Hellfire and Herring

by Christopher Rush

  Now the New Year reviving old Desires,

  The thoughtful Soul to Solitude retires,

  Where the White Hand of Moses on the Bough

  Puts out, and Jesus from the Ground suspires.

  But folk just don’t think like that any more. They don’t write like that either.

  You can see that from most of the modern-day headstones and their epitaphs. They used to take some trouble over a stone in the old days, with the emblems of mortality carved along the top and sides – skull and bones, the sexton’s tools, the hour-glass and the Angel of Death. And usually a grandsounding verse on the back. I know all the headstone poems by heart. This one, for example:

  Naked as from the earth we came,

  And entered life at first;

  Naked we to the earth return,

  And mix with kindred dust.

  How still and peaceful is the grave!

  Where, life’s vain tumults past,

  Th’appointed house, by Heav’n’s decree

  Receives us all at last.

  They didn’t have to be as long as that either, to be impressive, these old inscriptions. One of them here just reads, ‘Here lies all that could die of John Brown.’ Think of the faith that lies behind that one little word, ‘could’. You’ve got to admire it. You don’t get faith like that nowadays.

  The stones got smaller in this century – and so the verses got smaller too. Still, up to a wee while ago they always left room at the bottom for a nice bit of scripture, a consoling sort of text, like Until the day break and the shadows flee away, or just The morn cometh, something like that. But these days you usually get palmed off with something really uninspiring. Sadly missed. What do you think of that? No religious feeling behind it at all, not even any poetry. That’s what I miss most of all, the poetry.

  Some of the really recent ones have nothing at all on them, apart from the names and dates of the deceased. Can you imagine anything more dull of soul? There’s one here that was put up just the other day – that young chap that was killed on his motorbike. Do you know what his epitaph is? I’ll tell you. A great Elvis fan. I ask you! What will that mean to somebody clearing away rubble and dust from here in a couple of centuries from now? A great Elvis fan! What kind of immortality is that? I suppose it’s appropriate enough to our age, with its cheap tin gods that don’t even last out the age itself. It’s as I say, there’s no poetry left in death now. It’s not just a matter of economics, though there’s that to consider. It’s the spirit that’s missing as well as the flesh. From the point of view of feeling as well as finance, folk are just no longer giving death his due. That’s a fact.

  The gravestones in Alec’s kirkyard were my first books, I suppose, stories written in stone, some of which he showed me and all of which I devoured for myself as soon as I was able to read. The kirkyard was an open library, sprayed by the sea. Crystals of salt illuminated the letters so that they sparkled in the sun, lichens blotched the lines like mildew. Soon the fragrance of fried herring came dancing among the gravestones from the direction of Alec’s open window, mingling with the butterflies. It was easy to sit here and submit to time and heat, while summer was gold-plating the firth and the sun’s unstrung necklace lay broken over the bay, a scattering of beads, bouncing in front of my half-closed eyes. Just over the wall the sea’s pale-blue dress whispered like silk, drew back its curving hem, petticoats of surf, and I knew then that all my ancestors were doomed lovers. The sea was their femme fatale. She wove webs of sunlight that netted them like lobsters, bewitching even the strongest, the bible-boatmen who had steered a straight course through life, till she took them from wives to waves, and the cold caress of conger and crab. Out there somewhere they were salt and coral, vague as the shifting of the sands on the shore, lines of hair parted by the wind, time’s whispers along the skull, wrinkles imperceptible as ageing. The tides ebbed and flowed over them without destination, irrational and inarticulate as the years. There was something safer about the graveyard’s green memory bank, where the generations slept, too deep for tears. And so for a time I haunted the place like a revenant, resurrecting the sleepers in my mind, saying their names to the sea air, whispering their years to a wind of weathers. I fed deeper and deeper on their vanished lives, still available by the volume, on permanent loan. In spite of Alec’s horror stories, there was something satisfyingly fixed and final about this place, free from the frightening flux of life. Here I was at peace.

