Hellfire and Herring

by Christopher Rush

  ‘Come back, you blackguards! I’m phoning the bobby!’

  ‘I know all your names! I know every one of you!’

  But we were all behind our balaclavas and running like snow leopards in all directions.

  ‘You’ll pay for it! You’ll pay for it!’

  ‘I’ll be up at the school tomorrow! I’ll pick you all out!’

  We ran on and on into the eternal world of snow, our chests bursting like Jamieson’s bellows, our hearts like his forge, each one a red pulsation in the whiteness of the dead bewintered world.

  Word came through then that the fleet had left.

  Thirty hours later, in the smallness of the morning, we were gathered at the harbour, a huddle of families waiting to see the lights flecking the firth. Yarmouth brought back rock for the youngsters, perfume for the young women, glasses and presentation china for the old. The wedding-flags were run up with cheers on the bridegrooms’ boats, and the brides brought out their house-fillings from below the bed, the vases and pictures, the linen and crystal and crockery that they’d been saving bit by bit since they left the school, and which their fathers and grandfathers had been bringing back from Yarmouth and Lowestoft and Shields year after year, piece by precious piece. For now was the marrying time and at last old Leebie found a verse to throw in the brazen face of time.

  When December snows fall fast

  Marry and true love will last.

  Each man also brought back with him a barrel of salt herring for himself and his family. Grandfather’s was a half-barrel and Alec and Billy brought a quarter-barrel each. The first salt herring from Yarmouth were rinsed, then roasted on the brander and served with heaps of potatoes, rifled from the clamps in the fields. There were cauldrons of kale and boiled beef. And as Christmas drew closer Guthrie’s windows filled up with rounds of shortbread, each one bearing the design of a different drifter and its name and number.

  Work was over now for the drifterman till the second day of January. Only the fireman spent a laborious week inside the boat’s boiler, chipping away at three months of encrusted salt. But grandfather was hardly home a day before his restless legs were off again, gathering sea-coal from the shore, which sparked and spat in the grate all night long. For coal was often scarce and the braehead fire was never allowed to die.

  Sitting in front of the fire at last, grandfather celebrated the fish which multiplied so miraculously and fed so many thousands of families and yet which he killed in its millions. Along with all the old men of his time, he believed that the herring swam down from the Arctic and made a circuit round the British Islands once in the course of a year, and that for every ring that it completed, time put a ring on each of its scales. By counting the number of rings you could tell the age of the fish, just as you could with a tree – just as he counted the ring of candles on my twelfth birthday, for the last time.

  Mystical cycle or complete myth, what mattered was that he believed it, just as he believed in the fish itself, almost worshipping it. He sat me down on the pier once and showed me the features that made it so unique, the rings on the scales, the streamlined shape and forked tail which made it swim so far and fast, the silvery-white belly and blue-green back, the one merging with the sea, the other with the sky, giving it its double protection from predators of fur and fin, though not from a man with a net. He held a female in his hand and stroked its belly.

  ‘Thirty thousand eggs a year come out of that one little belly. If I didn’t catch them the seas would be solid with herring from coast to coast. Can you imagine that?’

  I imagined it – and once again saw grandfather walking on the water.

  He laughed at my expression.

  ‘As long as they keep on coming I’ll have to keep on catching them, I suppose.’

  ‘Won’t they ever stop coming?’ I asked.

  ‘Not till I stop catching them,’ he said. ‘When I stop, they’ll stop. We’re inseparable, just you wait and see.’

  Then he was off to sea again, leaving me with his words for the rest of my life.

  ‘Northerlies bring you nothing,’ he used to say. ‘Give me a good steady south-west breeze and I’ll bring you back a hundred cran with every shot.’

  He knew from observation what marine science confirms. Always the fish swam into the wind in the unseen currents between the surface and the seabed, and a compensating flow in this stream took them in the opposite direction to the wind and at a faster rate of drift, and so the herring made their way. A north wind held up the southward movement of the shoals and an east wind lured them further from the coast. But a south-west breeze brought them down and close to shore, where the nets were waiting and the old men stood with their nostrils flared, grandfather on deck with a smile on his face.

