Hellfire and Herring

by Christopher Rush

  ‘Is it like the ones you used to hunt?’

  ‘No,’ he said quietly, ‘that’s a killer out there. And compared to the beasts I went after, that one is a butcher, let me tell you, a bad black devil!’

  He told me how he had once seen a pack of killers tear out the tongue of a great blue whale.

  ‘It was nearly ninety feet long, and its tongue in its jaws must have weighed a ton. They just ripped it out and fed on it while it was bleeding to death from the mouth, the fuckers!’

  I knew he had said a bad word. He was grown up, so he was allowed to. All the same it shocked me. I’d never heard George swear before.

  ‘Didn’t you catch killers, Gramps?’

  He turned, and I saw his back making for the door.

  ‘Come with me,’ he said.

  I followed him down to the lumber room. It was like the interior of a shipwreck. He clambered stiffly over piles of dog-torn, mouse-eaten nets, throwing aside shredded baskets and punctured dahns in his struggle to reach what he was after. I frisked after him, sniffing at this and that. He was in the corner, tugging heavily at a stiff tarpaulin wrapped around what looked like a long pole.

  ‘Pull it off,’ he breathed, ‘you that has so much life in you.’ My great-grandfather was no more the man who had taken the Jehovah’s Witness by the throat.

  He tilted the pole and I pulled at the faded green sheeting till it came away.

  My mouth opened. It was his old harpoon – nine feet of lacquered larch and a further foot of solid iron, tipped with a brutal barb that made even a great-line hook seem like a bent pin. The everyday working weapon of my great-grandfather’s youth, unveiled after nearly three-quarters of a century.

  ‘Bring it outside,’ he said. ‘Take care.’

  I followed him through the transe and into the yard, amazed at the sheer weight and size of the arrow that had pierced a whale to the heart. We looked out at the killer, still ploughing up the firth.

  ‘That fish out there wasn’t made by God,’ George said. ‘It’s one of Satan’s playthings. Do you know what it’ll do? It’ll slash open the bellies of seals for sheer sport and leave them dying among the rocks. It’ll bite the heads off their bairns just out of its badness.’

  He steadied himself against the seaward wall and reached out for his old weapon.

  ‘And I’ll tell you this too. If I had seventy years off my back, I’d take that harpoon and a boat and go out there right now and bring about the death of that brute in the name of the Lord.’

  I looked at him as he trembled whitely beside me, putting up his hand to his blurred old eye.

  ‘But this is the nearest I’ll ever come to it now.’ He reached out suddenly and held on to the nearest support – the handle of old Leebie’s mangle.

  ‘And I’m heartsore at what I once did to the great whales.’ His voice cracked. ‘The days of my folly – too late now.’

  Then came the first surge of sorrow for one of my own family, one whom I would never have dared pity. But just a few short years of my own life had begun in him the slow stiffening that was a rehearsal for death. I looked quickly away from him and out again at the whale, still whipping up the waves.

  ‘I think it’s coming in, Gramps.’

  He peered hard over the rooftops.

  ‘So it is,’ he said slowly. ‘It’s coming into shore. It’s coming in to die.’

  The killer came in with the forenoon tide and the ebb left it stranded in the harbour, stuck in the mud between the middle and east pier. Everybody that was alive and walking that day came down to stare at it. Even wheelchairs were trundled down the brae, though my grandmother stayed at home, having no wish, she said, to see any animal in torment. But the whole village strung itself out along piers and street, galleries of spectators come to scrutinize its immobility, its utter possession of agony. The old men said that it couldn’t survive on land for long, that it was being slowly crushed by its own terrific weight, the vanquished victor victim now to its own bullying bulk, the pitiless unpitied.

  When they saw its helplessness a few boys descended the steps and plodded soggily across the mud to show their bravery. They swaggered right up to the slumped warhead, punching its defused, defenceless sides. The whale ignored them. Trapped inside its carcass, netted in air, only its tail flapped idly, like a tangle at low tide. Encouraged, they clambered up on to the huge back and raised their arms aloft and cheered, cheap little toreadors mocking the bull. Nobody laughed.

