The Testament of Gideon Mack

by James Robertson

Some ministers slave the entire week at their sermons, turning them inside out and worrying over them sentence by sentence, and then deliver something bland and tedious to people who don’t care what they say so long as they say it in less than a quarter of an hour. They write these homilies out in full, but until quite recently the written sermon was scorned in Scotland, seen as a kind of soft English aberration, a sign of feeble character and suspect faith. My father preferred to rely on divine inspiration: if God so willed it, holy words would pour from the mouth of his servant. Week after week as a boy I saw this happen – thunder and lightning, showers, gusts of wind and shafts of sunlight all rolled into one thirty-minute word-storm with my father at its centre. It was impressive, and thus I grew up sympathising with the old school. I could have half a dozen potential sermons gathering pace in my head, interweaving and overlapping as they grew; and as Sunday approached one of them would suddenly leap into focus and stand out from the rest. Yes, I would make notes and headings, but once in the pulpit I tended to abandon the prepared structure and let the words take me wherever they were going, and in this I was like my father, except that I put my trust in language rather than in God. Despite my professed preference for facts, evidence and logical argument, I have always found giant leaps of the imagination, which are akin to leaps of faith, exhilarating.

  My theme, appropriate to the beginning of January, was to be newness, and my text was from the Book of Revelation, the second-last chapter of the New Testament: ‘And I saw a new heaven and a new earth: for the first heaven and the first earth were passed away… And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain: for the former things are passed away.’ I always made a point of using the King James Bible. The New English Bible had been in use in Monimaskit before my arrival, but I reinstated the Authorised Version despite protests from Peter Macmurray and some of the other elders. They thought the King James too antique, beyond the comprehension of the general populace. I thought the New English unspeakably bland.

  ‘I don’t think people who come to church want the language of shopping lists and breakfast TV,’ I said. ‘They don’t want the Word of God to be as mundane as the word of the weather forecaster. They want a Scripture that has poetry in it, and mystery and beauty and splendour.’

  ‘You want that,’ Macmurray said. ‘I think they want the Word of God in a language they understand.’

  We had repeated arguments about this in the Session, but I held my ground. My arrogance was astounding. What right had I, who did not believe it anyway, to champion the seventeenth-century version of Holy Scripture like some elitist literary critic? And yet I am proud that I did.

  Now, as I stood over the cooker, stirring my porridge, I rehearsed what I would say. ‘What is it we want at New Year?’ I asked. ‘We make resolutions, promise new starts to ourselves and to others. We’ll stop smoking, exercise more, give up this bad habit or that, take up a new hobby. “This is the year I’ll learn to swim.” “This is the year I’ll find a more fulfilling job.” But what is it we really want? Perhaps the answer lies in that passage from Revelation…’ I left the porridge to sputter, flicked the kettle switch again, and when it boiled poured water over the coffee granules in my mug. ‘No more death, no more sorrow, no more pain! Don’t we all long for that? Don’t we watch the news every night and long for it? When we say, “This is the year I’ll do this, or that,” aren’t we saying, “This is the year when I’ll try to make things better”? Usually we mean for ourselves, but sometimes we mean for others, and in a way we believe that if everybody kept their New Year resolutions, the world would be a better place.’

  I took the pan off the gas and transferred the porridge to a bowl. I poured on milk, added brown sugar, began to eat. I thought of my mother, whom I would see later. She’d always made porridge with cheap, tasteless oats and put too much salt in it. My father had covered his with more salt, and, until his stroke, had not allowed me to sprinkle mine with sugar. After the stroke, his rule was diminished, and I tipped it on. I went back to the sermon, thought about working in a reference to the Stone. ‘As many of you know, I do a lot of running. I was out yesterday. It seemed a good way of getting the old year out of my system, a bit like that tradition of opening the doors and windows of the house, front and back. Blow out the old, let the new air in. Well, I was running in Keldo Woods. And I came across a standing stone. Yes, I did. I know what you’re thinking, if you know those woods – there is no standing stone in Keldo Woods. But there is, I’ve seen it. How did it get there? What can it mean? You don’t believe me? We live in unbelievable times, days of trials and wonders. Blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed. But never mind about that, I’ll show you. Come on, let’s go.’

