by Laura Legge
I am going to share with you, he said, some poetry I wrote when I was alone in my hut this autumn. I ask that you be kind.
O thou, in whom we live and move;
Who made the loch and moor;
Thy mercy day on day thee prove;
Our stains turn thee no less pure.
If it please you, O Good and Just;
To grant us grain and meat;
A town that we can trust;
We will sit now, and we will eat.
In the name of Dia. Amen.
Amen, the others said. Bad Muireall sucked on her teeth, while Aileen tapped her fork tines on the edge of her plate. Aram was mortified. It had been a mistake to share this poem with a room of strangers, several of whom were clearly indifferent or even hostile toward him. He had done so much in life to avoid holding himself this plain and public, had loved so many women to deaden the chance of being seen.
Well, he said, thinking of the fastest way to force the congregation’s focus from him, let’s eat.
As far as he could tell, this tactic worked. They started to pass the food clockwise. Bad Muireall piled her plate so mountainously she left almost no scalloped potatoes for anyone else; in a similar show of self-regard, she poured her tumbler full of club soda, chugged it down, and brimmed it again. As the dishes circulated, Grace and Lili both made sure to take precisely the same amounts of brandy butter and mince pies as did Mrs Macbay, for instance, or Good Muireall. Euna fixed a heaping plate for Lachlan Iain and a small, birdlike smattering for herself – noticing this, Aram sneaked some extra rumbledethumps and mealie pudding onto a side plate, should she still be hungry after that snack.
Conversation was token as they ate. Over the course of the meal, Lachlan Iain hid beneath the card tables. Occasionally he peeped out at Aram and showed his by then gravy-dyed tongue. Good Muireall at one point crawled under the table to retrieve him and instead stayed down there for a while, playing makeshift draughts with peas and soda bread the congregants had dropped from their plates. Aram barely knew her and he liked her already.
Where’s your better half? Minister Macbay asked Aileen.
She shot her father an unimpressed look, as if she could not believe he was asking this in front of the entire table. Carson? He has a toothache.
Lili perked up. I’m a dentist, she proclaimed, showing several holes in her own smile. I’ve pulled so many teeth I could make a necklace!
Aileen smiled. I’ll tell Carson to give you a call, she said.
He can’t, Lili said. We don’t have a telephone.
This opened a new conversation, and Aileen seemed glad to have the limelight turned from her. Each person, now fuelled by their first round of feasting, was eager to enter the discussion, incidentally about how advanced their own lives were relative to their neighbours’. No telephone? We have a toaster that changes colours! No telephone? We have an automated garage door! All wanted to prove how inventive their homes were, what widgets they had in their kitchens, what tools for climate control. Grace, in her cropped voice, said, We don’t have running water.
Bad Muireall threw a pheasant bone across the table at her, then looked penitent, as if she had unveiled a private matter by reacting that way.
Lachlan Iain showed his eyes above the table. He was hyper now, having eaten so many small portions of energy. He started to sing an updated version of that same strange number he had revealed to Aram weeks before, in the sanctuary upstairs. A chrostag! Today I drew a lady with a double bum! A chrostag! Today I wanted to pee in everyone’s cups!
Bad Muireall stood at once. Though most others were looking at the child with adoring faces, she would not even glance cold at him. Where is your outhouse? she asked the minister.
The bathroom is just upstairs, by the Sunday School entrance. He laughed. An outhouse, really. You must think we’re barbaric!
Bad Muireall gritted her teeth at the barbaric bit. She thundered up the stairs. As soon as she was gone, Aram felt the dampness that had been gripping the walls dry, just slightly, almost imperceptibly. He looked around to see if the others had noticed the shift in humidity, but most of them had started into their seconds, and were so absorbed by neeps and partan bree they seemed not to care.
Lachlan Iain insisted that Euna open her Christmas cracker, and to appease her boy, she did. In it was a red crayon, and with it he began to doodle on the tablecloth. Where are the other kids? he asked. I want to show somebody.
Mrs Macbay’s face was always a clear barometer, and Aram could tell this question depressed her. Oh, darling, she said. We don’t have too many in Pullhair. The brothers in the boys’ choir went to Inverness to celebrate the holidays.
