Highland river, p.11
Highland River, page 11
The main excuse would doubtless be that they had the house—and perhaps a young child or two—to look after and the dinner to cook.
But he is certain there was something more to it than that, something of age-old custom. She need not go to church and yet no harm will come to her. In man’s spiritual aspiration, she is forgotten or ignored. In his ascetic moments, she is seen darkened with passion, soiled with the pain of creation, bearing the burden of sin. So long has she been outside the mysteries and cults and secret associations man has made for his own pleasure and importance, that she is beyond the ethic of each age and every age, as life itself is, and continues as life continues, and endures as the hills endure. Possibly it was some such dim apprehension of her state that made Kenn conceive of her as being from everlasting to everlasting.
And if there appears to be mystery here, in the woman’s own mind there is no mystery. Kenn’s mother did not go to communion on the Sabbath of the Sacrament simply because she believed she was not worthy. Never in her life did she sit at communion table, never broke the bread nor drank the wine. She had done nothing to make herself unworthy. She was seen in her life as a good woman and without reproach.
Yet she believed herself unworthy and accepted her condition in the calm spirit with which she had turned away from the back door and gone to the front to see the worshippers drawn into the church.
It was a humility that was never confessed, as if the core of it were a shyness delicate as the compassion of Christ.
Neither, however, did her husband, who attended church regularly, go to communion. When the tables were being ‘fenced’ by the ministers, he and his brother seamen remained in their seats, worshipping with prayer and praise. When shots of herring had been plentiful and the quays of Stornoway or Castlebay or Wick had been quick with life, they had looked on the whisky when it was raw and sang and dared and danced. They knew their lives in the past had not contained enough solemnity of holiness to justify them in going forward to the tables. They were in act and fact not good enough. And should a drop of whisky come their way at any time they would, God help them, not pass it by.
They worshipped decently and quietly, strong incurious men, with no envy in their hearts. To this position they had been called and they would maintain it without fear; and if their church had been a vessel in distress, with the bread and wine its cargo, they would there and then have undertaken to navigate it through the brimstone loch of hell, and on getting a fair discharge would have set off again for another shot, leaving respectfully the elders, and the holy widows, and the old maids to the glory of the Kingdom.
Kenn has promised himself that sometime he will try to find out how it came about that Jesus had fishermen for his disciples; though it may be difficult to contemplate, without a smile, the Loch of Galilee over against the thunder of the northern seas.
If it may thus appear that woman was outside the mystery, at which her husband at least assisted, the final scene of that Sabbath comes back into Kenn’s mind with an odd mixture of amused excitement and reverence.
His mother is sitting in her hard chair by one side of the fire; his father, at the opposite side, has induced a mood of silence and preparation.
‘Let us take the Books,’ he says, in a voice withdrawn from them. He turns over the pages of the big Bible. ‘Let us read the eleventh chapter of the Gospel according to St John.’
When they have all got the place in the small print Bibles, he looks at Kenn the youngest, who starts and hurriedly mutters through the first verse: Now a certain man was sick, named Lazarus, of Bethany, the town of Mary and her sister Martha.
In a clear voice, Joe reads the second verse; and is followed, sunwise, by his father, his mother, and Angus.
Now this is the chapter that contains the shortest verse in the Bible, namely, Jesus wept. It is verse thirty-five. It has always been a game amongst the boys that it is hard luck to get a long verse or one with difficult names and embarrassing to get one dealing with certain bodily organs or acts. But to get the shortest verse in the Bible is to score.
There was a certain shyness and fear about this public reading. When Kenn had got over his first verse, he immediately began ‘counting out’ to find the lucky one. Angus, who had been quicker on the count, was waiting for him, and, closing his left eye, shoved out his tongue.
The droll mockery excited Kenn irresistibly. Joe nudged him with his knee. He stumbled so badly over his next verse that his father looked at him. He grew red and terribly confused.
The reading went on. Twice Angus coughed importantly.
