Moon Country

by Peter Arnott

  Those who interpret what was about to happen to him as mere suicide in the face of disappointment are insulting all of humanity, I think, by insulting him with so diminishing and dismissive an ending. Of those who go so far as to deny that she was ever there to have spoken to him, I cannot bring myself to speak.

  13.6

  Perhaps she told him:

  They call me Wounded Dove. I can hardly remember you. I can hardly remember anything. Yes. I left you that night, I went to Gerry at his aunt’s flat in Cardonald. I thought of coming to your trial. I thought about the children. But I couldn’t. I stayed in Glasgow for a year with him. I wasn’t using the drugs yet, nothing serious anyway. That got out of control later. I couldn’t face Agnes. I couldn’t face the kids. I was guilty at leaving them so I couldn’t go back to them because I didn’t deserve them. I thought I must be nothing so I tried to be nothing. I tried to die. Gerry got rid of me. I thought he was right. I thought everybody wanted rid of me. I wanted rid of me. I went to London. I lived in a squat in Haringey for a couple of years. I met a nice guy and he pulled me back to myself a little. He heard me talk, talk for the first time about the children, about having the kids and how they’d never forgive me and I hated them and I hated myself for hating them and he helped me find them. I was off the junk for a couple of years by then and I went to find Janette. That’s when I saw her in the hostel she was in then. Ronnie was with foster parents. I had another name. Agnes took me to her, said I was their auntie or something. No one gave a fuck what we said anyway. And it broke my heart because I could see Janette try when I told her I was her Mum, I could see her try to look as if that meant something to her but it didn’t I could see it didn’t and I ate my heart and I went back on the junk and didn’t go back to the guy and the guy chucked me and I thought I deserved it and I overdosed and I was in a hospital down south under a different name and I wanted to die I was depressed the air cut me the world hated me and I looked out the ward window at the flowers in the park outside and they were made of mud the world was made of mud and knives and they cut me and I was all mouth inside myself eating myself and my teeth fell out and my hair fell out and I was nearer death than I’ve ever been and that’s when he came to me.

  Wovoka. He came to me and he saved me, he taught me that I had become nothing for a reason. I had become dead I had become a ghost and if I wanted I could make myself one with the other ghosts. The ones who will come again like in the Bible but not like in the Bible not like out of the grave but all together in white buckskins the ghosts of all the people who will come back with the buffalo and save us from the drink and the drugs and all we’ve done to ourselves since we lost the earth to the pigs who make all the money and have all the guns and bombs and if we dance if we can only dance the ghosts will come back and nobody will hurt us we can save ourselves and get the world back before it drowns in sin.

  She looked into his face now for the first time needing him really to hear and believe her, needing his forgiveness as she hoped to forgive herself. And he smiled and put his hand upon her, blessing her, giving her up, saying goodbye.

  13.7

  Outside, the ghost dancers shuffled and chanted, men, women and children, all humanity dancing together, shiny eyed and loving, for a salvation that they surely knew would never come, wearing the ghost shirts they’d been making all this time (as Janice explained to Tommy), which would no more really protect them from the axe handles and pepper spray of hired security officers than had the shirts of their Indian forebears kept the Cavalry’s bullets from the dead of Wounded Knee.

  What had happened there at Wounded Knee was, to them, coda to a last, ludicrous, desperate yet beautiful hope that was being danced again here and now on Ossian’s Viewpoint. Some of them may well have also been aware that Ossian, in Gaelic Lore, was yet another imaginary definer of culture and a hoped-for, wished-for ghost of something past and fictional, and that they evoked both him and Wovoka now in a spirit of ironic sympathetic magic. They knew, perhaps that one incarnation of Ossian had been in the shape of the eighteenth-century literary fraud that had culturally defined Scotland itself. It may be that such an ironic gesture of postmodern solidarity may have been a minority perspective, but I like to think that the reincarnated Kicking Bear and Short Bull, heroes of faith that they were, had made the Kierkegaardian discovery, through their living and breathing of the Ghost Dance, that it is better to act as if you believed something absurd that you know not to be true (in this case, that human beings have inherent value), than to behave in solidarity with the ruthless rationality of the killing, indifferent universe.

