Where the World Ends

by Geraldine McCaughrean

  But what if the boat could not manage to touch shore? An awkward current, a heavy swell… The wind might move round! An inexperienced skipper might decide not to risk his boat attempting a landing…

  Domhnall Don had started to help Kenneth down from the Bothy, along the ledges, down the shallowest slopes of the Stac. The two of them were linked by a tail of grubby rope, in case Kenneth could not keep his balance on his maimed feet. The impression was of a shepherd leading an elderly sheepdog, or a prisoner being led away to justice.

  Only Lachlan, balanced high on a spur of rock, stood perfectly still – King Gannet overseeing his sunlit realm. His arms were crossed, and his face turned away every time someone beckoned him to come. Quill had to make a detour to fetch him down.

  “I’m staying,” he said, and the scowl line in Lachlan’s sunburned forehead was so deep it might have been cut with an axe.

  “But your people…” said Quill, because what else needed saying? The waiting was over. The world was not ended! They had been wintering at sea for nine months, but now they could get back to the warm jostle of their fellow creatures, their breed, their kin.

  “Hope they’re dead,” said Lachlan brutally, and then, fearing he might be misunderstood, hastily added, “Mine, not yours, yes? Mine, not yours.”

  It was not the Hirta boat, nor Mr Gilmour come from Harris with post and supplies. It was the Owner’s Steward, calling at Hirta to collect the rents. Arriving there, he had been told of the fowling party stranded on the Stac and had come to rescue them. He mentioned seeing smoke on the way over, coming from Boreray. They in turn mentioned the existence of Col Cane.

  Cane was standing, ready and waiting, in the cove when the boat put in there, too. Rounding the southern side of Boreray they could see the many futile attempts Cane had made to signal Hirta: white rocks embedded in the grass-green cliff: writing in the alphabet of desperation. He had signalled, after all.

  Still, no one spoke a word to the “Minister” – the “Hermit”. And though Cane bombarded them with questions, neither the Steward nor his crew were prepared to talk about what they had found on Hirta. “Illness,” was all they said. “Sickness.”

  There was no point in asking the Steward about particular people: the man knew Reverend Buchan’s name but that’s about all. In truth, the Steward could barely recognize the fowling party as human beings at all. With their long hair, bird-skin clothing and weather-cankered skin, they looked more beast than human. And after those words –

  “Illness.”

  “Sickness.”

  – they even ceased to speak to him, or to each other, but stood in the boat like garefowl on an iceberg, simply staring ahead.

  Hirta’s sandy beach, stripped away by the great storm, had washed ashore again, grain by grain in Village Bay. Farriss was first out of the boat, going over the rail so early that the water came up to his neck. He floundered ashore and set off to run up into the village.

  No one was waiting on the beach. Oh, there were a few – the Reverend Buchan, for instance. Murdo, seeing his father, threw up a hand and gave a shout of joy. But Quill, combing the shore for a sight of his parents, could see no one, no one at all. The island boat lay in its usual place. (So it was not damaged or sunk; it could have made the journey out to the Stac to pick up the boys. Given hands to launch it.)

  Col Cane called for prayers of thanksgiving. The crew only busied themselves with putting ashore.

  “Run the boat onto the beach,” said Don.

  “We’ll not get her off again,” the crew responded.

  “Oh, the men will all turn to,” Don assured them.

  The crew glanced at each other and repeated: “We’ll not get her off again,” and they dropped anchor in the shallows.

  A bundle of clothes thrown ashore. And not much of a bundle at that: old clothes so rotten that only the woollens were of use, for unpicking and knitting into stockings. But the bundle of Old Iain’s belongings had been enough. The disease must have come in on it.

  Smallpox.

  One by one, the boys, too, set off to run towards their houses.

  The Street itself looked dishevelled and careworn. The great storm that had killed Davie had ripped off turf roofs and smashed chicken coops, strewn The Street with wooden pails and felled a dry-stone wall. Why had no one put things to rights? Re-turfed the roofs? Mended the wall? Why, when the sun was shining, were none of the doors of the cottages open? No women or old men were sitting out on the benches warming their faces and feet.