  Maybe not. I sipped my coffee. The porridge sat rich and warm in my belly. The sermon would look after itself. I cared, but not enough to let it worry me. Of course I would leave the Stone out of it. I’d have to go back and check that it really was there. I didn’t want to blow my credibility: it was all I had. Still, I did want to tell someone. I thought again of my mother. I could tell her, without any risk to my credibility or hers.

  She’d been in the care home for five years, and was so far gone in her mind that nothing would surprise her, and nothing she repeated would surprise anybody else. I could tell her that Martians had invaded and she’d just smile and nod her head acquiescently in the manner learned through the years of being married to my father. She seldom knew who I was when I visited. She would stare searchingly as if she’d just noticed me and was wondering how I’d got there. I could tell my mother about the Stone, and she wouldn’t ridicule me, wouldn’t accuse me of fabrication, would just accept, then forget. She might even, in a flash of lucidity, say, ‘That kind of thing happens to me all the time,’ but I doubted it.

  The turn-out for the service was about what I expected for the first Sunday of the year. The church was a third full, a hundred folk or so, most sitting quietly, the usual unhealthy minority coughing or blowing their noses throughout. The sermon went off all right: I felt that surge of excitement about halfway through that told me I was on form, that I had their attention, that the words were firing out of me and hitting a few targets. Heads nodded; smiles, frowns and poker-faces greeted me; my sentences flew beneath the vaulted ceiling and drifted down on to people’s ears and through the gratings in the aisles. Good ground and stony ground. Whether they had any effect on the listeners was another matter altogether.

  Outside, I shook hands with them all, wishing them a good New Year, receiving their wishes in return. I reflected, as I did nearly every week, that not a single one of those I regarded as my friends – the ones who had me round for dinner, the ones in whose company I could relax, laugh or have serious conversations, the ones who treated me as a normal human being – none of them attended church, except a very few at Christmas. Why was I still there? Why was I not, like them, nursing a hangover, reading the fat newspapers, sleeping late, gardening, shopping, walking, watching TV?

  Peter Macmurray was inside the doorway collecting hymn books. Our eyes met briefly. He’d had me rumbled for years, and was thinking the same thing: why didn’t I just own up and go away? But I wouldn’t, I had nowhere else to go. And anyway, with my doubts and my insincerity, wasn’t I just the man for the job? Whatever else, I was a man of these times.

  I went home and made myself a sandwich and another cup of coffee, then walked over to the Monimaskit Care Home, where I went every Sunday to conduct a short service – a hymn, the Lord’s Prayer, a few prayers for anyone sick or dying or recently dead, another hymn, the benediction. The residents had had their lunch, and this was their entertainment before the telly came back on. Fifteen minutes was quite enough for me – though not for a few very devout old ladies who would happily have sung hymns all afternoon, and sometimes did. Then there were the ones who either slept through the proceedings or talked loudly du
ring the prayers. The devout ones suffered in silence or shrilly told them to be quiet. Desiccated chaos; formal religion gone to pot. I almost enjoyed it, it made me feel at home.

  I had a few minutes with my mother afterwards in the main dayroom. I saw her twice a week, on Sundays and Wednesdays. There didn’t seem much point in going more often. She was well looked after, ate well, slept well, was still pretty mobile. ‘She’s no bother at all,’ Mrs Hodge, the manager, told me. ‘Really, she’s a delight. She just ticks away like an old clock.’ Clocks have no conception of their own mechanism, they do not know what makes them tick, so Mrs Hodge’s analogy was a good one. ‘Don’t you worry,’ she said, ‘you’re a busy man. We know where you are if she needs you.’

  But she didn’t need me at all. I could do nothing for her, physically, emotionally or spiritually. Whatever state she had reached was how it was going to be till she died. She ticked away and I sat beside her with her hand resting on mine like an artefact, a paper model of a hand. She was humming something to herself. I tried to make out if there was a tune. We had sung ‘O God, our help in ages past’ but it didn’t appear to be that. I waited until she fell silent.

