The Last Wanderer

by Meg Henderson

  Stories would always be told about the departed Sorley Mor: that was how the memory of a respected, loved, village character would be handled, how the village would close around their loss; first by healing, then by scarring. This, however, was different. It wasn’t just the loss of the boat and a popular crew that the villagers were grieving for; it was the loss of that natural progression and future too.

  In those first weeks there was no talk about Sorley Mor and his exploits: the wound was too raw yet for healing to begin. Instead there was a painful void, a feeling that things could never be the same again, that Acarsaid had changed forever. It had been too quick, too brutal and too complete. Not only had the skipper gone, but the entire crew covering at least two generations, the people as strongly associated with him as his own family. Some of them would have outlived him had the natural order been preserved, thereby softening the blow when it eventually came. Because they were part of Sorley Mor, they would have led the recounting of tales and the gentle laughter; having them there with their direct link would have been like still having something of Sorley Mor with them. Even worse, Sorley Og had gone, too, his only son, so there would never be another Sorley MacEwan. As Father Mick had said, they had truly seen the passing of the last Wanderer.

  Then there were the widows’ situations; it was all too hard to dwell on. Who could think of Chrissie without Sorley Mor, Molly without Stamp? Perhaps worst of all, the two younger women: Rose, whose own father had died on a fishing boat before her birth, and Alison, carrying Pete’s baby, a child who would grow up in the same way. The villagers counted themselves lucky that the widows of the two engineers, Eric and Stevie, lived too far away from Acarsaid for the sight of the two women to pain them every day; but then they immediately felt guilty, felt like cowards. The grief of Marilyn in Glasgow and Jean in Fife wasn’t any less than the distress of the Acarsaid widows; the villagers knew that. They just felt that they had enough to bear at home.

  So life in Acarsaid went on in a kind of painful fog, a life that had contracted and dimmed. Where once people looked at where the Wanderer berthed and wondered aloud when she was next due home, now they looked away again and tried to turn their minds to other matters. Even in the Inn, that usual hive of banter and noise, the atmosphere was subdued. Men still dropped in, but not for long and not for much, and the dominoes in the corner where Sorley Mor had contested every move and denied every defeat lay silent, edited out of the traditional life of the Inn. It was as though the entire village and its inhabitants had contracted a sudden and debilitating illness for which there was no cure.

  Dan, really Donald, maker of ‘Ploughman efforts’ and brother of Stamp, who was also really Donald, had just settled an argument between two regulars by throwing them both out and banning them for life. He looked around the Inn.

  ‘What the hell is happening here?’ he demanded of no one in particular. ‘The atmosphere in this place is bloody awful these days. I’ve never known so many disagreements. I spend all my times sorting people out.’

  ‘People are a bit down, that’s all it is,’ shrugged Duncan, skipper of Southern Star.

  ‘I know,’ Dan sighed. ‘Do you think we’ll ever recover from this?’

  Duncan looked up at him, then back at his pint. He shook his head. ‘No,’ he replied quietly.

  ‘What? Never?’ Dan said in a distant, bemused tone.

  ‘Never,’ Duncan said. He drained his glass and left.

  At MacEwan’s Row at the same time, Father Mick was with Chrissie and Gannet, trying to find a way through the terrible, heavy, painful fog.

  ‘Have you seen some of the newspapers?’ he asked, and Gannet shook his head.

  ‘I kept a few,’ the priest said. ‘Look at this one.’

  Gannet looked at him sharply and turned his head away.

  ‘No, no, Gannet,’ the priest said gently. ‘Not those ones. These have photos of Eric. Look, in full dancing trim!’

  He unfolded the newspaper clippings he had carefully cut away from the more offensive accounts of the sinking, and there was Eric in all his finery. Gannet looked and laughed quietly. Eric in his tailed coat, white dickie and patent dancing shoes, his beard shorn and his thick, curly hair slicked back, competing in some Old Time event. Eric in his Latin-American reincarnation, wearing a tight catsuit covered in sequins, his hair now caught back in a ponytail, a dangerous expression on his face; Gannet noticed that his ‘bits’ had indeed been reined in, the elastic drawers really did exactly what he said they would.

  ‘Can you imagine Sorley Mor’s face if he’d seen these?’ Father Mick smiled. ‘The stories he’d have come up with to try to talk this evidence away?’

  ‘He’d say it wasn’t Eric,’ Gannet smiled. ‘He’d say it was a trick done with the camera, that one of the others had got somebody to do it just to annoy him. He’d …’ Then Gannet stopped and ran from the house, leaving the clippings in his wake.

  Chrissie looked fearfully at Father Mick and tried to stop him going after him.

