Hellfire and Herring

by Christopher Rush

  ‘What about your precious God now?’ asked his wife.

  ‘You’re havering like an old fishwife,’ said Job. ‘You’ve got to take in torn nets some time or other. It’s God’s will that matters.’

  But then his three cronies came and made things worse by trying to comfort him. They sat down and wept salt scalding tears, and that just made him see how bad a state he was in. So he opened his mouth and cursed the day he was born.

  ‘I wish I’d died in my mother’s belly and never sucked at her breasts. I’d rather be lying right now, a stillborn bairn in the old kirkyard, with kings and counsellors of the earth, dead in their tombs, dumb as the gold and silver they piled up for nothing, for other folk to spend.

  ‘Why are folk born at all to be burdened and bitter souls, their only comfort to yearn for a death that never comes, their only treasure the tomb, their only gladness the grave?

  ‘You try to live a good life and you see what you get for your trouble.’

  But God answered Job out of the storm-wind.

  ‘Who’s this darkening my door with debate, blethering like a daftie? Get a grip on yourself, man.

  ‘Where were you when I sank the foundations of the earth and threw it up in six days? When I poured out the sea and tethered the tides and all the morning stars struck up a song?

  ‘Ever tried telling the sun to rise? Go on, have a go, make the morning come if you can, take hold of the horizon and shake down the stars, keep the pole-star pointing to the north and tell the Plough not to rust. See if they listen to you.

  ‘Ever seen what lies on the sea-bed, have you? Or behind the gates of death? Or gone into a snowflake or a hailstorm? Are you the father of frost and rain and ice and dew? Could you freeze the sea to stone, do you think? Could you tie up the Pleiades or loose Orion’s belt, tame the Bear or dim Arcturus?’

  Job was quiet through all this, but he never agreed.

  Then God tried one last shot.

  ‘You know how to fish, I suppose? You use a hook and line. Now try it with a whale. Can you get a hook through his snout or bore through that jawbone with a thorn?

  ‘How do you think you’d get on? I’ll tell you. You can hurt him with harpoons, stick him full of spears, butcher him with barbed irons – all that’s straw and stubble to him. You’ll piss your breeks in the process! His teeth are like marlin spikes, his eyes like harbour lamps, his nostrils like funnels, belching smoke and fire. His heart’s like a millstone, his sides like a battleship, his brow like a boulder. His spout’s a tornado, his tail a typhoon. A whale is made of whinstone, my man – and I made him what he is!’

  After that Job saw the point.

  ‘I don’t know what came over me,’ he said. ‘I’m just a bag of wind, a pierhead blether. I can see how small I am – worse than nothing. From now on I’ll keep my hatches battened.’

  And God gave everything back to Job – as a matter of fact he doubled his fortune.

  So keep your mouth shut, and let God do the talking.

  In his most scripturalist phase, before he failed, George taught me the bible in the direct and vivid style of an old whaler, only occasionally referring to the big book itself. He also liked to combine seamanship and religion in the spirit of his generation and grandfather’s.

  There were no ornaments in George’s room. But on one of the walls he had hung a large painting of a ship, which he called the Gospel Ship. It was not a full-rigged vessel – it had twenty-four sails – but on every sail and key part of the ship there was an apt quotation from the bible. He made me learn the names of the sails and parts of the ship, and with my eyes shut I had to tell him the quotations, chapter and verse, together with the references, on every part, and on any part that he might pick out at random. This went on for many Sundays for many years. There were fifty references altogether and I can still do this behind closed eyes.

  The ship was guided by the morning star, shown blazing in the sky, with Revelation 2.28 printed underneath. And I will give him the morning star. At its stern a lighthouse revealed the rocks it had come safely through, and round the white tower was written the reference Psalm 119.105, Thy word is a lamp unto my feet and a light unto my path. A flock of seabirds followed the ship, carrying a message from Ecclesiastes 10:20, A bird of the air shall carry the voice.

