Island of Wings

by Karin Altenberg

  She could hardly remember now what it was like not to have children in the house. Over the last few years she had witnessed the death of so many infants in the clachan. She tried her best to support the women in their grief but increasingly, as her own children survived, she noticed that they shied away from her compassion.

  ‘Betty,’ she said suddenly, ‘do the women in the clachan resent me for the children?’ She realised too late that the question was unfair – Betty was one of them.

  Betty, however, did not seem disconcerted as she looked up – there was still mirth in her blue eyes. ‘I believe they think you pleasant enough – although perhaps a wee bit prim.’ She laughed the question away.

  ‘I worry about the filth in the clachan – it cannot be healthy for the little ones.’ Lizzie, who kept the manse clean and well aired in the hope that no ills would settle, shook her head at the thought. Some families even kept the latrines inside the houses in the winter in order to gather valuable manure for the fields.

  ‘Ah,’ Betty laughed, ‘we cannot all be as trim as you; look at your hands – they are all red and coarse from all the scrubbing and washing. After all these years on Hirta, you should at least have grown used to the stink like I have!’

  Lizzie felt a pang of hurt at being singled out like that, but there was no malice in Betty’s mocking.

  ‘I will never get used to the stink– it smells of old fizzy piss and horrible poo!’ Eliza squealed delightedly and they all laughed.

  But underneath all the gayness and delight Lizzie realised that the subject of the dying infants was unmentionable. She watched Betty’s face and wondered if the light in the other woman was not turned up too high. Was she trying to hide the truth of her feelings from those she loved?

  5

  JUNE 1838 – LESSONS

  There was a film of green on the black velvet, a vague colouring like fresh birch pollen on the still surface of a tarn. Below the velvet collar, on the shoulders and back of the coat, the fabric was shiny with wear. The boy Duncan was reminded of a greasy pot left out overnight to collect the rainwater – the way the grime would settle around the rim and in oily streaks across the surface. He wanted to taste the green on the collar, to draw his tongue through the velvet and leave a dark trail like the wake of a snail on a moss-covered stone.

  The coat was hanging from the tip of a ram’s horn which had been stuck into the wall of the new schoolroom. Duncan was sitting at the desk opposite the minister. The room had been attached to the kirk like a misshapen vestry, and it could not host enough students to form a seminar. It was about nine feet by eight, with a small canvas-covered window facing the bay. A wooden tube of the minister’s own engineering served as a chimney in the winter and a ventilator in the summer. On this day the door had been left open to let in the summer air. It was a warm morning and the minister’s coarse linen shirt was sticking to his back. Duncan could smell a sharp scent rising from the older man; it was of crushed cardamom and musk and not altogether unpleasant.

  The boy’s fair hair had been cut close to the scalp. His mother had used the small shears and called him her little lamb while she cut away his winter locks. His ears burned in humiliation when he thought about it. Why could she not understand that she was embarrassing him? He was not a child any more. In the slow afternoons, when he learned and improved, he sometimes came to believe in himself as somebody else, somebody older and slightly better. This is what the minister had promised – that he would be enlightened by the lessons and rise above his kin. The sounds of the schoolroom were contained and small compared to the noise of his world outside, where the acoustics were set against the sky. But in the mornings and at night, when feathers stuck to his dew-sodden feet and his mother prepared the guga over the hearth, he was Duncan again, and his mind would wander off into the old stories and songs. At such times he could hear the voices of the ancestors and his heart was full of the rocks and the sea. The calls of the birds re-formed in his mind until he could decipher their coded messages in the same way a traveller would slowly come to understand a foreign language. He kept a close watch on the movements of the birds and he would speak to them like he spoke to the sea.

  Over the last few weeks his cropped hair had bleached in the sun like a cornfield after harvest, until it glowed almost unnaturally white against his bronzed forehead and temples. Now, as he sat on the hard stool in the sparsely furnished room, his thin brown legs were moving restlessly as his bare feet swept the rough floorboards under the desk.

