Memory and Straw

by Memory

  Iain was crying, claiming that Donald had hit him. Elizabeth separated them, scolding them for being children.

  ‘Anyone would think you were cats in a cot. Look at you! At your age!’

  And Donald, at thirteen years of age and on the dawn of manhood, blushed. Next year he would join Angus in the Crimea. He would. One day he’d lift the big stone, put on a cap, and be a man.

  ‘Look,’ she said, ‘the storm has passed. And the byre needs to be cleaned.’

  And they both went out, taking their wooden spades with them from behind the door.

  The spinning-wheel was set and she began to work. Neil carded the wool and passed it to her. She spun it carefully through the spindle. It whirred, like the sound the corncrake made in the evening in the early spring. All the birds spoke, for there is nothing better in a bird’s mind than its song. How wonderful it would be when spring came, with the sound of the cuckoo and the curlew and the lambs bleating in the fields and the cows with their bonnie calves and the children all running round barefoot and whistling and whooping and singing. And Calum himself, with his hands on the plough and old Ned pulling it along nice and slow, and how she herself would follow, flinging the seed from the sling over her shoulder in arcs of goodness. I will go out to sow the seed in name of Him who gave it growth, I will place my front in the wind and throw a gracious handful on high. Should a grain fall on a bare rock it shall have no soil on which to grow, as much as falls into the earth, the dew will make it to be full.

  Work was a beautiful thing. You ploughed and the earth parted. You turned the spindle and cloth appeared. You lowered the bucket into the well and clean clear water emerged.

  They were evicted on the worst of days. A Friday. A bonnie autumn day it was too, with the heather still in full bloom and the Michaelmas rental set aside. Not that any of that mattered. Kennedy the factor was dispatched by His Lordship to break the news and they received it in silence. To say anything was merely to ensure that the few things they had would be torched along with the thatch. And they weren’t alone: everyone in the settlement was told to move by the time the sun set, and make their way east where they could find some land amongst the rocky skerries. These things were like the elements. Beyond their power, and all they could do was pity those who were inflicting such cruelty.

  Kennedy had a wife and children to look after too. He wasn’t really to blame. No-one was. And to whom could you complain anyway? The queen herself? God would deal with them. Calum put the bed on his back and Elizabeth the few household goods they had, and the children carried the pots and pans and kettles and scythe and spade and churns. It took three journeys there and back across the long stretch of moor, finally taking the single cow and the five goats and the horse and Neil on his stretcher over the hill.

  They moved physically only ten miles, from the inner green strath to the rocky eastern peninsula, yet it was as if they’d moved to the other side of the world. They’d heard fabulous tales about a land called America, where the trees touched the sky. Old Catrìona could look into a seashell and see it all: lights and noise.

  ‘Beyond the stream, over the hills and far away, city lights flare up,’ she said. ‘They are turning orange, changing the colour of the moon. None of them will ever find their way home, because the moon is gone.’

  The great Robert Kirk, in Secret Commonwealth of Elves, Fauns and Fairies, reports that all uncouth sights enfeeble the seer: ‘Several did see the second sight when in the Highlands or Isles, yet when transported to live in other countries, especially in America, they quite lose this quality, as was told me by a gentleman who knew some of them in Barbados who did see no vision there, although he knew them to be seers when they lived in the Isles of Scotland.’ For dreams have a tide line too, where the ocean ceases and comes no further.

  But maybe it was a matter of distance. Visions could stretch for ten miles but not for ten thousand. The map had limits. The horizons of the hills on one side, the sea on the other. Old Joan refused to move, crying that to move an inch was to emigrate forever. She died before sunset in her own bed and her soul was seen rising into the skies in the shape of a butterfly.

  They sheltered in a cave down by the shore, living on shellfish. Three of the little ones almost died that first winter. They were all in rags by the time spring came, bringing with it a bounty on the tide: the contents of some great ship which must have sunk somewhere out in the Atlantic. A mast floated in, and days after that the ship’s canvas, and then the planks and several chests full of hammers and chisels and nails and clothing. Heaven came to earth. Providence gave them the beginnings of a new home.

