And now it was all over. Scott and Macrae wouldn’t hold it against him, he knew that. On the other hand, did he want allies like Drummond and Macfarlane, those echoes of the fundamentalist platitudes?
He knew instinctively that his wife would be against him, for she was on the side of the young. She would have won Murdo and Drummond over to her side: he didn’t have the sensitivity or the bonhomie for dealing with people. He rose from the table wishing above all things that he could sit by his fireside and read a book. But, no, he couldn’t do that. The real world was always where one was, the kingdom of heaven was at hand. In all decisions great or small the kingdom of heaven was at hand. His stomach felt distended and poisoned. At any moment he was going to be sick.
Murdo waited behind for him as if he wished to be congratulated on the stand he had taken but the minister didn’t wish to speak to him. Was Murdo right? Was the Apocalypse near, the wild white horses raging like billows. Were the signs of Sodom and Gomorrah misdirected letters and tappings on windows at night?
“Well, so that’s that, Murdo,” was all he said as he went out into the sunshine where the gravestones leaned against each other in the slanting light. He saw Mrs Berry bending down, placing a bunch of flowers on her husband’s grave. How long since he had died now? Twelve years? Fourteen? And then there was Morag Bheag. He would have to enquire about her son. Mrs Berry straightened and waved to him. Her daughter waited in her yellow car.
The grey gravestones reminded him of the Covenanters, of their determination to worship as they wished. The words stood up in front of his eyes as if engraved on stone:
Blows the wind today and the sun and the rain are flying
blows the wind on the moors today and now
where about the graves of the martyrs the whaups are crying,
my heart remembers how.
Grey recumbent tombs of the dead in desert places,
standing stones on the vacant wine red moor,
hills of sheep and the homes of the silent vanished races,
and winds austere and pure.
He had hardly thought that he knew the words so well. The yellow car, a bright bubble in the day, drew away. The land stretched in front of him, the houses, the gardens, the rivers, the mountain. On such a mountain, but perhaps less green, the tablets had been handed down from a cloud of smoke.
Let me know You again, he prayed, let me hear You speak again. Speak to me out of the fire, the committee meeting, out of the grass at my feet. But, as he looked, the smoke from the different chimneys seemed to twist in different directions like snakes. Where were the martyrs now? In Ireland perhaps where the assassin gunned down the man with the rosary or the fanatic sprayed the policeman with bullets. And in this little place so serene and flowery what could he do? He watched Murdo as he made his way down the brae. He would be happy tonight, the decision would make his day for him. But had he himself made the right decision? He didn’t know. Had he really made a decision at all or had he simply responded to the programmed voice of his ancestors, severe and plain, that had spoken through him?
11
“WHAT HAPPENED THEN?” said his wife as the minister came into the manse.
“They’re not getting it,” he said abruptly.
“Oh? Who decided that?”
“I did.”
She was silent for a moment and then said, “Did you mention the picnic, the outing I was suggesting?”
“Not yet.”
“I think it would be very nice since the weather is so good,” she added enthusiastically. “I see them all in a field as in Biblical times eating their food and drinking their lemonade and the children running their races. The old people must certainly be there. Not just the parents. If necessary we shall provide sandwiches. What do you think?”
“I think it’s a good idea.”
“Especially,” she said, “as the weather is so good and no sign of a break in it. They say that there will be a second crop of fruit. I heard that on the radio. In England, anyway.”
“As in 1955,” he said.
“1955?”
“It was the same sort of summer. It was the year we came here.”
“So it was.”
He remembered it very well. It was the year he had left the city and had accepted the charge where he now was. He hadn’t believed a place could be so beautiful. He had walked about in a daze of happiness. Why, the very stones seemed to be shining as in a Revelation of their own. One morning he had seen a fawn feeding at the side of the manse, its delicate face twitching. The two of them had gazed at each other as if across an earth that was touched with annunciation. Even the stained glass windows had sparkled with their pictures of shepherds with staffs, the Christ figure holding out its empty hands, pale and bearded.
“Don’t you remember?” he said.
“Yes, I remember.”
In those days he had lived as in Nazareth or in Bethlehem. On Easter Sunday when he saw all the women in church with their new hats it was as if his heart turned over with pain and pleasure. Mrs Cameron, the organist, filled the stone building with music and it was only afterwards that he had been disturbed by the small mirror which she had in front of her. She tidied her hair at it before beginning to play.
“I wonder if Bach did that,” he had thought rapturously.
His two boys would come home in the evening in their football boots and muddy jerseys and he himself as if enchanted would read his commentaries and prepare his sermons in a continual trilling of birds.
He suddenly grasped his wife’s hand and they stood there in the living room in the autumn twilight. Soon the moon would rise, startlingly brilliant, and the millions of stars would come out as if engraved on the sky.
His wife said, “I don’t like Morag Bheag’s son being in Ireland.”
“Have you seen Annie? She’ll have something to say about it.”
“No, I haven’t seen her.”
“She’s interested in the East now,” he said. “She’ll end up as a Hindu or a Mohammedan. She believes that all the wisdom of the world came from there.”
“Is that right? Of course she’s a funny woman. But strong.”
