by Jim Butcher
Words—not water, not wind.
In that way I showed myself to be my father’s daughter. Only I never said so to him, nor he to me.
~
Making my way back down the stairs, I overheard several folk in the kitchen. They were speaking of those things St Monans folk always speak of, no matter their occupations: Fish and weather.
“There’s been nae herring in the firth this winter,” came a light man’s voice. “Nane.” Doctor Kinnear.
“It’s a bitter wind to keep the men at hame, the fish awa.” Mrs. Marr agreed.
Weather and the fishing. Always the same.
But a third voice, one I didn’t immediately recognize, a rumbling growl of a voice, added, “Does she know?”
“Do I know what?” I asked, coming into the room where the big black-leaded grate threw out enough heat to warm the entire house. “How Father died?”
I stared at the last speaker, a stranger I thought, but somehow familiar. He was tall for a St Monans man, but dressed as one of the fisher folk, in dark trousers, a heavy white sweater, thick white sea stockings. And he was sunburnt like them, too, with eyes the exact blue of the April sea, gathered round with laugh lines. A ginger mustache, thick and full, hung down the sides of his mouth like a parenthesis.
“By God, Alec Hughes,” I said, startled to have remembered, surprised that I could have forgotten. He grinned.
When we’d been young—very young—Alec and I were inseparable. Never mind that boys and girls never played together in St Monans. Boys from the Bass, girls from the May, the old folk wisdom went. The Bass Rock, the Isle of May, the original separation of the sexes. Apart at birth and ever after. Yet Alec and I had done everything together: messed about with the boats, played cards, built sand castles, fished with pelns—shore crabs about to cast their shells—and stolen jam pieces from his mother’s kitchen to eat down by one of the gates in the drystone dykes. We’d even often hied off to the low cliff below the ruins of Andross Castle to look for croupies, fossils, though whether we ever found any I couldn’t recall. When I’d been sent away to school, he’d stayed on in St Monans, going to Anstruther’s Waid Academy in the next town but one, until he was old enough—I presumed—to join the fishing fleet, like his father before him. His father was a stern and dour soul, a Temperance man who used to preach in the open air.
Alec had been the first boy to kiss me, my back against the stone windmill down by the salt pans. And until I’d graduated from St Leonard’s, the only boy to do so, though I’d made up for that since.
“I thought, Jan,” he said slowly, “that God was not in your vocabulary.”
“Except as a swear,” I retorted. “Good to see you, too, Alec.”
Mrs. Marr’s eyebrows both rose considerably, like fulmars over the green-grey sea of her eyes.
Alec laughed and it was astonishing how that laugh reminded me of the boy who’d stayed behind. “Yes,” he said. “Do you know how your father died?”
“Heart attack, so Mrs. Marr told me.”
I stared at the three of them. Mrs. Marr was wringing her hands again, an oddly old-fashioned motion at which she seemed well practiced. Dr. Kinnear polished his eyeglasses with a large white piece of cloth, his flyaway eyebrows proclaiming his advancing age. And Alec—had I remembered how blue his eyes were? Alec nibbled on the right end of his mustache.
“Did I say that?” Mrs. Marr asked. “Bless me, I didna.”
And indeed, she hadn’t. She’d been more poetic.
“Burst in twa, you said.” I smiled, trying to apologize for misspeaking. Not a good trait in a scholar.
“Indeed. Indeed.” Mrs. Marr's wrangling hands began again. Any minute I supposed she would break out into a Psalm. I remembered how her one boast was that she’d learned them all by heart as a child and never forgot a one of them.
“A shock, I would have said,” Alec said by way of elaborating.
“A fright,” the doctor added.
“Really? Is that the medical term?” I asked. “What in St Monans could my father possibly be frightened of?”
Astonishingly, Mrs. Marr began to wail then, a high, thin keening that went on and on till Alec put his arm around her and marched her over to the stone sink where he splashed her face with cold water and she quieted at once. Then she turned to the blackened kettle squalling on the grate and started to make us all tea.