  That first spring they gathered stones to build a house. A place for the cow at one end, then enough space for all of them at the other, and the roof held up by the grand oak beams from the wrecked ship. Elizabeth washed all the clothing and made it into shirts and trousers for the boys and into dresses and headscarves for the girls. Pride of place went to a shawl she made out of a rescued portion of embroidered woven silk, which had green curlicues at the fringes. One day she would wear it in public.

  So they became a new community, the displaced. George and June MacDonald and their children down by the cliff edge. The MacPherson family halfway up the cliff. The MacMillans on the incline beneath the steeple rock, the MacIsaacs next to them, and the aged couple, Ebenezer and Agnes MacRae, in a hut in the gully. The MacInneses set up home over by the stream, and Calum and herself and the children in the shelter of the old temple mound where others had worshipped once upon a time. The place was said to be haunted, but then so was everywhere, and it was only said by those who’d never actually stayed there. Those who lived on hearsay and rumour, imagining things about remote places which soughed and became inaccessible in the winter wind and darkness. Once you lived there it was no more haunted than your childhood cot or the womb in which you’d been born.

  Others, evicted from different villages, set up sporadic settlements in the next glen and in the next and the next. Tracks opened up, and within a generation new borders were established. This village became known as Baile; that other one as Clachan. Here they fished, there they farmed. Here they sang, there they told stories. MacPherson was the seer, and the seventh son of the seventh son too. Elizabeth thought he spoke nonsense. Calum believed him. Hadn’t he said years ago that when a Kennedy reigned the people would suffer? And hadn’t he said that one day men would speak and be heard thousands of miles away? That the message would arrive before the messenger. As if that was anything new. Hadn’t they always heard things in the wind, and what about that time the raven croaked outside old Flora’s house, and the next morning she was found dead, covered in feathers?

  You couldn’t manage it one day at a time. You had to believe it mattered more than that. That one thing could lead to another. Day after day, the relentless grind, the poverty, the rain, the darkness, the sheep huddled against the walls, the cow bellowing at the other end of the house, the distemper and illnesses. Calum’s dreams and the hopelessness of ever fulfilling any of them. And the smoke coming from the big house yonder a perpetual reminder of finer things: tailored clothes, a doctor, venison on the table, napkins, decanters, candles as a decoration. When you passed the house in the morning you could smell perfume, and whisky in the evening. They had leisure. Were all able to sit around for hours during the day doing nothing.

  You could only survive by treating life seasonally. That way you could hope. If something didn’t work today it might work in better weather, when the sun shone, or the wind changed direction, when the cold receded back into its cave. When something happened. The belief that spring would follow winter, that summer and harvest would follow. Whether you were here or not. Whoever was or wasn’t. You could only plant and work and hope that the corn and the potatoes would grow. How long was it now since the blight and the famine that had taken Christina and Iain and Seumas? You looked forward. Lived in certainty. Jesus would welcome you home. The mackerel-clouded sky was a good si
gn: it would be a fine day tomorrow. If you reached the city, you could make your fortune.

  She ladled out the broth into their wooden plates. And a full cogeen for Calum. Donald would take that down to the shore for him, along with a cask of milk. The broth warmed them all up. Enough to remove the shawl and the outer stockings. How rarely she touched her skin nowadays. The simple pleasure of being naked in bed or in water. Stroking a knee, her thighs, the curve of her breast.

  As a child she remembered spending a summer with her grandmother in the valley of the primroses. They grew in little clumps all over the place, adorning all the little crevices where the good people stayed. If you put your ear to the cleft you could hear them chattering or singing or dancing. The place was full of streams with soft verges of grass on every bank and she would strip naked and plunge into the small pools where all the world’s fishes lived. Tiny little creatures which glistened silver as they passed her in their hundreds and thousands, which splashed like thrown rocks when they decided to leap for air. She would lie ages in the little pools watching the water ebbing and flowing over her. Tiny insects danced on the surface. How was it possible for spiders to walk on water? What she would do too if she had eight legs. Run. And there was a waterfall as well where you could stand and let the jets pour down your hair and face and neck and breasts and tummy and legs and watch the little rivulets between your toes then run down to join the stream which then became a river and eventually the loch. One thing turned into another.