The boy sighed and rested his chin in his hands. I don’t want to draw any more, he said.
Lili excused herself from the table and found a private tract of carpet a few feet away. She pulled a torch from her snowsuit. Come here, Lachlan Iain, she said. As far as Aram knew, this was their first time meeting one another, but the sunny, natural way she spoke to him, the tender carpet-pat with which she invited him over, implied a high level of trust. He scurried over and sat on the carpet beside her. Let’s play sgàilich, she said. It’s my favourite.
Lili and Lachlan Iain started to cast shadow shapes against the wall, giggling each time a deer or hare or monster appeared in the ring of light. They gave each creature a distinct voice, though none used formal language, only an array of noises. While they played, Aram cleared the refuse of the meal, bones, pits, stems, ligaments. Conversation had started again, amiably, moving from news of deaths and marriages, to the congregants’ latest health concerns, to their increasingly marginal crop yields. Aram went to the alcove to settle the desserts onto a cart. It felt natural to listen to the conversation from this slight remove.
At last he wheeled the treat-cart to the table and arranged the dishes in the middle, a tad closer to Euna’s end. He passed the dishes one at a time, observing how lovely the border tarts were, the shortbread, the cranachan. He had always thought this the one defect of Scottish life, the paltriness of all desserts, the slight anticlimax they introduced to even the most delicious meals, but he knew how hard the womenfolk had worked on these treats, so he felt a duty to appreciate them out loud. Most of the guests ate generous helpings of the cranachan, by far the most tempting dessert, clots of cream adhering to beards and mouths. Euna refused a helping when the dish came to her.
After the meal, Minister Macbay read out loud from the Gospel according to Luke. They all listened to the story of Christ’s birth, for the fifth or hundredth time, though Aram noticed Lili covering Lachlan Iain’s ears. Bad Muireall had not yet returned from the bathroom, which Aram thought perhaps a mercy. When the minister was finished, the Christ child wrapped in cloths and snuggled in his manger, his folks having found no room at the guest house, the gathering began to dissolve. The goodbyes were many, the blessings sincere. This meal had heartened the congregation in a vital way, and as they prepared to leave, the room pulsed with eager dialogue, laughter. Mrs Macbay made a show of divvying up the leftovers evenly, wanting everyone to be well fed and fairly treated. Aram was happy to see her sneak extra soda bread into Lili’s container.
The townsfolk left as they had come, in a gradual trickle, though noticeably merrier than when they had arrived. Minister Macbay asked Aram to wait with the remaining guests while he sent the others onto the moor with a beannachd. Aram agreed. With the Macbays and the majority of the invitees gone, only two clumps – Aram did not want to call them families – lingered. The Gainntir women, minus Bad Muireall, who was still in the bathroom; and Good Muireall, Euna, Aileen, and Lachlan Iain, who Aram had begun to name-bundle in his head as the Hammers. It struck him as selfish that he had never learned Euna’s family name, but then, he had never learned his own, either. His father had insisted it was Sealoch, his mother Sundew. Perhaps they wanted to attach to him their most darling things, his father water, his mother land. When at Dungavel he had been forced
to use his surname, he had selected Sealoch.
Aram went to crouch beside Lachlan Iain. In Lili’s circle of light, Aram cast the form of a salmon. Want to know something? he asked the boy.
Lachlan Iain nodded. He was mesmerized by the fish, more than he had been by the deer or hare. Aram wondered if the boy had inherited this love from him, from the Sealoch-Sundews, or if that was a kind of covetous thinking.
You and I know each other, he said.
Lili, clearly intrigued by Aram’s proclamation, turned off the torch. She hooked a hand around Lachlan Iain’s waist, as if to brace him against the impact of the coming conversation.
Do you know what a father is? Aram asked.
The Gainntir and the Hammer women had, by now, all crowded around the child. Euna dropped to her knees beside Aram and he fretted, given how worn out the carpet was, this descent would cause her pain. But if it did, she showed no sign. Aileen sat down cross-legged, while Good Muireall, evidently not one to bear discomfort for no reason, pulled up a chair for herself and one for Grace.
