by Memory
Would he tell Elizabeth? Could he? Och, she would just laugh at him. Call him daft. And maybe he was, even thinking about believing in all that nonsense. Hadn’t he laughed himself at old Bella who claimed that the gulls flying about her house were witches and that MacDonald’s wife down the glen was a seal under spell, considering the amount of time she spent down at the shore paddling about barefoot in the sea? Fools who believed what their eyes saw.
‘Do you know what I saw today?’
And they would glance at you.
And what could you say? ‘The sun dancing in the sky?’
‘Oh? But did you remember to bring home the oatmeal?’
So he decided not to tell her. Not yet anyway.
They had their supper. Herring and potatoes, in the usual silence. The time of eating was not the time of talking. You had enough to concentrate on enjoying every morsel of the rare, good food on the table. The herring was salty and a bit fleshy, but all the better for that, rather than the thin early season herring which just melted in your mouth and didn’t satisfy. And the potatoes were good this year – nice and dry, so much better since they’d moved the patch a bit further uphill where the drainage was better. The skins were best, peeling off in your hand like shreds of tobacco. Which reminded him to light his pipe.
As he smoked beside the fire he gazed into the peat flames which formed story patterns through the smoke. Curls and lines and circles and puffs. It was said that if you looked long enough you could learn to read the smoke, in the same way as the Reverend Alexander read the books. A curled haze of smoke meant complications, while the smoke going in a straight line up the chimney meant that things would work out smoothly, just fine and dandy. The smoke tonight was in circles, which brought him back to the fairy woman he’d seen, for she seemed to move in circles, going round clockwise, which was a good sign. Green and silver and blue she was. Her bare arms dripping wet and glistening.
It was dark outside. Every evening at this point they went to bed. What else would you do between sunset and sunrise? Which was now a fraction later every day. But unexpectedly, Calum rose and said he was going out, ‘To see if the sheep are fine.’
Elizabeth looked at him and said, ‘It’s dark.’
‘I know,’ he replied. ‘I’ll take a kindling from the fire to light the way.’
And he put a glowing peat in a tin and set off into the night.
She was nowhere to be seen. The wind rose and fanned the kindling in the tin, turning the world orange. Shadows moved everywhere: his own shape illuminated on the big rock, and the lantern enlarged like a fiery furnace. He went over to the big waterfall and watched it pouring down over the rocks in spurts and leaps and jumps and streams. Nothing hindered it. It could do what it pleased. The water rose like an arc then descended like a flood.
He heard things. Otters scuffling about in their burrows, an owl somewhere folding his wings, a dog barking, a sound like a hammer striking an anvil. Which couldn’t be, because old MacLeod would by now have laid his tools aside and be snoring in his bed. And then Calum’s lamp went out and it was completely dark.
During the day he had no power. Lady MacLeod and her factor kept their eyes on everything. You couldn’t till beyond your patch. You couldn’t fish south of the skerry. And the Reverend Alexander had given them several commandments. Thou shalt not commit adultery. And there were other communal commandments. Things you couldn’t do. Such as lying out in the field during broad daylight doing nothing but gazing up at the blue sky. Dreaming when you ought to be working. In the twilight these ordinances dissolved and he could, at last, do what he liked. The darkness gave him courage to disobey. To tell fearful stories, lie all night on top of Elizabeth and, if need be, wander the dark moors where anything was possible. Though even there customs and boundaries had to be carefully observed.
He heard stories. Listened to them. The ùruisg and the taibhs and the manadh and the each-uisge, the water-horse in all its lying beauty. He tried to remember the rules, to remember the grace, not to speak and – now he felt for it in his pocket – always to carry iron. There it was, the small knife he always carried with him. He’d be safe and fine as he walked back across the moor, safe because he knew where each hollow and ditch and hole and bog lay. Heart-sore, because she had not appeared again with those gorgeous feathers and that bonny skirt above the pale shining skin. He ran with his heart in his mouth, hoping she would catch up.
