by Memory
Elizabeth lit the candle beside the bed and watched the light flicker yellow, then steady to a single white glow.
5
THE MOST POWERFUL person in the community was the Reverend Alexander MacKenzie. He taught people how to think. Not to steal. Not to envy. Not to bear false witness against their neighbour. Yet folk lived in the gaps between these commandments. Forever gossiping, quietly slandering, envying each other.
‘Did you hear what Archie did yesterday?’
‘What a nerve she had. Taking it. Just like that.’
‘The whore.’
‘Honestly, you can’t believe a word he says.’
Then the Reverend Alexander MacKenzie had a dream. All the rocks melted and turned into waterfalls which flowed down in streams and rivers into the sea. And he was sitting on a straw riding the waves, navigating the spaces between the rocks, sailing round all the obstacles that lay between the high cliffs and the wide ocean. It meant that his life had to be lived in the gaps. In the spaces between solid things, where men and women lived and died. Where they sang their songs, told their stories, saw their imaginary fairies. Where God also reigned.
It meant that the most solid of things liquefied and that he should forthwith forsake all things – the stone manse, the regular services, the rigid Westminster Confession of Faith – for serving the poor. Every stream had to run into the ocean.
He was done with signs. No longer would he consider words as clues from God, because He did not need to give clues. The world was not a puzzle to be worked out. It was not a maze to be navigated. Knowledge, after all, wasn’t some kind of reminiscent vision. For everything was as it was, and his job was just to deal with it. To lift a fallen thing if he saw it. To mourn with those who mourned. To rejoice with those who rejoiced. To do something. Anything. And it came to him as a revelation: that his work was just to love everything, because then he would love and know God. Without knowing it, he took up Wycliffe’s position, that property is the result of sin and that since Christ and the Apostles had no property, the clergy ought to have none. He wanted to be so unburdened of things that he could move in an instant as the Holy Ghost led him.
He looked out the window and saw an old woman leading a cow on a rope. Jessie Cameron was her name, the widow of John Cameron. She would drag the beast some yards, then the cow would lie down and refuse to move. Jessie hauled at the rope and the beast struggled to its feet and walked for a while before lying down again.
Alexander MacKenzie left the manse and walked downhill towards the woman.
‘She’s in heat,’ the woman said, ‘and been bellowing all night. Yet refuses to go where she needs to go.’
‘Why don’t we take the bull here instead?’ MacKenzie said. ‘Now that there are two of us.’
So the woman stayed with the cow and the Reverend MacKenzie walked towards the field near the river, where the bull was. When he arrived the bull was pawing at the ground, desperate to get to the cow. MacKenzie opened the gate, and the bull ran, so that by the time he got back to the woman and the cow the whole business was done. MacKenzie led the meek bull back to his field while the woman led the quietened cow back home in the opposite direction.
God, thought MacKenzie, is like this bull. Far more willing to come to us than we are to him, despite all our crying and bellowing. Nothing was a sacrifice if you had nothing. Once MacKenzie gave everything away he would have nothing to surrender. So he praised God for his health, put a few things into a bag, closed the manse door behind him and stepped out when the first rays of light filtered through the window-panes. He put on his best shoes, for a good pair of boots is the business. The dew still beatified the morning. His manse was on the high ground, and he could see for miles in every direction. The morning stars were still visible. The mountains were beginning to stretch, but still lay half-asleep to the east. An early morning mist covered the great sea to the south. The west too was still slumbering, while a brightness shone in the north, forecasting a sunny day. For Alexander was a man of the soil and knew all the weather signs. Nature never lied, once you’d reached an agreement. The fine day was a gift from God. When the Lord blesses, He blesses forever.
He thought briefly of places beyond these visible horizons which he would likely now never see again. The tall grey spires of Edinburgh and the foul-smelling closes of Glasgow; the great city of London where he had once dined with the Lord Mayor, one Thomas Challis. They had eaten venison and drunk port and had then talked all evening about the poetry of Walter Raleigh.