  But word had spread to the farms. A coarse drunken ploughman called Robert Mackie came down the steps and took sole possession of the summit. He started to fumble with his flies.

  ‘We’ll see if it survives my harpoon!’ he brayed boozily, standing over the whale’s blowhole and making it clear what he was about to do.

  The women shrieked and the men muttered under their breaths.

  Then the minister arrived.

  In a sudden kirk silence he materialized out of the mud and bellowed at the drunk.

  ‘Get down from there, you bastard!’

  The village as one drew in its breath. The huge rush of air was followed by an almighty hush. But lacking the sobriety to measure the mood of the moment, the ploughman began to execute a vulgar parody of the hornpipe on the whale’s back.

  The Reverend Kinnear heaved himself up. Without wasting another word he drove his fist straight into the slack side of the drunkard’s leering jaw. Mackie teetered on one leg for a fraction, then keeled over in slow motion into the sucking slime, where he lay like a felled tree.

  Hoots and jeers and applause all round for the minister. He was still standing on the whale, breathing fiercely through flared nostrils, his eyes like live coals, his huge fingers clenching and unclenching, his knuckles white and red. But he couldn’t speak for rage. He jumped down and sank up to his ankles. The silence was awesome, as if he were in the pulpit, holding forth. He trudged with soiled shoes and red face across the harbour bed.

  ‘Get me a hose!’ he roared as he came up the harbour steps.

  A long hosepipe was produced in seconds, led from the tap outside Harry’s office and fed into his hands. He pointed it over the wall and down below at the whale, quieter now without its tormentors.

  ‘Turn it on!’

  A fountain of water flowered and fell – and a great sigh rippled through the whole slow length of the whale. Everybody sighed along with it.

  ‘Now you can all go home!’ roared Kinnear.

  But he stayed there himself all through the rest of the afternoon and into evening, hosing down the grateful killer until the first blue fingers of tide touched its dying sides. Some of the newer seine-net boats were in harbour, their crews not part of the older work-rhythms that took grandfather up north. One of them tied ropes to the flicking tail and towed it slowly out past the breakwater, releasing it a mile out to sea. And there it died.

  But for weeks afterwards it was washed up at various places along the coast, haunting one harbour after another on the flood tide. Finally it came to rest on the west rocks, right beneath the Old Kirk. By this time it was stinking.

  Kinnear preached a sermon about it.

  ‘O, thy offence is rank, it smells to heaven!’ he thundered at his flock, telling them about the cruelty of man and the innocence of the animal kingdom.

  George always made a point of asking me what the Sunday sermon had been about. When he heard what Kinnear had preached he grunted.

  ‘He should go to the whales for a winter or two. He’d not come back with a bleeding heart for killers.’

  Then he looked at his quivering hands.

  ‘There was a time it could have taken its chances with me in the sea. I’d have brained it stone dead.’

  It wasn’t until the drifters came home the following month that we were finally rid of what Kinnear called the wages of sin. But the whale keeps on returning, on those tides that ebb and flow in sleep, deep in the brain.

  The sea was always bringing in something or other
to provide us with fun or food for thought: a massive spar of pitch pine which we tried to sell to the boat-builder, a turtle-shell in which we boiled potatoes, a tailor’s dummy (female) to which Peem and Golly added anatomical details, propped it up at Pussy Starr’s front door, rang the bell and ran away. Masses of driftwood for building into rafts or drying out and setting alight. Somebody’s wooden leg which we all tried on before hanging it from the red-and-white striped pole of Sam, the one-legged barber. A crate of sodden oranges which we did our best to eat. Once, a wooden crate, found half sunken in the sands at lowest ebb, and containing two bottles still intact. Golly pronounced it to be Spanish wine. There was no label to authenticate its Spanishness or otherwise but we needed neither label nor language to confirm its potency. Peem broke the neck of a bottle over a boulder, picked up a large scallop shell and filled it till it brimmed with gold.

  ‘This is Sangster’s skull!’ he tittered, swigging it off.

  We all followed him.

