‘Oh goodness, terribly sorry. I’ll be sorry all my life. Will you, Fergus?’
‘Yes, Ailie, I will.’
She was beginning to get agitated. With every minute that passed Kirstie went further and further away from us.
‘Are we going to wait till Mum and Dad come?’ whispered Ailie. ‘Shouldn’t we go and meet them?’
‘Would you like us to go and meet them?’
‘Oh yes.’
‘All right, we’ll go.’
‘Will we just leave Kirstie here?’
‘No. We’ll take her with us.’
She looked puzzled and worried. Was I going to perform a miracle more disturbing than her moist breath on the stone?
‘How can we do that, Fergus?’
‘I’ll carry her.’
She almost smiled. You are, her kind and truthful eyes said, too thin, too old, you limp, there is grey in your hair.
‘I’ll not be able to help much,’ she said.
‘I’ll take lots of rests.’
Like the widow in the ballad whiles I would gae and whiles I would sit.
‘Shouldn’t we put on her socks and boots?’
‘Could you do that, Ailie?’
‘I’ll try.’
She did try too, bravely, on her knees; but the task was too much for her. I had to help.
I would have liked to carry Kirstie in my arms, like a bride over a threshold, but, in spite of all those years of digging, they were not strong enough. I had to take her on my back, with Ailie’s timorous help.
I remembered that there was a kind of star so compressed that one thimbleful of it would weigh a million tons. Surely it was a similar compression, of unimaginable goodness, that caused Kirstie to be so crushingly heavy?
FOURTEEN
We did not deliberately plan, Mairi, Dugald, and I, a small private funeral: we just took it for granted that in this, as in everything else for the past ten years, we would be left to get on with it ourselves. With us independence had long since passed from a principle into a habit.
To satisfy the law, a doctor was needed to certify death. One was summoned with great difficulty. He came next day, Sunday, grumbling at having had to walk for miles in pouring rain. He asked for a dram before he as much as glanced at Kirstie in the bed.
That Sunday was a long wet dreich sad day.
The doctor was a cheerful, white-haired old man, semi-retired. ‘Must have been her heart,’ he said, as he signed.‘Famous for her strength, wasn’t she? Often happens. Knew a caber-tosser once. Legs like cabers. One day there he was tossing away among the best down at the Cowal Games, and two days later he was gone. Went out like that.’ He snapped his fingers. ‘Bonny woman too,’ he added, with a last look at Kirstie. ‘I didn’t know that. Well, I’ll let Donald McVicar the undertaker know and he’ll either come out himself or more likely send somebody for like me he’s a bit shaky on the pins for a brute of a walk like that.’
‘There will be no need for Mr McVicar’s services,’ I said. ‘We shall manage.’
He had been giving me some odd looks. I was dressed in my best kilt and jacket, and was wearing my MC ribbon and medal. I felt that Kirstie would have wanted me to.
‘Suit yourselves,’ he said, giving me the oddest look yet. ‘Like everybody else Donald’s always on the look-out for business, but he might not be sorry to miss this one, on the edge of the civilised world. Were you thinking of making a coffin out of driftwood?’
‘Why not?’ I said. ‘She gathered a lot of it in her lifetime.’
Mairi took me aside. ‘I should have told you this before, Fergus,’ she whispered. ‘Kirstie mentioned once that she would like a nice coffin. I doubt if you and Dugald could make one out of driftwood that would have pleased her.’
John Lamont, expert carpenter, could have, I almost said. What I did say, humbly, was: ‘I’d like her to have what she wanted.’
‘She also wanted a minister to take the service at the graveside.’
‘That,’ interposed the doctor, cheerfully, ‘might not be so easy. I doubt if there is a man of God throughout the islands willing to stand up in public and send her off into eternity with his and the Lord’s blessing. I mean, she wasn’t married to you, was she? I understand you’ve got a wife living somewhere. No business of mine, but then I’m not a man of God.’
‘I’ve been a bit worried about that,’ said Mairi.