An eagle flew high overhead. They that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength, they shall mount up with wings as eagles, they shall run and not be weary, and they shall walk and not faint. He set forth praying as he went that God would be gracious unto the nation and that the leaders of the nation, both spiritual and political, would repent of their ways and return unto their God and Maker.
He prayed for the queen and for the government that they would rule with wisdom, but that God Himself would overrule their wrong decisions. And he prayed for the city of London that it would be unlike Babylon and repent in sackcloth and ashes. He pictured Challis as a little child seeking the face of Jesus, for He said, Verily I say unto ye, unless ye be converted, and become as little children, ye shall not enter into the Kingdom of Heaven. What a bonny morning it was. Creation sang. A sudden shower of rain fell, dampening the waiting earth. Then a covenant rainbow embraced the sky from north to south.
The Reverend Alexander walked the glens and dales and hills and scattered hamlets for months, staying where he could, listening, preaching the word, ministering to the sick, encouraging the weak, warning the strong, baptising, marrying, burying. The story of the children of Israel, their kings and prophets, the acts of the Apostles, and the redeeming works of Christ were the only stories he treasured in his heart or read on the page or spoke to the people. For life was too short and eternity too long to be concerned any more with superstition, with trivial things and rubbish – what the Apostle Paul himself had called dung. He didn’t want to spend eternity damned because he had sat in an easy-chair by the fire reading a book. He heard voices, but the only voice that mattered was the voice of God. His lips formed the words and the hills listened silently.
Beware of dogs, beware of evil workers, beware of the concision. For we are the circumcision, which worship God in the spirit, and rejoice in Christ Jesus, and have no confidence in the flesh. Though I might also have confidence in the flesh. If any other man thinketh that he hath whereof he might trust in the flesh, I more: Circumcised the eighth day, of the stock of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, an Hebrew of the Hebrews; as touching the law, a Pharisee; Concerning zeal, persecuting the church; touching the righteousness which is in the law, blameless. But what things were gain to me, those I counted loss for Christ.
He knew it all by heart, for how else was anything to be known and believed and lived but by heart? The song had wonderful authority. And was he himself not like Paul – born into the aristocracy, the great MacKenzies of Seaforth, royal agents to the kings and with an empire of castles that stretched hundreds of miles from east to west and whose crest proudly proclaimed ‘Luceo non uro’? The great clan which had won all its prestige on the battlefield. Had earned it with their lives. Though that was like hoarding dust in a sieve. All of it dross. For all the MacKenzie land gained by violence was forever stained by blood, since the end was forever condemned by the means. He truly believed that nothing could be earned, only given.
So he came to the decision to burn all that rubbish he’d helped gather over the years – those pagan stories and myths which kept the people in worldly bondage and hindered them on the road to salvation. He would burn them all in a quiet hill-fire of vanities. They were tares amongst the wheat, jagged stones in the way of the blind, a babel of noise blocking up the ears of the deaf. Daughters of Jerusalem, weep not for me, but weep for yourselves, and for your children.
And hadn’t he wept? There was a girl w
ho had melted his heart like the summer snow. Jenny Gunn from Caithness. He was a student. He was walking down through the Grassmarket after a lecture when he heard a disturbance in one of the closes. A woman came running out and fled down the street towards Tollcross, where he happened to have lodgings. She disappeared through the West Port, but he found her minutes later slumped by the dairy wall at Fountainbridge. He knelt down and asked her if he could help. She tried to usher him away, but he persisted. As soon as she spoke he knew that she too was a Gaelic speaker.
‘Bana-Ghàidheal?’ he asked.
She looked up at him. And was the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen. A girl, really. Sixteen. Maybe seventeen.
‘An toir mi…’ he began… ‘will I take you to the hospital?’
‘No. No. There’s no need for that. I’ll be fine.’