  Every one of the twenty-four sails and each of the masts bore its text, and every working part of the vessel was appropriately inscribed, as were each of the ship’s flags. Along the hull of the ship were written the words, Though billows encompass my way, yet shall I fear not. And at the very bottom of the picture was a little couplet:

  Jesus, Saviour, pilot me,

  Over life’s tempestuous sea.

  The sea in the painting was suitably stormy, to fit the caption, and it wore an ominous frown that reminded me of the second verse of Genesis, known to me before I even knew myself, describing the primordial chaos that reigned before God took the universe in hand. Darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. God was invisible but the sea revealed something of his angry expression, and it was those broken masts and spars that frightened me more than anything else in the entire religious scheme of things. How shall we escape if we neglect so great salvation? It equated damnation with drowning – and for the impressionable child who just happened to live surrounded by sea, it represented an everpresent threat.

  Emerging from one of the church services, from Sunday school, or from bible-reading either with George or by myself, was like coming out of the picture houses in Anstruther or Pittenweem. The technicolour stayed in my head and projected itself on to the blues and greens of fields and sea, staining and splashing them with nightmare and blood. Everything was unreal. The preaching was still going on from end to end of the village, from pier to pier, the holy words whipped up on the four winds, howls and hosannahs offering pre-echoes of heaven and hell. The clouds looked strange and unfamiliar, as if they might fracture at the next fraction of recorded time, to reveal the whole biblical chronology of things from the first day to doomsday. And in the huge hole that would open up in the already darkening day, the village and its people, its works and ways, the safe steady ropes of its traditions, its fishing and farming, so changeless and sure, would snap, and in a twinkling we’d all disappear down the dark crack of doom.

  When the storm did break at last, I was standing outside the Congregational church, high up on the braehead, the last chords of the organ voluntary drum-rolling at my back.

  ‘Sky’s too blue over by the Bass,’ an old man said, and he pointed shakily with his stick.

  ‘There’s going to be thunder.’

  Down below us the firth took on an ominous flat calm and there was a terrible quietness. The only sign that the tide was flowing was an uneasy rippling like a whisper on the water. But the purplish grey-blue clouds were massing like anvils on the skyline, all the way along from east to south, showing the direction from which the hammers would soon come crashing. Far above them the whiter clouds dazzled, their edges unnaturally bright. God’s furious face was just behind them and his wrathful glower was what was causing the glare. Without the protection of the clouds his glance would fall on us like an atom bomb. The sea changed from mercury to molten lead and from lead into a black brooding oil. Then the wind sprang up from the south-east, the thunderheads racing in the opposite direction, travelling against the stream of air, and with a flash of lightning across the firth, the storm burst. The Bass roared like a blue bear gone berserk, its deep growls cracking open the sky’s theatre of war.

  But I knew as I ran screaming for my mother and the smothering blankets that the storm was not a mad bear at all but something much worse, because Epp had told me long ago that the thunder was God speaking to the wicked, and I knew there was no one more wicked than myself. My unbelief was abominable and my hypocrisy was an affront to God. I had lied to please the pretty evangelist. I loved her more than Jesus. Bert Mackay would plough a straigh
t furrow but I couldn’t even do that. I’d never make it to the kingdom of heaven.

  A thousand other sins clamoured against me, raging with the thunder and the hissing rain that fell like fire into the firth: Mrs Guthrie’s apples, the extra cream cookie smuggled once into the paper bag when she left the counter, the roses in Miss Balsilbie’s bosom and the white shock of Honeybunch’s flesh, the burning bush, the tree of knowledge that grew between her thighs.

  Everything I had done was a sin, smashed down now on the anvils of the sky to deafen me to mercy and drown out the songs of praise from the Holy City. Every wrongful thought, every playground profanity, the peeing up the wall, the garters round the head, the Blind Man with his stick knocked away from him, Honeybunch spreadeagled and shining on the tombstone. All the crystallized candy stolen from Kate, the taunts at deaf Jean Jeff, the times without number I’d refused to go for messages or told my mother the shop was shut, shufflings and grumblings and lies, lies, lies … ! And Miller’s lost watch, lying somewhere out at sea, where I sometimes wished my father to lie after a thrashing, not forgiving him as I should have done, but wishing him stopped like that watch, a thought for which I’d surely be punished in kind, as happened in sleep often enough, falling down again into the cold dark depths where the whale waited with the face of Tom Tarvit to swallow me like Jonah into the everlasting stench of the bilge, along with the Marship boys.