  13.7.1

  It had been the retelling of the Ghost Dance story at Glasgow’s Kelvingrove Museum some years before that had confirmed Short Bull and Kicking Bear, those two genial, grim old buffers, in their sentimental attachment to the aboriginal beauty of their sadness. That’s where they got their names, too. They had learned at the display of the Ghost Shirt at that very popular Glasgow Museum that survivors of both Little Bighorn and Wounded Knee, among them the “real” Short Bull and Kicking Bear, had come to Glasgow in 1894 as performers in the world tour of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show, that showbiz ancestor of the very Wild West film and TV genre that had so captured their boyish imaginations. They had learned that Short Bull had given, or sold, or had had stolen from him, a “ghost shirt” … this being the ritual garb of the short-lived and almost unbearably whimsical Ghost Dance Religion that had been woven from the Christian myth of the returning Jesus by the Paiute shaman Wovoka and had briefly and tragically offered a last hope to those who had been cheated, forced, drugged and deceived out of their sacred (and treaty guaranteed) land in the Black Hills from which the discovery of gold had now barred them.

  Wovoka had concocted a potent twist on the myth of the return of Christ in judgement, the twist being that Christ would come back as an Indian (possibly himself) and would bring with him all the dead ancestors — the ghosts — along with the vanished buffalo, to magically sweep the White Man into the sea. An unstoppable army of angels and of the returned dead would sweep through the cities of corruption, through the sinners of property, and return the land to the people and nature to which it belonged, restoring a lost ecological communism of humanity and nature. Catching on to the deferred hope and ritual longing for justice and the restoration of the lost that has made Christianity such a success story, Wovoka taught that anyone who wore a ghost shirt and danced the ritual dance would not only help to summon those glorious and avenging dead from their slumber, but would themselves become ghostly, would become, specifically, invulnerable to the white man’s rifle fire.

  13.7.2

  We know that the Ghost Shirt was “returned” to the Lakota people after that display in Kelvingrove. We also know that there were various public trials and enquiries into the many events that culminated together on that strange and powerful day in the Grampian Mountains. The deaths of both one of the Wheen brothers and Short Bull and the injuries inflicted on many of the dancers by the security personnel are a matter of record now. But Tommy and Janice, Janette and Ronnie were peripheral figures to the various legal processes in which they were coincident elements, so there is a good deal less certainty about exactly what happened to them after the dancers formed their circle and the Hunters, enfamille, hurriedly gathered by the ruined Hiace van to discuss the future.

  13.7.2.1

  I think I have already dealt with those who dispute that Janice was there at all to take her leave of Tommy and the children and go to join the Ghost Dance, and thus refuse the offer I am sure that Tommy made her to take her away with them. We do know that she was not with them when they made their escape from the encampment just as it was being attacked by the bomber-jacketed ranks. But to take it from that negative circumstance that she was never there in the camp at all, and thus to imply that Tommy had killed and disposed of her all those years ago is unconscionable. It is a logical possibility perhaps, but it is a moral nonsense to ev
en suggest such a thing. Just because death always wins in the end, that’s no reason to be on death’s side, as Short Bull once put it.

  13.7.2.2

  The fact that Short Bull himself died of a heart attack some hours after the attack on the camp, despite the efforts of the medical teams, and indeed of the outraged DS “Danny” Boyle who went so far as to arrest the two bastards who’d set about the daft old fool, is a melancholy confirmation of the heroism of acting as if one had faith, perhaps. Besides, as is evidenced by the elephantine and still unfinished public enquiry, the joint private and public security action that afternoon disintegrated into a complex chaos whose details are still being argued about by very expensive lawyers. However, what we know must be true is that from early in the afternoon, a minority of the occupiers, possibly those without vehicular transport, or those who simply couldn’t face or didn’t fancy the martyrdom that the hired thugs of the holding corporation were gleefully about to inflict on those who remained, were already making their way in unorganised dribs and drabs towards the train station on the Moor well before the attack on the camp took place. The refugees could hear the hourly trains coming, actually, for nearly ten minutes before they could see them … the silent air carrying the sound of the engine and the clatter of wheels for mile after echoing mile between the peaks and across the moor and peat bogs.

