Memory and Straw

by Memory

  How mice and rats and cats and pigs came into the world: they were made from St Martin’s fat. One night St Martin came to a house where a man had just threshed a stack of oats and there was a lot of chaff and grain lying about the yard. At that time, there were only cattle; there were no pigs or piglets. St Martin asked if there was anything to eat the chaff and the grain. The man of the house replied, no, for there were only the cattle. St Martin said it was a great pity to have that much chaff going to waste. So at night when they were going to bed, he handed a piece of fat to the servant-girl, and told her to put it under a tub turned upside down, and not to look at it until he would give her the word next day. The girl did so, but she kept a little bit of the fat and put it under a keeler to find out what it would be. When St Martin rose the next day he asked her if she had looked under the tub, and she said she had not. He told her to go and lift up the tub. She lifted it up and there under it were a sow and twelve piglets. It was a great wonder, as they had never before seen pig or piglet. The girl then went to the keeler and it was full of mice and rats! As soon as the keeler was lifted, they went running about searching for any hole they could go into. St Martin pulled off one of his mittens and threw it at them – and made a cat with that throw. That is why the cat ever since goes after mice and rats.

  Folk always asked the old pedlar what he carried in his other sack, but he never answered them until the day Calum was hit in the eye by the fairy’s arrow and lost his sight. He’d been out on the moor when the wind blew up strong. It started raining heavily and as he took shelter behind a big rock the arrow came flying towards him, blinding him in the left eye. The strange thing was that there was no blood, except that he could not see anything from the eye. On the way home, he met the pedlar.

  ‘Here,’ he called to Calum, ‘sit down here by the well and we’ll see what we can do for you.’

  And he took the secret sack from his pouch and asked Calum to dip his fore and middle fingers from the right hand into it, then put the liquid on to his blind eye. He told Calum to do it three times, and on the third brushing of the liquid against his eyelid he opened his eye to perfect vision.

  ‘What is it?’ Calum asked.

  And the pedlar said, ‘It’s a bag of tears. Which only heal when they are tears of laughter, not of sorrow.’

  And then he laughed loud and long until the tears came, which he let fall into the bag, as he told Calum this story, as if it was funny.

  ‘Three brothers they were who went to sea in a ship. They spent a long time at sea without meeting land, and they feared they would not meet any, but finally they came to an island which was wooded to the shore. They tied their ship to a tree and went inland. They saw no-one and met no-one. They set to work and worked for seven years. At the end of the seven years one of them said, “I hear the lowing of a cow.” But no-one answered.

  Seven more years passed.

  The second man spoke then.

  “Where?”

  It went on like that for another seven years.

  “If you don’t keep quiet,” said the third man, “we will be put out of this place”.’

  And the pedlar’s big tears kept dropping into his sack as he walked off down the road, laughing.

  Calum shrugged off these memories. For him the business in hand was to work out a way to see his fairy lover again, or he would pine away and die. It is said that fairies’ hearts are soft to love and admire persistence. So every evening after supper he would make his way to the knoll where the oak tree was beside the river, and sit there for hours, watching.

  He would sing, for he had heard that the fairies liked music. And he sang in Gaelic, for that would be the way of it and their native tongue, and what better than the love songs which would make the apples fall from the trees and the corn grow gold in the fields? O chraobh an ubhal, Oh, he sang, Oh apple tree, apple tree, branch of the apple tree, Oh apple tree, know the tree that is mine, the tallest with the sweetest apples, its trunk strikes downwards, its top is bending, Apple tree, may God be with you, may east and west be with you, may every sun and moon be with you, may every element be with you, Oh apple tree, apple tree, branch of the apple tree, Oh apple tree.

  And she would always appear halfway through the song. As soon as he sung east and west he would hear her joining: be with you. The two of them would sing, may every sun and moon be with you, may every element be with you, and gravity dissolved and she would take him by the hand and lead him over the hollow to the far side of the knoll where the hill would open and he would see the lights and hear the music and laughter from deep inside the brugh.