  Since then she felt her life was layering one thing on top of another until nothing bare could be felt. These thick long woollen stockings which were necessary to keep out the cold. The woollen vest and knickers which kept the chill from her bones. The full tweed skirt and the thick tweed jumper and the bobbly shawl which kept the wind and rain out as she carried the peats home in the creel and washed the blankets in the tub and birthed the calves and lambs in the spring. You had to be encased to survive.

  There was a time of passion and touch all right, some years ago. The initial fumblings behind the peat stack and the exploration of strange things, like crossing the moor on a dark night, with the heather catching your knees and the ever-present danger of bogs and holes and ditches. Strange how the world had been on fire within you all the time, so unlike everything that grew and grazed and moved outside. It wasn’t a cow, more like music. It made you tingle. And sometimes you’d hear a cough right behind you and run all the way home reassuring yourself it was only a sheep with the flux, though you knew fine it was the ghost of a lost sailor yearning for home. This hovel, this castle, of mine. Home. There’s me and Calum and Donald and Iain and Neil and Mary and Catrìona and Joan. And Angus even though he’s in the Crimea, and Isabel and Margaret and Oighrig in heaven.

  And every other evening at this time of year the neighbours would all come for a ceilidh at her house – the MacDonalds, the MacPhersons, the MacMillans, the MacIsaacs and the MacRaes – and the marvel was that they brought with them hundreds of the dead and the long gone, from Fionn MacCumhaill himself to the King of Lochlann’s three daughters, who would all sit there by the fire with their lustrous cheeks and their swift sharp swords cutting through the smoke and gloom. What a joy it was to have the travellers from Greece and Ireland playing dice on the marbled floor. Old Ebenezer would light his pipe and sit closest to the fire where the flames lit up his hollowed face which was so like the cliffs of Dun Mòr, where all the puffins and the kittiwakes flew and screeched their own stories.

  After a while he would nod off, and Agnes would gently take his pipe from his mouth. Elizabeth thought then he was the best story in the house, far away in a disconnected place. His mouth would drool with memories of the retreat from Corunna and the quenching of the Irish Rebellion, and he occasionally smiled in his sleep, once again hearing the castanets and seeing the Red Contessa dancing in Barcelona. Time and space really were fluid when Napoleon sat there jawing with Maghach Colgar and Alexander the Great dealing aces with the blind man who could play cards that didn’t exist. Ace after ace after ace. It was as if stories brought people they had never seen and were long dead back to life. And old Seumas could send a spit flying right into the ashes from the other side of the room.

  Then you could forget it all. That life was really all about enduring. Staying warm and dry. Having some kind of roof over your head. Some kind of man, or woman, beside you in bed. Some kind of food on the table. Fish. Meat. Shellfish and boiled cabbage if needed. Seaweed itself when the going got tough. Keeping the cailleach at bay. That hellish cold. The frost in your bones. The chill in your blood. The infant’s cough. Poor Neil’s gammy leg. Calum’s wheeze deep in the chest. Her own pain deep in her bowels. And the distance things were at night, so far away from everyone over bog and moor in the dark. Sometimes candle lights flickered in the dark to tell you that you hadn’t died.

  It was good to believe in God. The One who made Heaven and Earth, and all things Visible and Invisible as the Maighistir Alasdair never tired of saying when he managed to visit their remote hamlet, once a month or so. It was no easier for him, poor man, having to tolerate His Lordship and Her Ladyship up there in the big house and meantime care for all the pastoral needs of all these scattered children of Israel cleared and evicted by their Majesties from every green glen and strath out into all the rocky crevices that God too had made in His great provision.