  (For those who wonder what on earth a train station was doing way up on Rannoch Moor where no one lived when so many much busier stations had been shut by Dr Beeching fifty years ago, I refer you to the earlier mention of the ritual slaughter of birds by rich people. There was no road into the wilderness, and the only form of transport to that particular corner of sublimity in the nineteenth century and up until the present day was indeed afforded by the railway line that had been and remains a single-track miracle of Irish sweat.)

  13.7.2.3

  Meanwhile, before any of this happened, here, beside their own ruined transportation, sat Ronnie and Janette and Denise. The two girls were getting on like a house on fire. It turned out that they knew some of the same people and shared an ironic view of the world and of young men in particular that they were both finding very diverting. Ronnie, still feeling a mixture of shame and stupidity for his actions of the previous night and in relation to being alive, Scottish and sixteen all at the same time, was considering going for a walk and getting away from the pair of them, when Hunter and Janice emerged from the hostel together and came and sat beside them.

  13.7.2.3.1

  It was at this point, of course, that the family were all reunited as Tommy had hoped and planned, but even for Tommy this must have been dreadfully anticlimactic as he had already almost forgotten that he had been wishing for this moment for all of those years, given the fact that Janice and himself, against his expectations, were other people now than those they had been and also that they were having this conversation in noisy proximity to a hundred rotating, chanting hippies, who were now spinning like Sufis as they sang and danced, driving fear from their hearts by way of dizziness, losing their fear in the noisy embrace of vertigo. Things had moved on so far for all of them that the climax of what had seemed to be their story up till now passed by all of them without comment. So there’s no real reason for me to go into it in any detail either.

  13.7.2.3.2

  Despite the growing racket, Hunter probably produced the carpet bag full of money at this point, apologising to Janice about the contents having gone down from his original take at the robbery and how that had happened. It remained the case that £24,492.04 was quite a considerable sum, but nothing seemed to have quite coalesced as he’d anticipated. The direct vectors of his dreamed-of denouement to his journey, that he would bring his son and his daughter and his wife and this money to a single point in space-time, had seemed graphically clear and self-evidently pragmatic to him when he’d been in prison, or rather, since Frank had contacted him there shortly before his release to promise him payment of his share of the robbery in exchange for being left alone, for Hunter never coming back. Hunter, as he saw it, was merely fulfilling his agreement with Frank with the added and strategically unspoken rider that he was going to attempt to reconcile his family first and use this windfall as social cement, serving both the interests of family cohesion in the material world, and his own spiritual need to have nothing more to do with the blood money other than the getting rid of it to the benefit of Elspeth Dewar, Agnes, and Jack Webster along with incurred expenses and incidentals. It was not, he might have argued, his fault that Frank had deemed his reappearance in Oor Wee Toon for just long enough to make some financial reparations and kidnap Ronnie to be a breach of contract. Hunter had, in essence, done exactly what he had set out to do. The fact that a cash inducement and their mere proximity didn’t turn his ex-wife and children into the Partridge family was hardly his fault either. Nor can the revelation of pre-existing psychic damage in the Wheen brothers legitimately be added to the tally of his faults as written in the Book of Life.

  13.7.3

  The only negative causation, of which one can be sure, I think, was that the maximum volume to which the dancers were now attaining meant that no one heard the shot.

