Memory and Straw

by Memory

  And why should they understand each other when they had no need to? Old Seumus there in his guttural Gaelic and Lady MacLeod in her refined English and he himself in the fortunate, or tragic, position of being a bridge between the two, fluent in both. But wasn’t his Saviour fluent in both – in the languages of heaven and of hell? Wasn’t that why He came to earth: the word become flesh, so that the two could be reconciled, so that both the Lady and the tramp could be saved?

  And saved from what? MacKenzie asked himself. Sin, of course, was the right answer, but what did that mean? From themselves. From privilege. From the habits and desires that left her Ladyship thirled to the fine bottles of Bordeaux wine she quaffed daily and left Seumus bound to his poverty, like the crippled man who lay for decades by the pool of Bethesda and when asked by Jesus if he wanted to get well poured out a long litany of excuses and reasons, that others always got to the healing wells first, that others were always faster and stronger, that he was bound by his ailments. By his excuses, his reasons. By everything that keeps us from dancing. Everything that keeps us from singing. The sin that so easily entangles. It was as if life itself could deliver you from all sin. Perish the pagan thought, but what beauty there was all around. The waterfalls teeming with light, the rivers full and flowing, all the birds of the air singing their hosannas: it would make a dead man rise.

  He was sitting on a knoll halfway up the hillside. All of a sudden he saw an eagle swoop down from over the high cliffs and make for a lamb grazing down in the glen. The great wings were silent as the bird arrowed down and he watched in awe as the eagle picked up the lamb in its talons and flew off towards its lair. That too was election. What choice did the lamb have? Or the hungry eagle for that matter, following its instinct. For Alexander MacKenzie, the countryman, knew that no eagle would attack a lamb except when in great need of food. He was led like a lamb to the slaughter. Behold the Lamb of God! Feed my lambs, feed my sheep. He knew all the metaphors off by heart. What man of you, having an hundred sheep, if he lose one of them, doth not leave the ninety and nine in the wilderness, and go after that which is lost, until he find it? His work was to find the lost sheep, not to choose them.

  How valuable sheep were. Each lamb could become a meal or a mother or, one day, a coat. He’d already seen the great cotton mills at work during his visit to Manchester, and before his conversion had a dream that one day a cotton mill would be established up here in the glens, where the wool was so plentiful and the workers so hardy and honest. And he used to make little speeches to himself that he never got the opportunity to share.

  ‘Imagine’, he would tell the gathered peasants ‘having your own factory here. Instead of sending your wool down south for the profit of others, having a mill which would belong to yourselves. The fruit of your labours, the produce of your fields, the works of your hands as a holy, and profitable, offering unto the Lord.’

  For he had seen the brutal conditions in the factories and knew them to be the work of Satan. Had he lived, he would have established the New Jerusalem in the glen and given the keys to the people, as part of the promise that they would inherit the earth.

  The heather was in full bloom, and as the Reverend MacKenzie walked, ticks began to cling to his skin. You never notice ticks at first. Only after a while, when you feel the itch on your leg or in your crotch or somewhere where the flesh is soft and juicy and the blood good for them to suck. They eventually kill you if left there, infecting your whole body. Alexander was meticulous at removing them, inspecting his skin closely at the close of every day and removing ticks with the pincers he had in his bag. They were like sin: not to be tolerated. To be removed. Yet despite his care, a tiny tick evaded him in the end. He felt the itch during the day and sat down by the river in the evening to remove it, but his homemade pincers broke and left a trail of black so tiny as to be almost invisible.

  It did its work quietly, secretly. It weakened him. He wondered whether one day men would not believe in God at all and consider his work of mercy as a primitive vanity.

