Memory and Straw

by Memory

  John was unsure whether stealing was stealing unless the owner was aware that it was taking place. Maybe he didn’t exist at all if no-one knew him. But they did know. They knew him as ‘Poor John’, and turned a blind eye to his weakness. They all knew he’d been to the big house up the hill and was mad, a daftie, a truaghan, a lunatic… whichever word came to mind. For each district had its caste. But he was harmless. More to be pitied than judged. Best ignored rather than challenged. So he was, truly, invisible because their pardon came from pity, not grace. All would be revealed one day and shouted from the rooftops.

  John walked round the sanctified streets of Inverness as invisible as all the other poor souls condemned to this living death, this exclusion. Mad Meg whose conversation rambled from subject to object, from drivel to divine insight, sometimes laughing, sometimes crying. Who would lock herself up in any old room and rummage everything all about, pocketing all the rubbish she could – odd things, hairpins, matches, ornaments, rags, scraps, bits of food. William Clark, who told everyone that he was about to make millions of money by means of a patent for protecting ships of war by armour plating, and that such consisted of two excessively thin layers of steel containing powdered cork, and that this would cost about one-quarter of the present price of armour plating. And young Julia Scott, who went about telling people she had a divine mission to crush socialism. They were ‘characters’ to whom no-one listened, but to whom everyone was kind.

  John knew that sweets weren’t important enough. So he walked the streets of Inverness and made an inventory. Any obsessive always starts there: with a list, or lists. So, there were Aerated Water Manufacturers (Mackintosh & Co of Abban Street), and Agricultural Merchants (Ross, Duncan & Co of Baron Taylor’s Lane), and Ashphalters, and a Blacksmith, and a Bookbinder and Boot and Shoemakers and all the way through his carefully annotated alphabet down to the Saddler in Queensgate (Donald Morrison), the Shipping Agent on Lombard Street (David Petrie), the Slater on Kenneth Street (John Reid), finishing where the letters ran out at Q with the Qualified Cash Chemists at 31 High Street, with their grand notice in the window declaring: The most desirable House in the District for the purchase of Pure Drugs, Proprietary Articles, Patent Medicines, Toilet Requisites; also Nursery and Sick-Room Appliances. W.G. MacDonald, Proprietor. John wanted to reach the end of the alphabet, so searched all the streets and markets and alleyways of Inverness to find a proprietor beginning with Z, but found none. There was a tailor, Zkajewski, but he had no sign up on his little back-street premises, so didn’t count. He wasn’t official, so John reckoned he didn’t exist either. And anyway he was just known as Skat the Pole, which brought him back up the alphabet.

  John eventually decided to steal a pair of boots. From JW MacKenzie and Co at 9 Church Street. Old MacKenzie himself still worked through the back, or at least supervised things there, while his two sons, James and Donald, made the boots. Good leather boots and shoes for men and fine leather brogues for women.

  Old MacKenzie knew what it was to be without shoes and valued them all the more because of his own childhood deprivation. They were morally as well as financially valuable to him. They signified progress, development, education. Commerce brought with it a liberality of spirit. He minded fine his young days of walking barefoot through puddles and the laughter of the other children, and that mockery had given him an evangelical zeal for the best leather, the best shoes, the best value. He’d personally selected the leather for over fifty years from an old Sutherlandshire farming family he trusted, and had taught his sons the same loving care for materials and workmanship. It was a craft as well as a business. A vocation.

  So when Limpy John came into his shop old MacKenzie wasn’t surprised. Weren’t old soldiers with gammy legs and one leg and no legs forever coming in expecting him to perform miracles? Which he invariably did, fitting a size ten on one leg and a size eight on the other, or a size seven on one leg and a false raised-heel shoe on the other Crimean foot. And he knew who John was, of course. Inverness wasn’t that big. Hadn’t he come down south from his own original native shires years ago? The illegitimate son of Anna. The son of the water-horse. And what if everyone talked, saying – and here they would whisper – that he’d been ‘locked away up there in the big house’. No wonder.