  Yet he was always careful to carry some bit of iron on him, in case he got stuck down there, never to come out again. He needed to be careful not to speak either, for to speak inside the mountain was to be trapped there forever. The more he was in the knoll, the lovelier she looked and the sweeter the music sounded and the better they danced and, after all, wouldn’t it be as well just to forget the sliver of iron the next time and speak out his heart and to his heart’s content? Which is exactly what happened.

  It was the bonniest of summer evenings. On his way to the knoll Calum tossed the little iron knife aside and when he saw her, combing her auburn hair by the river, he deliberately forgot all taboos and took her hand and the side of the hill opened up and they descended into the fairy place which smelt of honey and apples. And because this time he had no iron and spoke and groaned, he was trapped there for a hundred years and never came out again until everyone he had ever known was dead and gone, and no-one recognised him and he recognised no-one. He was in a place where consequences didn’t matter anymore.

  She was tender with him, caressing the lobe of his ear as if that small lump of flesh was the most wondrous thing in the whole wide world; in return, he spent weeks running his fingers through her hair which was like gold ribbons flowing down from the skies. There was a curve between the river and the hill, then a perfumed hollow where you could lay your head down, and as soon as you had rested you could then climb the brae to where the apple trees were, and those small pots of honey secreted away in the bushes where the fauns played on silver whistles and time stood still. It was a place like those beds of silk brocade in the stories the black tinker used to tell. Rivers flowed, rushing uphill then cascading down the rocks like spurting waterfalls with each stream a different colour, and after you had run so fast you could rest forever in her arms which were as soft as summer.

  Things had no weight. You could lift stones as if they were feathers, push mountains and they would open, visit the insides of things. There was no bending over to plant or lift potatoes, no climbing cliffs to find eggs. The cows didn’t need to be fed or moved from pasture to pasture. The ground didn’t need to be tilled. And this fairy woman loved him, even showing him her full naked body while it was still light. She was translucent, covered in oil, and glistened. As they lay by the river she dipped her hand into the water and dredged out a sparkling blue shell. She gave it to him. It was whorled and serrated and rough in the hand. So unlike her skin.

  ‘It’s got seven layers,’ she said. ‘The magic number. If you put it next to your left ear you will hear the future.’

  He listened and heard her heart beating like the ocean and mermaids singing in the distance.

  The more you listen to a sound the more familiar it becomes, until it signifies the thing itself. A single bee droning in the sun becomes a whole summer, the wind whistling in the eaves of the house an entire winter. Calum never thought he had much of a voice, but discovered that she loved the way he spoke, slowly and softly, and he even joined in her songs, at first merely singing the chorus but building up enough confidence and energy to sing on his own as she played the silver whistle. She made magic shoes for him out of rabbit skin to match her own, which meant that they could run as fast as the wind, and move silently from one river to the next in the curragh she’d made out of wicker and hide. They flew with the wind like seasonal birds from south to n
orth and east to west and back again.

  Rumours spread that Calum had been kidnapped. Stories circulated that he wandered on the headland on moonlit nights and that he had returned unshaven and bedraggled, frightening the children and begging for bread. Some said he’d become an old man, others said he’d become young again. But all said that he came back the same age as when he disappeared; that he came walking over the moor and asked a man if he knew where Elizabeth was, and the man said that he didn’t know, but that he should ask his father, who was sitting inside by the fire. And so Calum went in and asked the old man by the fire if he knew where Elizabeth was, and the old man said he didn’t, but that he should ask his father, who was down in bed. And when he asked the wizened old man in the bed if he knew where Elizabeth was, he said he didn’t, but that he should ask his father, who was sitting inside a pouch at the end of the bed. And when he asked the little ancient man inside the pouch if he knew where Elizabeth was, he said he didn’t, but that he should ask his father, who was hanging in the atom dust in the air. And when he asked the tiny little man inside the atom dust if he knew where Elizabeth was, he said he didn’t, but that he should ask his father, who was out in the invisible sky. And the ones who told the story said that they saw Calum calling up into the sky and walking westwards, beyond the stone wall where the sun was setting red.