  ‘For goodness’ sake boy! Can you sit still for one moment and concentrate on your task?’ the minister said crossly in a voice that was thick but precise within the box-like room. His forehead was furrowed but his eyes, as he looked up from the papers in front of him, smiled at the boy. The minister had started giving Duncan special tasks and lessons shortly after Hogmanay a few years previously. In the beginning the lessons had been set to straighten his mind and quench any superstitious tales that may have hovered on his tongue. Duncan could see that this was justified. He had fabricated all those stories and told them to the others in such a way that he believed his own words. He had been too young to understand back then – just a child with a child’s mind – but everybody had wanted to listen to him and so he had got a bit carried away. The minister had been very cross with Duncan after this episode, and at first the lessons had been all dark and terrifying. He shuddered in the hot room as he thought about all the perils he had so narrowly escaped when the minister saved him from superstition and fables. After a while the nature of the lessons had changed and the minister had started telling him other things – things about the world and all the different countries, about kings and heroes in history, about the apostles and their adventures, and of philosophy and the monk Augustine. He talked of explorers and new worlds, and those were the stories Duncan liked the best.

  By and by the man and the boy had become used to each other’s company, perhaps even dependent on it. They would sit for hours in the lamplight and trace the wanderings of the apostles on the globe the minister had ordered from the mainland. This was called geography. The minister would point out large green and yellow areas which were called the Americas, where Christian missionaries had risked their lives in order to save the savages and bring them into the light. Another such explorer was Mungo Park, who had set out from Scotland a few years previously to find Timbuktu. Mungo, who was named after a saint, and as such was almost an apostle, had befriended Negroes along the way and learned to speak their language. It seemed as if their communication was just like the white man’s. But mostly the savages were unimprovable and therefore outside humanity. This, explained the minister, justified the colonisation of the American prairies by the white farmers. The savages had forfeited their right to their parcel of God’s earth as they had shown no intention of improving it or making it more productive. It was obvious in this light that Hirta must continue to change and improve. After the land reform that he, the minister, was putting in place, the land would no longer be held in common but each individual tenant would pay rent for his own croft. ‘Why can the land no longer be held by the islanders like it has been since the time of the ancestors?’ asked Duncan. ‘Ah, the ancestors – tell me about them, boy,’ MacKenzie had said.

  The minister did not seem to understand that the ancestors were part of the land and that the intricate web of kinship tied the fields, meadows and fowling rocks to the community. The birds would have told him, if he had been able to hear them; they had been there since the very beginning, sharing the rocks with the men and women whose names were still given to the newly born and whose blood fuelled the souls of those who grew old. Just like the day moved east over the world to return each morning, climbing the steep cliffs of the Gap and entering Village Bay between Conachair and Oiseval, so would the St Kildans live on from generation to generation with the birds watching over them.

  There were white p
atches at the top and bottom of the globe. These were very cold and largely unexplored, the minister explained. Duncan would often think of them at night and envisage himself walking across all the green and yellow and blue areas until he reached the white patches, which even the apostles and the missionaries had avoided or been defeated by. These white patches were the ends of the world and no one really knew what happened there. Duncan had his own theory that this was where the sky met the earth, and the white was the clouds and the wild storms that would gather there before being sent off across the seas to reach the shores of Hirta. Early on he asked where Hirta was, and the minister explained that it was not on the map but if it had been it would have been there, and he had put his finger in the middle of the blue which was ocean. It was strange, Duncan thought, to learn geography when your place in the world was still unmarked.

  Once the minister told Duncan about swimming – how it could save people who fell over the rocks. Duncan had never known a human being to swim and the idea of it thrilled him. And so the minister and Duncan made a pact; the minister would teach Duncan to swim, and in return Duncan would tell the minister about the old beliefs and about all the songs and stories.