  Howling, I tore off the bedclothes and ran out into the street. Scores of boys were down at the harbour, turning fear into fun in the middle of the thunder by braving the storm on the Blocks.

  6

  Winter Drifting and Spring Lines

  The Blocks were as far as you could venture out to sea if you weren’t a fisherman and kept your feet on terra firma. Not that they felt all that firm underfoot. Green sleet coated the crumbling surfaces of the concrete megaliths that zigzagged out from the back wall of the east pier and took you into deep water and the heavy swell of the open ocean – ocean enough for me, at any rate. But the petrified forked-lightning formation of the breakwater was the long arm of the law, science’s law, that protected the town and its harbour from the pitiless laws of nature.

  And yet the natural world was in itself a protection of a sort, a skin that stretched between you and the next-world terrors of the evangelists. All year round the skin was there, enveloping and enthralling, keeping you in that state of nature, reminding you of how simple things might have stayed, if only Adam and Eve hadn’t gone the way of their nature. Their disobedience meant we were destined either for the dust or the deep blue sea. We’d come up again as flowers or foam, recycled. All flesh was grass. And what wasn’t – was the curl of a wave, the wishless swing of seaweed in the bay, the mother-of-pearl film on a twist of shell, the glint of what had once been life. Or it was a white flash of wings over the water. Grandfather said that the souls of drowned fishermen became seabirds. So they still hunted for fish and never left the sea, but their spirits soared high above it now, freed from bondage to wind and wheel and tide. And their wailing was for the life they’d left on shore, calling to their loved ones. Grandfather was no churchgoer either. He said that the sun was god.

  ‘Gone to glory? Gone to graveyards more like.’

  That was about as far as he would be drawn on the subject of religion. Instead he drew a perfect circle with a pencil stub round his old shilling and asked if I could show him where it started and where it finished. And when I couldn’t he said that nature went round and round just like that, endlessly, and we’d go with it when we were dead, and that was our eternity.

  ‘So you might as well start getting used to it now, lad. Take my tip, follow the wheel of the year. You’ll learn a lot and you won’t put a foot wrong.’

  It wasn’t difficult. Our lives were bound to that wheel and we turned with it, grandfather marking its revolutions in his own eccentric way. We stood on the braehead on the first day of the year at nine o’clock in the evening. The snow was glistening on the south side of the firth, the lights of Edinburgh, where I’d never been, like fallen stars all along the skyline; and at nine exactly where his hand pointed, Regulus rose out of the sea, the first sign of spring. Grandfather had discarded the conventional calendar long ago. He followed his own clock, telling the time from everything that went on around us: the fieldfares arriving in large numbers after the snow, the robin singing in the small hours, the snowdrops spearing the earth – brave wee troopers, he called them – dandelions bursting, the woods full of young green nettles, dry mud floating on the flood tide. But as well as the usual signs, he taught me to recognize the sound of spring in the peculiar quietness of the air at sunset, as if the whole earth was holding its breath, waiting for the huge surge of sound and colour, the clamour of returning life. Crabs spawned among the rocks, brittle starfish appeared in the shallows, and whelks bejewelled the bottoms of the rock pools. Gannets flew over the firth again, and massive flocks of oystercatchers, and west of the town the bay was flecked with purple sandpipers. All these things were the numbers on the clock.

  At the start of the year, if he couldn’t fish and was tired of mending nets, grandfather went out whelk-gathering, dipping his brown hands into the clear icy water that turned them weirdly white. Usually he refused to take me along because of the cold.

  ‘The whelks is a miserable wet job in January,’ he said. ‘A depressing month for melancholy folk, and bad enough for me.’