I had forgotten that, since Kirstie had been living with me in what the ministers would call a state of adultery they would hardly think her death an occasion for forgiveness.
‘Bastards,’ I said, bitterly.
‘Well no,’ said the doctor, reasonably. ‘You really can’t blame them. You broke their rules. So did she. If one of them was to let a fit of pure Christianity get the better of him the Lord might be pleased, but I’m damned sure his congregation and colleagues wouldn’t.’
‘You’d have thought,’ said Mairi, with a sigh, ‘that the War would have made us all a bit more tolerant.’
The doctor poured himself another dram. ‘Ah, you’re presupposing, Mrs McLeod, that tolerance is in itself a good thing. Not many people really believe that. Most of us are prepared to tolerate only what we understand and approve of.’
I walked with him most of the way to the road-end where his motor-car was waiting. There was little wind, but the rain was steady. We did not speak much. Every stone on that track reminded me of Kirstie, and the doctor kept damning them for bruising his feet and making him stumble.
So Kirstie had her nice coffin, made by craftsmen in Glasgow, and delivered to us by two of McVicar’s henchmen. It was of polished oak, lined with white satin, and adorned with golden-coloured tassels. In it Kirstie looked like the abbess of some great convent. She should have been lying in state in a vaulted hall, with nuns praying round her.
Young Hector refused to look at her. He would not even go into the back room where the coffin lay on our kitchen table. Nor would Laddie, our collie, which raised its head and howled at intervals of half an hour.
No one sympathised with Hector more than I, who had refused to look into my mother’s coffin.
Ailie was bolder. She gazed so long that her mother had to tell her to come away.
‘Is it Kirstie?’ asked Ailie, hours afterwards.
We knew what she meant. It was hard for us who had seen her spread dung and gut fish and scratch her oxters to believe that this woman with the noble, austere face had once been our Kirstie. It was hardest for me, who had slept with her.
We had loved her, but we had not valued her as much as we should.
‘Don’t blame yourself, Fergus,’ said Mairi, weeping in my arms.
I was weeping too. ‘But we laughed at her sometimes.’
‘Well, why shouldn’t we? She didn’t mind. I think we loved her most when we were laughing at her. Well, I did, anyway. I don’t know about you and Dugald and Hector. I do know about Ailie, though.’
I left it to Dugald to try and find a willing clergyman. He did not succeed. Perhaps he might have if he had had months, but he had only three days, and they included Sunday, a day when in those parts it was not possible to buy a loaf of bread far less persuade Calvinist ministers to put pity before dogma. In any case, Dugald, his own morality Deuteronomical, could not have been a very persuasive envoy.
If nobody minded, he said, and if nobody expected too much, he would himself read a passage out of the Bible at the graveside. After all, there would only be ourselves present.
Hector offered to play on his bagpipe some of the tunes Kirstie had taught him. He wasn’t a very good player yet, he admitted, but Kirstie hadn’t minded his mistakes.
There was the grave to dig in the old kirkyard, where the ground was stony. Dugald and I found it hard work in the rain, requiring more skill than we had thought. He kept forgetting, and remarked more than once that if we had had Kirstie to help we’d have got it done a good deal quicker.
Hector walked up and down over
the old flat gravestones, practising. He tried hard but he did make many mistakes.
Mairi and Ailie brought tea and pieces. We sat in the broken church and had a sad picnic. Still forgetful, Dugald chucked away a crust— since he was five, he muttered, he’d hated black crusts; but before we had time to rebuke him for his sacrilege an attendant gull pounced on it.
We kept assuring one another that though it would not be the most expert of funerals Kirstie wouldn’t have minded.
FIFTEEN
Tuesday at three was the time fixed. The morning was damp but with gleams of sunshine. The whole countryside was fresh and sweet. There would be a lot of larksong that day.