“She’s strong certainly. One of these days she’ll go about in a veil. I believe she has dismissed her Jehovah’s Witness.”
“I would imagine that. Are you feeling all right? You look pale.”
“I’m fine. It’s just those silly committee meetings.”
They sat there companionably while the moon rose ahead of them, shedding its uniform predestined light.
“Do you believe,” he said, “that everything is predestined?”
“I thought we had gone through all that already. I don’t and neither do you.”
“Sometimes I wonder about it,” he sighed. “I feel as if I have been here before, as if my whole life is a replay of an earlier recording.”
“Even your committee meetings?”
“Especially these,” he answered, smiling.
“I feel as if I’m catching up on what has already happened. And yet I shouldn’t feel like that. The truth about Christ was that He was new, that He gave the world a fresh start. The rest of us pass on our weaknesses and our sins, only He was pure.” He was silent for a moment and his wife said, “I don’t believe the gift shop will sell very much. I was in again today and there were only two people there. Why they should have opened a gift shop I don’t understand.”
“Are there many tourists?”
“Oh, plenty. Germans, Dutch, and even two Japanese.”
“Japanese?”
“I believe he’s an engineer. He’s got a tiny wife and a tiny child, and he stays with Calum the butcher. You know that his wife does bed and breakfast.”
“I know.
“Sometimes,” he said, “I wonder what my contribution to this place has been. What should the job of a minister be? Maybe it should be to disguise death from them? Or go about in a hairshirt. At least the people who provide tourists with
bed and breakfast know what they are doing.”
“You look thin enough for a saint,” his wife said affectionately.
He heard the train’s whistle and was again reminded of predestination. Maybe they should go and visit one of their sons. In fact he ought to visit both of them before anything serious happened to him. Immensely pure, the moonlight swam about them. Endure, endure, as the Anglo Saxons had done among the storms and the blizzards when their castles where they had been happy had been taken away from them. What was that poem again about Maldon? ‘While the spirit endures.’
“The cat caught a vole today,” said his wife dreamily. “I found it in the garden with it. I took it out of its mouth and released it. It was playing with it on the lawn.”
“Good,” he said absently. He wondered where the cat went during the day. It left the house every morning and padded into the bushes with a sense of purpose and then in the evening it sat by the fire humming to itself like a hoover.
Even the cats had purpose.
“Young Hugh and young Alisdair found a ring,” said his wife, “near the railway station. They brought it home to Calum. His wife thinks it belonged to Chrissie Murray.”
“Oh? Did she lose it?”
“They think she might have thrown it away when she was going to catch the train. It’s the sort of thing she might do. She wanted to be finished with it all perhaps.”
“And so she threw the ring away?”
“That’s the theory anyway. A ring wouldn’t normally fall from one’s finger.”
“I hope John doesn’t find out.”
“They’re not going to give it to him. I think they might give it to you so that you can keep it. They think you are wise and will know what to do.”
There it was again, the childish trust that the Bible had something to say about women who left their husbands, taking transistor radios with them, and throwing rings into bushes. He, their minister, wasn’t any wiser than they were. Sometimes he thought that Kenny Foolish who wandered about the village with his big blank clock-face was just as wise as he was himself, and with whom little children played contentedly for he was a child himself and as much as them would play games for hours together.
“I don’t mind keeping it,” he said. “I don’t think John should see it. He’s got enough on his plate. And in any case we don’t know definitely that it was Chrissie’s.”
“It is more difficult for a man to be left alone to cope,” said his wife mildly.
It came into his mind how a minister from a town he knew had taken a little Vietnamese child into his house. There she sat, gentle and smiling, after the helicopters had burned her village with waves of flame. O world, what is happening to you? Is there no one listening while the Irish gun each other down from speeding cars, while the boat people rise and fall on blank nameless seas, while millions of children hold out shrunken arms in Cambodia? Sorrow and grief without end, and how little he knew of it. He had never been starved, he had never been nearly drowned, he had never been burned with napalm. What then had he to say?
“I think I’ll go to bed,” he said. “I feel tired.” Her sharp eyes clouded for a moment and he could have sworn that she knew what was wrong with him, but she didn’t say anything. My bonny little fighter, he thought, you stood out for me even when I tried to shift the blame, you’ve been as straight as a die. And yet you are infinitely mysterious to me, your womanly ways are strange and odd like a river that sings in the night. I don’t understand you, your concern for cups and plates and chairs. Do not think of the morrow, do not lay up treasure on earth, for the moth will corrupt it.
He saw the lights go out in Calum’s house and then in Collins’ house and then in Mrs Berry’s house.
“I’ll come to bed as well,” said his wife, “after I’ve locked up.”
He was suddenly almost consumed with rage. I’m the fig tree without fruit, so much to do and so little time or inclination to do it. Give me a sign, he murmured inwardly, give me a sign, O Lord. But the moon shone, bright and distant, and he thought with astonishment, men walked on that brilliant barren globe. The Universe swarmed with people. If he himself had been born in Cambodia what would he have been? Would he have confronted the teeming jungle with his starched collar?