  ‘This is old Gourlay’s!’

  ‘We’re the One-Gallus Gang!’

  Drinking out of the dead heads of the dominies, our ancestral enemies, gorging ourselves to glory on their seascoured brains.

  We filled and refilled the shells, clapped them on our heads and went staggering about the beach with long prowling strides, whacking the air around us.

  ‘Open your sum books at the end!’

  ‘Open your mouths wide, you stupid wee buggers!’

  ‘Open another bloody bottle, boys!’

  ‘Damn me if I don’t, Miss Shagster!’

  ‘Have one for the road, you lemon-faced old nannygoat!’

  ‘Go and meet your maker in hell!’

  ‘How do you fancy being ravished first?’

  ‘Three times!’

  ‘By Spanish sailors!’

  ‘I’d rather have Spanish women!’

  ‘And kiss them too!’

  We laughed as long and loudly as we could, out of our ignorance, our undefined longings, at the thought of kisses that lay beyond the Spanish seas.

  ‘Get out your Oxford Song Books, you drunken dunderheads!’

  ‘You’re tone deaf, boy, you’re dumb as the devil made you!’

  ‘You’re dumb as they come and daft as they go!’

  ‘Daft as a duster!’

  ‘Get your hands off these dusters!’

  ‘Off these garters!’

  ‘Off these girls!’

  ‘Off these Spanish ladies, I say!’

  ‘Are you ready then?’

  ‘Farewell and adieu to you fair Spanish ladies.’

  ‘One, two, three . .’

  Now let every man drink off a full bumper,

  Now let every man drink off a full bowl,

  For we will be jolly and drown melancholy,

  With a health to each jovial true-hearted soul.

  The shore was rolling underneath our feet and the skyline tilted. So we stood splay-footed on the bouldery deck, sealegged, as we ranted and raved like true British Spaniards, tossed and pitched and lurched and heeled, and then we ran into the sea and sang Blow the man down.

  The waves pounded us. But we knew our Oxford Song Books, year in, year out, cover to cover.

  The gale she is raging far out on the deep,

  Away-hay, blow the man down.

  We blew mightily on one another. Struggling back to shore, I blew on Peem and he dropped like a tree in a storm. Golly blew on me and I fell alongside Peem. From the beach the two of us blew up at Golly and he toppled and rolled, crashing on top of us. We became insensible as spars, and the sea broke over us.

  When we woke up we were dead men. Leebie threatened to knock me back into final senselessness with the leg of a chair. George, who had once thundered at me that the drunkard was an affront to God, stared into space and said nothing. My mother and grandmother brought me through the hangover with aspirins, soda from a siphon, hot sweet blackcurrant drinks, eyeshades, smothering blankets, a few whispered words and a great deal of sympathy. After that my father thrashed me, and my aunts laughed till they had to lie down for the soreness of their sides.

  ‘If it’s not drink, it’s women,’ old George used to say. ‘Man has only two ways to fall,’ adding that if Adam had had the technology, he’d have made cider out of the apple.

  July proved him right. When the trains pulled into the station in the first week of the month, they disgorged dozens of Glaswegians, who emerged out of the steam with a clattering of accents and carriage doors. They threw their suitcases before them out on to the platform and jumped from the footplates with whoops of jubilation. They were determined to squeeze every drop of enjoyment out of their two-week respite from Glasgow’s daily grind. There were children and couples of all ages, married and single, linking arms or slinking off to their separate pleasures, the twin ingredients of which were, just as George said, either Eve or the apple.

  The apple was consumed in the Cabin Bar, the May View Hotel – or out in the street. Eve required some privacy and we spent part of our summer holidays shadowing the courting couples as they made their way hand in hand to the old castle. Once a fortress, the castle was now a stronghold of concealment for the lovers who occupied it. On the south and east sides it was approachable from the village only by toiling up steep green slopes. On the west and north sides was the sheer crag on which it was built, dropping a hundred feet to rocks and sea. But the killing times were over, time itself was now the killer, and folk simply walked in through the gaping holes, unchallenged and untriumphant. Its roof was the blue sky, the sea its window panes, tussock and turf its floors. Dog roses decorated the green tapestries, grew in the cracked hearthstones, leapt up the cold chimneys.