  He stood up, looking down towards the glens and hills where smoke curled from a thousand chimneys. All the glens he knew so well, where the cows grazed by the streams and where the pigs grunted in the fields and where the dear people lived and moved and had their being. With their lovely stories and songs and hopes and dreams and fears and failures. The wretched of the earth who were more loved in God’s sight than Herod the mighty King or even her Ladyship up in the manor, and may the Lord forgive me for judging her, who needs as much mercy as the biggest sinner in the universe, whether that be Paul or myself. O wretched man that I am! Who shall deliver me from the body of this death? And he walked down the glen where an old widow beckoned him into her hovel and gave him milk and bread and some broth made of fish heads. It was the sweetest and best food he’d ever tasted, with the grace being in the giving and eating rather than in the quiet words of thanks.

  That too was the year of the great fever which swept through the district like a muir fire. A fever which was so contagious that to breathe the same air as a person who’d caught it was to be guaranteed death. They died in their thousands throughout the whole countryside, from the infants on the breast to the aged stooped by the fires. All neighbourliness vanished because folk were terrified to go near each other or each other’s houses and fields, so the sick were left to die in their hovels and the dead left where they had fallen, inside and out. Nobody was buried, for to contemplate going near or touching a corpse was to ensure your own death, and those family members who survived would try and fling a rope around the dead and if they were lucky catch a hand or a foot or a head and haul them out like horses.

  And the only saint under the heavens was Alexander MacKenzie who fearlessly, for his earthly life hardly mattered except in so far as he could live the Gospel, entered every house and brought out the sick and the suffering and the dying and dead and cleaned them and cared for them and baptised and buried them, until he too caught the fever which took him to his Master, on a bonny autumn afternoon in the year of our Lord 1876, just when the harvest would normally have been brought in, had there been enough harvesters to go out into the empty fields.

  6

  AS A CHILD, Calum was attracted by movement: how wisps of straw caught by the wind would fly, how the clouds in the heavens changed shape, how the small hole in the rock from which a trickle of water flowed became a stream, then a river, then the ocean.

  He said he remembered waking up as a baby and watching the atoms of dust moving through the air as the sun streamed in through the open door, and as he watched the motes of dust dancing his mother was singing. He discovered that things were adjustable. If he cried, his mother would come to him.

  Later on as a young boy he would go out late at night to pee and stand amazed as the moon raced beneath the clouds, its pale light first on the hill, then on the loch, then on the byre before another cloud raced by and shadows came, then darkness. And when his father died he minded how everyone carried him in his coffin on their shoulders across the hills to the cemetery, the men all taking turns in groups of four in moving him from the land of the living to the land of the dead. Calum was six at the time.

  Calum knew fine what attracted him to the fairy people: their lightness of being. They lived on the margins where risk was rewarded, in a place where things appeared the moment they were desired. Wish for a jug of whisky and there it was. Wish for a beautiful woman and she was yours. Wish for a good harvest and there instantly was a field of golden corn. He yearned for the airiness of their existence. Anything to take him away from the dull and heavy daily grind of turfing the earth and cutting tangle and heaving things across the sodden moors.

  The fairies are bodies of condensed air, and those who have seen them repeatedly say they are as air ‘somewhere of the nature of a condensed cloud and best seen in twilight’, according to Kirk. The Gaelic-speaking people called them Sluagh Math, ‘Good People’. They were known not by their appearance but
by their powers.

  They are flimsy, brittle things, easily destroyed by sudden human movements and discourtesies. Nothing is rigid. Their existence is as fragile as a child’s breath. And it was that very flimsiness, that sense of something ephemeral, glanced, passing, which caught Calum’s attention in the first place: the cloth’s delicacy, that flash of green and silver and blue in the twilight, which disappeared as soon as he looked. It was the lure of a passing fancy. A glimpse of flesh. Was everything really momentary and temporal? The fragility of things. Here was a world of rare, delicate things which needed softness and tenderness in a life where you needed to be hard and robust.