Elizabeth was preparing for bed. Combing her hair, which had grown so grey. Auburn hair was best, like the rowans. She minded that first time she’d met Calum, on the way to the church. He lived over the hill in the next glen and these Sabbath days were a wonder as folk converged from all around to walk down towards the kirk, which stood in splendid isolation at the bottom of the strath, half a mile from the manse and the dairy where the Laird’s fine-looking cows grazed in the lush fields, even on the Sunday.
She was sixteen then, and only afterwards realised that Calum was a year younger, though he seemed older and more mature with his height and his strong shoulders and long loping walk. She’d never seen him before, because he’d just come to live with his grandparents, having been brought up over on the far coast with his parents, who had died of some fever. He was dark and quiet. Neither of them spoke as they walked with her parents and his grandparents down through the ferns towards the church. But she could see that he admired her bonny auburn hair blowing in the breeze beneath her Sabbath bunnet. He too was wearing a cap, which of course he removed when he neared the kirk gate.
She sat with her parents in their usual pew at the back to the right, whilst Calum sat beside his grandparents further up and to the left. This was in the old days, before the Reverend Alexander arrived, when the people still suffered the ramblings of old MacCuish who was as likely to talk about the moods of the weather as he was of the miracles of Christ. Once, Elizabeth looked up and glanced over where Calum was and caught him looking round at her; she lowered her eyes and he smiled, glad that she had seen. Afterwards they all walked back together over the hill, ever so slowly because his grandparents were old, and nothing suited Elizabeth and Calum better than the eternal slowness of the walk in keeping with such a fine sultry Sabbath day. It was as if the eternal ordinance had been made just for them.
‘You young people should run ahead,’ Calum’s grand-
father said, remembering that furnace he’d felt himself when courting Jessie centuries ago. How you could neither listen to a sermon properly, nor shear a sheep right, or even walk uphill without thinking of how much better it would be to be running downhill to meet Jessie by the dairy doors. So Calum and Elizabeth moved ahead, and he let her walk ever so slightly in front of him so that he could admire her auburn hair moving in the wind. It was curled and reached down beyond the nape of her neck and God only knew how far it would reach if she took that bonnet off and let it flow free. It looked soft and thick, unlike his grandfather’s horse’s mane which was thin and straggly and felt like old broken pieces of string when you put your hand through it to calm him down.
And she combed the long grey strands which he had now not touched for so long. And not just her hair, but those slouched shoulders and her loose breasts which had nursed everyone, and the rest which needed to stay eternally warm in the permanent damp and wind. Every time she passed the comb through her hair a few strands would fall out and she was superstitious enough to put every strand into the fire. Otherwise they would meet her feet in the dark and make her stumble. It instantly burned. At least she would not drown.
She smoored the fire and went to bed just before Calum returned. She heard him say something outside, but could not make out what, except that it contained the word ‘nothing’. Maybe that thing the Reverend Alexander had said about God making the whole world out of nothing, but more likely he was just muttering that nothing mattered or that they had nothing to worry about. Which they didn’t. What was the point of worrying about things beyond your control, from the weather to
the mood of Her Ladyship, from what had happened to Angus to Calum’s state of mind?
Which of course didn’t prevent her from worrying, endlessly and without ceasing. How the poor girls were, all on their own down there in Glasgow, and not a sign or a word of any of them marrying yet, even though that too would just be something else to worry about. Best to leave it all in the hands of providence. She wondered about the Reverend Alexander and why he had to make everything so complicated and unnatural when it was really all so simple. There was nothing really difficult at all about what he called the supernatural – didn’t the sun rise every morning in the east and set every evening in the west, and no matter how huge and angry the waves were they had never yet risen above the low sand. Did you need faith for that? For Elizabeth, miracles were a simple matter. They happened every day. They had food on the table and a fire in the stove and a roof over their heads.
