A Field Full of Folk

by Iain Crichton Smith

  “I think I see what you are getting at,” said Mr Scott. “I used to feel the same about the bank. And yet routine is surely our salvation. Surely?”

  “I quite see that,” said the minister, his face pale and intent. “I quite see it. It’s only that I feel we should get a bonus of grace now and again, like interest in the bank. You see, I’m an intellectual being. It’s in my nature. Yet the significance of the world as it says in the Bible can be revealed even to little children. The mind has nothing to do with it. Christ entered the world vertically from above but the horizontal world is our province. I can understand that. He entered history and transformed it. The thing about Him is His continual radiance and freshness. It must have been a place like this that he came to: his language surprises us by its radiance. How can we tap his power at its source, its simplicity? I feel as if the answer is all very simple, like drinking water, like seeing a stone in its uncorrupted nature without the shine of human beings on it. Prayer, I’ve prayed.” He had given up all pretence now and was talking as if the putative man who had lost his faith was in fact himself, as indeed he was.

  “To live well and with simplicity, how difficult it is.”

  “Yes,” said Scott slowly, looking at him with compassion. “Yes, there ought to be a way of living like that. And yet, aren’t you romanticising? Aren’t you idealising the children?”

  “Oh, I know that,” said the minister impatiently. “I have children of my own. They were jealous of each other. They fought each other all the time. They were not innocent. And yet they had the capacity to surprise. Do you see? They had the capacity to see the world in a new way. Listen, some time ago I was reading about Einstein. What happened to him? He had no facts other than those which were already provided. But he looked at them as if they were new. So instead of saying a train leaves a station at forty miles an hour he says that the station leaves the train at forty miles an hour. And both are right. Yet only he had the childlike mind to see it. I look out every day from my window at the rails. They are heading somewhere, the train is constrained by them. The question is how to get off the rails and remain true and loyal and faithful and astonished. If there is one woman in the village I admire it is Mrs Berry. She has strength. Where does she get it from? She is never afraid and the world never becomes stale for her. Do you understand what I’m saying?” He wiped the sweat from his brow with a handkerchief.

  “I think so,” said Scott. “When I retired from my work I felt the same. I felt disoriented. I would wander about the house like a ghost, picking something up and then putting it down again. That was why I left England, I know that now. I wanted as it were a second chance. It must have been as you say. The world needed a second chance, and got it through Christ.”

  “Yes, yes,” said the minister with the same glowing eagerness. “That is what I’m talking about, a second chance. You know the way you are typing something and you are using carbon and it seems wrinkled and old and used. You want to throw it away. It’s as if we want to throw the first life away and have a new one. How did you cope?” he asked abruptly.

  “How did I cope,” said Scott meditatively. “It’s difficult to say. It’s a question of letting the springs of action run down. Of realising that one must accept what there is, taking pleasure in small things if one can.” He smiled suddenly. “I grew interested in gossip again. In the doings of ordinary people like myself. And then very slowly the world accommodated itself to me. That is what happened.”

  “Yes,” said the minister, “but I don’t want that. I want the world to be as glorious as it once was, to be as radiant. When I came here first I didn’t think there was a place as beautiful as this in the world. I had come from the city, you understand, and then one summer I came here and it seemed to me it was like heaven. Every shadow cast by every stone was clear, almost solid. The hedges seemed to blossom with words. You cannot imagine what it was like. Things …” he tried to grasp it, “Things … they were like … Listen, have you ever seen that visual trick where you stare at a certain shape for a long time and then you turn from it and you look at a blank wall and as you do so an after-image forms itself? I saw one once and do you know that the after-image was the face of Christ. It hovered in front of me. I would look at the floor and then raise my eyes again and the image persisted. It was as if the image of Christ was with me all the time. Do you understand? But I don’t feel that now.”

  “Can any of us,” said Scott gently. “Are you asking too much? After all we grow old and we are none of us perhaps privileged.”

  “But I want it to be like that,” said the minister fiercely. “I do not want faith to grow tired. Is it perhaps that it is not sufficiently tested here? In this calm place? Is that what it is?”

  “I don’t know,” said Scott. They gazed at each other in a common union of despair and yet of hope. Eventually the silence was broken when the minister said, “I think I hear the ladies coming. They must have finished the dishes.”

  As if in a secret conspiracy they smiled at each other and Scott said, “Yes I can hear them. My wife will have been showing yours the house. She always does that.”

  “Mary does the same,” said the minister smiling affectionately. For some reason there came into his mind the phrase, “In my father’s house there are many mansions,” and he felt utterly exhausted as if the words, bare and uncalled for, had reminded him of a world that he could no longer enter.

  The two of them rose to their feet as their wives came in.

  “Discussing theology no doubt,” said Mrs Scott, and Mary smiled. Even my love for you is not enough, thought the minister, even that is not enough.