  Fairies permitted you to be the person you couldn’t be, touching female things. They broke the story. Made it possible to love things beyond what you were told. To achieve things beyond your capabilities. God, how weary he was of the slow daily grind. The wind, the constant rain, the storms. Of behaving the way he did, day after day, year after year, quiet, steady, sober. Waking, working, sleeping. Constantly driven down the same narrow furrow by convention and tradition. By Elizabeth and the children and the neighbours and the minister. As if you couldn’t think for yourself all these unthinkable and unsayable thoughts. Inside, far deep down in the fairy knoll where the grass was silk and constant music lit up the silence. The fairy knoll stretched and condensed time: you entered as a young man and emerged a hundred years and a thousand adventures later still the same age as you were a century before. You could be forever young, and live forever.

  Calum sat on a rock by the river. After a while in the dark you can see everything. Things begin to glow. The pinpricks of the stars become lamps hanging from the rafters, and then homes, and villages and great cities and constellations. Faraway places become as intimate as your own home. There’s America: it’s a shining place entirely made up of stars. What it would be to live in the Great Bear, all illuminated as you walked along herding your cows before you. They would need no flailing stick or barking dog, for the animals would follow these bright lights all the way home.

  Would good dry potatoes grow on the moon? For they needed good soil – the sandy machair was best, though he didn’t think they’d have that up there. And down there on the shoreline the will-o-the-wisp hovered: the souls of the living dead. The whole world was lit up. He stood aside to let a phantom funeral past, looking down so that he wouldn’t have to bear the burden of knowing the future, where light and matter are interchangeable, where energy has been converted into time.

  An alternative had been imagined. And once it vanished (it never of course vanished at all, for nothing ever disappears), that lightning sight of silver and green and blue remained with him and he knew for certain that she would come again, down there in the hollows, when the time was right. And he waited, for he was a man of patience. What is tasted once will be savoured forever.

  About a month later, as he was walking home from the shore, with the sun beginning to set to the west, he glanced over towards the hollows, not allowing his eyes to rest, for that was to give too much away. That he was impatient. Keen. Passionate. Any signal had to be faint and distant, like moonlight on the horizon, which made shadows live. Too much consciousness would make the fairies hesitant. It was always better to be casual about it, so that it would look as if you’d just stumbled upon them, that you just happened to be there when they were out, frolicking and dancing in the evening light, and your unexpected appearance surprised and delighted them and they would then invite you to their party. They had to be given freedom to live and die. The secret was to give them power. They never took it against your will.

  So he walked along slowly, casually. Whistling, for he knew they like a good tune. A pipe reel was best, for they are the finest pipers in the whole world, having given MacCrimmon himself the gift of music when music meant the pipes, and the pipes only. As he whistled, he thought he heard the refrain from the green mound to his left, so he varied the tune and sure enough the variation came back to him as the new tune. He stopped whistling and listened. There was a great silence. The more he listened to the silence the more he heard. Rustling and soft whispers and soughs of sweetness, as if the grass itself was bending into the earth to hear the secrets.

  Moonlight was emerging now to the east. Those soft green knolls which were all around, and the liquid light of the moon cast soft shadows on the whole earth. Calum knew his birthplace like the back of his hand: down there the sea, and over by the river, and those seven standing stones a bit above them, then the small tattie field and the path to the glen where the ponies grazed, and on the other side, the old mill and the gravel path built by the estate workers down to the laird’s big house. He had a name for everything. Abhainn Dearg. Red River. Achadh na Coirce. Barleyfield.

  As the moonlight shone on that familiar world, Calum had to forget that where the moon shone and made a shape like a sickle on the path was really only the curve of the road, and that what looked like a cart was only the outline of the two large rocks, one dragging the other. Nothing was as it seemed during the day. The whole order was in peril at this time of night.

  He heard the tinkling of glass, laughter, and music from the knoll above the river and when he walked over he saw her sitting by the trunk of the tree next to the river. There, playing a tiny silver whistle was the most beautiful creature he’d ever seen: long red hair, the bluest of eyes, wearing a green smock and a blue skirt above skin boots. She was luminous. A wooden quaich with a whitish liquid was by her side. She beckoned him to drink from it and it was the sweetest mead he’d ever tasted.