  Mr MacKenzie greeted John in Gaelic and asked if he could help, and John naturally said he’d like to be fitted for a pair of shoes. And while old MacKenzie himself went through the back to get the tape and the blocks, John scanned the shoes, deciding on a beautiful pair of oak-leather boots he’d seen in the window. He made no pretence of hiding his activities. He was tired of being invisible. So he put the new boots on and walked out of the shop with old MacKenzie standing in the door looking after him with some astonishment. And MacKenzie understood, for not only was he a Free Church elder blessed with the spirit of forgiveness, but he was also enough of a businessman to know that Limpy John would make a fine walking advert for him.

  ‘There he goes,’ he could hear the burghers cry, ‘wearing MacKenzie’s best. And what a fine sound they make!’

  Ticketty-tack, clippity-clop, down the streets, like a great big Clydesdale horse.

  Now that he was visible again, John went dancing that night. Mary was off-duty and they met for tea at Serafini’s Café before walking over to the Caledonian Hall Ballroom. Everyone laughed, but who cared as they waltzed and moved in each other’s arms, his oak-heeled boots setting sparks off the floor and her smile dazzling in return. They walked home by moonlight and stood for a while at Petrie’s windows wondering whether to emigrate to Canada after all. Their eyes scanned the notice, though neither of them spoke out the words –

  D Petrie, Cameron & Co, Passenger Agents. Book Passengers and Tourists to all parts of the world.

  Agents for all the Lines to Canada, United States, Australia etc.

  Agency for Women’s Canadian Employment Bureau, Montreal. Employment found for Domestics & Farm Hands. Assisted passages to Approved Applicants.

  Agents for CPR Farm Lands & Ready-Made Farms. Easy Terms of Payment. Apply Early. 2 Lombard Street, Inverness.

  ‘I’d probably qualify for Assisted Passage,’ he said.

  ‘And I’d easily get a job as a nurse there,’ she said.

  They continued to study the words.

  ‘Canada?’ he asked.

  She smiled.

  ‘Australia?’

  ‘Too hot.’

  ‘New Zealand?’

  ‘How about a farm?’ he asked.

  Instead, they returned to Mary’s native village in Lewis, where John felt safe from all dangers. Temptations came, for they do always and everywhere, and maybe it was the wind and the rain and the open spaces, but he somehow felt less confined, less restricted. Less controlled in a way. Unlike India, there was a middle distance where you could see things in perspective. A cow standing in a field, but dwarfed by the hill behind. There’s Donald-John and his youngest son, Murdo, out fishing in the wide Atlantic. Hawks hovered high over the cliffs.

  He became one with the landscape and with the people who crofted and moved in slower tempo. Was visible when he wanted and invisible when required. And Mary loved him. For sometimes, when looking back at history we mistake care for love, or think that our grandparents loved less because they wore more clothes, or were more reticent, or religious or taboo-ridden. That they felt less lust than we do because they saw less flesh.

  It seems that when he got to Lewis John forgot about his illness and about the war. Though ‘forget’ is such a big, impractical word. He just buried it, like dross or treasure, and concentrated instead on the visible and the manageable. Though that’s not accurate either, for he became obsessed by the weather, which is as invisible and as unmanageable as any illness or war. The bare island was dominated by weather. You had to plan ahead. You had to be meteorologically wise. No use of thinking of planting seed if that howling gale was going to come in suddenly from the west. No point in going out herring fish if a
storm was brewing. No sense in ploughing if a flood was on the way.

  So he took to reading signs. If the clover is folded in, big rain will soon begin. If the swan is on the swim, warm showers are coming in. If the grass is dry at morning light, look for rain before the night. When clouds look like black smoke, a wise man puts on his cloak. Life had rhythm after all.

  On May Day he would go out before sunrise and bring into the house a small green branch of whatever he could find – bog myrtle, perhaps – because it was right to bring in the summer on May Day. He would put the green thing under the thatch and leave it there till next May Day, to ensure a perpetual summer.

  ‘Do you remember...’ Mary would begin now and again, and he would immediately interrupt. For it is dangerous to remember.

