A Field Full of Folk

by Iain Crichton Smith

  “I hear you’re in the wheelbarrow race,” she said to John.

  “Yes, I got myself landed for that,” he replied. She wondered what would happen to Chrissie while he was taking part in the sports and decided that she would stay with her.

  The grass below her was slightly damp. Not far from her she saw the Jap smiling into the sun serene as a graven image. Her mind cast about for a topic that would be neutral enough for the inflammation not to become swollen again. And yet there was a compulsion, sadistic in its intensity, to be probing at the wound.

  “It is good for the children to have such a day,” she said at last to Chrissie who replied, “Yes, it brings them together doesn’t it?” Yet even that statement, innocent as it appeared, hadn’t been a neutral one for it recalled that Chrissie had in fact been willing to abandon her children when she had made her frantic flight.

  On the other hand how could one remain silent, thought Mrs Scott. One could only do that when the atmosphere around one was settled and calm. She noticed that Chrissie was wearing flat shoes and not the red flamboyant boots in which she had left the village. Well, what had it been like? She herself had often speculated about such a parting, even from her own husband, steady and unwavering as he was. There was a part of her which remained discontented with the kitchen and the cooker, the white shrine at which so many were forced to serve. There was a part of her which was fluttering and wild and dumb. Not that she had ever made the leap though she had thought about it: not that her husband had ever dreamed that she would make it.

  The minister was now announcing the wheelbarrow race in which the children would be wheeled along by the stronger adults. John stood up, excused himself, and walked across the field to where the wheelbarrows were waiting. In one of them Kenny Foolish was hanging upside down as if on a playful cross which he had devised for himself. The wheelbarrows were brought to the starting point with lazy movements as if they were stirring in a gluey substance composed of time become tactile.

  Mrs Scott suddenly turned to Chrissie and asked, “What was it like, then?” It was as if she were saying, “We are two outsiders, you might as well tell me and I won’t tell anyone. We both made the leap, I to this village which I saw at its best during the summer holidays, you to that man whose better side you saw.”

  “I made a mistake,” said Chrissie, “I made a bad mistake.” It was the first time that she had spoken of what had happened since she came home. Everyone was trying to avoid speaking of the business and now this Englishwoman with the blunt nature was asking her. Her voice seemed to herself dead and far away.

  “It was all right at the beginning. It’s a great feeling to throw everything away. I did it on impulse. One day I was washing dishes at the sink and I could see the mountain in front of me and the train going up and down and then I … just went. It was like a brainstorm. I’m glad I came back.”

  “Are you? Are you?” said Mrs Scott fiercely. “Are you sure?”

  “Yes, I’m sure,” Chrissie replied, calmly. “I’m perfectly sure.”

  And she was sure. She felt at home in a way that she had never felt at home in Glasgow. She couldn’t put into words what exactly she felt, it was a peace that almost justified her momentary exile.

  She looked across to the water which shone in the sun and then to her right where she could see Mrs Berry’s calf grazing in the field, tethered there by its rope. In a way it was all like that, necessary and to be chafed against. The only thing that bothered her was that she had to make her hair into a bun, she who had before her marriage worked as a hairdresser and who hated such conformity. And yet she wasn’t to be pitied. She was in fact very lucky. What if after all John hadn’t wanted her back? But he had done so in spite of everything, in spite of the knowledge of that other bed in which she had so feverishly rested, in spite of the betrayal. That must be what people called love.

  She watched him as he placed little Alisdair in the wheelbarrow, lifting him lightly and carefully. How had she not recognised that patient fidelity? The shadow fell over her again. What if he had not wanted her back? What if in the future he wanted someone else? What would her bargaining power be then?

  “Don’t you worry,” said Mrs Scott patting her knee. “Don’t worry. Time will heal. You will have to join one of our committees. It will keep you from being bored. Once you’ve heard Mrs Campbell going on for an hour you’ll feel that you’re at home again.” And she laughed happily as if she and Mrs Campbell belonged inalienably to the same village, equal and essential to each other.

  Chrissie smiled back at her. What a pretty child she was, though later she would almost certainly run to fat.

  “You and John come and see us one night. We’ll have plenty to talk about.”

  The diamond panes on that thatched cottage, had they been red or green? And had the woman’s name been Sarah or … She could swear that it began with an S. Now she could see the bus shelter and hear the birds singing in the gardens. She was standing at the station and the train was rocketing past at what must have been eighty miles an hour. She withdrew from the edge of the platform. There was an Indian standing beside her, a furled umbrella in one hand and a copy of The Times in the other. No, she couldn’t go back there, it was finished with, it was a world that was forever gone. She must put all that away from her, and accept the place where she was as being the one where she would stay and be eventually buried. There was no way round it, the railway lines had pointed irretrievably to where she was.

  The Jap was standing up with his camera pointed at the wheelbarrows and Mrs Berry was standing beside her daughter Patricia, her green cap on her head. And there was Annie talking to those Germans in her circles of brown beads, her hawklike face vital and interested as if she belonged to a world that was definite and meaningful. The sun laid a track across the field and the wheelbarrows were about to go.