  Boys disappeared inside and reappeared moments later, bewildered or panic-stricken.

  The sagging stacks of peat by each house looked sumptuous to boys who had lived without fuel. The greenness of the island dazzled them. The flatness of the ground under their feet felt as if the world had tripped and fallen on its face.

  Which indeed it had. Of the twenty-four families who had lived here last year, only a handful of souls remained. The return of the fowling party had just doubled the population.

  For an hour, Quill sat in his empty, one-room cottage. The floor was as it had been when he left, strewn with daily sprinklings of peat ash and barley straw and food scraps. “Needs digging out. You can give me a hand when you get back,” his father had said. But the strewings were scarcely any deeper than when Quill had gone. They must have died so soon… He would have to start carting the mulch over to the rigs to manure the ground, or nothing would grow in the autumn. No one else to do it now.

  He would start tomorrow. Or next week, maybe.

  There was a penny brooch on the table, a pair of shoes under it. He would have changed out of his bird-skin and sacking, but someone had burned his other suit of clothes for fear they were infected with the pox. He would have washed himself – his ears in particular – but there was no water in the pail. The neighbours must have emptied it scrubbing down the table where the bodies had been laid out before burial. His mother. His father. Who should he thank? Who could tell him the way of his parents’ death? There might have been words spoken at the end – messages left for their only son…

  The kind of things Davie’s mother would want to hear about.

  Inside his head, Quill started to concoct what he would tell her, what he would not. But all the pretty lies of a storyteller had deserted him.

  A field mouse as big as his fist emerged from the fire grate and sat eating a snail. It was startled to see him, but not afraid enough to run away.

  Leaving the door open, to be rid of the staleness, Quill walked up The Street to Davie’s house. On the way, he passed Lachlan hurling stones at his own cottage door for the joy of hearing them thud against the wood. “I’m glad. I’m glad. I’m glad,” he yelled defiantly, the tears running freely down his face. Quill wondered what kind of misery had existed behind that door for a boy to rejoice at the death of his own parents. Living nine doors apart, how could he have known so little about Lachlan’s life? On the Stac, they had been kith and kin to one another… But Quill’s mind would not apply itself. Instead, he found himself thinking what a fine raft could be built if he took all those imported wooden doors off the cottages…

  He knocked. He knocked again. He hoped that…

  And sure enough, his vile wish was granted: Davie’s house was empty too. There was no need for Quill to say the unsayable, recount the unbearable, see the mother’s face crumple, her heart crumble like dry bread.

  In fact there was no need to tell anyone that Davie had died on the Stac. Here on Hirta, barely any records had been kept: only “ninety-four dead”. Quill found his own parents’ graves in the cemetery, but there were plenty of others with no marker, no name daubed in tar. If he and the others kept silent, no outsiders need ever know where or when Davie disappeared from the scene.

  But when Davie’s dog came in at the open door, and behind him barmy Nettle, sniffing and snuffling, Quill welcomed them with hugs and kisses, and promises of everlasting tenderness and all the food they could eat for ever more.

/>   A steady stream of visitors called at the Manse to ask Reverend Buchan what he knew about their relations – if there was some reason – some other reason – why they might not be at home. He told them what they did not want to hear, and promised to pray for them in their hour of grief. Then he praised their fortitude, in the hope they would show some and not collapse in his parlour.

  Quill asked if the Reverend knew – if by any chance he recalled – what became of Murdina Galloway, wincing as he asked it, because Murdina had rather disturbed the Reverend’s peace and quiet. But the pastor was fulsome in his praise. Murdina’s singing and laughter were long since forgiven. For when the smallpox broke out, she had stayed on in Hirta, nursing the sick tirelessly, comforting the dying and the bereaved, and being a veritable mother to all the little orphans. “…Until, of course, she fell ill herself. I cannot tell you precisely when, after that, she died or where she was laid to rest: I was absent with my family by then at the bidding of the Presbytery of Edinburgh. Poor soul. I was so sad not to be met by her smiling face on my return. You might ask those that the Good Lord has spared in His mercy.”