  ‘What was that, Mum?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘What you were singing just then.’

  ‘It’s a bird.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘Yes, it’s in the garden.’

  ‘That’s nice.’

  ‘No, it’s wet. We’ll not go out today.’

  ‘It’s a lovely day, Mum. It’s not raining.’

  ‘It’s in the garden.’

  She hummed again. I wondered which garden she meant, the home’s, or the manse’s – she lived with me here for nine months before she became so confused that I could not leave her alone – or our old garden at Ochtermill. When she stopped humming, I said, ‘I went for a long run in the woods yesterday.’

  ‘Always running,’ she said. ‘Always running.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘that’s right, I am. Do you know what I found?’

  She said nothing.

  ‘I found a stone,’ I said. ‘A great big standing stone that wasn’t there before.’

  ‘Not much good in that,’ she said. ‘Leave it alone. Come away from that. It’s dirty.’

  ‘No,’ I said, ‘it’s all right. It’s strange, though, don’t you think?’

  ‘It’s a bird,’ she said. ‘It’s in the garden.’ The humming started again.

  Betty, one of the staff, was near by. ‘You’ll get a cup of tea soon, Agnes,’ she said loudly. ‘Would you like a cup, Mr Mack?’

  ‘No, thanks,’ I said. ‘I’ll need to get on. Why’s she going on about a bird, I wonder?’

  ‘Who knows?’ Betty said. ‘Better that than a moose, though, eh? Mrs Doig over there’s aye seeing a moose, but there’s nae mooses here. Sure you’ll not have a cup?’

  ‘Thanks, but no,’ I said. ‘I’ve things to attend to.’

  This was a lie. All I wanted was to shut the manse door on the world. I walked home through the kirkyard, feeling the ice in the gravel of the path crunching under my feet. I felt the graves murmuring behind my back: apostate, hypocrite, man of straw. I silently berated them: fuck off, you flinty old buggers, times have changed. Stones everywhere: upright ones, leaning ones, flat ones, broken ones, ones you couldn’t read the words on. I was getting hassled by stones, they were crowding in on me, and now there was one scowling at me in the woods. I needed some space. I needed some sleep. It was only the 5th of January and I was exhausted.

  IX

  My father was in hospital for three weeks, then convalesced at home for several more. The stroke was not a severe one, the doctors said, but it was a warning shot across the bows. He would have to take things more easily.

  He came home greyer, more distant. Gentler too, in a way that was disturbing: the beast of that Sunday afternoon in the back parlour still prowled behind his eyes, ready to emerge at some unknown, unknowable future moment. Physically, he did make an almost complete recovery. Three months after the stroke he conducted his first service, and by the end of the year everything was, on the face of it, back to normal. But inside he was changed, there was no question. For a start, he did not order the removal of the television. Batman was never mentioned and, as for the actual set itself, from the day of his return from hospital he simply avoided it, even for football. In fact he could hardly look at the thing, on or off, without wincing.

  Neither could I, while he was in hospital, but once he was home and I understood that it was going to stay, my guilt wore off, and I began to watch it more and more. He never objected, though he surely knew. He continued to pay the rental and the licence fee, but he stayed in the safety of his study, away from the television itself. Perhaps he was trying to appease the force that had leapt out and floored him.

  He was wary of me too. In hospital he’d smiled at me and we shook hands, but if I sat too close to the bed he seemed to shrink away. My mother had told me that it was not my fault, that a stroke might afflict anyone at any time, but I knew he was thinking about it differently, just as I was. I’m sure that, like me, he was trying to work out whether God had struck him down, and if so why he had targeted him and not me. Neither of us could entertain the possibility of my mother being right. When he came home we re-engaged with each other at a polite, passionless distance. I would sometimes catch him looking at me as if he suspected me of being a spy, but he never raised what had happened. I never heard him absolve me from responsibility for his stroke and I never felt obliged to say sorry.