And said, Where have ye laid him? They said unto him, Lord, come and see, said his mother.
Jesus wept, said Angus.
There was silence.
Kenn’s mother sat quiet and aloof. She did not even look at her young son. Correction here lay with the man of the house.
Kenn gulped— Then said the Jews—and gulped again— Behold how he loved him!
While his father was still looking at him, his eyes whipping-angry under ridged brows, Joe quietly read the next verse.
Kenn did not look up. Tears were not far away. Then he heard his father’s voice going on as if nothing had happened.
His shame was held by a strange and petulant fear. He could not look up; could not look anywhere. The figure of Jesus, weeping.
Joe had read on to cover him up. And then his father. There was that bigness about them. And though he saw this, he resented it, too.
The reading of the chapter over, his father meditated a little while, then turned to the twenty-third psalm. The Lord’s my shepherd, I’ll not want. …
While he read the psalm, the fingers of his free hand crushed audibly against the rough skin of the palm. His voice was charged with fervour, and his head moved as if he were telling the lines to himself in a lonely place.
He finished and there was silence.
The mother was sitting upright in her hard chair, the Bible closed on her lap, her face towards the fire. Without a movement of her body she began singing the psalm.
These first notes of his mother’s voice always had a strange effect on Kenn. They were balanced and unhurried; they sang with grace and calm; their rhythm entered his breast, took possession of it on a surging swell, surging upward and out of him, on great, slow, expanding rings, till the floor of heaven itself was circled and sustained.
After a little time, Kenn joined in, his voice moody and muttering, but gradually thinning and growing clear, yet never quite winning free of the jealous burden of self- consciousness. When the singing ended, they all got down on their knees on the stone floor, put their elbows on their chairs, and bowed their heads.
His father prayed for a long time, and he prayed well and fluently and without a pause or stutter. There were phrases that he used every Sunday night; favoured quotations from the Bible were frequent and apt; yet the whole was always a new creation.
It could not be otherwise and come so winged from the heart. In the urgency of his supplication, his voice rose and fell. The power of God was like the power of the sea. He had to navigate the sea, to cry out in the storm, to be quick in his flesh and his spirit if he were not to founder in the wrath to come.
The heart of the seaman in utter humility, open and laid bare, was yet the heart of the seaman who, lashed to his tiller in a winter’s storm, fought the real sea with a grim and even exultant courage. There were stories of seas fought through that brought the shiver to Kenn’s spine.
The abiding calm of his mother, old as the earth; the cleaving force of his father, like the bow of his boat.
Kenn became aware of the stealthy movement of Angus’s body. But even in the very moment of making up his mind that he would not look at him, he turned his head and at his brother’s mockery stuck out his tongue to the root. Then, feeling better, he bowed his head again.
‘… and all we ask is in Thy name. Amen.’
CHAPTER NINE
SPRING CAME IN one morning with a spring salmon. Kenn spotted it from the high coping of the bridge, told Beel, and let all the scholars pass to school. Beel did not believe it was a salmon, saying he thought it was the edge of a stone with green slime. But when they went down to the river they found that it was in truth a salmon. With wings to his heels, Kenn flew home for two hooks.
When he returned, Beel was trimming the second stick. ‘You take that one,’ whispered Beel, ‘and tie on the hook hard so that it won’t turn.’ When the gaffs were ready, he added, ‘I’ll take him just below the head—you above the tail. When I say Go!—pull.’
No one was to be seen from under the arch of the bridge. Beel got down on hands and knees. Kenn followed.
Slowly their sticks went out over the fish, touched the water, and sank down, down until the hook was hidden by the curve of the body.
‘Pull!’ said Beel, and he himself pulled and landed clean on his back, his hook having glanced off the hard scales. While he was yet on his back the fish landed with a great wet walloping on his stomach, and Kenn on top of the fish, his hook still embedded, and the freed stick whacking the stones. Through the tumult, Kenn fought for the gills and got his hold. ‘Hit him now!’ he cried.