  As he drank again, all the old stories he’d heard as a child stirred within him. How witches disguised themselves as birds, how music was always the first sign of danger, how the devil could disguise himself as the most beautiful woman on earth to tempt men to destruction. Nothing was ever as it seemed.

  Calum took fright. He ran as fast as a hare through the shifting moonlight, jumping the streams, louping the stone walls, arriving home breathless to tell Elizabeth that he’d been chased by the famous grey hound of the moor which could leap rivers as wide as ten miles.

  The addict begins small. At first, it’s a rabbit taken in the moonlight. Then a salmon in the river, a deer on the hill, and before you know it you are forever on the alert for the sound of scurrying feet on the machair, the soft splash in the stream, the rustle of bracken on the mountain. You dream about hunting.

  As he lay there that first night beside Elizabeth, he was ashamed of himself for having gone beyond the boundaries, opening himself to such danger and temptation, over by in the green moonlit hollows where all kinds of things were possible. He was fine where he was. This bed he’d made, and the stone walls and the rocks and the stream and the patch where they planted the tatties. The safe, settled globe.

  Where the cabbage patch had been was now filled with carrots, and in the stream he had built a dam to make a pool where he caught fish. He had changed the world in his own little way. Things could alter. Change shape. Fallow fields could be planted. Calum knew that he too had changed shape when he’d seen that bonny lass. It had to do with patterns. He thought of the blankets Elizabeth had made that now covered them in bed. There was a brown square, a russet one, then a blue one and they made different shapes according to how you looked at them: brown, russet, blue, russet, brown, blue. If you squinted one eye shut, the world became blue, brown, blue, brown, russet.

  Everything was different if you looked at it some other way. For when Angus had disappeared, there had been a whirlwind – which meant that the Airy Host had lifted him. Or maybe the Press Gang had taken him away as young Margaret said, claiming she’d seen the foreign men coming in by night by boat, but who would believe her, given her condition?

  So Calum returned to where he’d seen the beautiful woman the night before. Everything was so different in the bare light of day. Nothing but the familiar. Sleepy green hollows, the running river, the old oak tree and the patch leading up the hill. Everything was as
it had always been. Nothing had changed. Things hadn’t moved. If they did, then nothing would ever again be as before. He knew that once something changed shape it could never again exactly recover its old shape. The ocean, for example, which in his young days used to reach only as far as the skerries, until one day they were breached by a massive tide and ever since that day the tide would now reach up to Bran’s Rock high on the shore.

  It was all to do with patterns. As with the bed blankets. There were quarters. The true quarters of the year and the crooked quarters of the year, which differed so much. There was the brown cow, and the black cow. And there was the brindle cow. March boasted that he would take the skin off her, so she went into the woods for shelter. Then when March was over, the cow left the woods in the morning, and went skipping out into the open. She said, ‘Goodbye to you, little, ugly, biting, grey March!’

  But March asked April for the loan of a day and he gave it to her. And that day blew hard with snow, rain and cold. The Brindle was too far from home and had no shelter, and that day killed her. We don’t know if April ever got the loaned day back since. The last two days of March and the first day of April have been called The Days of the Brindled Cow ever since. An Irish pedlar told Calum that when he was a child.

  The pedlar carried two sacks. In one were pebbles which he would lay out in patterns on the ground. He insisted he was just playing a game though everyone knew he was staking claim to land and cows and children, for no sooner would he leave the area and move on than a child would fall ill, or a cow would die, or neighbours would quarrel over boundaries. So they would all give him extra milk and bread, buy trinkets from him, allow him to stay overnight and give him porridge in the morning. And as soon as they began doing that, no-one fell ill. The pedlar had told many stories which Calum now realised had shaped his world as much as the cliff edges had defined the limits of the eastern landscape.