  ‘Chrissie MacEwan,’ said the priest with exaggerated patience, ‘I’ve never answered back to you before, but I’m going to do so now. This is between men, you know nothing about such matters.’ He was disappointed that she didn’t reply ‘Bollocks’, and wrestle him to his seat again; if she had it would have meant life was going on in some way, however small. He followed Gannet outside to the wall overlooking the harbour.

  ‘Gannet,’ he said heavily, ‘we must get out of where we are now. This is a bad place, a place we needed to be in for a time, but one we must move on from.’

  ‘That’s easy to say,’ Gannet smiled sadly, ‘but not easy to do.’

  ‘I said something similar to young Dougie,’ Father Mick smiled. ‘He told me to pretend thinking and doing were exactly the same. Where would we have been without that lad’s logic?’ He smiled. ‘And besides, Gannet, who said it would be easy? We’ve lost more than any mortals should be expected to bear; who said it should be easy? That doesn’t mean we have to set up camp in this desperate place.’ His words ran out and there was a silence. ‘Do you think if the tables had been reversed and you’d gone down with the boat in his place, that he’d be standing here feeling like giving in?’

  Gannet turned and looked the priest in the eye. ‘Aye,’ he said firmly, ‘he would.’

  Father Mick looked away. It had been a silly question, a ploy he used on bereaved parishioners all the time, but one he should have known better not to pose in this situation. ‘I’m sorry about that, Gannet,’ he said, ‘it was crass, and you’re right. He’d be exactly as you are today. I’d be saying the same useless bloody things to him, too, and he’d be reacting in the way you are doing. All I’m trying to say is that there are others to think of, particularly those he would expect you to think of, Chrissie and Rose.’

  Gannet nodded. ‘And you think I don’t know that?’

  Across in Rose and Sorley Og’s house there was silence. Rose felt adrift from all life, especially her own. She didn’t know who she was any longer. Once she had been Sorley Og’s wife, about to start a new life, about to start a family, and now there was – well, there was nothing. There was no routine, no pattern to her days and especially her nights, no reason to eat, or sleep, or move, no reason to live. She was in a long tunnel of nothing and the only sensation she felt was pain. She hurt everywhere, every joint and every muscle, that was the only reality she knew. Days merged into night just because they did, and darkness didn’t mean turning on a light; anyway, she preferred darkness. Sometimes her brother or Chrissie would bring her food she didn’t want and didn’t eat; she didn’t want them in the house come to that, because they disturbed her pain and if pain was all she had left to connect her to Sorley Og, then she wanted it undiluted, undisturbed, all to herself. She treated their gentle hints as insults. Life did not have to go on, not if she didn’t want it to, and she didn’t. Fresh air would not be good for her, neither would company. What would be good for her was if they woul
d just go away and leave her alone. Chrissie was so concerned about her daughter-in-law that she called Father Mick, Dougie and Gavin to her house.

  ‘I’m really worried about her,’ Chrissie told them. ‘I take her over a bowl of soup and next day it’s still lying there, untouched. I go over to collect it and she’s sitting by the window, exactly where she was when I left her the day before. She doesn’t even look up, far less say a word.’

  ‘She’s the same with me,’ Dougie said quietly.

  ‘What about your mother, son?’ Chrissie asked. ‘I’m not criticising, but I’d have thought she might spend some time with the lassie. After all, she lost her own man at sea, she should know how that feels.’

  ‘My mother’s not really like that,’ Dougie replied uncomfortably. ‘Granny Ina is, or was, but she’s not keeping too well herself. She’s not fit to look after Rose.’

  ‘Well, what about Sally? She only lives doors away,’ Father Mick asked.

  Dougie shook his head. ‘She wouldn’t let Sally in the door,’ he smiled sadly. ‘It was something she said about Rose and Sorley Og getting married.’

  ‘But surely all that’s forgotten at a time like this?’ Chrissie said, aghast.

  ‘Not as far as Rose is concerned,’ he said, ‘especially at a time like this.’ He looked at Chrissie. ‘We all said things then,’ he said, ‘and Sorley Og didn’t really understand. That’s what Rose holds against us all, that we hurt him, not that we said what we said. It was this kind of thing we wanted to protect her against, we weren’t objecting to Sorley Og—’

  ‘Sure, I know that, Dougie,’ Chrissie said kindly. ‘You didn’t want Rose to be a fisherman’s widow, there’s nothing wrong with that.’

  ‘But we must’ve put it badly,’ Dougie said, his eyes filling. ‘I grew up with Sorley Og, I never knew a finer man. I told Rose that when she said they were getting married. I just wanted her to have a better life than as the wife of a fisherman, or the widow of one, even Sorley Og.’

  ‘You don’t have to explain, Dougie,’ Chrissie smiled. ‘If I’d ever thought you were putting my son down I’d have had a word in your ear with my fist, you know that. I knew why you objected.’

