But Liza, who had always realised things, began to realise then that the road back to the Lane was not going to be so easy.
‘We’ll have a house in the country, Mam. Mind, we always wanted that. With a garden and nasturtiums and a goat. We’ll never live in the Lane again. We’ll have plenty of money when I’m educated, you see; that will only be a few years now.’
Janie’s words lapped against the grey, unseeing rock of Liza’s face.
‘The Lane will do me fine,’ she had said bitterly, ‘for all the time I’ve got left now.’
A vividly remembered fear of death had clutched at Janie’s mind.
‘You’re not going to die, Mam? Not for a long, long time?’ She had almost pleaded, ‘Promise me that you won’t die. Just promise this one time.’ But, knowing now that people couldn’t truly make such promises, had sat quietly, filling her eyes and mind with the long lengths of the great trees and shutting out the brooding image of death.
‘I’m no’ so sure. The doctors dinna’ hold out much time for me.’
It was then that Liza had groped in her bag for the certificate.
‘You can see I’m that, that I’m gey ill,’ she had said quietly, proudened by the impression the unfamiliar name of her illness had made on Janie.
‘But the doctors can cure you, Mam? Surely they can cure you?’
‘I’ve left it some late for that. They say I need somebody with me all the time now. It’s my sight that’s failing fastest.’
You could pray your intensest prayer ever, stricken by blindness yourself. Your eyes wide open, staring through the wood without seeing its trees. And without words at all. Just the heart beseeching in hurried incoherent beats:
O say what it is that thing called light
Which I can ne’er enjoy.
What are the blessings of the sight?
That had been one of the first poems that Liza had ever taught Janie on the long road to Grandmother’s house. The sudden recollection of it lit dim corners of her mind, revealing small half-forgotten things.
All the things I know, she taught me, God. The good things, I mean. She could make the cherry trees bloom above Dean’s Ford, even when it was winter. Hidden birds betrayed their names the instant she heard their song. She gave the nameless little rivers high hill sources and deep sea endings. She put a singing seal in Loch Na Boune and a lament on the long, lonely winds. She saw a legend in the canna flowers and a plough amongst the stars. And the times in the Lane never really mattered, because of the good times away from it. And I would myself be blind now, if she had never lent me her eyes.
‘And if that Matron gets thrawn about you coming home, she’s got this to contend with.’
Liza had waved the doctor’s certificate preciously, gently, smiling over it as secretly as if it had been a magic wand and she only had the awareness of its power.
But the magic hadn’t worked with Mrs. Thane. The spell had exploded in the magician’s face, confounding the onlookers.
‘That,’ Mrs. Thane had shot back from Liza, handing the certificate to her, finger-tipped, a spill rescued from the flames and still smouldering, ‘is about the very last reason why Janie should return to live with you again. It is certainly the last reason the Trustees will ever recognise.’
Liza had cursed them. Striving for utterance in words that were familiar enough to her ears, but harsh and uneasy on her tongue:
‘You smug bastard! You’re born, but you’re not dead yet! You . . .’
Poll and the others swore slickly. Could say F and B and C smoothly, as if they weren’t swears at all, but part and parcel of the Lane’s own language. But even ordinary words had always come to life on Liza’s tongue. They writhed now through the dim reception room, stabbing it with light each time she swore.
‘And God doesna’ pay his debts wi’ money. But that’s something you’ve still got to learn yet, you . . .’
The fir tree in front of the window closed in on the room. I’ve never properly heard a swear till now, Janie had marvelled. Mrs. Thane hasn’t heard one before either. And her face isn’t really angry. Not half as angry as it sometimes gets with me for just saying Damn. She just looks fat and lost and bewildered with arrows. The fir tree began to swim in front of Janie’s eyes. A great blur of green. ‘I’m sorry.’ Her eyes had tried to find Mrs. Thane to tell her, ‘I’m sorry she’s swearing at you.’
The shame of that day was less now. Janie felt guilty about this. ‘It should never get less,’ she protested to herself, ‘I ought to feel ashamed about it forever and ever.’