  So for the last couple of weeks they had not looked at the globe. Instead the minister had asked Duncan to write down some of the old Hirta songs in a book with blank pages. Duncan would hum the songs to himself quietly so as not to disturb the minister, and as the song ran through his mind like a bright burn Duncan would put the words on the paper in front of him. Duncan thought this was an odd and boring task. Why would anyone want to have the songs on paper when they were supposed to be sung and everybody knew them anyway? Once there had been pipes and fiddles on the island, which the ancestors had played. This was before the missionaries started coming. The songs were the links to that time, the time before the pipes were taken away and the drums were buried and forgotten. But Duncan could still hear the music as he walked over the island; he would hear a fiddle being stroked by a burn after rain and the whispers of a song rising from a spring. Perhaps the minister knew this, but Duncan was loyal and unsuspecting and, unknown to himself, he was spiriting the Reverend’s work, recording and mapping the souls of his people and exposing their hidden lives.

  ‘When will you teach me to swim, sir?’ the boy would ask every now and again, and the minister would lift his head from a book or a paper and smile absently. ‘What? Oh, soon enough, my lad, soon enough.’ ‘When is soon?’ The boy was eager, but the minister knew how to keep him occupied. ‘When you have learned not to test my patience.’

  But these thoughts alone were not the cause of Duncan’s restlessness on this summer’s morning. No, something much more exciting was going on. For the last couple of days, as the afternoon light lingered warmly into the white night, Duncan had felt them coming. He had felt it in his blood as surely as the return of the birds in early spring. He even thought he could smell it on the air, like the thickening scent of the first snow. And then at last, this morning, they were there. Even before he got out of the dwelling he knew that they had come. He had heard the birds calling to each other and telling of their arrival since the sun rose. He had been expecting them for days. The summer was warm, and green algae were growing around the island. And sure enough, when he reached the new sea wall that morning, Village Bay had been boiling with an enormous shoal of mackerel. As the morning wore on he had seen some of the older boys through the open door of the schoolroom as they walked in pairs and groups towards Dùn or the Point of Coll. It was insufferable to be indoors today. Duncan glanced longingly out of the window and thought of his rod, which was leaning against the kirk wall. He had worked on the rod and the line all winter and he knew they were perfect. His bare feet were drumming the floor now and although he tried to keep them still he would forget and sometimes his knees would hit the desk and rattle the ink bottle so that it shook dangerously.

  The minister looked up again and shook his head. ‘All right, Duncan, off you go before you spill the good ink all over my sermon.’

  ‘Thank you, sir,’ said Duncan as he pushed out his chair and caught it just before it toppled over. ‘It is the mackerel come back,’ he said at the door without turning.

  ‘Yes, my boy, I know,’ said Mr MacKenzie quietly as he watched the lad depart through the open door. ‘I felt them coming too.’

  Duncan loved fishing: the long wait for the sharp thrill, the delight of getting something for nothing, but above all the mys­tery and adventure of it. Adventure is as inherent to the nature of a boy as procreation is to a man. Adventure is the breeze becoming wind, bright, primary colours and the smattering of flags; it is dark shadows of purple and blue and a deep smell of earth and mystery. The very magnificence and beauty of adventure makes you braver as it offers the possibility of love, and of death.