  ‘No. I don’t. But what I do know is that the day after May Day was known in Ireland as Milking Sunday. You had the late-milking from then on. That is the day you start the late milking, Mary – you leave the cows in the field without being milked until nine in the morning.’

  There was no escape from the webs he wove to replace memory. A black-handled knife: there is a great protection in it against ghosts. If you catch a lizard and lick its head, after that you can lick red-hot iron and it will not burn your tongue. If you hear a cuckoo with your right ear the first time you hear it in the year, that year will be a lucky one for you. And anything begun on a Saturday will take a long time to finish. Things long believed were safer than any new customs.

  And Mary? She cared for the stock. A fine flock of Cheviot sheep and a good head of cattle which gave them milk and cheese and crowdie and cream, and mutton for the winter. She became known as Màiri Bhuachaille, Mary the Herdess, because she was constantly out on the moors or down by the shore herding the cattle. What she didn’t know about cattle and sheep wasn’t worth knowing about. All the diseases from Bluetongue and Foot Rot to the best way to take a cow’s temperature. You disinfect a thermometer with alcohol and insert it into the rectum. The temperature should be around 101.5 degrees Fahrenheit. The pulse, meantime, should be between forty and seventy beats per minute. You locate the pulse of the cow at the angle of the lower jaw-bone where it can be felt by pressing the artery against the bone. It was nursing, really.

  She built walls. Small stone dykes to separate the rams from the ewes, and larger ones to keep the bull from the heifers. She built hen houses and a pigsty and a larger byre which acted as a cow shelter and a place to keep everything dry, from peat-ploughs to ropes. And she learned by building them why some walls fall down and others don’t. It’s not because one wall is stronger than the other, but because it’s more stable. It all had to do with stability. A long piece of rope was no stronger than a short piece of rope. A low unstable wall wouldn’t stand any longer than a high shoogly wall. And once a wall was stable you could then decorate the top any way you liked, either with turf or flowers or shells.

  Which is why John was now fine. He didn’t need any strength. Everything was stable for him. Good strong walls were built all around him. Borders were clear, the horizon was always visible. If anyone walked the moor road he could see them, getting smaller as they walked away, or larger as they came near. Who’s that? Ah – some holidaymaker going fishing on Loch Ruadh. He never went out in the twilight or in the dark, when things became hazy and obscure. Fog and mist were avoided. The sun rose in the east every morning and set in the west every evening. The ocean waves came no further higher than the shore. Spring followed winter, autumn followed summer. When he said something, Mary didn’t contradict him with an alternative truth. No shrapnel flew about the place, no sudden orders were issued. If you put some of the clay round the threshold of the door to where the sharp pain was on your body, you would get relief. No-one stirred his past. Nothing shifted on the croft without his knowledge. If a gate fell, it stayed there. If a cow moved, it was for a reason: towards better grazing, or to drink from the water-trough. The sheep kept to familiar paths, without deviation.

  Their own conversations were dislocated, though that didn’t seem to matter much. Like swans swimming on a loch, it was sufficient to know that each other was there.

  ‘What a day!’ Mary would say. ‘These sheep are obstinate buggers. You just can’t control them. You know what they did today? As soon as I had put them into the grazing field, they jumped over the wall, one by one. And why? Just because one decided to do it.’

  ‘In the old days,’ John responded, ‘there was a saying. Wind from the star of spring, heat from the star of summer, rain from the star of autumn, frost from the star of winter.’

  They were like two different channels on the radio.

  ‘The bee is under shelter, a storm and tempest will come,’ he would say.

  ‘I’ll need to go and get the ram from Morag tomorrow,’ Mary would reply.

  They spoke like angels to each other, in tongues.

  ‘I wonder why birds have feathers?’ he asked.

  And she replied, ‘The cattle sales are a week Monday. I need to fatten them up for that,’ although days or weeks later she might add, ‘because otherwise they’d hurt themselves when they fly into bushes,’ and he would know that the answer had arrived. Because things arrived. From elsewhere. From where things were made. In factories on the mainland. He would spend hours beachcombing every morning and find all kinds of treasures – not just the usual debris, but rare green indented bottles and nuts and stones and strange bits of wood brought in by the tides.