But the pain of that day remained. My Mam went away without knowing I love her. The words wouldn’t come till she was getting on to the bus. And then it was too late.
Unleashed by the desolation of Duck’s Wood, Janie raced down into the ordinary world again. Its large brightness rushed upwards to meet her, its fields panted past her, a great haste of green. The Orphanage down in the hollow was the only solid thing in the whirling, sunlit world. It had gathered all its own within it. There was neither sight nor sound of its children.
They’ll be polishing the floors like mad. Getting all stickied up. And creaking, every time they rise off their knees.
Janie stopped in her race to enjoy the moments of not having to polish. To recall with apprehension how the house would put out its dark, cold claws and claim her again, catching at her breath with the smell of beeswax, whispering roughly in Scots. And speaking aloud in polite English.
This was true freedom. Out here beyond beeswax. She shut her eyes to feel the sun groping warmly over her and hotly finding her. You could know an invisible world if you were blind. You could feel its being trembling. Smell its nearness. Hear the thin murmur of its voice.
‘You’d better make your feet your friends, Janie! There’s a gey bit steer going on down in the house.’
The Mannie shouted across from the lythe dyke, slanting above it like a shadow cast by the trees. ‘They havena’ missed me yet, down-bye.’ He nodded towards the house, his felt hat clinging to the back of his head by a miracle. ‘But they’ll have noticed by this time that you’re no’ there yet, Janie.’
The useless ones. A knot of laughter unwound itself, wriggling through Janie in little smiles. Weary Willie and Tired Tim. Ike and Moe. All the funny folk I once knew in the comics. That’s us. That’s me and the Mannie. Leaning over a dyke in the sun, till a big, fat policeman moves us on with a kick in the pants.
‘And I’ll warrant you’ve been on the dawdle again, Janie.’
The Mannie unconsciously but severely withdrew himself from the comic strip. And Tired Tim had never been funny, left on his own. Aware of this Janie volunteered seriously:
‘Hempriggs is going to scythe his inroads the morn.’
‘Is he, by God? Did he mention it, like?’
‘No. Not exactly. But I noticed. I saw his scythe. He’d been sharpening it. And he was keeping his eye on the weather.’
‘Mphmmm.’ The Mannie turned his eyes towards the weather too. Even the Cairngorms were free of mists now. A small flock of gulls put a cloud in the sky. They watched them dipping and rising and borrowing a sheen from the sun.
‘I’m no’ so sure about the weather,’ the Mannie said. ‘That’s the first of them flying inland. From the Brock, likely. There’ll be others to follow. I’ll warrant it’s rough at sea. And we’ll land wi’ the hinner end of the storm. But mebbe thae chieldies werna’ in flight, when Hempriggs took his survey.’
‘His oats are gey and thin.’ Janie was enjoying the rare experience of being accepted man to man, in broad Scots, and with authority. ‘He’s got some gey rank-like stuff in yon park.’
‘And small wonder at it,’ the Mannie agreed. ‘Hempriggs should have stuck to concreting. He kens a lot about cement, but deil all about the rotation of crops. And so his corn’s shargared, ye think, Janie?’
They stood contemplating the fat, bearded ears of their own corn. Still green over by the Glebe, but
yellowing southwards down to Hardhillock.
‘I’ll maybe mak’ a start to the inroads next week, if the storm bypasses us,’ the Mannie concluded.
He’ll be a windmill on the hum then, Janie thought, remembering past harvests. Flailing his long arms above the scythe, and singing the hot afternoons over and past.
‘This will be your last hairst wi’ me then, Janie.’
It was just a statement. But, somehow, it needed a reply. An expression of regret.
‘I’ll miss outside,’ Janie said truthfully, ‘I’ll miss outside terribly.’
The clang of a distant door prevented elaboration. It shot the Mannie up into straightness, and turned his face to Leuchar’s Hill.
‘I’m taking a turn up-bye to look at the gimmers if onybody speirs. And you had best be making tracks for the house, Janie.’