Beel hit him on the back of the head with a stone.
It was a nice fish of about eleven pounds, clean run, a hen fish with a lovely small head. Its beauty, dead, frightened them a little.
Kenn undid his trousers, and Beel, lifting the fish, stuck it tail-down against his bare leg; then Kenn pulled up his trousers over the lower part of the fish and spread his jersey over the top part. From under his arm to his knee the cold wet fish was like a gigantic splint. But Kenn did not feel it cold as he went carefully along the grass, holding it in position by pressure of arms and hands.
‘No one would ever notice anything,’ said Beel, walking close beside him.
‘Are you sure?’ But behind their earnest whispered talk, Kenn was exultant.
He had seen the salmon, when Beel had not seen it; he had landed it, when Beel had missed.
They hid the fish among the salleys, and, as they were topping the brae, heard the school bell.
Sweating and breathless, they arrived to find the classroom door closed. Boldly Beel opened it and Kenn followed him across the floor before the rows of scholars and the gaze of the headmaster.
But the bible reading had not actually started. Nothing was said.
Kenn had done his home lessons. It turned out a memorable and blessed day. The way in which Kenn and Beel stuck together in the playground or smiled esoterically to each other across the benches was so flagrantly odious in the eyes of their class mates that a fight was arranged between Jeck Munro and Kenn.
Jeck had all the omens against him, however, including a weak nose. The only science in the fighting game was to stand up to your opponent and hit him hard and as often as possible. Before the engagement had right started Kenn landed full pelt on Jeck’s nose. The blood gushed.
‘Ah ye big coward!’ screamed Martha, Jeck’s sister, at Kenn, her blue eyes flaming with fight. She came towards him, one flaxen pigtail whipping round her throat.
Kenn backed away, giving her his shoulder.
Beel raked a sarcastic ‘Hο! Ho!’ at her. Maddened, she swung round on him. Beel took to his heels, laughing affectedly, leapt on to the wall, pivoted on his chest, and was gone.
Mocking laughter came up over the wall.
Kenn joined him on the crest of the brae and they swayed in their mirth, pushed each other with weak arms, and could be heard a long way off.
They went home together, carrying the tantalising mystery with them. In many a township that night, boys singly or in little groups wondered jealously what it could have been.
In the first of the dark Kenn and Beel squatted among the salleys. The silver had dulled and the fish was stiff as a board. A blackbird scolded in a bush.
In the listening quiet of the twilight, Beel opened his knife and measured the fish with his eye.
There. Or perhaps there. There, say.
He cut through the tough skin, opened out the red flesh, came on the bone. The bone finally cracked and, bloodied from the guts, Beel severed the neat tail portion from the stumpy head. While he wiped his knife and his hands, he said, ‘You can spit on the stone.’
Kenn took a small flat stone from his pocket and spat on one side of it. Then he spun the stone in the air and for a moment their uplifted faces were pale in the grey light. ‘Dry!’ said Beel. The stone landed and rolled downward. They followed it, rooting among the salleys. The dry side was uppermost.
Beel chose the tail. Through Kenn went a bitter pang, and, as they walked back across the river flat, the evening drained thinly away through his fingers.
But he found his mother liked the head portion just as well as the other; to her there was no difference. The neatness, the pretty shape of the tail portion was thus lifted and lost in an ampler good. Kenn felt its further horizon break on him as if he himself had been lifted up.
And so his happiness returned and ran secretly in him again.
As he thought over the day’s doings in the nest of his bed, he was full of glee. ‘Hah-haa!’ he breathed, wide-mouthed; he constricted and blinded himself with his mirth; turned in upon himself like an adder, seeking the central core of himself, so that he might burrow into that, crush his laughing mouth against it, and go blind in the last tension of fun.
Then he drew back, open-mouthed and listening, like a troll, and heard nothing in the world but the river.
Contract and expand, systole and diastole: the river flows.
The river! In the night of the world. Listen!