I turned to the doctor who had his glasses on now, which made him look like a somewhat surprised barn owl. “What do you really mean, Dr. Kinnear?”
“Have you nae seen him yet?” he asked, his head gesturing towards the back stairs.
“I… I couldn’t,” I admitted. But I said no more. How could I tell this man I hardly knew that my father and I were virtual strangers? No—it was more than that. I was afraid of my father dead as I’d never been alive. Because now he knew for certain whether he was right or I was, about God and Heaven and the rest.
“Come,” said Doctor Kinnear in a voice that seemed permanently gentle. He held out a hand and led me back up the stairs and down the hall to my father’s room. Then he went in with me and stood by my side as I looked down.
My father was laid out on his bed, the Scottish double my mother had died in, the one he’d slept in every night of his adult life except the day she’d given birth, the day she died.
Like the house, he was much smaller than I remembered. His wild, white hair lay untamed around his head in a kind of corolla. The skin of his face was parchment stretched over bone. That great prow of a nose was, in death, strong enough to guide a ship in. Thankfully his eyes were shut. His hands were crossed on his chest. He was dressed in an old dark suit. I remembered it well.
“He doesn’t look afraid,” I said. Though he didn’t look peaceful either. Just dead.
“Once he’d lost the stiffness, I smoothed his face a bit,” the doctor told me. “Smoothed it out. Otherwise Mrs. Marr would no have settled.”
“Settled?”
He nodded. “She found him at his desk, stone dead. Ran down the road screaming all the way to the pub. And lucky I was there, having a drink with friends. I came up to see yer father sitting up in his chair, with a face so full of fear, I looked around mysel’ to discover the cause of it.”
“And did you?”
His blank expression said it all. He simply handed me a pile of five notebooks. “These were on the desk in front of him. Some of the writing is in Latin, which I have but little of. Perhaps ye can read it, being the scholar. Mrs. Marr has said that they should be thrown on the fire, or at least much of them scored out. But I told her that had to be yer decision and Alec agrees.”
I took the notebooks, thinking that this was what had stolen my father from me and now was all I had of him. But I said none of that aloud. After glancing over at the old man again, I asked, “May I have a moment with him?” My voice cracked on the final word.
Dr. Kinnear nodded again and left the room.
I went over to the bed and looked down at the silent body. The old dragon, I thought, has no teeth. Then I heard a sound, something so tiny I scarcely registered it. Turning, I saw a toad by the bedfoot.
I bent down and picked it up. “Nothing for you here, puddock,” I said, reverting to the old Scots word. Though I’d worked so hard to lose my accent and vocabulary, here in my father’s house the old way of speech came flooding back. Shifting the books to one hand, I picked the toad up with the other. Then, I tiptoed out of the door as if my father would have minded the sound of my footsteps.
Once outside, I set the toad gently in the garden, or the remains of the garden, now so sadly neglected, its vines running rampant across what was once an arbor of white roses and red. I watched as it hopped under some large dock leaves and, quite effectively, disappeared.
~
Later that afternoon my father’s body was taken away by three burly men for its chestening, being placed into its coffin and the lid screwed down. Then it would lie in the cold kirk till
the funeral the next day.
Once he was gone from the house, I finally felt I could look in his journals. I might have sat comfortably in the study, but I’d never been welcomed there before, so didn’t feel it my place now. The kitchen and sitting room were more Mrs. Marr’s domain than mine. And if I never had to go back into the old man’s bedroom, it would be years too soon for me.
So I lay in my childhood bed, the covers up to my chin, and read by the flickering lamplight. Mrs. Marr, bless her, had brought up a warming pan which she came twice to refill. And she brought up as well a pot of tea and jam pieces and several slabs of good honest cheddar.
“I didna think ye’d want a big supper.”
She was right. Food was the last thing on my mind.