  13.8

  Why did Frank shoot his brother? Well, I think we know the general answer to that question. But why did he choose that exact moment? We’re again reduced to guesswork, but I think it probably happened when it did partly because from where they were perched in the ruins of the Pictish structure (the eponymous but misnamed “Ossian’s Viewpoint”), they could see the stealthy approach from several directions of the forces of Law and Order. Among these were DS “Danny” Boyle and Maggie Singleton, who had made it with minutes to spare, to the chagrin of Superintendent Bellamy, though I doubt if the Frank spotted any of them individually.

  Frank may also have calculated that all the noise the dancers were making would cover the gunshot. But it is my suspicion that Frank was already well beyond calculation by the time he killed his brother. That he was already weeping, in the throes of a nervous breakdown.

  13.8.1

  Joe was found to have been shot at point-blank range in the back of the head, forensics confirmed, while in a prone position. I imagine Frank had been looking at his brother for some minutes before the murder, and had prepared the nine-millimetre automatic, putting a round in the chamber and easing off the safety, waiting to do it. I think the noise and the electricity in the air worked on him below the level of consciousness. Add to this that it was entirely within Joe’s character to have promised his brother retribution for the payment he’d made to Tommy as a sequel to finishing off Tommy Hunter himself, or that Frank had inferred such a danger from his brother’s generally and specifically unpleasant demeanour, and I don’t think motivation for the crime is any more difficult to discern than are the means and opportunity. We have already understood the level of aggression and unselfconscious mayhem of which Joe was more than capable, and that the prior killing of Jack Webster had already pushed Joe well over the edge from where Frank, with the best will in the world, could have recovered him. Frank may also have gleaned that it may well have been in Joe’s mind that there was going to be some exciting but messy Mexican stand-off that would leave both Frank and Hunter dead and Joe standing, triumphant and no longer cash-poor. Joe may even have told his brother in so many words that he, Joe, was going to kill Tommy, and that he, Frank, was next. But whatever scenario Joe had in mind was cancelled by Frank, who picked up Joe’s gun once he had killed him and numbly, barely sentient, started down the slope towards the dancers.

  13.8.1.1

  As the late, lamented Short Bull once observed to his friend Kicking Bear: “Some cunts are born cunts. Some cunts achieve cuntness. Yet other cunts have cuntitude thrust upon them.”

  13.8.1.2

  Now, had Frank been capable of paying more attention, he’d probably have seen what Joe had seen, I think, immediately before Frank shot him. Joe had seen Hunter sitting and talking with his fam
ily. Joe had recognised him even after all this time. I think Frank probably had been sitting behind Joe ready to shoot him, when Joe had shifted his weight preparatory to telling his brother that he’d spotted their quarry and that it was at that instant that Frank had shot him more in panic than premeditation. Having set himself up to maybe kill his brother, it had been Joe’s moving and breaking the spell of contemplation (or dwam as we say in Scotland) that had precipitated the actual execution.

  13.8.2

  Maybe Frank saw Jack’s ghost again. Who can say?

  13.9

  After an exchange of their details on Facebook, Denise and Janette had already agreed to part as Denise went to join the circle of dancers as she must have done (her name appears later in the list of those arrested at the site that afternoon). However, I have to admit that it is only my opinion that Janice too left her family and went back to the dance, back to the security of the new family she had made for herself and rejected Hunter’s offer of a renewal of their vows. Maybe he gave her an envelope full of money for her trouble. It seems likely, but I’m afraid I don’t know that either. Let’s say he gave five grand.

  13.9.1

  Leaving £19,492.04 approx.

  13.9.2

  The train they were trying to catch stopped at the station at 4.35. So I’m saying that at some time before 4 p.m. that Thursday afternoon, Hunter and his children, money in the carpet bag in Hunter’s hand, having been given directions by Denise, began to make their way from Ossian’s Viewpoint across the moor three miles to the station. We know from the police report into the whole episode that it was on the way to the station where Joe’s gun and the catatonic Frank were later found, so that we can only deduce that it was in the course of that journey on foot that they were intercepted by the panting spectre of Frank Wheen who called upon them to halt.