  But Quill knew already when Murdina had died. Hadn’t he seen the dead garefowl spilling out of its sack? The smallpox might have killed Murdina the summer before, but her wandering spirit had surely been extinguished the day they slaughtered the garefowl on the Stac. After tending the dying on Hirta, her spirit must have flown to the Stac and lodged in the bird, comforting Quill, consoling him, watching over him as bad turned to worse.

  “Have everyone gather in the kirk at dusk, Murdo,” said the Reverend, mistaking Quill for his friend. “I shall speak words of comfort.”

  The clapper of the ship’s bell presented to the kirk was lying on the ground beside the door, its tongue silenced by too much tolling for funerals. Col Cane said he would mend it. Despite the fact that he was no longer on speaking terms with God (who had left his prayers unanswered), Cane fell back into the role of sexton, tut-tutting over the hastily dug graves, the disorganized overcrowding of the cemetery. He made no mention to Reverend Buchan of his “vigil” on Boreray: the Reverend was a shrewd and educated man and might ask a lot of questions that would be too difficult for a humble man like Col to answer. With luck, the other members of the fowling party would be so devastated with grief over their own losses that they would quite forget the matter of the girl John and his need to requisition the raft. It would not do for his small and scratchy wife (who had survived the smallpox) to get wind of any such scurrilous gossip. Besides, hadn’t the Minister himself escaped the troublesome company of his dying flock and gone to Edinburgh?

  When the fowlers had left, the door of the kirk had surely been higher than this. The older boys now needed to duck their heads to go inside. When they had left, the barley-straw bales inside had invariably been crowded end to end, so much so that some villagers would be left standing. Now, a half-dozen bales were enough to seat everyone.

  Reverend Buchan talked to blank-eyed boys about thanksgiving and joyous reunion. He told them that a heavy responsibility now rested on their young shoulders: to be good men and to secure a future for Hirta.

  Meanwhile, Kenneth’s sisters sat on either side of him, jabbing him with knitting needles. It had started as a comical way of checking he was real and that they were not dreaming him. It had quickly become a pleasurable pastime, trying to make him curse or yelp in kirk. Quill had never noticed before how much the family members took after each other.

  John sat with her mother, but her father was missing. To fetch him back to life, she would willingly have cut her hair and put on boy’s clothes for the rest of her life, but instead she was free to be herself and to make her own choices. She decided that Calum, bereft of parents, brothers and sisters, had troubles enough without being reminded of the silly games they had played on the Stac. Games, yes: crab-racing, arm-wrestling, betrothals… He had probably already forgotten his engagement to John.

  No one was choosing to remember their time on the Stac. No one was speaking a word about it, and Niall, Keeper of Memories, had nothing in his head these days but a jumble of fantasies.

  Domhnall Don sat, back bent, with his elbows on his knees, his hands over his head like a man beneath a rock fall. Stalwart through cold, hunger, fear and provocation, he had shed not a tear on the Stac. Now he rocked forward and back, forward and back and, regardless of who was speaking in the pulpit, repeated over and over “We should never ha’ gone. I should never ha’ gone.” While he looked to the needs of other people’s sons, his own family had died, one by one.

  Farriss sat with both his daughters in his lap, his wife beside him: a man reborn. As Quill passed by him, he grabbed the boy’s arm ferociously tight. “I will bear you up, man, as you bore me up. I swear it.” And his little girls smiled at the two dogs Quill had brought into the kirk, then nestled their pock-marked faces against their father’s chest.

  Quill knew he ought to say how sorry he was about their niece, Murdina Galloway. But there was no speaking the name. People say these things out of politeness, kindness, sympathy – “we share your sorrow” – but there were no words to express the depths of Quill’s sorrow. If he opened his mouth, the whole kirk might fill up with a million birds and they would all be screaming, like the ones inside his head. He would ask no one about the manner of her death or the whereabouts of her grave. She was gone and nothing would change that.

  The Owner’s Steward took the opportunity to mount the pulpit and reassure everyone. He made them a solemn promise that the Owner would re-people the island with good workers from Harris and Skye. St Kilda would not want for hands to dig the barley rigs, or fowlers to harvest the birds.