Calum climbed into bed beside her fully clothed, except for the outdoor oilskins and boots, which he left drying by the fire. He took her hand and squeezed it as if to tell her that he loved her, then buried his head on the back of her shoulder and tried to sleep. She smelt of peat. Earthy and familiar. That hint of fairy cloth blowing in the wind kept returning to him. Who was she? Maybe she was young and as pretty as the May wind and had auburn hair, or maybe she was an old crone in disguise. He had to be careful. Desire is dangerous. But no matter how hard he tried to envisage her face and form he could not, for the fairies, as everyone knows, never come bidden. They have to reveal themselves. They find you.
And then Elizabeth made an unexpected move. She turned towards him in the bed and he could feel her breath on his face; memories stirred and he too minded that day when they first walked through the glen and how her gorgeous auburn hair had blown in the breeze and he responded despite the barriers of clothing, finding his way through the thickets to where she was somewhere beneath the clouds of tweed where the fairies lived, singing and dancing and drinking wine from golden goblets which sparkled in the magic light which only daylight itself could extinguish. Put out the lights, put out the lights that I might see the world, he cried, and whatever you do don’t speak in the brugh or you get trapped there forever.
And he lay there, blinded, but was given the gift of music as recompense, and sang sweet nothings into her ear, all night long until morning came, with the cockerel crowing once more outside and the hens scratching at the door and the birds singing, because they had just woken and it was a new day, and who knew if they had any memory of yesterday or the day before, or of anything except their song and their next meal.
In the morning, Elizabeth knew she was pregnant again, after all these years. Not that it was a miracle, for she was not that old. Not even fifty, as far as she knew. It didn’t take long for word to get round. Not that it was really word, just looks and glances, because these old women knew. They knew the signs, that look in her eyes, as if she had more important things to think about than whether the bucket of water was properly full, or whether the hens had laid a dozen eggs.
They knew everything, these old women, from why men were the way they were to what needed to be done if a cow stopped giving milk. It was the evil eye of course, and wasn’t Elizabeth aware – and her a woman of her age who had already borne, how many children was it again, six, nine? – that her condition was dangerous? You could see it in her frame. That tendency to thinness, her lack of bulk. And what was it that had happened to poor Neil again? Then there was Mary Cuagach, who had withered away to nothing while her neighbour’s cows had grown fat though not being fed a single morsel by that old witch MacKay. And poor Effie, whose skin erupted in ever more pestilences the more cats old MacAskill acquired. She eventually died and one by one they slunk away out into the hills where the whole neighbourhood could hear them wailing in the dark.
Elizabeth did her best to avoid their company, though it was next to impossible as she had to go out to the well daily, and to the fields. They would wander out with their buckets and hoes as if the moment had been accidental, and though she averted her eyes she could feel them already healing all sorts of imaginary ailments. Winding bits of thread round their wrinkled fingers so that the child within would not be born deformed, and muttering incantations to prevent blindness and deafness and epilepsy and God only knows what. Stealing her joy with their ancient superstitions.
In the midst of it all the Irishmen came, preaching revolution and the rights of man. A big white-bearded fellow by the name of Shaughnessy and his small dark-haired accomplice called O’Riata. Shaughnessy was the more powerful speaker. His big booming voice echoed across the hills and glens when he held his open-air meetings, while O’Riata did the leg work, going from house to house taking names for a petition to parliament while, at the same time, gathering volunteers who would join him at night in damaging some of the Laird’s property, which he called ‘the restitution of rights’.
‘Stop looking inwards and upwards for faults and solutions,’ he declared. ‘Seek happiness not in a future heaven but in a fairer earth, here, right here where you are. Religion is fine for prayer, but for those of us seeking justice the answer is to be found in politics.’
Nevertheless, he sounded like the Reverend Alexander: ‘The keys to the kingdom are not distant and far away, but are firmly in your own hands. Use them.’ It was so much easier to preach the big things rather than the little things. Sometimes when people spoke anything seemed possible.
