by Memory
He’d been a scholar, and spent the first ten years of his moderate ministry writing down the songs and stories of his parishioners. Those foolish things that were like the bread of life to them. In that time of vanity, the tale of Cuchullin was better than the story of Abraham, but this time on his journey north he was of a different conviction. Poetry had been made flesh. All tales revolved round the Christ, who spoke in parables and loved the poor and died for the sins of the world. There was no bigger Fingalian hero than the Christ, no songs greater than the psalms of David, no story more important than that of the Incarnate Redeemer and the Risen Saviour. ‘The Lord is my Shepherd’, he sang all the way north, not unaware that all the glens and straths he passed through had been emptied of men to make way for sheep. Men could perform wonders, but they didn’t know which wonders to perform.
When he returned to the extended scattered parish, the people noted his new fervour. He still asked after them and still sat for hours by the fire or outside by the grassy knolls on the bright summer days writing down all their old lore, but treated these now as pagan treasures to be classified rather than as living codes by which to behave. Instead of turning away from old traditions, Reverend Alexander MacKenzie knew that by acknowledging them he would unveil them and so take all their superstitious sting away. For when things are invisible they have power over us. He weighed words carefully, knew that each one hauled a universe behind it.
And he had the power of words, for he could do something that no-one else in the community could. Read and write. He would take their stories and songs and ancient remedies and put them down in a big lined book, and if anyone asked to see what he had written he would patiently show them the symbols and take them through each magic word repeating back, syllable by syllable, what they had said. Even though he realised that by setting down a single word he had already changed its meaning.
At first they found it strange that their words were that particular shape, but when they heard them spoken back they believed they were the same words that they had spoken to him. So words were just pictures after all. A was the roof of the byre with the spar across it where the hens slept. C was the shape of the curved river that ran through the glen. O was everyone’s favourite letter for it was the full moon. But he encouraged them all.
‘For after all,’ he said to them, ‘you can read the land and the sea and the sky far better than I can.’
He was teaching them that the medium was the message. That you understand the world only through the means you have. A people surrounded by water fear and worship sea gods, he said. Those living on the edge of forests the nymphs of the grove. The secret was to keep your eye on the moon, to remind you of how small a great thing looks. And the birds – look! God has given them different gifts – the gifts of flight, of feathers and of songs. ‘Never confuse the name of a thing with the thing itself,’ he said to them. ‘A stone is much more than a stone, and all of you are much more than your names or sloinneadh, your genealogy. You are all made in the image of God, who is greater than anything you can ever begin to think or imagine.’
Alexander MacKenzie knew that when the people themselves could read, the story would need to change. And how strange the words sounded from the page, as if the writing itself was telling the story and not the minister. During the service later on, he would open the big book himself, turning the pages with loving care and reading, emphasising certain words and phrases like the people themselves did when talking. Even though he came from a different district than themselves and thus spoke the words strangely, they all listened with keen ears, hearing the nuances of the drama and the unexpected turn of impossibilities, where the poor were loved and won. When you have nothing, heaven has everything. It thrilled their hearts to see such results. The blind could see. The deaf would hear. The dead will rise.
Then spring came and Calum returned from the shore. The seas calmed and he fixed up the cobble-boat once more and rowed out to the headland where the fish were plentiful. Small things began to grow out of the earth: tiny leaves and flowers and roots for which only the very old now had names. Burdock and skirrets and fucus and vetch, which if you boiled and then swallowed whilst walking three times sunwise round the old temple would cure you of jaundice. Gorse juice would fix a cough. Most things you could boil and eat, though there were a few things you could only admire. The beautiful crimson foxglove which guarded the way to the cemetery, but which also opened the doors to other imaginary worlds if you used it wisely. Nothing ever changed until it changed suddenly.
This was the time to clean things. Elizabeth removed all the tweed blankets from the bed and washed them in the river, laying them out on the rocks to dry. Then she removed all the children’s winter clothing and washed these in the soapy upper pool, hanging them on branches of trees and on the jutting pinnacles. From now on until Michaelmas they would all go barefoot. Feel the grass on their skin, become once again accustomed to the sharpness of stones, the softness of moss.
They fetched out the turning-spades and began to plough the earth. MacPherson was the seed-man and Calum went there to barter. A bag of oat seed for a tub of mackerel and two days’ labour. A bag of seed potatoes for five tubs of herring and five days’ labour. Everything was provisional.
MacPherson was the Lady’s man, and hoped one day to get a proper house himself. The fool, thinking he could ever aspire to such grandeur. He used to spy on the Lady, watching her through the window as she played the piano on wintry afternoons. He was fascinated by the whiteness of her fingers which had never been spoilt by earth or potatoes or fish, but were beautifully sculptured and refined, like the long blue shells of the razor-fish on the strand. He would stand outside in the dark not hearing a word of the music, but absorbed by the beauty of her fingers gliding across the piano keys. What it would be to be caressed by these slim hands making music across his broad back. A broad back earned by such hard work on her behalf, building that road up the hillside to her summer lodge. For which she rewarded him with a summer picnic outside the lodge when he was given fruit in a glass bowl and allowed to kiss her gloved hand.