  ‘I don’t have to sniff for herring,’ he once said. ‘If they’re there I can taste them in the air.’

  So the crews cast their curtains over the starboard side, fifty feet deep and two miles long, steaming on their way till the long meshed wall was unfurled in the water. And it hung there while the boat drifted quietly with the tide, coming back on board like a sheet of shining silver shivering madly in the moon. They steamed furiously for harbour then with their perishable cargo, and the sweat would barely grow cold on their faces before they returned to the herring grounds, fishing in the same old way all through the months of September and October and November, and back again in winter and summer and autumn the following year, year in year out. And they did all this on little sleep and wet sea legs, on beef puddings and suet duffs. Their medicines were Friar’s Balsam and Sloane’s Liniment, Gregory’s Powder and Carlton’s Dutch Drops, and their bandages were of red flannel, cut from their women’s petticoats and soaked in paraffin to take out the sting of the saltwater boils.

  And finally they came in to rest.

  It was Christmas Eve. After dark I went out with grandfather and we took the deserted road to Balcaskie, white in the moon. We were off for our Christmas tree. Grandfather walked slightly ahead of me, the end of his cigarette glowing redly in his cupped palm as he shaded it from the wind. We sang together as we walked.

  Brightly shone the moon that night,

  Though the frost was cruel,

  When a poor man came in sight,

  Gathering winter fuel.

  When we neared the wood we stopped our singing and went in whispers, walking in silence through the trees, the snow starting to fall again in the world outside. The Bishop’s Walk, roofed and carpeted by nature, kept us dry. Grandfather still led the way, his cigarette end bobbing like a red boat-lamp through the dark. I followed it as it veered off into the spruces and firs and pines, then stopped. I knelt down beside him as he opened his jacket and took out the saw. Quietly, gently, his cigarette in his mouth the whole time, he took down a small fir, the property of the rich man in his mansion. I remembered Hallowe’en and suggested to grandfather that if I sang the old man a carol he might let us take an even bigger one.

  ‘Better not bother him,’ grandfather said, ‘he might tell you to take the whole wood!’

  On the way out grandfather picked us some greenery and a sizeable log for the fire, a Yule, and we lifted up our voices again when we were well clear of the estate, the thickly falling flakes burning our open mouths.

  Page and monarch, forth they went,

  Forth they went together,

  Through the rude wind’s wild lament

  And the bitter weather.

  The tree spread the secrets of the wood around the room, a totem glittering in its tinsel. Some gifts were laid in front of it. The holly and the ivy made a grove of the walls. Birdsong whistled from the wet firewood and the screwtops were opened and cigarettes lit, grandfather rolling his with one hand and without even looking. His stockinged feet were on the fender and his head was back, eyes closed. He’d be asleep soon.

  But Georgina sang us a carol about a spotless rose blowing at midnight in a cold cold winter, and he opened his eyes again for a bit. Then s
he sang ‘In the Bleak Midwinter’ and he closed them again. When he woke up he took the half-burned Yule log out of the fire, saving it to light up the new log next Christmas. He ran out with it on the shovel into the yard, where he threw it, spitting and snarling into the snow, dying among clouds of smoke and steam and popping sparks. Our chimney smoke was drifting up into the stars. George’s window was an open blackness and his chimney was cold.

  ‘He’s not long for this earth,’ grandfather said, putting his hand on my shoulder, ‘and he’ll go out in his own way.’

  The gravestones glittered like sentinels on the kirkyard hill. Down beneath us, over the rooftops of the town, the breakers foamed, pounding the shore. An alien eternity was grinding its teeth.