His wife came in and they entered the bedroom together. She sat in front of the mirror for a moment loosening her hair. Dear girl, he thought, I love you. I shall love you forever even in death. And he shivered. He heard the throaty cry of an owl as it quartered the woods searching for a mouse, a vole, anything that moved. The berries had lost their redness in the dark. A dog howled and then a cat as if caught in barbed wire suddenly screamed. The sky was a sieve of a million lights, space was endless. He felt suddenly dizzy and sat down on the bed. We twa hae paiddlt in the burn. The words came into his mind and were infinitely sad and regretful. His wife turned to him in her white nightgown and they clutched each other in the darkness. “I’ll turn over now,” she said and kissed him. Her kiss was fragrance on his lips. He imagined Judas bending down and lightly touching with his lips the divine face in the shroud. The pulpit was a forest full of complications. How had he ever thought that he had understood what he had been doing?
12
MARY MACARTHUR LISTENED to John Murray working on the roof which was being repaired because it let the rain in during the winter. She hoped that he wasn’t a Catholic. Ever since her daughter Kate had married that fellow Danny Young she hadn’t liked Catholics. Her grandchildren were going to be brought up in the Catholic Church even though she had raised Kate up to be a faithful Protestant, sending her to Sunday School in her twin ribbons of red, teaching her to recite passages of the Bible such as that section about Charity from Corinthians which her father had taught her himself when she was a child. But there had been no way of stopping Kate from marrying, she had been set on it, and now she would pay for it with holy water and candles and vulgar incense.
Actually it was possible that the whole village was seething with secret Catholics pretending to be Protestants when they were not. One couldn’t put anything past them. She wasn’t sorry when she heard that the chapel had been broken into, that would teach them. And look at all the trouble they were causing in Ireland with their masks and their guns. My poor Kate, she thought, when I hoped you were going to be a comfort to me in my old age, look what happened, you were taken in and deceived by smooth words. And anyway Danny Young’s mother was a dirty woman incapable of keeping her house spick and span. And on top of that she smoked, at her age. What could you expect of people like that?
When her daughter came to visit her it was as if she had been let out on parole. Of course she now knew that she had made a mistake but she wouldn’t admit it. She was too proud to tell her own mother that she was like a prisoner of war. Look at what they did to their womenfolk in Belfast, they tarred and feathered them and shaved their hair.
She put the kettle on and went outside and shouted to the joiner to come down. He was a nice fellow, name of Murray, and his wife had run away with another fellow. A Catholic, she shouldn’t wonder. They were everywhere in Glasgow, the city was hoaching with them. Leaving him with those two little girls, it wasn’t right, nothing good would come of it. Murray was very quiet these days. In the early days you would hear his whistling as he worked but he didn’t whistle now. He came inside, his ruler in the top pocket of his dungarees and sat down in the chair that she had placed at the table for him. She had laid out a roll and tea for him. He said, “It’s just as well that you did the roof just now. The rain would be in in the winter.”
She felt even as he spoke the stabbing pain in her hip. Actually she wouldn’t put it past that doctor to be a Catholic as well. Sometimes she wondered whether she shouldn’t throw away the pills he gave her though the pain was great. He didn’t belong locally, that was sure, and Stewart was a Catholic name. A lot of tinkers were called Stewart as well. Murray ate his roll quietly and drank his tea, as if he didn’t wish to speak, or as if
he had nothing to speak about. He looked drained and blank. Why, she could remember when his children had been baptised in those days when she could go to church and didn’t have to stay in the house all the time.
She didn’t know whether she ought to mention his wife. Sympathy was good for a man, but on the other hand he might not wish to talk about it.
“I’ll tell you,” she said abruptly, “my own son-in-law should have done that roof for me, but these Catholics can’t do anything. He didn’t need to have been told about it. He could have climbed that roof with a ladder. Why couldn’t he do that? The priest maybe told him not to, because I’m a Protestant. He doesn’t care whether I have water coming in and ruining my good wallpaper.”
Murray had become morose right enough. He had finished his roll and was making himself a cigarette. She had heard that if you gave workers tea they would add it to the time that they had been on the job, but she didn’t think that Murray was like that. She chattered on while he smoked.
“Of course,” she said, “they usually have big families and that’s why they are poor. The Pope makes them have a good family and yet he’s not married himself. That’s to make sure that there are more of them than of us. He came to Ireland and told them all to have big families. He landed there in a ’plane. I’ll tell you another thing, he’s a Communist. They think he’s descended from St Peter, but Peter was a true Protestant and anyway you never found any of the disciples travelling about in ’planes. They were given a little food and they were told to go about the world preaching. That’s what Christ said to them. Now they have council houses.”
As he sat at the table silently she thought that perhaps he ought to have married Kate. He had always been a good clean worker and look what happened to him: there was no justice in the world. If there was, how should a good workman who had harmed no one be shamed like that, in front of his own people. He should have taken a whip to that wife of his with her bare knees and her red boots. In fact she thought that she remembered him having been out once with Kate but she wasn’t sure about that. Kate had been out with so many boys before she got married. One of them had given her a beautiful ring and hadn’t even asked for it back when she got married to someone else.
A Field Full of Folk Page 6