‘Thank you,’ he stammered.
She peered down at the crown of his head.
‘Private and public decencies should always be observed,’ she announced.
Calum and Elizabeth and the children planted the oats and the potatoes. The oats here on the bit of sloped grass between their house and the river, where the sun was best; the potatoes there on the lower slope, where the wind was less severe. It was splendid weather that year: long dry sunny days, then showers of rain overnight, ensuring that nothing dried out or withered. Calum was good, cutting peats or thatching or gathering wood from the shore or hoeing or harrowing during the day, then out fishing with Donald and Iain every evening. Elizabeth and the girls knitted and spun and gathered crotal and herded, while Neil carved himself a new future.
As a cripple, he was destined to become a tailor, but instead became absorbed in making things out of wood and straw. He began with whistles and chanters made out of dark rushes with the reeds made out of barley stalks, but then stumbled on a way to make a living by making cane fishing-rods which he showed to MacPherson who of course showed it to her Ladyship who showed it to her husband who showed it to his fishing friends when they came north for the salmon, so that by the time he died, Neil – the most unlikely Victorian entrepreneur – had built a little lodge of his own down by the salmon stream. Angus came home from the Crimea with a Turkish Crimea Medal on his lapel, but promptly left again and emigrated to Canada and was never heard of again. They say his ghost built a cabin in the Rockies, near Mount Robson.
The oats grew buds and flourished and the potato stalks sprouted all green and healthy, and the children ran about in the sun browned and happy. It made you glad to be alive. They even managed to go all together to the annual tinker fair over in Druimbuck, everyone walking, except Neil who sat in the cart hauled by Ned.
And what a day it was, of horse
-trading and drinking and card-playing for the men, with the women and girls chumming each other to all the cart-stalls where you could buy handkerchiefs, pots and pans, brooches, pins, mirrors and feathers, and have your fortune told by a red-haired Irishwoman called Nell. Some would travel far and strangers would enter their lives, some would live long and into happy old age, and some would have troubled times ahead. But these wouldn’t last.
A handsome looking traveller beckoned them over to his cart covered in ribbons. He held a beautiful oval mirror in the palm of his hand. Some small strange fruit on a tree was carved round the edges.
‘Only tuppence. You can see the past and future in it.’
He had a beautiful smile. Lying bastard. Though time proved him right.
So Elizabeth bought the little looking-glass where she saw her own image properly for the first time, rather than in the rippling waters of the river where nothing was ever fixed and where a fly landing on the water could make you dissolve. All the children wanted turns looking into it and smiled and pulled faces and stuck out their tongues and watched with delight and laughed as they looked at themselves looking back at themselves. There was even a dance on that evening, down in the grove by the well, and Calum, fired up by a dram or three taken during the day insisted that they all stay on, for it would be such a grand occasion and a rare opportunity to enjoy themselves.
‘We can walk home by moonlight,’ he said to Elizabeth, as if that were an added attraction. And stay they did, to the great delight of the children, who could have lived there forever. And who wouldn’t, amidst such colour and laughter and life? For look – there’s Big Sam Stewart hurling fists at Jimmy MacTavish and over yonder a young gypsy girl dancing on top of a spinning horse.
The dance lasted all night, beneath the moonlight. Jigs and strathspeys and reels from Jimmy MacPhee on the pipes and a small dark tinker from Speyside, Hamish MacPherson, on the fiddle, and an Irishman, O’Toole, on a red melodeon. The O’Rourkes fought the MacGurks and the Kellys the Flannigans. Some old clan skirmishes were re-fought as well, with the MacKays and the Camerons pelting each other down by the river. But the young danced, in what looked like improvised jumping but was really years-old rituals. To and fro, me to you, touch your toe, I love you! Calum fell asleep eventually and they managed to haul him on to the cart where he lay snoring beside poor Neil all the way home as Ned led them across the moorland. It was a joy to be alive trying to count the stars. A new one was born every minute. They looked as if they had been scattered across the inky sky solely for her benefit.
What it would be to live like a tinker, under the blanket of the stars, mending pots and pans and drinking and fighting and dancing and telling stories and moving from place to place as the fancy took you without some clan chief or landlord or Her Ladyship telling you where to live and what to do. Though, God only knows, they had their own travails, surviving under canvas in the winter storms and being hounded from place to place by fear and anger and hatred and disdain. What was it that made us as we were? Or left us as we are. Wanting this, that, and the other and always ending up at the bottom of the pile.
O, she kent fine how Mr Alexander explained it, and believed every faithful word he spoke. How everything was made by God and how everything he made was good, but that Eve was then tempted by the serpent and ate the fruit and everything fell apart. It was like when she baked a perfect loaf and went outside to see if the clothes were dry and by the time she came back in Calum or one of the children had already taken a bite out of the bread.
‘You should have left it,’ she’d say, ‘to settle. It’s always better left for half-an-hour or so.’
But the temptation was always too much, for there is nothing under heaven as sweet and tasty as barley bread steaming fresh from the oven.