  We lived like that for the next few years, as the sixties, which had infiltrated the manse via the TV set, drew to a close. The grown-up world was becoming more sordid just as I was reaching an age when I wanted to be part of it: rock stars died of drug overdoses in miserable motel rooms; their music was waylaid in acrimonious break-ups, traffic-jams, mud and murder. I acquired a transistor radio around 1970 or 1971, determined to catch up on the music I was missing. I heard the disbanded Beatles telling me to let it be and a dead Jim Morrison instructing me, when the music was over, to turn out the lights.

  The old public library in Ochtermill had been replaced by a bigger and better one, but I’d long outgrown the children’s section. I persuaded the head librarian to let me have tickets for the adult department. How could she have suspected me of motives that were anything less than pure? I was a son of the manse.

  Meanwhile, like some footsore moral policeman, my father continued to make his rounds, but he was increasingly powerless in the face of change. His old anger still boiled up once in a while, but the big things he wanted to oppose were too big, and he was left to rail against trivialities. My mother took some of the flak for his increasing sense of irrelevance; I took some too. We tiptoed around him until he tired even of being angry with us. The manse became a refuge for him from a world which no longer thought as he did; and within the house he had a further place of retreat, his study, where nothing he disapproved of need penetrate. My mother stole through the hall, knocking gently at his door to tell him dinner was served, or to bring him black tea and biscuits on a tray. Apart from going to the Ochtermill shops and to church, the journeys of her life lay almost entirely within the manse and its garden. The pair of them were like ghosts, haunting the present but not part of it; haunting each other too. But then, it wasn’t so very different for me. The present was a mere waiting room for the future; that was where I would really begin to live.

  I feel this now more than ever, though for different reasons. The present has narrowed to a mere sliver of time. All that rests between me and eternity is the sliding of this nib across the page.

  X

  By 1970 I was at secondary school in Tulloch, the nearest town of any size to Ochtermill. The world was coming to me, and nobody, least of all my damaged, unworldly father, could prevent it. While he was out, or ensconced in his study, I would sit on the floor in the back parlour and sample what the television had to offer. I sta
yed close to the screen with the sound down low, but not because I was afraid of being caught. It was simply easier, in those days of internal aerials and no remote control, to sit within arm’s reach of the set. I saw programmes my parents didn’t know existed: plays, sitcoms, game shows, cop shows, cartoons, soap operas, Hollywood movies. Even the news was exciting: watching film footage of the Vietnam War, I found myself silently cheering on the Vietcong. I didn’t understand why – gut over reason, perhaps, jungle overthrowing order – but I wanted them to win.

  Up until the time of my father’s stroke, I’d never questioned his authority. Every week I attended church and heard him praying and singing, reading out lessons and intimations and delivering sermons. Every week my mother sat beside me, gazing up at him with an expression that seemed to betoken both wonder and acceptance. Every week I saw the other familiar faces of the congregation – people who afterwards would smile at me, ruffle my hair, shake my hand – and they too seemed to have no dispute with anything that my father said. How could I not have believed? It was all I knew. But after the stroke, all was changed. I could tell that even the older members of the congregation were dubious about this man and his great truths. Did he really know? He was less convincing, and they were less convinced. And so, too, was I.

  God might move in mysterious ways but, until the stroke, and for a while after it, he was a definite fact of my life. He was watching me all the time. My innermost secrets were known to him. He knew, for example, about my television habit. But did he approve of it, or was it a trap, the open lid of a sewer of temptation? I worried about this, and the felling of my father made me worry about it more. Had God meant to strike me down, and missed? Or was he punishing me more subtly, with contempt rather than blows? I prayed earnestly at night, asking God to tell me what he was doing, and why. What did he want from me? My father had taught me that prayers were seldom answered directly, but by an indication: a pricking of the conscience or an uplifting of the soul – these were what assured you of the nature of God’s response. I assumed, from the jaggy and guilt-ridden twinges I was getting, that God was telling me that watching television was bad for me. So before I went to sleep at night, having mulled all this over, I would apologise and promise not to do it again. The next day I would do it again. Even the recurring vision of my father lying crumpled on the floor did not stop me.