  “Come on, come on!” the minister heard himself shouting to John Murray who was wheeling Alisdair along in the barrow. All around him there was shouting and cheering as the competitors raced across the field bouncing in and out of the slight hollows of deeper damper green in the ground. At the far end of the line which was advancing raggedly yet energetically he could see Peter, Mrs Berry’s grandson, in a barrow which was being wheeled along by the janitor, Duncan Bell, known affectionately as the Furnace. He hadn’t realised that there were so many wheelbarrows in the village, all painted in different colours, all seemingly in good condition. It recalled the chariots of the—was it the Hittites?—who had in the past attacked the Egyptians and beaten them down from their arrogant power. The race seemed to him to be symbolic of an army as it headed into the sun which was shining directly ahead. It was odd how involved for a moment he felt in the fortunes of these wheelbarrow drivers, even though they were slightly comic, the wheelbarrows like parodies of war machines composed of brittle wood, while the crowd laughed and cheered, some of them with sandwiches still in their hands. And there it was. The momentary justice of life had decreed that John Murray and Alisdair should win. (Had the janitor in fact slowed down slightly at the decisive moment?) But Alisdair was now out of the wheelbarrow and dancing up and down in triumph, his previously petulant face transformed from anger into joy. Suffer the little children to come unto me, the Lord had said, in their changeable hearts, in their almost uncorrupted shine of the future. In just such a place as this, among such a crowd, He had preached, while later there had been gathered the remains of the fishes and the loaves, the eternally renewed bread of the imagination. How lucky it was that both John Murray and Alisdair had at last won, and how the crowd liked it. His wife was now bending down and handing Alisdair his ten pence and Alisdair was running away to his friends, his face alight with happiness.

  He walked over towards Mary Macarthur who was sitting by her self on a chair that someone had thoughtfully supplied. He thought that it was Mrs Campbell who had thought of bringing chairs along for the older people and made a mental note to thank her.

  �
��And how are you today?” he asked, leaning down, for Mary was slightly deaf.

  “Oh, I’m fine, minister,” she replied, her face creased yet happy and serene. How old would she be now? Climbing for eighty certainly.

  “Good, good,” he heard himself saying. “And how are you enjoying your little outing?”

  “It’s fine, minister. My daughter couldn’t come. I wish she had been able to come.” Of course she couldn’t come, she was married to a Catholic. “I miss her,” she added petulantly. “But then she belongs to the Other Side.”

  “Yes,” he said, “I quite understand.”

  The old woman tapped the arms of her chair spiritedly and said furiously, “He wouldn’t let her come, you know, even though her place is here.”

  “But of course,” said the minister placatingly, “her children don’t come to the Sunday School.”

  “I know that but they should, shouldn’t they? Didn’t I go myself to the Sunday School when Mr Marshall was the minister here? And didn’t she herself go to the Sunday School? In those days you had to do what your parents told you.”

  She was staring at him with an odd almost disquieting gaze, and he felt that she knew things about him that he didn’t know himself. She had a reputation for telling fortunes in the village, and many superstitious women had gone to visit her to have their fortunes read from her study of tea leaves; she had once cured little Alisdair of what she called the King’s Evil, a spot on his lip. The minister himself didn’t believe in such nonsense though curiously enough his wife had had her fortune read on one of her visits to the old woman.

  She had looked at her cup and tilted it this way and that and said that there was a bit of jealousy going on around her, and that she could see a voyage. She was perfectly convinced of her own powers. The same unwinking stare—common to both the old and children—was fixed on him.

  “You are not well,” she told him at last as if delivering a weighty judgment. “You should look after yourself.” Her voice came to him as the Oracle at Delphi must have come to the Greeks and behind her he could see, stretched into a far past, a history of witchcraft and magic from which the church had managed to extricate itself.

  “Oh, I’m all right,” he said lightly.

  “Of course you have much to do,” she said. “The Catholics are taking over the world. Did you see the pictures of the Pope on TV? You have to stop them,” she said leaning towards him confidentially. “Mr Marshall never gave them an inch, not that much,” and she measured a tiny length on her finger. “He preached against them regularly. He called them the Powers of Darkness. Now my son-in-law belongs to them. He worships that holy water and he makes my daughter go to Mass. You watch them, that Pope is a cunning devil. In his white robes.”

  “I look after myself,” he said in the same light tone.

  “You don’t understand,” she insisted. “You don’t understand, I wouldn’t be surprised if that Mrs Scott wasn’t one of them. We don’t watch them enough.” And then she added, “You should take honey. Honey is good for you. It has the sun in it.”

  At that moment he had the strangest feeling as if he had actually been touched by an omen from the darkness and roots of long ago, an ancient force which dwelt in this woman who refused to eat fish because the Catholics were supposed to eat it. It was as if the field itself darkened and on one side of it there were the phantom warriors for good, arrayed in their white robes, while ranged against them on the other side were the warriors of evil emerging out of the shadows that played around them. The field became a treasury of herbs among which old women bent down to gather the most secret in order to help their own army. He shivered in the sun and said,

  “Well, I’m glad that John Murray and little Alisdair won.”