  21

  MURDO MACFARLANE WALKED heavily into the small garden at the back of his house. He dug in the soil with his graip and took out the potatoes, shaking them free of dirt. He put about a dozen of them into a small blue bucket that he had carried with him from the kitchen. As he was doing this he was aware on the rim of his sight of the other plot where he had his turnips and his carrots. Some day he thought that perhaps he would plant parsley and maybe have a hothouse for those striped tomatoes that had once been given him by George Miller who raised them and gave some to the villagers. As he bent down he felt his knees creaking and his sight blurring a little but he knew that it wasn’t anything serious. Carrying the bucket in his hand he walked past the tool-shed where he kept among other things his hammer and chisel and nails and an old churn that his mother had used when she was making cheese. Automatically and without thinking he checked that the padlock was on the door and that none of these vandals had been trying to get in. Before he entered his house by the back door he shook his shoes free of the dirt that they had accumulated, and watched for a moment the hens moving about in their black skirts like old women taking the air.

  He went into the combined kitchen and scullery, shutting the door behind him. He went over to the sink and put the potatoes in a yellow plastic basin, and then washed them. He frowned slightly: he had been meaning to buy two of those rubber things that you could fit on the taps so that you could spray the water in any direction. He scraped the potatoes and turned the tap off. He poured out the dirty water from the basin and refilled it with fresh water and washed the potatoes again. Bending down he took a pan from the cupboard below the sink and put the potatoes in it and ran water over them. He placed the pan on the nearest ring of the cooker, for he had discovered that the inner ring didn’t work too well. He took the salt container down from on top of the cooker and poured some salt into the pan then switched the cooker on.

  After he had done that he went to the cupboard and set the table with one blue plate, a knife and fork, a cup which was bitten at the edges, sugar, butter, milk, and two biscuits which he took from a tin which he kept in a drawer. Then from the bottom part of the cupboard he took a tin of ham, opened it with the tin opener and put some of it on the plate. The rest he removed from the tin and placed on another plate which he covered with a pudding dish.

 
; Then he sat down on a chair and began to read the Express. But before he could start he noticed that there were spots of dirt on the linoleumed floor and he began to clean it with a brush, putting the dirt on a shovel which he then tilted into the bin. He put the brush back in the corner and began to read. He didn’t read about the Afghanistan invasion but looked for small paragraphs about people. One paragraph told him about a father who had snatched his little daughter from her mother at gun point. He read very carefully, making little movements with his mouth, and moving his neck all the time as if his collar was too tight for him. He didn’t miss one single word and took perhaps seven minutes to read the story. After he had finished the first story he read a second one which told him about a beauty queen who had run away with a new boyfriend leaving her husband behind. The husband wanted her back and had said, according to the reporter, “I will forgive her anything.” While he was reading, the potatoes began to boil and the light shining through the window made big panes on the floor. He heard a hissing sound and went over and turned down the switch for the ring on which the potatoes were boiling. When the water was bubbling merrily but not spilling over he sat down again in his chair. “Climber saved by fingertips,” he read. He moved steadily from word to word, sometimes returning to one if the sentence didn’t seem to make sense. He twisted his neck and his lips moved and the water in the pan bubbled.

  After a while he went over and tested the potatoes with a fork to see if they were ready. He frowned because he had allowed them to become too soft. Then holding the lid of the pan at a slant he poured the hot water down the sink and placed the pan on the ring again, turning the heat down. After the potatoes were dry he placed them on the plate beside the cold ham that he had taken from the tin. Then he sat down and began to eat, chewing carefully and with relish, and when he had finished he placed the plate in the sink. Then he boiled the water in the kettle and made his tea, using one tea-bag only. In order to make the tea stronger he stirred the bag with a spoon, then he poured the tea into a cup, buttered bread, and ate it with his tea. When he had finished his tea he put the milk, sugar, and butter and bread into the cupboard noticing that there was a slice of plain loaf still in the breadpan with green mould on it. He took it out and put it in the bin. Then he washed the knife, cup, fork and spoon, hung the cup on a hook, and put the cutlery in a drawer. He returned to his chair and read some more of the Express, now and again looking up to see if any bird had entered his bird house. One had. It was a blue tit, a beautiful bird which haunted his garden every summer.

  Later on he would go to the shop. In the evening he might watch the television or visit David Collins. For his tea he would have beans with the remainder of the ham and perhaps some of that fresh butter that Sandy sold in his shop. His mouth watered when he thought of its creamy taste. Till then he might do some work in the garden but before that he would have a snooze in his chair. He closed his eyes after placing the Express over his face and prepared to sleep. As he did so he began to think of the girl Elizabeth who came to help David Collins. Why did she hardly ever visit him? Was there something wrong with him? Though he had only one eye he wasn’t a monster. From thinking of Elizabeth his thoughts moved to his mother whose bones were mouldering in the churchyard. He never put any flowers on her grave, and he knew that people talked about that. She would now be a tangle of bones anyway. He was walking through summer with the postbag on his shoulders. A stoat suddenly ran across the road in front of him, stopping to gaze at him with cloudless shining penetrating eyes and then eeling its way through a hole in the wall. He knocked on a door and it opened. “A parcel for you,” he said. The woman who was wearing an almost transparent nightdress invited him in. She said, “I have always loved you. You are the best postman there has ever been. I love your conscience.” He put the bag down. She floated ahead of him, turning to look with untroubled yet inviting eyes. He slept, smiling. Now and again he passed his hand unconsciously over his face as if brushing away a fly.