After she left the room, I took a silver hip flask from under my pillow where I’d hidden it, and then poured a hefty dram of whisky into the teapot. I would need more than Mrs. Marr’s offerings to stay warm this night. Outside the sea moaned as it pushed past the skellies, on its way to the shore. I’d all but forgotten that sound. It made me smile.
I read the last part of the last journal first, where father talked about the toad, wondering briefly if it was the very same toad I had found at his bedfoot. But it was the bit right after, where he spoke of “formidable visitants” that riveted me. What had he meant? From the tone of it, I didn’t think he meant any of our St Monans neighbors.
The scholar in me asserted itself, and I turned to the first of the journals, marked 1926, some five years earlier. There was one book for each year. I started with that first notebook and read long into the night.
The journals were not easy to decipher for my father’s handwriting was crabbed with age and, I expect, arthritis. The early works were splotchy and, in places, faded. Also he had inserted sketchy pictures and diagrams. Occasionally he’d written whole paragraphs in corrupted Latin, or at least in a dialect unknown to me.
What he seemed engaged upon was a study of a famous trial of local witches in 1590, supervised by King James VI himself. The VI of Scotland, for he was Mary Queen of Scots’ own son, and Queen Elizabeth’s heir.
The witches, some ninety in all according to my father’s notes, had been accused of sailing over the Firth to North Berwick in riddles—sieves, I think he meant—to plot the death of the king by raising a storm when he sailed to Denmark. However, I stumbled so often over my Latin translations, I decided I needed a dictionary. And me a classics scholar.
So halfway through the night, I rose and, taking the lamp, made my way through the cold dark, tiptoeing so as not to wake Mrs. Marr. Nothing was unfamiliar beneath my bare feet. The kitchen stove would not have gone out completely, only filled with gathering coal and kept minimally warm. All those years of my childhood came rushing back. I could have gone into the study without the lamp, I suppose. But to find the book I needed, I’d have to have light.
And lucky indeed I took it, for in its light it I saw—gathered on the floor of my father’s study—a group of toads throwing strange shadows up against the bookshelves. I shuddered to think what might have happened had I stepped barefooted amongst them.
But how had they gotten in? And was the toad I’d taken into the garden amongst them? Then I wondered aloud at what such a gathering should be called. I’d heard of a murder of crows, an exaltation of larks. Perhaps toads came in a congregation? For that is what they looked like, a squat congregation, huddled together, nodding their heads, and waiting on the minister in this most unlikely of kirks.
It was too dark even with the lamp, and far too late, for me to round them up. So I sidestepped them and, after much searching, found the Latin dictionary where it sat cracked open on my father’s desk. I grabbed it up, avoided the congregation of toads, and went out the door. When I looked back, I could still see the odd shadows dancing along the walls.
I almost ran back to my bed, shutting the door carefully behind me. I didn’t want that dark presbytery coming in, as if they could possibly hop up the stairs like the frog in the old tale, demanding to be taken to my little bed.
But the shock of my father’s death and the long day of travel, another healthy swallow of my whisky, as well as that bizarre huddle of toads, all seemed to combine to put me into a deep sleep. If I dreamed, I didn’t remember any of it. I woke to one of those dawn choruses of my childhood, comprised of blackbirds, song thrushes, gulls, rooks, and jackdaws, all arguing over who should wake me first.
~
For a moment I couldn’t recall where I was. Eyes closed, I listened to the birds, so different from the softer, more lyrical sounds outside my Cambridge windows. But I woke fully in the knowledge that I was back in my childhood home, that my father was dead and to be buried that afternoon if possible, as I had requested of the doctor and Mrs. Marr, and I had only hours to make things tidy in my mind. Then I would be away from St Monans and its small-mindedness, back to Cambridge where I truly belonged.
I got out of bed, washed, dressed in the simple black dress I always travel with, a black bandeaux on my fair hair, and went into the kitchen to make myself some tea.
Mrs. Marr was there before me, sitting on a hardback chair and knitting a navy blue guernsey sweater with its complicated patterning. She set the steel needles down and handed me a full cup, the tea nearly black even with its splash of milk. There was a heaping bowl of porridge, sprinkled generously with salt, plus bread slathered with golden syrup.