  It wasn’t to last. It was the family funerals that put an end to my safe house and personal library.

  The funerals were my first acquaintance with drama. Refining the rawness of human grief, they elevated it to the status of tragedy, played out on the coast’s rocky colosseum to the listening amphitheatre of the sea. Penman’s bell rang in the streets, summoning the audience, beating open a black hole in the kirkyard turf, which Alec covered with boards until the day of the funeral. And the gods took their seats.

  Always the funeral service was held in the house of the departed, where the corpse was laid out, given the last longing, lingering looks – a black procession of eyes – and finally screwed down. Eternity lay just behind those closed eyelids and it was always a relief when they were hidden from sight. A house of death was recognizable by its drawn blinds. I used to hurry past in the street, wondering what it would be like to be on the inside of such an establishment.

  My time came soon enough. Uncle Jimmy, the sailmaker, died in his sleep one night, and three days later we all sat in silence in the Elm Grove kitchen, a solid black circle of suits and shoes and dresses, so seldom worn that they creaked and squeaked and whispered whenever anyone made the slightest movement. So nobody moved. You could hear everybody breathing, though, packed together round the fire, sitting on borrowed chairs, not speaking, waiting for the minister. The coffin was apart from us in the best room, old uncle Jimmy lying in state behind polished oak and brass, alone among the faded family photographs in their cold frames, alone in the cold and darkness of wherever he was – nobody knew where for sure, but we could all hear the continuous hushed roar of the silence he now inhabited. It deafened us as we listened to it between the hideously slow and heavy tickings of the grandfather clock. Eternity, eternity, eternity. Hell, hell, hell. Tick, tick, tick.

  Rat-a-tat-tat, bang, bang. The knocking on the door – no timid fist, that one. It shattered the closed circle with the relief of the outside world breaking in.

  ‘That’ll be the minister now, let him in, somebody.’

  Mr Kinnear filled up what was left of the room when he came in. A big, black-coated bear, blowing heavily, unnecessarily, smelling of the pews, he rubbed his huge hands together briskly, a hale and hearty antidote to death, and nodded to the fire.

  ‘Nice blaze there, yes, grand to see a fire today, the year’s drawing in now. How are you, Mrs Main?’

  Silence.

  The fire burned. The clock ticked. The silence roared. We adjusted ties, hats, handkerchiefs. What was it we were waiting for exactly?

  Then Mr Kinnear put his back to the fire, looked up at the low ceiling, and cleared his throat. ‘In the midst of life we are in death …’

  I had never heard the words till that day, not even in church. They were reserved for the funeral service. Now they hit me like a gong, confirming the triumph of death over my decade. In the midst of life we are in death. It was true. It had always been true. One of the sea-facing stones Alec had shown me had long since lost its names and dates. But the epitaph survived on the reverse side. It read simply, O! thou Adam, what hast thou done? This said it all. The whole promiscuous boneyard was Adam’s work, the whole thrust of life itself stifled and negated by the first great sinner. The wages of sin is death. And now uncle Jimmy had reaped Adam’s reward. As would we all.

  Mr Kinnear’s bellowing was filling up the room.

  We are like grass which groweth up. In the morning it flourisheth and in the evening it is cut down and withereth …

  And then
a few words on uncle Jimmy, who had sat on his low, dark brown bench all the days of his life, now defined as futile, with his sailmaker’s tools and his heavy drooping moustaches; uncle Jimmy, who had always looked so sad because he was born of woman and his days were few and full of sorrow; uncle Jimmy, who was being moved out of the best room now, feet first, and into the waiting hearse, to take his last journey. The rooms were small and the hallway narrow. The undertakers were having a hard time manoeuvring the coffin. There were six feet of uncle Jimmy, one of Miller’s biggest boxes.