It was the kind of morning when Kirstie, driven by some instinct, had used to play truant from work, and go walking, as far as twenty miles there and back, into the hills or along the coast, to secret places dear to her. When she had come back in the gloaming her mood had always been strange and distant. It had seemed to me that she was still trying to recover human thoughts and feelings, after having been for hours, God knew what, a seal perhaps or a curlew or a hare or a dragonfly. As a poet seeking new experience, I had myself tried often to taste life as wild creatures did, and to enjoy, even for a few seconds, a holiday from being human, but I had never got anywhere near. Kirstie, I felt sure, had passed over that boundary many times.
We had indeed not valued her as we should.
I spent the morning of the funeral at the McLeods’. We would leave for my house where the coffin lay at half-past two. It was curious how, with only ourselves to consider, we were so concerned about not being too early or too late. Keeping to a time-table, we seemed to hope, would help us to discipline our grief for a little while longer. With so few of us to attend to so much we could not afford any breakdowns just yet.
Ailie and Hector had been kept off school. They went off to gather flowers, Dugald to look at a pregnant cow. There was no urgent need for her to be looked at but Mairi urged him to go. Work, she said, was the only way by which Dugald could express his feelings. Anyone watching him examine the cow would see how much he missed Kirstie.
Sitting in the sunshine, Mairi and I talked, as she peeled the potatoes for lunch.
‘I think I ought to tell you, Fergus,’ she said, ‘that we’ve made up our minds to leave East Gerinish and go to Inverness.’
‘I understood Dugald was still thinking it over.’
‘He thinks he is, but it’s really been decided. We’ll go some time before the winter. It wouldn’t be fair to the children to ask them to stay here any longer, cut off from the rest of the world.’
‘They’ve always seemed to me very happy here.’
‘We’ve all been very happy here, Fergus. It’ll break our hearts to leave. But I’ve got to admit I’ve been feeling restless and discontented myself. I suppose the War has something to do with it. And now Kirstie’s death. Anyway, my father’s getting old. He’d like Dugald to help him run the farm. Dugald will have more scope there than he’s ever had here. Look how hard he’s worked, how hard we’ve all worked, and what have we got to show for it? Look at yourself. You had more money when you came here than you’ve got now.’
‘I’m not complaining. I have your friendship and my poetry to show for it. I have memories of Kirstie.’
‘When we leave what will you do? You can’t stay here all by yourself.’
‘I really haven’t thought about it, Mairi.’
‘Tell me I’m a nosy besom if you like, Fergus, but there’s something I’d like to say to you.’
‘Say away.’
‘Is there any chance of you going back to your wife? I know you’ve been living with Kirstie as man and wife, and I expect a woman like Betty T. Shields would be shocked by that kind of thing, but I read a story of hers once, years and years ago, in the People’s Companion, about a woman forgiving and taking back her man after twenty years of separation, and after he’d done lots of things far worse than anything you’ve done I should think. Mind you, I was never very sure just what the wicked things were that he’d done, for she didn’t make them clear, being too ladylike I suppose, but they were terrible anyway, in India and other places in the Far East. I remember it brought tears to my eyes reading how she forgave him and took him back. It was so beautifully written. I was about eighteen at the time.’
I was searching in my mind for words which, without being spiteful, would indicate what a monstrous hypocrite Betty was, when we were interrupted by shouts from Hector and Ailie.
They came running towards the house, carrying armfuls of flowers.
‘There are men come for the funeral,’ shouted Hector. ‘Lots of them.’
‘They’re all gathered at Fergus’s house,’ cried Ailie.
‘Going in and out all the time,’ panted Hector.
We never locked doors in East Gerinish.
‘All right,’ said Mairi to her children. ‘Get your breath back. What do you mean by “lots”? Five? Ten?’
‘Oh, more than that, Mum,’ cried Ailie. Thirty at least.’
‘Thirty? Don’t be daft.’
‘We counted them,’ said Hector.
‘Well. Did you notice any women among them?’
‘No. All men. Dressed in black, and wearing hats.’
Mairi stared at me. ‘Well, she was well-known,’ she said, weakly.