  As he climbed over the glebe wall Duncan could see a couple of older boys walking quickly ahead of him towards the Point of Coll. His heart was racing fast now, and for a moment he was afraid that they would get to his rock before him. He decided to try to reach it from above. For days during his free late afternoons he had been climbing around the point looking for the perfect ledge from which to cast his line. He had found it just on the other side of a rock which cut into the sea so that a narrow ledge was formed about six feet above the water. As he climbed the slope behind the kirk Duncan thought of the savages in America and how they would sneak up on their prey, or on the white men who had come in carts with women and children and clocks and bibles and cultivated the land on the great grass plains, which were like the seven seas but green. As he reached the right height he started running across the slope on a path trampled by sheep. He ran just like a Sioux or a Cherokee, crouched and thrusting the rod like a spear in front of him until he reached the edge of the sea, where he started to descend towards the ledge. He could see the other two boys below. They had stopped about a hundred yards from his ledge. A few puffins were dozing on the slope below him. He stopped and crouched behind a stone while keeping his eyes on the puffins. ‘I will get you palefaces – there will be no surrender,’ he whispered coarsely in what he thought might be a savage voice. He raised his imaginary bow and fired a couple of swift arrows – phew! phew! – before charging forward and grabbing the closest puffin by the neck. He twisted the neck with practised hands before facing the other birds. A few of them had been disturbed by the commotion and tumbled off the rock, but a handful remained and they were looking suspiciously at Duncan and grumbling in protest. ‘I will tie all your bloody scalps to my belt,’ he hissed to the bewildered puffins, and added, ‘That will teach you to stay off my land!’ He killed another three puffins and tied them to his belt before reaching his ledge safely. The ledge was not large enough to accommodate two boys or even a full-grown man but Duncan was not yet thirteen and his thin body sat comfortably on the stony seat.

  Everything was still. There was a slight swell and the sun would sometimes break through the thin veil of clouds around the island. Further along the rugged coast, barely within earshot, the other two boys were throwing their lines into the sea, jigging for the precious catch. Duncan rested his head against the rock and let out a sigh of pleasure and the wind replied. He liked the warm granite at his back; a scent of salt and sun radiated from the pink rock and mixed with the sharp smell from the dead puffins around his waist. He was used to these smells and they comforted him. He watched the line as it disappeared into the deep – the water was very clear, and every now and again he thought he could see the bait glinting far below. The surface of the sea was still, but Duncan knew that they were down there, shooting back and forth in one great body. He closed his eyes and listened to the soft wash of the waves. It was the sound of his mother’s hand gently stroking his temples just before falling asleep.

  He woke when he felt a tug on the line, which he had tied to his big toe. He jerked his foot and felt the resistance. The fish had caught, and as he wound
it in he waved triumphantly to the other boys, who did not acknowledge his greeting but stood watching grumpily as he pulled in the first catch of the day. It was a beautiful mackerel; its underside was the colour of clouds and the back still wore the colours of the sea, cut through with ribbons of grief.

  As the morning wore on, the wind picked up and the fish ran too so that the boys were pulling them out until the bait ran out and they had to start using mackerel flesh on the hooks. The rock around Duncan was slippery with blood and gut, and the puffins gave off their strong smell. A new group of boys had assembled at the point. Clouds were gathering with the wind and would sometimes cover the sun, the sea darkening for a moment into threat. Suddenly Duncan heard a peal of laughter. He stood up quickly – too quickly – to see what was going on. As he stood one of his bare feet slipped on the slimy ledge. He tried to grab hold of the rock above. His hand clawed and grasped, looking for a tuft of grass, a solid piece of the island he had always known and never left. Because he could not believe it was happening, the beginning of his fall was horribly slow. He saw too much; he saw the safe rock falling away from him, the shimmer of minerals in the sun, a clump of violets in a crevice and next to it a cheerful bed of sea-campion, thrift and scurvy grass. He saw, or perhaps he did not, the boys look up at his shrill cry and start running, shuffling amongst the boulders and rocks towards him.

  The punishment that inevitably followed the fall was severe and the boy was shocked by the chill of the water as it closed around him. As he bobbed up to the surface Duncan spat out the vile water he had swallowed. He found that he was still hanging on to the rod. Blinking away the cruel salt, he saw his friends on the rocks. They were calling to him but he could not hear. One or two were reaching out their rods for him to catch, but the current around the point had already carried him too far out, and in any case he did not want to let go of his own rod. He clung to it desperately, wide-eyed. The whole thing surprised him; he could not swim and yet he was afloat – how could it be? But none of this was imaginary, and the truth could not be reconciled. But just when disaster presents itself, in that moment when the horror is unveiled, there is a space where you are untouchable, and perfectly safe because it has already happened. The trick, unpreventable perhaps, but still so unnecessary, has already been played on you.