  Yet it was only yesterday he’d been a boy, so he’d told me, running down the brae for the butcher’s fat, the day he spoke about barking the sails. I remembered the sea’s blue immensity at our backs and how he’d sat in the sun, shading his eyes as he talked. Soon he would be with his friends, he said, and he took off his cap, revealing just a few fronds of sea-bleached hair. I couldn’t fathom the net of veins on that wrinkled head. So I’d sat there and watched him die, sentence by slow sentence in the sun. There was a picture of him on the mantelpiece, the sail spread stiffly over his knees and tumbling on to the floor like solid water. Only when the four winds blew into his canvases did the stillness of his life’s work take on form and movement, when the dark fins of the Fifies cut the sky and a forest waved in the firth. Now they’d wrapped a shroud round the tall mast of his years and taken him down.

  ‘That’s him left the house now,’ said auntie Elspeth, dabbing her eyes, ‘for the last time.’

  But uncle Jimmy was going to God, said Mr Kinnear. For the souls of the righteous are in the hands of God, and there shall no torment touch them.

  All the men went away then, and I was left with the women.

  ‘He had a long haul, old Jimmy.’

  ‘Do you mind how he laughed that day?’

  ‘Aye, they’re not long in getting you into the ground.’

  ‘And to think we’ve all to come to it!’

  I wasn’t allowed to accompany the hearse to the kirkyard. Auntie Elspeth had said I should wait till I was twelve till I got involved in all that. If she’d known about the grisly conversations with Alec, she’d have been horrified. The graveyard was visited mostly by women, and shawled old wives were frequent figures up there, sitting knitting among the graves. ‘Oh well, we’re among our own folk,’ they would say with a shrug. But the women were not expected to attend the actual funerals. They stayed at home among the unbroken shortbread, the unstoppered sherry, waiting for the men to return from that most harrowing of journeys. It was a man’s business. Fumbling with coffin cords, handling the heavy box, watching it swing slowly down into that awful hole in the ground. The grim practicalities of death.

  But on the day of uncle Jimmy’s funeral I asked to go out for a walk, and I stole after the cortège, darting across the fields to watch the business from the shelter of a dyke. The hearse wound its way up the steep green mound of the kirkyard hill like a giant beetle gleaming in the sun, and the figures followed it like ants. I moved closer, scaling a rock and scuffing my new shoes, to look down on them. They gathered round the graveside, black statues, all holding their hats, and the words came floating up to me, resonant with life and death.

  Since by man came death, by man came also the resurrection of the dead. For as in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive.

  I am the Resurrection and the Life saith the Lord; he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live; and whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die.

  Forasmuch as it hath pleased Almighty God of his great mercy to take unto himself the soul of our dear brother here departed, we therefore commit his body to the ground, earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust, in sure and certain hope of the resurrection to eternal life through our Lord Jesus Christ.

  At that point Kinnear turned slightly and nodded, and Alec came up to the graveside with his spadeful of earth. I could see the slight smile on his face. He looked in my direction, right over the heads of the mourners, and seemed to wink up at me as the minister grabbed a fistful of dirt and scattered it over the coffin. I ducked down further behind the rock.

  And so into that cold hole in the ground, where the worm feedeth sweetly, as old George used to say, uncle Jimmy went to join Epp and Chae Marr, Hodgie Dickson, Miss McNeil, Sangster, Shuggie and the whole host of the earth’s anonymous. The Reverend Kinnear’s voice boomed through the boneyard like a trumpet.

  I know that my Redeemer liveth, and that he shall stand at the latter day upon the earth. And though worms destroy this body, yet in my flesh shall I see God.

  The men put on their hats and filed away, and the first clods came thudding on to the coffin lid. Alec would have been pleased with the performance.

  I ran back to the house, my heart beating for fear and yet with a wild vibrant thrilling to the triumphant sound of the words, the message of hope boomed out from the mound of bones, where all hope seemed to have died.

  The next day I went back to the kirkyard and looked at uncle Jimmy’s grave. The grass had been desecrated by his death, the squares of turf stitched crudely together by the hand of the old sexton and battered flat by his spade. But in a year from now I knew the grass would be blowing sweetly over his bones like a seamless green sea.