Shaughnessy was persuasive, though a bit vague at times. His basic message was that the earth beneath the people’s feet belonged to them as much as the common air they breathed or the rain that fell on them all, and that no person anywhere had any right to call the earth his personal property or wall it off like they’d done up at the big house.
‘There is no such thing as private property,’ he proclaimed.
Which confused all of them, whose only possessions were the hovels they stayed in, which they’d carried stone by stone from the hills and thatched with the rushes from the hillsides. Was he going to take that away from them as well? Did that too belong to everyone?
But he sounded grand and seemed to be great friends with a whole number of people, including Abraham who had nothing when he was promised descendants as numerous as the stars in the sky, and Finn MacCumhaill who fought the powerful people of his day, and Marks who had told him that the people had nothing to lose but their chains, when they only really had home-made ropes for the cow and to tie the boat up, and someone called Proud Horn who was an anarchist, which meant that everyone was free to do what they liked, which sounded like a wonderful thing if you didn’t have to work all day and all night just to eat, as even the Redeemer and Saviour Himself, Christ Jesus, had to who was born in a byre and had nowhere to lay his head and had to work as a humble carpenter, not to mention all these disciples of his who were fishermen. They would certainly have given him what they had, even if it had only been a few potatoes mashed in milk, and what could be better anyway in the whole wide world?
Young Angus Morrison and Donald MacDonald and Archie MacColl joined O’Riata in a couple of his night-time skirmishes but were caught red-handed and the constabulary arrived to cart them off to Inverness. Isn’t it strange how everyone agrees that the thing that happens is for the best? For with that, the whole rebellion petered out and the revolution came to naught. The leaflets which O’Toole had left in every house proclaiming Workers of the World Unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains! Property is Theft! disappeared within days, used to light fires or as toilet paper because the words were printed on such lovely soft material.
Elizabeth listened carefully to Shaughnessy. His Irish accent confused her at first, but once she tuned in to the lilt of it she understood everything he was saying about how unjust everything was and how much better things could be if the people had power. Only they did here already, she thought, and all that had caused her lately was grief, with their comments and suggestions and treatments. She often cri
ed as she listened to Shaughnessy out in the open air and she wasn’t the only one. They would all cry together and laugh together and clap and applaud. It put her in mind of the twice-yearly communal fanks when they all sheared the sheep together, or when they’d gather to share a miraculous catch of herring, or to distribute the last peats of the season out to the widowed and the lame and the bedridden, and everyone felt that the world was at long last right and fair.
But Shaughnessy went on too long and the people got fed-up. And anyway, Elizabeth had a thousand and one other things to do, what with young Joan teething and the old ewe dying from flux and the burn overflowing and half-running through the house and the thatch needing to be repaired. With the weather closing in, if Calum didn’t get that cobble out soon they’d starve, no matter how well Shaughnessy spoke, he who had such a fine round belly that he could last for months even if no herring were ever landed again until next century. He was a strange one, even proclaiming the loveliness of nature. ‘The hills and moors and seas are there for your joy and delight’ he preached. ‘Things of beauty for you to behold.’
As if they had time to stand and stare. Nature was not there to be admired, but to be endured.
Everyone reduced the universe to size. For Shaughnessy, nothing seemed to matter but politics, even though every sentence he spoke was laced with the guilt of having left fourteen illegitimate children scattered throughout every parish in Ireland, for what else could explain the anger and regret with which he spoke? Whilst for old Morag at the bottom of the glen, nothing mattered except singing her endless collection of ancient songs because her heart was thrice-broken by lovers who had promised so much and then left. For Hamish nothing seemed to matter except his annual crop of carrots though he’d never recovered from the death of his three young children in the fever of fifty-five. As if life was just politics, or music, or a tallow candle, while billions of stars glittered in the sky.