Are you really going to do this? Aileen asked him.
Why not? Aram asked.
Go ahead, Euna said. Just don’t use him to work out your own cac.
As ever, he was moved by Euna’s unassuming wisdom. He took a moment to undress his reasons for announcing his paternity. He tunnelled down into his interior world, away from the faces, expectations, sentiments glutting the basement. And finally he saw nothing but virtue in his drive to reveal his identity. There was no guarantee he would be received well by Lachlan Iain, or by any of the watching women, but he of all people was sure a boy had a right to know his father.
So he looked into Lachlan Iain’s eyes, while Lili continued to hold the child, and explained he had fathered him. He wished Aileen would step in then and explain her role – Lachlan Iain did, after all, still believe Euna to be his biological mother – but then, Aram had learned long ago he could only speak for himself.
Lachlan Iain shrugged and said, All right. He did not seem especially shell-shocked, to Aram’s relief and disappointment. Having spent minimal time with children, he had lost track of how mutable they could be. Lachlan Iain nudged Lili to turn the torch on again.
Before she could do that, Bad Muireall, clearly having heard what Aram said to his son, came clomping down the stairs and jumped onto Aram’s back. She clawed at his eyes, monkeying over his left shoulder, and then they were rolling together in the tobacco-and-burned-coffee stench rising from the prehistoric carpet. He had never grappled like this, had only fought with honour or else been sucker-punched, only rolled when he had intended it to be sensual. This was anything but sensual. From outside came a babel of thunder and dense rain. The church basement was surprisingly well insulated, and free of windows, so only the most violent sounds ever permeated its walls. Lachlan Iain had started to cry, in his infantile way, where every ten seconds he would stop to make sure everyone was noticing how sad and scared he was, and then he would start to cry again. Meanwhile, Bad Muireall cupped her hands over Aram’s eyes, blinding now rather than clawing. Apparently she did not want him to see his son’s emotions, perhaps afraid this would bond the two of them.
You stupid toll na tòine, she said to Aram. Look what you’ve done.
The rain intensified. When the thundercloud boomed, the room trembled, as if the storm were directly overhead. Grace prised Bad Muireall’s hands from Aram’s face and in the process was steamrolled, her hand and shoulder forced brutally into the weight-bearing column. Rounds of blood appeared in the lace. Ach, she said. I was just trying to help.
Aram pinned Bad Muireall’s two wrists to the carpet. He climbed onto her low belly and straddled her, by then breathing heavily. Her haircut, severe before, had been ravaged by the rolling, her whole person slick with sweat. She looked weak like this. Assailable. And yet any desire Aram had to hurt her, primal or mindful, faded as quickly as it had come.
What hurts? he asked.
Her face changed. Where before her features had been distorted by fear, anger, now they were phenomenally still. The thunder blanched and gradually began to diminish. Bad Muireall looked silently at Aram. She looked at him until her looking made him sheepish and he had to speak. He said, leaning in so only she could hear, I don’t know what happened to you. But I believe it’s not your fault.
Now his temple was soaked with her sweat, or maybe tears – he was too close to have any perspective. He was still afraid of what she might do were she totally free, so he kept her pinned lightly in place, as a boy might a butterfly whose wings he did not want to tear. A strange endeavour, finding the midway between reasonable measures of safety and all-out domination.
Euna said to Bad Muireall, If I’d had you in this position a few years ago, I might have done something terrible.
Bad Muireall closed her eyes, as if, body trapped, her only retreat was toward sleep or some likeness of it. Aram had secretly wondered if Bad Muireall were somehow controlling the rain, but now the downpour had diminished, he felt ridiculous for even considering that a possibility. If she had that power in her arsenal, surely she would be mustering it right now, in this defenceless moment.
Aram looked at Euna. What should we do with her now? he asked. He liked this arrangement: Euna felt she was in control of Bad Muireall’s fortune, while in truth Aram was the one with his knees tight around her ribcage.