  But he always had a rhyming alternative.

  January is wondrous good

  To lop trees or fell wood

  And as he could never sit down for long, he took me by the hand, slung his axe and sack across his shoulder, and we started off for Balcaskie.

  There was a thin wind. Fieldfares fluffed their feathers in the leafless hedges, ignoring the withered berries that shivered there like black widows. Not a hip or haw was to be seen, but the robins were lighting up their braziers in the bare hawthorn bushes and the whins were sending out yellow sparks from the hills.

  We waited until Peter Hughes, the farmer, had gone over the road past Balcaskie. He was carting dung to the fields. Lumps of it lay among the frosted grasses where the gulls were stabbing at them alongside jackdaws and rooks.

  ‘Poor wee buggers,’ said grandfather, ‘doddering about up here with these landlubber birds – they should be out at sea looking for herring.’ He looked over his shoulder across the already darkening fields to where a few boats were etched on the firth. ‘And so should we.’

  He leaned over the fence, pulled off his cap, and set it back on his head in exactly the same position.

  ‘Ach, no we shouldn’t. When you see these seabirds ferreting for a beetle in a bit of cow-dung, you know there’s not a herring to be had in the whole firth.’

  The cap came off and on again, as if confirming the observation.

  ‘So why waste time taking the Venus out? A herring gull’s got more sense behind its beak than all those fellows out on the firth right now. They need their heads flushed out.’

  Peter Hughes passed us again with his rich dark load, his horse breathing like a steam engine. His sheep were shivering over their frozen turnips. The cattle stood in a black huddle around the frozen water trough.

  ‘Let’s give the poor beasts a drink.’

  Grandfather broke the seal of ice with his axe and watched with satisfaction as the pink tongues shot into the water like hot melting pokers.

  ‘A man like that,’ he said, ‘who can’t even see to it that beasts can get their drink. He works for the nobs in Balcaskie, so he doesn’t give a damn.’

  We went over the fence.

  ‘We won’t let him or the nobs see what we’re up to, though. Do you want to taste the sun?’

  He snapped off the withered skull of a cow parsnip and put one of the seeds into my mouth.

  ‘What do you taste?’

  ‘Earth,’ I said, spitting.

  ‘That’s the sun in the earth, and that seed holds it locked up all th
rough the winter. It’s not the earth you’re tasting, it’s the sun. Eat it – it’s solar energy.’

  A natural presenter, that was grandfather. He knew things about things. His dream was that I would go to university one day and do the things he might have done. Except that what he did, he did perfectly, and neither asked for nor expected more.

  In the wood we found a fallen tree. He hacked and sawed and sweated while I poked about among its litter of dead leaves. A bunch of snails lay buried deep in the pile, fastened together in the frost, sealed up in sleep and slime for the winter.

  ‘Don’t separate them, they’ll be warmer together.’

  I tried to stick back the one I’d snapped from the cluster.

  ‘You’d better hide them again – the Snailer might sniff them out, all the way from the town.’

  Do worms eat snails or do snails eat worms, I wondered. Grandfather laughed. ‘Neither. But you won’t find any worms around here right now. They’ve delved deep and all the moles have gone after them.’

  His old eye spotted something lying among the scattered leaves and branches. ‘Acorns,’ he said, ‘still lying there nice and dry from the autumn. Let’s gather a few.’

  He came out of the wood like January itself, my grandfather, white-haired, bright and bearded, a sea-god on shore leave, blowing on his fingers, his bag of logs on his back. By this time the heavy sky had fallen like lead on the top of Kellie Law, but he hurried me up the hill with him to cut a branch of whinflowers for my grandmother.

  ‘She can’t get out now – and they remind her of how she ran about the hill as a young thing. Burning the whins was always a great affair.’

  I tried hard to see grandmother as a girl, dancing round bonfires on a hilltop. It was easier to picture grandfather sailing to the Dardanelles – like sheep to Churchill’s slaughterhouse, he said, recalling it as ever at the oddest moments.