A shooting star fell from east to west, trailing a long silver spray behind it, like a salmon leaping the Corran Falls. The old people claimed it signified a death in that village to the west, though Elizabeth refused to believe that such a light could bring any darkness. Others claimed that the falling stars were homeless angels caught halfway between Heaven and Earth when Satan was expelled from heaven from having become too proud. Those that fall safely all the way to earth become fairies. Others smash against the earth when they land and their blood can still be seen as red crotal clinging to the rocks.
A crescent moon hung low in the north-east lighting the way home. She looked at Calum, lying there like a newborn babe curled up in a blanket in the corner of the cart with Neil fast asleep, resting his hand on his father’s shoulder. The other children, still exalted from the dance, ran and skipped ahead of the cart. All those poor innocent bairns of hers, with the whole world ahead of them. What on earth was to become of them? She prayed. May God keep them. May all of them have the grace of the swan and the likeness of the Lord. May yours be the best hour of the day, the best day of the week, the best week of the year, the best year in the Son of God’s domain.
She prayed for their daily bread, knowing what it was not to have it, and that the potatoes would grow well and be gathered like manna, and all her prayers were so selfless that they were guaranteed to be heard and answered. And there, already, was their home, the turf falling in at one end and the goats and sheep having pushed open the door, and she would now need to light the fire again, and clean everything up, and make the porridge while they all slept the sleep of the ever blessed.
4
IT SEEMED AS if the mirror was the only thing that had survived the past twenty years, for every time she looked into it she could still see her own face as it was that first time, bonny enough and freckled in the summer sun, and the young faces of the children before they had all gone. Donald joined the Cameron Highlanders and came back after five years to tell about his adventures in India. He then returned after another five years to tell about different places, Bhutan and Abyssinia, which were so hot that your eyes blistered and your shoes melted. Though they hadn’t heard from him since.
Iain sailed to the seasonal herring fishing and met and married a lassie from Wick and made his home there, while Catrìona, Mary and Joan all went into domestic service in Glasgow. Neil was already thriving in his rod-making and instrument-making business and well on his way uphill to the lodge. The girls were the best, faithfully sending money home to their parents each quarter from their own meagre wages: a few pounds each, which made all the difference to Calum and Elizabeth between mere grinding subsistence and the luxury of being able to buy things from the travelling pedlar when he came on his rounds. Laces and thimbles and knives and stuff.
The last time he’d called, he had with him some beautiful silk coverings from India, and she spent the girls’ gifts on a brocade covering for her bed. He talked of a new sewing machine that was coming his way, which he’d bring sometime if he could get hold of one for her. For things were improving bit by bit. There was even talk now of the Irish coming over and helping them get some bits of land for themselves.
The little mirror from the tinkers’ fair had taken on almost magical properties in the intervening years. It was never used to admire herself. Folk lived in it, as in a little village. She had no photographs by which to remember any of her children, except those pictures stored away in her heart. But the mirror contained them all.
In the mornings now when Calum was off by himself up the moor herding or down the shore gathering sticks and remnants, she would fetch the mirror out from under the mattress and sit by the fire where the glow was best and look into it and relive that fantastic day in Druimbuck. She smiled, watching Tam Stewart once more leathering the living daylights out of MacTavish, and that beautiful ringleted gypsy girl pirouetting on white horse, and Catrìona and Mary and Joan dancing with the lads, under her watchful eye.
Calum had his own mirror, out on the moors and down by the shore, where he saw all kinds of fancies and wonders as the clouds scudded east in a gale or as the rain teemed down or as the wind blew its cheeks out and tried to lower ev
ery raised thing on earth.
He knew each inch of his world. Where the cattle would graze and where the sheep could crop, where the rabbits could be caught and the crotal could be found growing on the rocks, where the best place was to lie and stare up at the eternally blue sky when a summer’s day finally arrived without a single passing cloud spoiling the view. Everything had a place and a name. The hills knew their own height, the rocks their own weight.
The first time he saw the fairies was on an early autumn evening just after the harvest. He’d been out cutting the hay all day with Elizabeth and she had then gone on ahead to prepare the dinner while he tidied up the stooks in the field. He sat down on a rock and took out his whetting stone and began to sharpen the scythe. The wheesh of the stone on the downwards stroke then the sweesh on the way back up, and every time the blade glinting brighter and brighter in the amber evening sun. Occasionally a corncrake called or a dog barked in the far distance, but the day was settling into a kind of slumber, even the sun herself yawning in the reddening western sky, her toes stretching down into the water.
Out of the corner of his eye he caught a glimpse of movement, like a rag waving in the wind. He looked, and there was nothing there. A few final strokes from the whetting stone would do it, and just as he finished with a downward flourish he saw the glimmer again, this time on the other side, to his left, on the slope of the brae. She was wearing a green cap with a beautiful tuft of silver feathers waving from its crown and a short blue skirt, but he blinked and the vision was gone and when he stood where she’d been nothing could be seen or heard, though a sweet perfume filled the air. Do we imagine things? He looked behind the stones and rocks and in the hollows, but all was empty, and after a while even the fragrance was gone.