  The survivors were supposed to be relieved by the news. Re-people Hirta? Like replacing lost chesspieces so that the Owner could go on playing chess?

  Quilliam would not be staying, though. No one could send him new parents or a reason good enough to share his cottage with some family of strangers from Skye. Harris could not replace the Parliament of Elders sitting on their benches in the sun, nor the toddlers interrupting their solemn deliberations. No, Quill’s mind was made up. He would leave St Kilda and go somewhere where there were trees, and having seen them, cut them down, so that the birds could never nest there. Perhaps he would build ships from the timber, and sail farther afield. Nowhere could be far enough away. Like the Stac, Kilda was all stone. Fowlers might cling on to its hide like barnacles on a whale, but it neither knew nor cared one jot about them.

  “We should never ha’ gone away,” said Domhnall Don yet again. When the service ended, he was barely aware of the benches emptying around him. He remained seated, hands over his balding crown. Quill stopped beside him and Nettle licked the man, smelling salt.

  “It was no’ us who went,” said Quill.

  For it was not the fowling party who had gone away. They had been just a few miles across the water, all that time. It was not they who had gone, but everyone else. Their whole world. Quill’s whole world.

  On the Western Isles of Scotland – maybe in other parts, too – the teller of a story must give credit to the storyteller from whom they first heard a tale. So. I who set this down had this story from Quilliam McKinnon of Hirta, and he told it only to me.

  None of them talk about what happened on the Stac. A fowling party went after guga. They could not be fetched back for nine months. Most survived. To speak of hardship would be absurd alongside what happened on Hirta while they were gone. So they do not. And anyway, St Kilda men are not a talkative breed. But Quilliam told me.

  Most of it he told on the summit of Conachair, the day after I stepped ashore. One boat later, and I might have missed him. But as we arrived from Harris, dear Mr Gilmour set his boat nose-on to the rocks, and the shadow of its mast fell upon the figure of Quilliam McKinnon, waiting there, holding a sack of belongings and two dogs on string leads. In fact he was in such a hurry to board that he lobbed the sack on board straight away: it barely missed
my head. Otherwise he might never have troubled to see me.

  Now, he looked at me wide-eyed, and gave me the startling news that I was dead. This I strenuously denied, as you can imagine, but he was most insistent.

  It is true that I remember nothing of leaving Hirta last summer. I was halfway to my death when Jamie Gilmour’s boat sailed up. He threw post and supplies ashore, but hearing the news that all Hirta was in the grips of smallpox, he took nothing on board. No goods. No passengers – said he could not risk carrying contagion to the mainland. There was one thing he took, though. Me.

  He’s kin to my mother and apparently he had promised her he would bring me home safe and sound. I bless the man, I truly do, for the trouble he took over me.

  Before he fled, parents of the fowlers crawled from their sickbeds to beg him: “Fetch home our boys! They’re over yonder! Marooned on the Stac! Fetch them home to us!” They were too weak to launch the island boat themselves, you see, and the boat-master – Calum’s father, if I remember right – had been the first to die.

  But Jamie Gilmour said no, he’d not sail out to the Stac. Don’t hate him. He did not say it out of selfishness (though they accused him of it). He said it because he knew their boys were safer on the Stac; safe from the disease that was busy killing Hirta men, women and children like summer flies.

  When we reached Harris, he quarantined not only me (for fear I infect his family), but himself too, in case he had caught the “plague” from me during the voyage. He must have been watching out for the signs in himself all the while he was nursing me. You would have thought I was his own daughter. I thank God he was spared the pox.

  After this self-imposed quarantine, he went to the Owner of Kilda and told him about the boys marooned on the Stac. The Owner said yes, yes, he would send his Steward to take them off. But there were obviously more important things to do. Or maybe the Owner supposed the boys would find their own way home – like stray sheep. Having never visited the place himself, he would not see the problem; the islands and stacs look so close together on a map… In truth, stray sheep would have caused him more concern: sheep are valuable. Boys are two a penny. Maybe he just forgot to send help. Happily, when the rents fell due the following summer, he remembered to send his Steward to collect those.