  7

  AFTER CALUM DISAPPEARED, Elizabeth and all the neighbours searched for him all over the place. Despite the claims that the fairies had taken him, Elizabeth was convinced that he had fallen off the high cliffs on the eastern edge and that his body had been swept out to sea. So she built a cairn on the cliff’s edge to mark his passing, for no-one should be without a memorial stone.

  The wailing women condemned her lack of tears. It wasn’t strength. Just that she wept when alone, which was such a difficult place to find. In the house the children would see her, and around the village there were a dozen prying eyes, so she’d find reason to go out to the moor or down to the shore where she recalled that first time she saw Calum. On the way to the kirk, his dark curly hair cascading down beneath his bonnet. What a daftie he was, when she thought about it. As handsome as a summer’s day and his head in the clouds. And that day they were supposed to plant the potatoes, but instead he took her by the hand down to the shore where they spent the morning building sandcastles.

  ‘You make such beautiful ones,’ he said.

  And that day she did, a castle within a castle within a castle, surrounded by five wide moats which he dug deep with the potato-spade. She missed him terribly, for no-one else could make her smile simply for being alive. Daily, she chose to remember him for his best self, wishing he’d given himself the chance to be as good as he’d intended to be.

  The pregnancy wasn’t easy, but the child would be fine, Elizabeth knew that. All her pregnancies had been so different. Looking back on them all she felt she could now trace their future from the past: those constant movements that Angus made in the womb, prophesying his travels in the Crimea and off to America; the way Iain kicked; the quiet, almost apologetic, ways in which Mary and Catrìona and Joan had been born, without a cry. This new life within was moving as if impatient to be out and about with her in this strange world.

  Elizabeth considered herself a widow, though some of the other women around treated her like an abandoned woman whose husband had been taken by the Host, substituting an unborn child for a full-grown man. For hadn’t Alasdair Mòr MacKintosh been lifted by the Airy Host on his way back from Strathfarrar, leaving a widow and ten young children to fend for themselves while Cumberland’s army ravaged the country? And hadn’t MacGillieChaluim himself been drowned by the coven of cat witches who had called up a storm out of nowhere, leaving a grieving family behind? Smaller gifts always replaced the bigger things that were destroyed. That was the way of it.

  Two weeks after Calum’s disappearance Elizabeth gave birth to their daughter, Anna, who was christened on the 26th of September 1876, according to the old church records. This Anna was the first and only child of theirs to go to school, the Education Act of 1872 having made the building of a school in every parish compulsory. It opened up a whole new world for every child in the country, who were now all forced by law to attend. The local whipper-in was a bushy-bearded former constable named Duncan MacKenzie.

  Anna had to forsake her native Gaelic to enter this magic world of learning. The schoolmaster was Mr Johnstone, who combined standard rote learning with a passion for the Wild West of America, where he’d spent some years as an itinerant preacher during the years of the gold rush until drink almost killed him before he was shipped back to the family home in England. Although he still took an annual drinking bout, he was sober enough through the school year to survive as a teacher in various parishes before moving on. Further and further north he travelled – a season in Shropshire, then Cheshire, Lancashire, Westmoreland, and on to Cumberland and Northumberland; in Scotland, working his way through Dumfriesshire and Lanarkshire and Stirlingshire and Perthshire and Inverness-shire before arriving here on the edge of the known world with nowhere else to go to except the ocean.

  He was an invigorating teacher. If you learned the three Rs from him you never forgot them as long as you lived. Along with all the others from the surrounding villages and glens, Anna worked her way through The New Royal Primer and never forgot the rhyme which opened the door to Mr Johnstone’s marvellous new universe: those children who would learned be, must first begin with ABC.

  Anna loved that her name began with the first letter of the alphabet. And how easy everything was for her to learn when it rhymed!

  In Adam’s fall

  We sinned all.