  “Yes, he’s a good joiner. It’s a pity about that wife of his in her Papish boots. But he’s a good man and a good worker. And Alisdair’s mother hasn’t had much since her husband was killed.” How old the woman was. Perhaps she was more than eighty. Her face was beginning to curdle like old milk.

  Was it true that even in this village in the past people had stuck pins into effigies of those whom they hated, that this woman herself could still cure the King’s Evil as kings had done in the past?

  “I’m sorry,” he said, “I’ll have to go. I’d better announce the next event,” which was in fact a three-legged race.

  “You take honey,” she said, smiling at him. “You take honey. It’s the best thing you can take.”

  “I’ll do that,” he replied. “I’ll make sure my wife buys honey next time she goes shopping.”

  And yet the meeting with the old woman had disturbed him. It was as if through her he sensed an ancient force, which was indifferent both to evil and to good, which was close to the sources of nature itself in all its manifestations, whose badge was perhaps the oak tree and whose instruments were herbs and nostrums of all kinds. He prayed rapidly as if to make the darkness pass from him and thought wryly that if he had been a Catholic he might have counted his beads.

  “I am certain,” said Mrs Campbell to him, “that John Murray and Alisdair were allowed to win that race. I don’t think that’s fair.”

  “Oh, I never noticed that,” he said diplomatically.

  “I could see Duncan Bell,” she said. “He pulled back at the last minute. That was because Alisdair lost his first race and made a fuss about it. My daughter was in the race, you know. And my husband couldn’t get past Duncan Bell when he pulled back. I am quite sure that is what happened.”

  “If you are convinced that is what happened perhaps you should have a word with Duncan himself.”

  “Duncan? Of course he would deny it. He would deny everything. He has no sense of truth whatsoever.”

  It occurred to the minister that the reason she didn’t like Duncan Bell was that they both competed for Bed and Breakfast visitors. There was also the fact that Mrs Campbell had been a teacher before her marriage and considered Duncan Bell to be many classes below her.

  “That man thinks he runs the school,” she would say. “He has more power than the headmistress herself.” And indeed one would think that too from talking to Duncan who would say, “My school has the worst ceilings in the county. When I ’phoned him up the Director of Education said that he couldn’t do anything about them. I told him that I considered my school to be as important as any in the county. I told him that over the ’phone.”

  “I should just like to know,” said Mrs Campbell. “If we are going to have competitions let us have fair competitions. It’s the principle of the thing.”

  The minister briefly made the announcement about the three-legged race and standing with his back to the table stood and watched. He felt very tired as if his whole body had turned to water, and yet there was an hour or so yet to go. He looked forward to a night at the fire reading a book. The last time he had been to the library he had a strange feeling as if he were walking over skulls and the bones of millions of people, as if as a minister he should not be studying books but listening to endless stories of tragedy and sickness.

  He looked over towards Elizabeth. Now there was a girl of plain shining goodness. What money she made at her job she spent the greater part of on Oxfam, and yet he himself had recently read that hardly any of that money was getting through to the victims. They said that parcels meant for the poor and dispossessed were being stolen by those who were organising the supplies. Bespectacled, cheerful, pale, Elizabeth was always helping people in the village, but was considered by Mary Macarthur to be in the pay of the Catholics because she had brought her fish on a Friday.

  He was suddenly filled with anger. Was there no end to the petty strategies of the mind, was there no end to its vanity and egotism and its thorny sensitivity? Was there no end to the eternal voice that cried, “I am, I am, look at me. I will not be put upon.”

  He felt as if he wished to leave the assembled crowd and go away somewhere, and then it came to him, “This must have been how Christ Himself
felt when He went into the desert to pray. Underneath the stars. He must have grown exhausted by unteachable human nature with its coil on coil of self deceit, He must have tried to put the voices away from Him and lain on the ground at night staring up at the lucid cities of the stars, so aloof and so apparently harmonious.” But then he was a minister, he wasn’t Christ, he was only a poor follower, he needed help.

  How could God have made such people the apex of his creation, how could He have generated out of the immense ocean of His illimitable spirit people whose worry was that a wheelbarrow race had been fixed? And he suddenly smiled to himself as he thought that perhaps he was being too serious. Perhaps he should look more towards a solution of comic glory, as if the whole universe were a healthy joke the answer to whose complexities would finally emerge like the punch line in a funny story.

  27

  MARY MURCHISON WAS not an imaginative person. It did not occur to her when she watched the three-legged race that there was anything at all symbolic in it, two people limping along chained to each other heading for the same goal. As she watched her husband talking now to one person now to another she was concerned first of all by his appearance (had he for instance polished his shoes or had he forgotten to put his shirt inside his trousers?), but these days she was also worried about more than that. For of course she knew what the doctor had told him, she was not foolish enough not to know that there was something wrong. Nor did she speculate, as she might have done if she had been more intellectual, that there might be a profound connection between his loss of faith and his cancer, one causing the other, though the enigma was like that of the chicken and the egg. For reasons of his own he did not wish to tell her, he was protecting her in his own fashion and she respected him for what he was doing.