He gave her a hand and when she stood up towered over him by inches. She had seemed so small when running and crouching.
‘Alasdair,’ he said. ‘Alasdair MacCoinnich. Alexander MacKenzie.’
She inclined her head a fraction.
‘Sìneag. I… Jenny Gunn.’
‘Gunna? Gallaibh, an e? Gunn? Then you’ll be from Caithness?’
‘I am, Sir.’
‘Please…’
The absurdity of being called Sir. For he was just eighteen himself.
And so they walked out, as the phrase went at the time.
‘Where do you…?’
‘O, with an aunt, down by the Canongate,’ she said, and he asked if she minded if he accompanied her safely back home. No, she didn’t mind.
‘It might be safer, Sir.’
‘Please…’
And it was the last time she used the word.
Maybe it was grace. Maybe it was shyness, but he never asked what had happened. For surely it was hers to tell? And she never did.
He left her outside her aunt’s house, but not before they’d arranged to meet again. On the Wednesday night at the castle walls. And they walked. And walked and walked. Down the Royal Mile and round by Calton Hill and on towards the New Town, where they sat for a while side by side in the gardens and admired the trees and the buildings that were being built all around them. The blossom was in full bloom.
‘They smell like crushed roses,’ Jenny said. ‘Granny grows them. Then at the end of every autumn when the petals fade she brings them into the house and puts them in hot water which she keeps boiling for days, then pours the perfume into little bowls which waves all through the house when the frosts come.’
It was the moment he kissed her for the first time. The first moment he’d ever kissed anyone. And she too was like a rose. Her lips opened like a petal and even in his awkwardness he knew that this was the sweetest thing he would ever taste. It poured through him. He thanked God he had a coat on.
They walked back over George Street and on to Princes Street. The gloomy castle was covered in clouds high above them as they walked up the Mound. It was getting chilly and Jenny put her gloves on. Fox-skin.
They paused by St Giles.
‘I’m leaving,’ she said. ‘Next month. For America.’
He was so shocked that he almost blurted out the Lord’s name, in vain.
‘America?’
‘Yes. A place called Philadelphia. I’m going into service. With Mr Ritchie, the banker.’
And she explained how it was. That she’d served Mr Ritchie and his wife now for a year, but that they were returning back home and wanted to take her with them.
‘There are prospects,’ she said. ‘They have some property in New York City as well, where Mr Ritchie works for half the year and they’d like for me to look after them as they move around the place.’
‘Maybe...’
‘No’ she said quickly. ‘It’s best you stay here. It’s… it’s impossible. There are… there are circumstances.’
‘Circumstances?’
But she turned away, and he didn’t want to press.
‘You have your own future.’
Oh, he wanted to pour it out. That there was no future without her. That he would do anything. Sail to America after her. Swim there. But her face forbade it.
‘So what if there are circumstances,’ he said. ‘God’s grace is sufficient for all circumstances. His strength is made perfect in weakness.’
She stretched out her gloved hand and stroked his cheek.
‘Dear boy, dear man,’ she said, wiping away the tears that were streaming down his cheeks.
‘Write to me,’ he said. ‘Please. Please write to me and when…’
‘Shush, shush, shush,’ she whispered. ‘Of course I will. Of course I’ll write.’
She never did.
Jenny who had sailed to America. Bonnie Jenny, who could sing the birds into silence and stop the sun in its tracks. No wonder he had entered the ministry, wounded and seeking solace. But praise be to God for His grace and favour, who turns all things to the good, for even out of that poor, selfish reason – Jenny’s rejection of him – He could bear fruit. For we know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to his purpose.
As he was about to burn the stories, a bird sang. Alexander looked up. A robin was sitting on a bough made gold by the evening sun. It was singing in Gaelic. It said, Bìg, bìg bigein, cò chreach mo neadan? Mas e gille beag e, cuiridh mi ri creig e; mas e gille mòr e, cuiridh mi le lòn e; ach mas fear beag gun chèill e, gun glèidheadh Dia d’a mhàthair fhèin e. Chirp, chirp, chirp, who robbed my nest? If he’s a small boy, I’ll throw him off a rock; if he’s a big boy, I’ll fling him in a pond; but if he’s a little senseless boy, may God protect him for his mother.