  22

  “ARE YOU SURE you want to get rid of all the paperbacks?” said the minister’s wife to her husband.

  “I’m quite sure.” He was sitting in the green armchair, the Scotsman in front of him, spectacles down on his nose.

  “A hundred books you want to get rid of. Why, that’s all you have,” she went on. There was something here that she didn’t understand.

  “Yes,” said the minister calmly. “I want to get rid of them. You can put them in boxes and I’ll put them in the boot of the car. Mrs Berry’s daughter is running a bookstall, I think you said.”

  “But look,” she insisted. “These are good books. They are religious books.”

  “Yes,” said the minister patiently, putting down his paper. “They are by Barth and Niebuhr and Kierkegaard. And I’m finished with them.” He was really finished with them, he wanted to give them away, there must be someone else who might want to read them, they hadn’t helped him at all. What use was academic information to a minister when at the end his job was to be at the bedside of a dying man, reading the service for the bride in her white dress, comforting the sick.

  “Yes,” he said with finality, “I’m finished with them.”

  For some reason she shivered as if a dark shade had crossed the sun, as if there was standing at the door with a telegram in his hand a man not with a head but a skull. She often had these premonitions and she couldn’t explain their origin to herself.

  “Have you weighed yourself recently,” she said, “I think you’ve lost weight.”

  “I’m all right,” said the minister. “You just give them the paperbacks. Maybe Annie will buy them though there are none about the East.”

  But the frown on her face persisted. He didn’t like that knitting of her forehead, the twisted paths that were like the tracks left by snails.

  “Sometimes I’m worried about you,” she said. Her one quarrel with him was his secretiveness, his silent endurance, his keeping from her the pain he suffered. She knew that he thought more deeply than she did, that in fact she herself lived in the world’s continual traffic, that when it came to changing a nappy for instance he was useless. And yet her two sons had respected him for he hadn’t been at all bigoted with them. Truly she hadn’t missed the money that other people made. Now and again of course since human nature was human nature she would look at catalogues and think, I would like that ring or that potato peeler or that new hoover. But she had learned not to love possessions, for her husband was totally indifferent to them, his mind was bare and simple. Indeed if it weren’t for her he would walk about the place with his shirt hanging out of his trousers and his face unshaven. He was like a saint: that was the only word that could describe him.

  In all the time he had been in the village he had never asked anything for himself, he bore implied insults with good humour, as if he didn’t belong to the world that ordinary people inhabited.

  He had turned back to the Scotsman and something in the way he held it in front of him brought her terror back again. It was as if a crack had opened in the sky and she sensed a crumbling and breaking, steady, silent and persistent. I should put my arms around him and hold him close, but he doesn’t like these demonstrations of affection, they embarrass him. Of course he was brighter than her, he had been the best student of his year at Theological College, but in a deep sense he was still a child. She dreaded what would happen if she died before him, he would be lost in the world. And she knew that he wouldn’t want to stay with his children however much he liked them.

  You have done well, you good and faithful servant, she thought in silent tribute. And yet, and yet, there was something. He had lost weight. She who never bothered about her weight though it was women’s perpetual topic was frightened now. They had once been young and they had gazed into each other’s eyes in cafes in the city, had climbed the Mound to see round the old historic castle, and yet the faces that they now presented to the world seemed to be much the same, immortal in love. They had grown old in r
eciprocal tune with each other. Time was an eternal miracle. But something had changed. It was like a bell striking, a small metal bell.

  “Are you sure you’re all right?” she said. “You’re perfectly sure?”

  “Perfectly,” he said, without raising his eyes from the Scotsman. “There’s nothing wrong with me. And you can take the books and sell them all. I have plenty more books, enough to keep me going. Anyway it will give you more space. You can always put dishes in the cupboards from which you take the books.”

  “It’s not that,” she said. “I was not thinking about that. I was thinking about you.”

  “For the last time,” he replied. “I’m all right. And for the last time you can take the books with no guilt complex.”

  “All right then, dear. If you’re sure you’ll be all right.” She almost bit her tongue off. “I’ll run down with them now.”

  “You do that, dear,” he said. “Now go away and leave me to read the letter page of the Scotsman. I hadn’t realised there were so many teachers in the world.”

  She went out of the room to hunt for cardboard boxes. “Look, girl,” she told herself firmly. “You take yourself in hand. Just get the cardboard boxes, put the books in them and take them down to Mrs Berry’s daughter. That is what you have to do.” Sometimes her husband would call her Martha. “You are the dearest one,” he would say, “the one who keeps the world going. The one with the flour on her hands and face.” And he had once shown her a painting of a woman with big red arms and a big bosom pouring milk from a red jug into a red ewer. “Thank you,” he had said, “thank you.” She bent down to pack the books in the cardboard boxes which she had found in the attic among her children’s discarded toys.