Dear Mannie. He was none other than Mrs. Thane’s husband. But the children had no name for him, other than the Mannie. He hovered on the fringe of Orphanage life. Clumsy, and ‘in the road’ of everybody in the busy kitchen. Ill at ease in the best room. And positively uncomfortable in his stiff, black Sunday suit in the Kirk pew.
His was the shadow that would whiles slope round the back door, wondering ‘if he could get a bairn or two to give a hand with the tattie lifting?’
The children vied with each other to work for the Mannie. He made slight demands on them, and was so grateful for so little.
‘And what’s your name, lass?’ he would inquire with great bewilderment. Never quite sure if the Mannie had really forgotten the name, or if this was a signal for fun, the children would shout protestingly:
‘That’s Janie! Janie MacVean. She’s been here for years and years!’
The Mannie would lowp startled up into the air, knocking over the tattie pails in his surprise.
‘God be here! So it is. Of course it’s Janie. Can ye sing, Janie?’
And without waiting for a reply, would go striding down the furrow, past the children bent double with laughter, singing out of him:
There was a wee cooper
Wha lived in Fife.
Nicketty. Nacketty. Noo, Noo, Noo.
Without ever probing, the Mannie knew when any of the children were ‘in disgrace’ with his wife.
‘How can ye no’ work your work right in the house?’ he had once asked Janie, as sadly as if her unhappiness belonged to him too. And the Mannie was the only person to whom she had ever tried to explain it:
‘I do try. Truly I do. I start to dust fine, then something comes into my head, and I think about it so long that the time passes, and the dusting isn’t done.’
Peering over the calves’ loose-box, which was momentarily the confessional, Janie had awaited the Mannie’s verdict with all the apprehension that sometimes overtook the Kirk on Sunday mornings when the Minister, tired of beseeching God, attacked his congregation with cantankerous cunning: ‘Can any good thing come out of Nazareth?’ That the Minister didn’t really want an answer, relieved the doubt on the faces of his congregation. But Janie had wanted a reply and, in supplying it, the Mannie had somehow relieved her too.
‘The happiest chield ever I kent, Janie, was a chield who hadna’ two thoughts to crack between his ears. But God preserve us! Folk couldna’ thole to see him so happy about nothing at all. They couldna’ comprehend it, ye see. So they just up and lockit him awa’. On the t’ither hand, folk with owre muckle thoughts in their heads, they’ve been lockit awa’ as well. Nothing riles one human being so much as the ither human being that they canna’ understand.
‘Like the brute beasts, by God! Tak’ you a calf that’s been born wi’ two heads or one leg. That’s no’ the beastie’s wight. It was born that wye, poor vratch. But the ither calves, in the same loose-box, mark you! They’ll hound it down and butt it to death. That’s the beasts. And whiles human beings are no’ muckle better, for all that they’ve got minds to think things out with. And never comprehending that it’s gey ill for some to find the balance, and aye just hell and all to keep it. Do you no’ think now that it might be easier to work your thinking in with your other jobbies? It can be done, ye ken, Janie. Between you and me and the roan calf there, I do it mysel’ all the time.’
Janie was vividly to recall and interpret the Mannie’s words a short year later: meanwhile they seemed to cover herself and the Mannie with a conspiratorial kind of comfort.
There had always been comfort to the Mannie’s being. A smell of dung as coarse and complete as that of the dustbins in the Lane, when you had first lifted their lids. You still sometimes escaped to the fields, just for the smell of him. To gaze on his glorious grime, to hear him sing in the loud uninhibited accents of the causeway:
For the Minister kissed the fiddler’s wife.
And he couldna’ sleep for thinkin’ o’t.
The Mannie had set his singing seal on Janie’s growing-upness. Had marked the passing of the years with a signature tune. Gently, teasingly at first:
For Nancy’s hair is yella like gowd.
And her e’en are like the lift, sae blue.
Now that the gentle preliminaries were over, that skirts were longer, and legs had become a mystery beneath them, the Mannie’s song of growing-upness echoed with virility in the early morning byre and in the fields that lay the furthest from the house:
O my lass, ye’ll get a man.