  He was a good man the Reverend Alexander. The Reverend Alexander MacKenzie, a scion of the great Seaforth Clan who had won famous victories at the Battle of Bealach nam Bròg and at Sauchieburn and were valiant at the Battle of the Boyne and died courageously by the score too on the bloody field of Culloden.

  Young Alexander could have chosen the heroic path also, but was eventually converted in the Second Great Awakening under the fiery preaching of Robert Murray McCheyne. Alexander, who was already an ordained Establishment minister of Moderate persuasion happened to be in Dundee when McCheyne was holding one of his outdoor meetings and went there out of curiosity, but as he listened to the impassioned young preacher his heart burned within him with shame about his own softness. He was only a minister because he had taken professional steps towards a career, not because he believed in anything. He hadn’t risked anything.

  ‘God risked everything,’ McCheyne preached. ‘O, there are some who argue that everything was certain, but the God of love is the God of risk. He risked everything for you, trusting Jesus to deliver. Most of you have risked nothing. Especially those of you who purport to be ministers of the Gospel. For in Christ even your human doubts can fortify rather than weaken your faith.’

  Alexander MacKenzie thought McCheyne was speaking only to him amongst the thousands. That God Himself was speaking to him, alone. Saying that only love, not elegance, could cover a multitude of sins.

  ‘Safe in your glebes and in your respected positions. Safe behind your orthodox theologies and rituals. What have you, you supposed ministers of the Gospel, risked for Christ? Nothing. Go and sell everything you have and give to the poor, go risk all your securities, for the Redeemer of Calvary. You are God’s enemies not by nature, but by will. You sin because your understanding is finite, but your liberty is infinite. So choose differently,’ preached McCheyne, and MacKenzie fell on his knees, put his head on the grass and rose a converted man. For to confess Christ is to be changed.

  Alexander MacKenzie became an evangelical without formally joining the evangelicals. He wanted to risk even that. He concluded that God’s way for him was to labour in the poor vineyard in which he’d been set, and decided not to join the newly established Free Church when it was founded that famous day in Edinburgh. Instead, MacKenzie stayed to fight the battle within.

  He travelled north by foot, carrying his worldly possessions on his back like a hobo, camping with tramps and tinkers and hawkers on the way. He read portions from the Bible and The Pilgrim’s Progress to anyone who listened. He had nothing to prove, because everything was sealed already. God was not to be discove
red, like America, but to be found, like the orchid in the roadside ditch.

  He fasted for days and stepped out of time.

  He met a man sitting on a stone by the roadside looking at pictures in a little box he held in the palm of his hand. The pictures were moving.

  ‘Good morning, Sir,’ said Alexander MacKenzie.

  ‘Hi,’ said the man.

  ‘Bonny morning.’

  The man looked up at him. ‘Not everywhere.’

  MacKenzie knew that. He looked at the thing the man held in his hand. Stormy waves were lashing against a beach. The man rubbed his thumb against the object and naked men and women appeared, fornicating. They were like the animals in heat he saw in the fields, thrusting and jabbing at one another, though they took much longer about it than John Campbell’s stallion. It was a breach of all the commandments, not just the seventh. Man as beast. When it was all over the man turned the abomination off and looked up at MacKenzie and at the thing he held in his hand.

  ‘What’s that?’ he asked.

  ‘The word of God.’

  ‘People call things all kinds of things.’

  ‘And what’s that you’re sitting on?’ asked MacKenzie.

  ‘A stone.’

  ‘And if I called it a feather,’ said MacKenzie, ‘would it still be a stone?’

  ‘It is what people call it,’ the man said.

  The preacher stood up.

  ‘How chained you are by your time. Let that thing go and be free.’

  It was May-time with all the birds of the air talking to him all the way home. The starlings and all their husbands and wives wheeling ahead of him all the way. Here a thrush laughing its heart out. There a sparrow cleaning his feathers. An owl yawned in a tree above him as he slept by the roadside at night. He rolled out his blanket by the loch another evening and stayed awake all night watching all the little stars fall into the loch. It reminded him of the little woodland lake of Nemi he’d seen in a painting in the din of London years before.