I wasn’t sure myself whether to be angry at the presumption of gatecrashers or moved by the decency of simple folk who had not needed an invitation to come and honour a dead isles woman.
‘I hope they don’t expect us to feed them,’ said Mairi.
‘I don’t think they’ll be interested in food.’
‘There’s that.’
In those parts it was the custom to bring a bottle of whisky, or rum if you were odd enough to prefer rum, to a funeral. I had seen in a corner of the graveyard at Cullipool lots of empty bottles lying in the long grass like exhausted hares.
‘Goodness,’ said Mairi again, even more weakly.
I knew what she meant. Our quiet little funeral looked as if it might turn out to be a bacchanalian ceremony, and she didn’t know whether to be pleased or horrified.
I didn’t know myself.
SIXTEEN
They had come from townships up and down the island, some as far away as twenty miles. Their coming had not been organised. They had heard that Kirs tie McDonald, strongest woman in the island, and daughter of the late Malcolm McDonald, had died suddenly and was to be buried on Tuesday at three in the afternoon in the old kirkyard at East Gerinish. So that Tuesday morning, leaving their wives at home, they had put on their Sabbath blacks, thrust into their pockets bottles of whisky flat-shaped like Bibles, and then, by hired bus or decrepit car or rusty bicycle, headed for the East Gerinish road-end. There, seeing the state of the track, they had dismounted and taken to their feet. One car-load, however, who had made the mistake of broaching their bottles too soon, saw no reason why they should not motor all the way. They quickly came to a halt, with a shattered radiator. Their vehicle, abandoned as not worth the expense of retrieval, was still there couped into the heather when some months later I left East Gerinish for good.
Though no coherent discussion could have taken place on the subject, it had been agreed that in spite of my not having been married to Kirstie and therefore not being entitled to the role of grieving husband, they would nevertheless honour me as such. Therefore, when I appeared, every man there, except the one or two already incapable, took off his hat and at the door of the house shook my hand, murmuring the traditional Gaelic condolences.
To Mairi’s indignation, one white-haired patriarchal old man with the reek of whisky off his breath took her aside and informed her that since she was a woman and Ailie a female child they must not take part in the procession to the kirkyard. It had been the custom for hundreds of years for females to stay at home at funerals. It made no difference at all that the dead person was herself a female. If Kirstie could have been consulted, he said,
he was sure she would have wanted the old custom to be observed. There was in his opinion no need to know the reason for a custom, but his own father had once told him that females were barred because it was not in their nature to give the Lord his due at a graveside.
Dugald quickly let me know that he had changed his mind about reading from the Bible. All these men had been to dozens of funerals. They were expert judges as to a minister’s performance. They would be scornful of his.
There was no question either of young Hector playing his bagpipe. Not only was he too bashful, it would also have been denounced as sacrilegious. At Hebridean funerals in those days if any man needed help to stir up the appropriate emotion in himself, either joy if he believed that the departed’s soul had gone to the Lord, or sorrow if to the Devil, he was expected to use the time-honoured method of frequent swigs of usquebaugh, which after all was the water of life.
Still not sure whether to be angry at or moved by all this usurpation, I was pushed into pride of place at the head of the procession, immediately behind the coffin. So were Dugald and Hector.
The coffin was carried by relays of mourners. From the house to the kirkyard was a little under a mile. There must have been at least a dozen halts, for rests, changes of carriers, and refreshments. Hector whispered, with scorn, that Kirstie could have carried it herself without stopping once.
By the side of the track not far from the kirkyard the laird, Major Pert-Thompson was waiting, dressed in a dark suit. He had come to take part in the funeral.
He was not an ancestral laird: the estate had been bought by his father, who had made a fortune in Malaysian tin.
I had met him only three times during my ten years in East Gerinish, and each time only briefly. He was fat, with a big loose face that almost had dewlaps. He had talked to me as to an equal, though once I had had a peat-spade in my hands. Wounded in the War, he walked with a limp. Though our conversation had lasted only two or three minutes he had been several times on the point of inviting me to his mansion-house on the other side of the island.
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