christmas.

  I wave him in, proud that the young man at his breakfast is mine, that I can barely separate who he is from what I am myself.

  “My son,” I say, laying my hand on his head. “Graeme, this is my neighbor, Jim, local historian, big know-it-all.”

  Jim laughs. “Oh, thank you very much.”

  Graeme looks suspicious.

  “Do you have a Christmas tree, Jim?” I ask.

  It’s a good excuse to send Graeme off to Jim’s house and see what he makes of this newfound friend of mine.

  “He fancies you, Mum,” Graeme says when he comes back with a well-battered box under his arm. “Plastic tree,” he says. “I suppose it will have to do.”

  Jim follows him in with another battered box of baubles. Graeme looks away when I kiss Jim’s cheek good-bye. If my son only knew what I have been up to in the eighth century with the brother of the king of Dunadd.

  “Mum?” Graeme says, as we watch Jim’s car cross the bridge from our window. “Once you’ve had the operation, you won’t be coming back to Dunadd, will you?”

  He has to say “Mum?” again, because I hear it on the periphery of my awareness, while I try to get myself around the notion of not coming back to Dunadd.

  He touches my shoulder. “Remember you said you might move to Edinburgh?”

  I nod. “I did say that, didn’t I?”

  His face suddenly looks old and heavy. He says, “I suppose you’ve probably changed your mind.”

  He goes and sticks the star on the top of the tree.

  “I haven’t,” I say. “Of course I haven’t.”

  He hangs up another bauble. And then another, but his actions are mechanical, and he is taking no pleasure from this. I feel guilty for the disruption to the life of what should have been a normal boyhood. I am paralyzed by the window and don’t know how to get to him. He kneels by the Christmas tree, but not in worship of our Lord Jesus.

  When I see his shoulders begin to shake, I go to him, crouch down beside him, but I don’t touch him.

  “It’s such an awful tree,” he says, and tries to laugh.

  But then he is in my arms, sobbing, and it is so unexpected, I feel as if I am being driven backwards off a cliff. I guess I retreated to my corner after Ellie died, just like he did. I abandon any hope of finding something to say, a question to ask that might stop this avalanche. He curls up against me, big boy that he is, in a retreat to the unblemished fetus. And he stays there, we stay there beside the bare Christmas tree with its star until he can look up and I can kiss his forehead and there is a sense of getting back home again.

  That night, after we have said good night, I sneak to the door and quietly don my Wellies. With my hood pulled tight around my face, I walk along the path to Jim’s house, then through the stile and up over the stone slabs towards the top of Dunadd. It’s one of those oddly balmy winter’s eves. The wind is set to push me right over, but it’s a kind, nonbiting wind, and I can set my weight against it and walk, after a fashion.

  Before I reach the top, I pass the place where the mason traced around Sula’s foot.

  I wonder what they would say at the museum if I announced that the foot at Dunadd belonged to a woman druid. We’re too far gone along the man track even to allow the possibility. In the dark, I stoop and run my finger around the outline of the boar.

  At the top, I find shelter in what is left of Sula’s hut and picture her tattooed fingers working her herbs and remedies, her long grey curls bouncing off the small of her back. Herbs drying from the rafters, the smell of mold and dirt and stinky roots. I picture Fergus’s outline in the doorway and feel his hands about my waist, lifting me against him.

  At the edge of the cliff, I drop down to Fergus’s little ledge. Instead of the moon, there’s a muted light over the islands. I relax into my own solitude. For the couple of miles between the sea and me there is only the flat stretch of the Great Moss, Moine Mhor, boggy and sinking in its peat bath. All the birds are quiet on the Great Moss now; everything is still. No wolves or bears or beavers here anymore, only the faint bleat of a far-off sheep. The lights of an airplane blink high in the indigo sky, unaware of this solitude here on the hill in the grass.

  I have no choice but to walk forward off this cliff in the dark, this cliff of unknowing. The modern world has its answers: it knows how my brain functions and why it fails. It has noted the lesion on my right temporal lobe, and the answer is as easy as the way airplanes fly. It lays its silken path before me and bids me come. Tiugainn comhla rium.

  But it has no answer for one value against another. In the scale of my hands I hold Graeme on one side and Fergus on the other. Ellie sits right between. How can I choose? It’s not a function of the brain; it’s not the way man comes to the table and divides his counters into piles. It’s not a table at all, but a night sky and an ocean spread before you, and not the countable minutes of the clock, but a tunnel that starts and ends in this moment. You can’t walk through any of those things, only hover.

  I leave Fergus on his ledge looking out to the islands, his hair blowing back in the wind. I leave him there for now, but can I leave him forever? Graeme wants me to try, to let them tease out the parts of my brain that don’t work for them. I will be saved from the best and the worst of myself. This, I decide in the dark of Dunadd, is what I must do. But not yet. I have to go back on
ce more. Please, just one more time, let me go back to Fergus.

  22

  I find myself in the woods with Iona this last time picking hazels and acorns from the leafless trees and looking for something she calls druidh lus. I look around for Fergus but see only Marcus sauntering nearby with a dagger tied to the end of a long stick. As we push into an area of dense thicket, something large moves quickly away from our feet. Marcus lifts the goat’s horn that has been hanging from his hip and calls back in the direction of the loch. Iona pays it no heed. She tugs on my sleeve and shows me how to pull a withered plant for its roots, which she snips off with her fingernails and drops into a jute pouch tied around her waist.

  My day brightens when Fergus, the old man, and several others come running past us, some with spears, some with daggers like Marcus’s, all with their tunics bouncing off their backsides. Iona doesn’t look up, just keeps picking and dropping things into her bag. It’s been so long since I saw Fergus, I have to hold my hand by my side to stop it from catching the hem of his tunic and pulling him back to me. I strain to catch a last glimpse of him, but Iona is calling; she has found her sacred plant growing halfway up an oak tree.

  “Druidh lus,” she says, pointing, with as much animation as I have yet seen come over her.

  “Mistletoe,” I say.

  But Iona is not interested in learning English names. Her pale blue eyes pass over mine only fleetingly. I am glad that the tradition of mistletoe and Yule will carry forward all those years into my time. God only knows, and only if she is a pagan goddess, how far back it goes the other way.

  Iona pries the plant off its oak host with a stick and lays it carefully on top of the greenery and white berries in her lap of nuts. Somehow I think the mistletoe of these people has more significance than a means to a kiss.

  There’s a clattering through the bushes, and then we jump back as a wild boar tears past us with the men in pursuit, all of them laughing for the distraction or just for the anticipation of hog meat tonight. I am half excited myself. The tradition of roast turkey at Christmas must come later.