  I went to bed to wait for Santa Claus to swing into our tiny port, tie up on the pier, and perform his secret ministry. But I knew that grandfather was really Father Christmas, and the unseen presents from Yarmouth were waiting downstairs. Midnight was striking in the black belfry of the year, flinging out the wild white chimes of Christmas. And I knew that in just a week’s time Regulus would be rising on the first day of January at nine o’clock, a starseed of spring sown in the dark, and that grandfather too would be rising for his last day at home. The following morning he’d be off again to the winter herring.

  As always.

  8

  The Village Spade

  If the worlds of work and nature wove a double rhythmic spell, sealing off childhood terrors, the seal was broken every time I headed for Alec Fergusson’s house by the church, or looked in on him at his work. It would have made perfect sense to stay away. But there was another sense, a moth-and-candle-flame sense, in which Alec was always waiting for you. So I went slowly by the back gardens, past the old ladies washing their long white hair in the rain barrels. Or I detoured the streets, where the same old ladies, their hair now up in netted buns, were out shopping, their string bags dangling as low as their hems, even with the pitiful contents – a half loaf, a couple of carrots, an onion, a scraggy pork chop from Grant’s, just enough to keep them from their Saviour for one more day, before Alec dug a hole for them. As he did for all of us.

  There in the kirkyard, his black bent outline etched against the glimmering sea, Alec toiled among his gravestones. He considered his gravedigger’s duties a calling, no mere crust-of-bread occupation, he left you in no doubt about that. But let him speak for himself now, just as he spoke to me fifty years ago.

  Sexton here sixty years (he always started by telling you that, as if a thousand tellings hadn’t registered it with you) and just a day off eighty now.

  (Curiously, he was always just a day off eighty. He never moved in that respect. Maybe he was eighty. Maybe he was a hundred and eighty. I don’t know. I do know I’m interrupting him, though.)

  Yes, sixty years, man and boy. I worked with my father when I was ten, and took over the job from him when he died. Literally. I was twenty and the first grave I had to dig was my father’s. He was digging a grave the day he died, and had almost done when he collapsed on the spot and died in the grave. And do you know what his immortal last words were? ‘Finish it for me, son!’ That’s all he had to say. I suppose it was all he had time to say, but you’d think a man would use that last precious breath for something a bit more memorable, wouldn’t you? ‘Finish it for me!’ It’s quite practical but hardly encourages philosophical contemplation, now does it? Me, on the other hand, I’m something of a philosopher as well as a practical man.

  Puff puff. (Sometimes Alec remembered to put a match to his pipe, but in or out, it was always clenched in his teeth, and he either talked through it or through the blue narcotic haze, Death drawing nicely and making the silence fragrant. Then after a few puffs he’d get into his stride.)

  I’ve never actually taken an exact count, though I could work it out from the records, but I reckon I’ve put upwards of six thousand folk into the ground. That’s near six times the town’s population today. Just think, I’ve buried the whole village six times over, single-handed. That’s a lot of digging. What do you think has kept me so fit? That – and going to the lobsters.

  Most folk imagine there’s a thousand jobs they’d rather do than dig a grave for a living, and sure enough, it wouldn’t suit everybody. But look at it this way. The kirkyard here is right hard against the sea, and it’s a cold enough business in winter – but I’m breathing the best fresh air to be had on God’s earth, I’m out here in the open, and I’m doing a lot of bending and stretching that keeps my joints supple, in spite of my age. I’ve never had a sore back in my life.

  Look at it another way. I’m more or less my own master. Nobody breathes down your neck when you’re digging a grave, least of all the one you’re digging it for. It’s a trouble-free occupation. You make a hole in the ground, deposit a box in a safe place, pile on the earth and put back the turf. What could be simpler?

  Mind you, it’s surprising the lengths some folk will go just to avoid an hour or two of labour. A mile up the coast you’ll find a man in my trade who’s made up a hexagonal frame, shaped like a coffin and not much bigger. He lays it on the earth and digs inside it. He drew me a diagram once to show me how he was saving himself nearly half the digging. He worked it out exactly by geometry. To me that’s no way to dig a grave – by geometry, and with your eye on the clock. No way at all.