  Here the local boys also took their girls when they had at last grown tired of making tinny fires and had started talking to mirrors instead. Here they were out of sight of all the houses in the town – apart from God’s house, of course, only half a mile east. And God was always at home. But when we saw them heading west, holding hands, shy, secretive, subtle, we followed their slow feet through the tall grasses of July, allowing them ample time to disappear between the castle walls before closing in on them, giggling guiltily, frantically afraid of what we would miss, of what we would see.

  And what did Peem and I see as we crawled through the grass, approaching our twelfth year?

  Golly and a big-eyed Glasgow girl, leaning back in the grass, etched against the sea, their hands cemented, their breath intermingled, their lips feeding off one another. They were like statues. They had a beauty all of their own, unprecedented, impregnable, excluding us absolutely.

  We brayed our hatred of Golly. We threw down fistfuls of insults and stones, letting him know that we had sullied his secret, and we ran off across the fields, howling and hooting our jealous derision. For the next five minutes we tore up dog roses, kicked the heads off dandelions, hurled huge boulders into space, watching them smash on the rocks below. Then we ran to the castle’s crumbling old dovecot and shook our fists at the pigeons.

  Golly had broken the code. Peem and I parted sullenly and went back to nature.

  July was a blaze of blood-red poppies, heavy with the smell of elderflower and tall with nettles and willowherb, waving at us from the dry ditches and the kirkyard burn, where the loosestrife ran free. The dog days were sweetened by dog roses and wild roses, and by wild strawberries that lay in the hedgerows like fallen sunburned moons.

  Yet it was a sad month too. The leaves were already losing their gloss and rustled now with a drier sound in the early morning breeze. Birdsong was dwindling. Towards the end of the month the swithers and bladderwrack and green sleet came in on the tide in large quantities, the slack heads of the tangles washing ashore in the south-east gales. Heavy rains drenched the harebells, drove the bees from the lime-flowers and clover, and gave the meadowsweet an even madder fragrance. The old men looked up from their benches, glanced over their shoulders and commented on the mass of seaweed floating in t
he harbour, nodding at it with a grim satisfaction.

  ‘Well, there’s another summer almost gone.’

  And as I walked along the shore, I could see the summer slipping away and life going back fast. The whelks that had spawned in June now began to creep back underneath the stones. The oystercatchers had returned but the shelducks had gone and wouldn’t be seen again this year. At nine in the evening Cassiopeia stood like a gathering of old friends, their cigarette ends glowing faintly in the dark. Autumnal Pegasus reared above the sea. The afterglow was dimming fast by midnight, the firth darkening during the lengthening nights, ghost-moths fluttering here and there, and the air full of the crushed peppery nettledust of life, drifting over the fields, cooled by the first evening mists.

  Old Leebie came back to the house after one of her rare summer visits to the braes.

  ‘Summer comes with a white flower and goes with a white flower,’ she said.

  She was holding a daisy in her right hand and a bindweed in her left – life and death in either hand.

  By August the north fishing was played out and the drifters came down past Fife to the Northumberland coast and landed their herring at Shields during the week. On Friday nights they shot their nets in a northwards direction, hoping for a modest catch which they could carry straight home and sell on the pier on Saturday mornings for twenty shillings a cran. But if they made a heavy catch when shooting on the way back to port, they had to turn about and steam all the way back to Shields, for only smaller shots could be handled by the St Monans buyers. Small for Shields but enormous for me – the harbour at the weekend all fish and funnels and shouting and bargaining, with Northumberland herring for tea. They were the biggest and best that I ever saw taken out of the sea.

  The days were long gone of the Lammas Drave, the local fishing in the firth during August, when colossal catches had been taken from the stretches of water at Pittenweem, and especially off Fife Ness – the area known as the Old Haikes. Grandfather remembered this over and over.

  ‘The shoals were so dense you could have walked on their backs right across to the Bass.’