  Close to the grave a dandelion clock faded like a white moon into morning – the clock and the tomb, the two things by which our lives are bound, standing side by side in the graveyard, the one so quickly blown, the other not to be worn down by a world of winds. The image was not my own. Alec had preached on the subject often enough.

  I left the new grave and wandered among the older stones that I’d come to know so well. What was death? Thousands of bones and skulls separated from me by only a few feet of earth. But Jesus, who had raised Lazarus and Jairus’s daughter, had said that these people were not really dead, they were simply asleep. I lay down on one of the graves and shut my eyes, my feet to the east, ready to rise and face my Saviour, my head to the stone, pointing in the same direction as all the other heads in that green hill, one flicker of life in the whole sleeping shoal, adrift on the dreamless tide.

  But was it really dreamless? Nobody knew for sure. I opened my eyes again and stared up into the blue sky, trying to see where it began and where it ended, whether it existed at all or was some vast empty illusion. Would being dead be much different from this? I shouldn’t see the sky, of course. Nor would I hear the sea, or the spray splashing on my stone or the raindrop ploughing down the carved letters of my name, turning to fire in the sudden sun. But I might just be dimly aware, in my six feet of slumber, that I was lying waiting, and that the great and terrible day was lying in wait for me too, when Judgement would rip off the green covers and rumple the sheets of clay, and the bright golden trumpets and sunrise would erupt irrevocably.

  In the fields behind the kirkyard the farmer’s men were busy bringing in the harvest, and their shouts mingled strangely with the soundless roaring of the dead all around me, and the words of yesterday’s service, still filling my ears, telling me that uncle Jimmy would wake up one day with a new body.

  Behold I shew you a mystery: we shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trump: for the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed.

  The shouting grew louder and I tried to sink back into sleep so as to avoid the terrible day, but the time of the harvesting of the world had come at last. The graveyard was raggled and crumpled, its stones cracked and capsized, and all Alec’s work was undone. In a thousand broken beds the sleepers stood, dazed with day, rubbing the long sleep from their eyes. They were all new made. Kate the Kist threw away her coffin to be fitted for the New Jerusalem. Jean Jeff’s ears were opened and she turned and pointed her finger. Peter Cleek held up his hook in a bright new fist and flung it with a whoop into the sea.

  They all came at me then, out of earliest childhood – Hodgie Dickson pointing a
t me with solemn warning as he advanced, Chae Marr thumping his chest to show off his bright new heart, beating it like a drum, Tom Tarvit growing teeth and toes and standing up straight again, and the Blind Man opening his red eyes for the first time and running at me in his rage. He hurled his stick away over the kirkyard wall. It fell whirling like Excalibur into the waves and he charged with eyes of fire, his fists and feet flailing.

  Now I’ve got you, fishbait! Break open your head … feed your brains to the fish!

  I screamed and fell to my knees, covering my head with my arms.

  And the sea gave up its dead, all the drowned bones of my ancestors, coral skulls answering the call. Mad Maria stood up to her knees in the water and roared and laughed. Bella Bonnysocks ran into the tide that had taken her Tam for forty years and he came reeling off the end of the great line that had wound him into eternity. It was the day of reckoning and all the shopkeepers lined the shore, clamouring to be paid. Then Honeybunch rose out of the waves, new washed and shining and singing to herself, naked as the day she was born, straddling the grave of Alec Fergusson, demanding to be dressed.

  Was Alec dead then?

  We were all dead, and we all stood before God, and the books were opened. And another book was opened, which was the Book of Life.

  There are a great many souls in the world, and you have to make very sure that yours will not be a lost one. Supposing, just supposing, that you were such a borderline case that the recording angel missed out your name by mistake? Imagine all the saved souls of the world to be written down, and just one little error to exist, a scribal error in heaven, so small that not even God would notice – and that error to be the omission of your own name! Left out not because you were exceptionally wicked but because your life had simply not made it clear enough whether you were sheep or goat. Why not put that beyond doubt right now, while there is time?