  In some places they use mechanical diggers. The grave-digger just touches a button and pulls a lever and watches a load of metal do the rest. Gravedigger? He doesn’t even deserve the title. To me that’s soulless. It’s possible, believe me, to dig a grave with feeling, especially if it’s for somebody you’ve known. You can take pride in it, just as if you were building a house for the man – which in a sense you are, a house that lasts till doomsday, which makes you a better builder than the mason, the shipwright or the carpenter. You see? I’m not an uneducated man for an old spade. I’ve read some Shakespeare and I’ve read the Prince of Denmark. Hamlet says to his friend Horatio, about one of the gravediggers, ‘Hath this fellow no feeling of his business that he sings at gravemaking?’ And Horatio says, ‘Custom hath made it in him a property of easiness.’ He’s used to it, in other words. Well, I think that misses the point. No professional ever dug a grave with a long face. It’s a job. There’s no question of having to get accustomed to it. But that doesn’t mean you can’t dig with dignity.

  That’s something a machine can’t do. The least one man can do for another is to personalize his resting-place for him. Mechanical diggers! Can you imagine? Next they’ll be having mechanical ministers to conduct the service, just you wait and see.

  In a manner of speaking we’ve got some of them around here as it is. Dull of soul, that’s what they are. Not Kinnear, mind you, he’s got fire in his belly all right, but when you listen to some of them reading the Order for the Burial of the Dead, they might as well be reciting from the back of a cornflakes packet. For as many times as I’ve heard it, the funeral service is one of my favourite pieces of reading. I used to enjoy hearing the bits from the Book of Job.

  Man that is born of woman hath but a short time to live and his days are full of sorrow … My days are swifter than a weaver’s shuttle and are spent without hope … We brought nothing into this world and it is certain we can carry nothing out.

  Passages like that fairly put life in perspective for you, so that you can see death as not so bad after all, if life’s so terrible.

  Few things used to be so grand as one of the old-style ministers pointing his finger at the coffin in the open grave and proclaiming that worms would destroy that body. That was impressive, dramatic. One old stager was fond of quoting from one of the Paraphrases.

  The wood shall hear the voice of spring

  And flourish green again,

  But man forsakes this earthly scene,

  Ah! never to return!

  That sort of thing made you come away from a funeral with something to think about. But some of them these days are happy e
nough with the earth-to-earth, ashes-to-ashes bit, and even that they get over with as quick as they can, as if it were indecent to remind the mourners that their loved one is just a pile of dust, and that that’s all they are too, kirkyard mould. Some of them even tell me not to bother stepping up to the grave with my spadeful of dirt during that part of the service – that’s when I scatter some soil on to the coffin – and I’m always disappointed when that happens. I feel I haven’t done my job.

  In the old days the ministers weren’t frightened of dirtying their own hands from my shovel, even on a wet and muddy day. One man used to grab a fistful of clay as tightly as he could, and hold it up to the mourners, shaking it in their faces before he threw it on to the coffin. That was one way of showing a man what he really is. But not any more. Folk just can’t look death squarely in the face these days and that’s a fact.

  I think it all stems from the modern attitude to death. What with all these clever operations and medical machines and pills being pumped into folk to keep them pegging on long after they ought to have died – they start seeing death as something unnatural instead of the most obvious thing in the world. I’ll tell you, nothing strikes me as simpler than the fact that one day I’ll just be a few shards of bone lying in the earth somewhere, and after that just kirkyard clay and nothing more.

  It’s not that I’m not frightened of death. Everybody’s frightened of death in one way or another, whether they’re religious or not. I don’t fancy the actual process of dying, for one thing. There might be nothing in it, of course, like falling asleep after dinner. But you can never tell. There could be pain and prostration, and nobody actually looks forward to that, the indignity and hopelessness of it all. I don’t want to die in my sleep, though. I can’t understand folk who say a man was lucky to have died in his sleep. Lucky? To have missed the big scene? The curtain call? I’d feel cheated.