Euna thought for a moment, using her clipped, guitar-shredding nails to force back her cuticles, one so far she drew blood. Aram’s mind went first to formal punishment. There was no gaol in Pullhair, no standard means of justice or restraint of dangerous persons – they could have ferried and charged her farther south, in a more populous area of Scotland. In theory, Aram no longer believed in holding folks in captivity – he knew how degrading that fate was – though he was not sure how he would behave in practice.
Lili covered Lachlan Iain’s ears again. She seemed eager to safeguard his innocence. Euna turned toward Good Muireall and asked, Would you help us figure this out, Muireall? Your word is basically gospel.
Bad Muireall flared her nostrils and opened her eyes at the sound of her own name. She seemed enraged to learn she shared Muireall with someone else, especially someone Euna genuinely loved. Aram felt the ribs between his knees inflate and then tighten, a fast and repeated pattern.
Absolutely, Good Muireall said. I mean, what the feck do I know, but it might be helpful that I have the least stake in this.
You’re a wise woman, Euna said.
The breath-pattern between Aram’s legs hastened. I think what’s important, Good Muireall said, is that everyone who’s been hurt gets some time to talk about it.
Aram groaned inwardly. This sounded like a nightmare. Luckily, he had never been hurt, so he did not have to say a word. He could sit there straddling Bad Muireall and pretend to listen while Good Muireall conducted her little bohemian, fringy, free-and-easy circle. He could wait for everyone to share their grievances, air the wounds well beneath their daily armour, and when that chatter, like the thunder, had subsided, they could return to the practical matter of what to do with the villain who had upended all their lives.
Good Muireall said, We might need to do a few circles like this one. There might be unresolved matter after today.
Shite, Aram thought. That’s okay, Euna said. We don’t expect miracles.
Grace nodded so the lace on her neck furrowed and flattened. She said, If you only knew how low our expectations are…
Nothing better than low expectations, Good Muireall said, laughing. So here’s how it works: participation in the circle is voluntary. I’ll be the keeper, and I’ll direct the movement of the conversation. She looked around and retrieved Euna’s guitar pick, a thin, hot-pink piece of plastic, from her fretboard. When you’re holding this pick, you’re allowed to speak.
At that point, Minister and Mrs Macbay came back down the stairs, presumably having blessed all the guests and waved them out onto the heat
h. The Macbays took one short look at the scene and a long one at each other. Well then, Minister Macbay boomed. We’ll let you get on with… this.
Aileen beamed, a sight Aram had rarely seen since she was eighteen, by the forcing house. She said, I’ll explain later, Boban.
I trust you, dearc-dhearg, he said. Redcurrant, Aram thought, was appropriate. Mrs Macbay motioned with her hands to say she would be waiting above, in the sanctuary. She seemed to direct this message toward Lili in particular. The Macbays left the basement with a few concerted glimpses over their shoulders, as if nervous parents leaving their children alone for the first time.
When they were gone, Good Muireall combed the room and found the communion wine Aram had fetched for Bad Muireall hours before, then squirrelled away in the Sunday School supply closet. She uncorked the bottle with a camping knife from her pocket and poured its contents into a casual assortment of teacups, steins, and Mason jars, one for each person, save Lachlan Iain. This isn’t exactly recommended before a circle, she said, but it’s more fun this way.
Aileen raised hers, a chipped, commemorative Stornoway United FC mug, to toast. Everyone followed suit, other than Bad Muireall, who was still trapped beneath Aram. Aileen said a benediction first in lilting, golden Gaelic, and then in blunted English: May the Lord keep you in His hand, and never close His fist too tightly on you. Aram found the words vaguely ominous, more of a warning than a blessing, but hey, any excuse to drink.
Within a few minutes, thanks both to the wine itself and to the act of imbibing together, the energy in the room was looser. Good Muireall must have sensed this, because then and only then did she explain the parameters of the circle. First, they would build a list of the crimes committed. Second, each person would explain how these offences impacted them physically, emotionally, and spiritually. Third, the offenders – she looked at Aram, what the hell?, as well as at Bad Muireall – would explain why they had committed those crimes.