  ‘Ash,’ he’d say to himself. ‘Or yew.’

  Things that smelt and felt strange which had floated in from the Atlantic. Iron bolts on which shrimps grew. Keys that didn’t fit any locks. A doll’s ceramic head with dazzling blue eyes.

  Those things brought in on the tide were gifts. Faodail the natives called them – goods found by chance, things found, stray treasure. There was a proverb – chan e sealbh na faodalach a faotainn – to find goods is not to own them. For nothing comes from nothing, and a big thing does not come from a smaller thing. A stone cannot come from a pebble, but the pebble must come from the stone. The doll’s head must one time have had a ceramic body. This piece of ash wood must have come from an ash tree, John thought. Something bigger. Though that too would have been a tiny seed, once upon a time. Like himself. Everything was a gift or a curse. Iain Cuagach, Limpy John. Not a right. To find a long thick piece of wood on the shore which would make a doorpost. To have a cow or a wife or a patch of land, or to be crippled or poor or landless. To crouch for a cigarette in the trenches just before the bullets arrived which killed all your colleagues. You stumbled across things – once he’d found a gold watch inside a sealed box wedged between the stones by the lobster pool. While Mary knew that every drop of milk from the cow or every fleece from the sheep had to be earned, John believed that fate – or grace as he called it – would suffice.

  They lived on the west side of the island, almost smack against the Atlantic, and John’s songs bear witness not just to the power of nature but to the vein of grace which made things tolerable. The songs are hard to translate, not just because they were written in Gaelic, but because their sense depends as much on sound as upon meaning, from the days when sound mattered. In so far as anyone can ever separate the inseparable. For instance, there is the repeated use of the word m’eudail, which in its simplest form means my darling, but is derived from the word feudail, meaning treasure, cattle, prey, spoil, booty, since the most important thing once upon a time in every rural economy was your stock. Your treasure was your cow. So when grand-uncle John is calling Mary his darling, he is not of course calling her his cow, but neither is it a mere phrase, or cliché. He is saying that, like the cow in the old dispensation, she is the one who is the difference between life and death, who sustains him. And who is equal to such burden or praise?

  There is a saying that a coin can take you to the mainland, but that a song can take you to the ends of the earth, and when you now read these songs that John composed, nothing is sur
er. Perhaps it is no surprise that the trenches are so seldom mentioned, though John made a splendid song about a little bird hopping from dead body to broken helmet across the wastes. Unfortunately, all the words have been washed out by damp except for this quatrain found in an old suitcase in the byre:

  ’s an t-eun air iteig air a’ ghaoith

  a’ leum o cheann gu ceann

  gun fhios a bheil a’ chas a’ caoidh

  am fear tha marbh neo beò

  and the bird flying in the wind

  hopping from head to head

  not knowing whether his feet mourn

  the living or the dead

  Other-ends-of-the-earth places are mentioned with more vigour – Afghanistan and Agra, and he also left a fine song about the Taj Mahal, seen on a clear moonlit night during the Indian Campaign:

  Tha mise seo sna h-Innseachan

  ’S mo chridhe trom ’s fo smàl,

  ’S gun sìon bheir togail cridhe dhomh

  Ach gealach ’s an Taj Mahal.

  Ball beag cruinn air pàlais mòr

  Geal air mullach òr,

  Aon a’ deàrrsadh air an aon.

  Mar sgàthan air a’ ghlòir.

  Here I am in India

  My heart heavy and burdened,

  And nothing to raise my spirits

  But the moon and the Taj Mahal.

  A small round ball on a big palace

  Whiteness shining on gold,

  One reflecting the other

  Like a mirror on glory.

  10

  MAGNUS – GRANDFATHER MAGNUS – looked after Anna as she approached old age. And in retrospect, that perfect thing, he was the one who entered modernity. He was the first to move. Really move, I mean. Of course the others had travelled, including John who had seen the Taj Mahal and the Somme, but in a sense they had never really left. Whether in India or in Inverness, they were still really elsewhere: back in the glen, amidst imagined eternal things.