“Thank you,” I said. It would have done no good to argue that I drank coffee now, nor did I like either oatmeal or treacle, and never ate till noon. Besides, I was suddenly ravenous. “What do you need me to do?” I asked between mouthfuls, stuffing them in the way I’d done as a youngster.
“’Tis all arranged,” she said, taking up the needles again. No proper St Monans woman was ever idle long. “Though sooner than is proper. But all to accommodate ye, he’ll be in the kirkyard this afternoon. Lucky for ye it’s a Sunday, or we couldna do it. The men are home from fishing.” She was clearly not pleased with me. “Ye just need to be there at the service. Not that many will come. He was no generous with his company.” By which she meant he had few friends. Nor relatives except me.
“Then I’m going to walk down by the water this morning,” I told her. “Unless you have something that needs doing. I want to clear my head.”
“Aye, ye would.”
Was that condemnation or acceptance? Who could tell? Perhaps she meant I was still the thankless child she remembered. Or that I was like my father. Or that she wanted only to see the back of me, sweeping me from her domain so she could clean and bake without my worrying presence. I thanked her again for the meal, but she wanted me gone. As I had been for the past ten years. And I was as eager to be gone, as she was to have me. The funeral was not till mid afternoon.
“There are toads in the study,” I said as I started out the door.
“Toads?” She looked startled. Or perhaps frightened.
“Puddocks. A congregation of them.”
Her head cocked to one side. “Och, ye mean a knot. A knot of toads.”
A knot. Of course. I should have remembered. “Shall I put them out?” At least I could do that for her.
She nodded. “Aye.”
I found a paper sack and went into the study, but though I looked around for quite some time, I couldn’t find the toads anywhere. If I hadn’t still had the Latin dictionary in my bedroom, I would have thought my night visit amongst them and my scare from their shadows had been but a dream.
“All gone,” I called to Mrs. Marr before slipping out through the front door and heading toward the strand.
~
Nowhere in St Monans is far from the sea. I didn’t realize how much the sound of it was in my bones until I moved to Cambridge. Or how much I’d missed that sound till I slept the night in my old room.
I found my way to the foot of the church walls where boats lay upturned, looking like beached dolphins. A few of the older men, past their fishing day
s, sat with their backs against the salted stone, smoking silently, and staring out to the gray slatey waters of the Firth. Nodding to them, I took off along the beach. Overhead gulls squabbled and far out, near the Bass Rock, I could see, gannets diving head-first into the water.
A large boat, some kind of yacht, had just passed the Bass and was sailing west majestically toward a mooring, probably in South Queensferry. I wondered who would be sailing these waters in such a ship.
But then I was interrupted by the wind sighing my name. Or so I thought at first. Then I looked back at the old kirk on the cliff above me. Someone was waving at me in the ancient kirkyard. It was Alec.
He signaled that he was coming down to walk with me and as I waited, I thought about what a handsome man he’d turned into. But a fisherman, I reminded myself, a bit of the old snobbery biting me on the back of the neck. St Monans, like the other fishing villages of the East Neuk, were made up of three classes—fisher folk, farmers, and the shopkeepers and tradesmen. My father being a scholar was outside of them all, which meant that as his daughter, I belonged to none of them either.
Still, in this place, where I was once so much a girl of the town—from the May—I felt my heart give a small stutter. I remembered that first kiss, so soft and sweet and innocent, the windmill hard against my back. My last serious relationship had been almost a year ago, and I was more than ready to fall in love again. Even at the foot of my father’s grave. But not with a fisherman. Not in St Monans.
Alec found his way down to the sand and came toward me. “Off to find croupies?” he called.
I laughed. “The only fossil I’ve found recently has been my father,” I said, then bit my lower lip at his scowl.
“He was nae a bad man, Jan,” he said, catching up to me. “Just undone by his reading.”