And syne ye’ll need a cradle.
Furtive, but exciting were his theme songs now. Like the gleam of young girls’ thighs once glimpsed in dark corners of the Lane. Mysterious and thrilling and quite unlike the dark, growling sound, ‘whoring’, that the Duchess had applied to it all.
Janie would have got all the blame if the Mannie’s songs had ever been overheard. She knew that surely, in the dim, instinctive way that she realised blame had been borne in from some bewildering airt, with her first breath. And, though a sense of blame was ever present, the sins which gave rise to it could not easily be defined, confessed to God, and absolved. God could understand everything, even incoherent guilt, but you were only really sure about this on Sundays. Everybody believed in God on Sundays, then laid Him carefully away with their best clothes for the rest of the week.
Old and forbidding as the Kirk was, it was one of the few places in which Janie’s spirit thawed in its narrow cocoon. Bursting out to meet the Word of God according to the prophet Isaiah. Blossoming, as it had blossomed in the Green, to the enchanting sound of far-flung places. Racing through desolate Sharon and Lebanon ashamed. Through Tarshish seas. Up Tyre and into Babylon bloated and bedamned. Down Ephraim and over Idumea.
But the cormorant and the bittern shall possess it; the owl also and the raven shall dwell in it.
And it might have been Leuchar’s Hill itself that Isaiah told of, for all that he had ever excited the faces of the congregation, folding their thoughts darkly down into the furrows of their own fields:
God help the poor Israelites if ever they were as deived wi’ reiving hoodie craws as we’ve been over Leuchar’s way the year. According to Isaiah there, the bodies of his time had more than their whack of pests and plagues and the like. You would have thought now that such mischances would have quelled the perverse craitturs. But deil the bit o’t! Isaiah ranted on of worse to come.
And thorns shall come up in her palaces, nettles and brambles in the fortresses thereof: and it shall be an habitation of dragons, and a court for owls.
Thorns and nettles, by God! Skeyne had known its share of both. Though the Lord in his wisdom had keepit the dragons for the fear of foreign folk in far-off times and places. Knowing, no doubt, that a dragon crawling over the Cairngorms would fair bewilder a decent Skeyne man.
But Isaiah’s dragon had never bewildered Janie. It was something she took from the Kirk, a weapon of the imagination which she whiles sent writhing in through the back door, to breathe its fire through the coldness of Mrs. Thane’s disapproval.
ten
THE shrubbery which walled the Or
phanage round parted to reveal Mima, the newest Orphan, sitting on the shaft of the wheelbarrow, staring bleakly at the long length of yard which she still had to rake clear of leaves.
‘I hate raking this yard.’ She spoke dully, as if Janie had been standing beside the barrow forever. ‘It’s the hardest of all the jobs in the Orphanage. You never come to the end of it.’
That was allowed.
‘You finish raking one bit of it’—Mima felt encouraged by the allowance—‘then the leaves fall down and you’ve got to go back and rake it all over again. It’s always me that’s got to do the raking.’
‘Because you’re the newest. That’s why,’ Janie explained. ‘That’s the job we’re all put on to, when we first come here. It teaches you perseverance and self-discipline,’ she added, echoing Mrs. Thane’s own words.
But I hated raking the yard too, Janie remembered silently, staring at its grey length and at the treacherous trees and rhododendron bushes that surrounded it. Especially in autumn. I used to sit on the shaft of the barrow and cry sometimes, because the wind nipped my face all the time, and the leaves kept whirling down, and it was like trying to rake the whole of the world clean, in a wind that had taken a spite to you and never ended. I was right glad when Donnie came and I wasn’t the newest any more. Because he had to take over the raking of the yard.
‘Never mind, Mima,’ Janie consoled aloud. ‘You’ll soon get off the raking now. I’m leaving. Somebody else will be coming in my place. They’ll be the newest, and you’ll get promoted to another job.’
The White Bird Passes Page 10