So birds also proclaimed the Gospel. And if birds were angels, so was Jenny. Because she loved to sing. She must have. She must have loved to sing. And he suddenly remembered how tender she’d been with him. Despite her decisiveness she had been as tender as a lamb, stroking his cheek. And for the first time in twenty years he caressed his face, feeling each and every hollow, the shape of his nose, and the curve of his brow, and the bristle of his stubble, which he would now grow without cutting ever again. He sang. I will build my love a tower by yon clear crystal fountain and on it I will pile all the wild flowers o’ the mountain. Like the Lord Himself. And so songs and stories and fiddles and pipes were also means of redemption. Nothing was vanity, and that day nothing was burnt. For to destroy anything was to destroy God. Paradise lost could never be regained but it could be made new every morning.
And as he walked from village to village and from hamlet to hamlet, the Reverend Alexander met shepherds and prayed with them, met maidens out herding the cows and blessed them, met children begging for bread by the roadside and gave them every morsel he had. He became acutely aware how everyone made decisions, if that was the right word, and stayed with these decisions for the rest of their lives. How essentially conservative humankind was, how unwilling to change.
He would suggest more efficient ways to till the ground and people would listen and then return to their old ways, saying to themselves that there was nothing wrong with the way their fathers and their forefathers had tilled, and who was he anyway to tell them how to dig the ground? Let him keep to his speciality, and they would keep to theirs.
‘This was the way my mother made the bread.’
‘This is where the cow always slept.’
‘That’s what my father said.’
And the even more powerful collective.
‘They always used to wash wounds with gannet oil.’
‘This is the way they always did it.’
‘That’s what they said anyway.’
Whoever ‘they’ were. The massed host of spirits who hovered at every corner telling the living to walk this way, to avoid travelling that way, instructing them not to open that furrow up for it contained the bones of the dead, not to bury that child in consecrated ground because she had been born out of wedlock, not to buy that horse bec
ause it was under a spell.
And the Reverend Alexander MacKenzie also knew full well how contingent and haphazard these ‘decisions’ were, though they had such eternal consequences. He met a man out on the moor who lived in a turf hovel and when MacKenzie asked him why one half of his dwelling was boarded off he said that was for the cow.
‘But you don’t have a cow,’ said MacKenzie, and the man replied, ‘But my father and my grandfather did and that’s how they built their little houses.’
MacKenzie advised him to build a wee byre in case he ever got a cow and the man agreed but as soon as MacKenzie left, muttered to himself about the folly of the gentry.
MacKenzie knew fine, from his own aristocratic upbringing, that the gentry were exactly the same: living by habit, guided by their own ghosts. Living beyond their means, not because they could afford it, but because that was the way their people always lived. Why change anything as long as it made an impression? For the impression itself was what mattered and gave prestige. And prestige was power. Fine wines in the cellars and enormous bank loans while their peasants laboured down on the shore cutting kelp for them, and anyway what would these poor people do without the glory of the big house, and the deeds of their heroic ancestors? They would have nothing to talk about.
He knew the chains of habit in his own life. He’d buried Annie. Buried human love and desire away deep in his heart for a quarter of a century without confessing its hold, its liberating power. It was fine to have been young, and in love, and heartbroken, so it must be fine too to be old, and believing and grieving.
In his lonely walks over the moors MacKenzie meditated long and hard on the contingencies which left Lady MacLeod in her manor and old Seumus in his hovel. How could one ever understand the other, when they lived worlds apart, in different universes only a few miles from each other? Proximity didn’t guarantee anything. Neither friendship nor enmity. Weren’t the fiercest battles fought at the hearth, not on the heath?