  Thy life to mend

  God’s Book attend.

  The Cat doth play

  And after slay.

  A Dog will bite

  A thief at night.

  The Eagle’s flight

  Is out of sight.

  The idle Fool

  Is whipped at school.

  Mr Johnstone spoke with a twang which affected Anna’s speech pattern for the rest of her life, so that her As were always slightly angled and the O sound always tended towards ay. Even in old age she carried hints of an Anglo-Bostonian-Scotch accent from an earlier century.

  Anna would sit in her wicker chair in her old age and sing screeds of songs she’d learned from Mr Johnstone – ‘Oh, Susanna’, ‘She’ll be Coming Round the Mountains’, ‘The Battle Hymn of the Republic’, ‘I’m Going Home to Dixie’. He’d been a great lover of spoken-out poetry and taught young Anna to stand up when she was reciting from memory, so even in the nursing home she would stand on her frail legs and chant:

  By the shores of Gitche Gumee,

  By the shining Big-Sea-Water,

  Stood the wigwam of Nokomis,

  Daughter of the Moon, Nokomis…

  Mr Johnstone was astonished at Anna’s capacity to learn things on one hearing, whether a poem, a story, the multiplication table, the capitals of all the countries in Europe, or a list of all the native tribes he’d seen in America. Apache, Blackfoot, Cherokee, Cheyenne, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Comanche, Cree, Crow, Navajo, Pawnee, Pequot, Shawnee, Shoshone, Anna would recite, with no notion that there were hundreds of others which Mr Johnstone had never heard of.

  London was the capital of Britain. The longest river in the world was the Amazon. 1314 was the Battle of Bannockburn. Latitude was the distance north or south of the equator, Longitude the distance east or west of the meridian, which, said Mr Johnstone, was an imaginary line running north and south through Greenwich, England. There were two places in Australia called Kalgoorlie and Coolgardie which sounded terribly like the teacher saying, ‘Cailleach a’ mùn air cùl gàrradh.’ (‘An old woman pissing behind a wall.’) So the pupils would ask Mr Johnstone to tell them about the recent gold rush in Australia so that they could secretly snigger at his mild innocent obscenity.

  Somehow he’d managed to carry a great big sea-chest north w
ith him and sometimes he would let the scholars rummage in it for a while and extract the marvels of the universe: maps and a globe; a telescope and a magnifying glass; a photographic camera which he set up under a dark blanket on a summer’s morning to take a picture of them all standing in front of the school. He told them to stand still for ages and ages, but the very young ones moved and the photograph would therefore be useless, he said. For decades after that they would all sit stock still if anyone took their photograph in case a flutter ruined the moment.

  What confused Anna at first was the exactitude of school. She was used to the uncertainty of home, where things depended on the weather and upon her mother’s health and her neighbours’ fortunes and the varieties of God’s will. One day, all would be well and there would be food on the table and her mother would be singing; the next, there was scarcely a bite and her mother would hold her stomach and rock backwards and forwards by the fire, asking her to fetch a pail of water from the well, or go out and gather some sticks for the fire.

  In school everything was so precise and clear. There was either a right answer or a wrong answer. One and one made two. Always and every time, without exception. But boundaries were very clear, same as at home. Mr Johnstone had a map of all the countries of Europe and it was easy to see where each country began or finished: France was all blue, but as soon as you stepped out of the blue you were in a green country called Spain; from there, if you jumped across a line you were in a red land called Portugal. Anna thought how beautiful it would be to live in a place which had blue grass and what fun it would then be to hop from country to country across the colours on to green, red, blue, orange, yellow and purple grass.

  And there were different colours of people too, Mr Johnstone said. Yellow ones and white ones and brown ones and black ones and multicoloured ones and maybe even purple ones out in space, though he wasn’t sure about that. But he was sure about the others, for he had seen them himself, in America. And he had books in his big sea-chest to prove it, books of half-naked people with bones through their noses and jewellery hanging from their mouths and painted people with big feathers on their heads and spears in their hands.