He burrowed again, wrinkling his nose. For it was not the salmon, nor the fight, nor the thousand practical incidents of the past day that reared the fun in him. It was that he had seen where Beel the lynx-eyed had not seen, and had succeeded where Beel the leader had failed.
His own personality rose out of the river within him. He was a little shy of it, as he might be of some dark boy-stranger with a waiting smile.
He turned his head away, silently laughing. In the middle of laughing he fell asleep.
CHAPTER TEN
LOOKING BACK ON HIS CHILDHOOD, Kenn finds, is looking back on a small figure in a sunny valley. The birch and hazel trees that clothe the sides of the valley are in full leaf; the green river-flats, widening and narrowing and disappearing round bends, are moss-soft to noiseless feet. The white scuts of the rabbits disappear in bracken clumps or sandy burrows or up under the foliage of trees. A hawk sails from one side of the valley to the other; inland, a buzzard circles high up over a gulch where rock faces stare.
A shot is heard faintly towards the high ground and the small figure stops and listens. That must be Gordon the keeper working the low ground in towards Con na Craige. Wild cats had been coming in from the Sutherland mountains and he had been setting traps for them. He also had traps for the hawks and the eagles.
All of which meant that Gordon was not on the river that day!
The strath is emptied of his presence, drained of the fear of him, and the little figure takes a small run, full of eagerness and the thrill of freedom.
He wanders, he stops, he peers into pools, he pokes under stones, he examines rabbit burrows, he listens, he looks about him, he wanders on.
From high overhead the river in its strath must look like a mighty serpent, the tip of its tail behind the mountain, its open mouth to the sea.
It is easy at such a thought to mount still higher over the small figure, to rise above the buzzard, and with circling sweep to scan that whole northland.
A thrill comes to Kenn as his eye takes in feature after feature, the shores of the Moray Firth, with all its villages and towns, every name charged with association, thick with the texture of life, Fraserburgh, Buckie, Burghead, Cromarty (the place of refuge), Tarbat Ness, Dornoch, Golspie, Brora, Helmsdale, and passing away nor’-east through Lybster to Wick.
At a glance Kenn can take in the whole steel-shimmering triangle of the Moray Firth. Each of its sides is barely seventy miles. For its size it is one of the finest breeding grounds of fish—and perhaps of men—to be found in any firth of the seven seas. Since the birth of his grandfather, its story to Kenn is intricate with the doings of men and women, legendary or known to him. The rocks are quiet enough today. Even the headlands are stretched out in sleep. But Kenn smiles, knowing the rocks and the headlands, and that innocent shimmer of the quiet water like a virgin shield!
As he wheels slowly, the great plain of Caithness opens before his eyes and the smile that had been in them deepens with affection. This is the northland, the land of exquisite light. Lochs and earth and sea pass away to a remote horizon where a suave line of pastel foothills cannot be anything but cloud. Here the actual picture is like a picture in a supernatural mind and comes upon the human eye with the surprise that delights and transcends memory. Gradually the stillness of the far prospect grows unearthly. Light is silence. And nothing listens where all is of eternity.
Pride quickens the smile. This bare, grim, austere Caithness, treeless, windswept, rock-bound, hammered by the sea, hammered, too, by successive races of men, broch-builders and sea-rovers, Pict and Viking. Against the light, Kenn veils his eyes, and wheeling round sees the Orkneys anchored in the blue seas with the watermark of white on their bows. Brave islands, he feels like saluting them with a shout.
Westward yet, and the granite peaks of Ben Laoghal, the magic mountain, beckon towards Cape Wrath and the Arctic. Westward still, and all the dark mountains of Sutherland march on Ben Mor Assynt, beyond which is the Atlantic and the Isles of the west.
Kenn completes the circle and his vision narrows on the winding strath beneath him, upon its skyey thread of water that links mountain to sea, west to east; the strath where all he has seen is given living shape and desire; and suddenly closing his wings, he stoops upon the moving figure on the river bank.