  ‘All the times afterwards,’ Dougie said, ‘when Sorley Og came into the office to talk business, I always wanted to say I’d got it wrong, that he’d made Rose happy and I knew now that was all that counted, but I could never say it somehow.’

  ‘Bloody men!’ Chrissie pretended to explode in something of her normal style.

  Dougie looked up at her and smiled, nodding his head. ‘Aye, that was it,’ he said, ‘that was it exactly. There was always a barrier between us that I should’ve broken through, but I didn’t, and I’ll regret that for the rest of my life. He was my brother-in-law by then, we should’ve been closer, but we never got past the fact that I hadn’t wanted him to marry my sister.’

  Gannet, who was sitting listening to the conversation, spoke up. ‘It’s all right, Dougie,’ he said quietly, ‘these things happen in life. We’re all struggling with guilt, the place is awash with it. I made the skipper go on that last trip. He didn’t want to go to sea without me, he’d never been without me in his entire life, but I made him go. I know it’s stupid, but I can’t get that out of my head.’

  ‘Have you been drinking on the quiet?’ Chrissie demanded.

  Gannet smiled and looked down. His arm was still resting in a sling and over the last few weeks, he’d developed a habit of fiddling with the material to distract himself, pulling one thread out after another.

  ‘He’s right, though,’ Chrissie told Dougie. ‘I feel the same. I keep going over it in my mind. I insisted that Sorley Mor should go, too; practically threw him out the door. If he hadn’t gone he wouldn’t have been on lookout; if he hadn’t been on lookout maybe Sorley Og would’ve been and maybe none of it would have happened.’

  ‘That’s silly,’ said Father Mick.

  ‘So who asked you, Hooligan?’ she demanded.

  ‘And he shouldn’t have gone,’ Gavin said quietly. ‘I told him when he came to see me, but I should’ve been firmer, I should’ve stopped him.’

  ‘When he came to see you?’ Chrissie asked, looking up sharply.

  Gavin squirmed. ‘Well, he didn’t so much come to see me as ambush me on the road a few weeks before the Wanderer went out on the last trip. I was on my way back from seeing a patient in Keppaig, and he and Gannet were coming in the opposite direction in the Land Rover. Just past Sandy Bay it was, and he stopped me by executing the first part of a three-point turn and blocking my way.’

  ‘Ah, yes,’ Father Mick chuckled. ‘He was the devil of a man with those three-point turns. The first part, anyway: never knew anyone do that first part better!’

  ‘Shut up, you,’ Chrissie seethed. ‘This isn’t funny. Go on, Gavin.’

  ‘He climbed into the Range Rover beside me, said he thought his indigestion was getting worse, or that Dan’s cooking was – couldn’t make up his mind which it was. Or maybe that the old Milk of Magnesia wasn’t working as well these days. Said he was a bit short of breath at times, too, especially when he was climbing back up to the Row with Gannet. Thought it was either down to the heaviness of Dan’s cooking as well, or to Gannet making him talk too much after he’d eaten Dan’s cooking, and asked if could I give him something to sort it out.’

  Gannet nodded without looking up.

  ‘You knew this?’ Chrissie demanded, catching the movement.

  Gannet nodded again, still playing with the sling material. ‘Well, I could hardly not know, I was there,’ he said.

  Chrissie reached forward and tightly gripped his hand. ‘What have I told you about pulling those threads out?’ she demanded, like a mother to a child. ‘You’ll be left with nothing but a single thread the way you’re going on.’ She looked back at Gavin. ‘What happened?’ she asked.

  ‘I told him it might not be indigestion, it might be his heart,’ he shrugged guiltily, trying to avoid Chrissie’s gaze. ‘I said I’d arrange some tests in the hospital and he said if I wasn’t having him on he’d rather go somewhere well away from Acarsaid, so I wrote off to Glasgow. I was waiting for word back when …’

  Chrissie stare turned to a glare. ‘And you didn’t tell me!’ she accused. ‘How could you do that?’

  No one said anything.

  ‘I asked you a question, Gavin. You knew he was ill and you didn’t tell me. Why?’

  ‘Chrissie, I didn’t know he was ill, and I couldn’t tell you,’ he said quietly. ‘He didn’t want you to know, he didn’t believe there was anything wrong with him apart from indigestion, and he only stopped me on the road because his old standby wasn’t working as well as it had.’

  ‘You should’ve told me!’ Chrissie shouted angrily.

  Father Mick cowered in his chair, but still felt quietly elated; this was Chrissie of old.

  ‘I couldn’t tell you,’ Gavin tried to explain. ‘Chrissie, there’s such a thing as patient confidentiality, even here. It’s much harder working in a place you’ve grown up in, especially a small place like this where the patients are part of your private life too. I had to respect his wishes.’

  ‘I can’t believe he didn’t tell me himself,’ Chrissie said quietly in an amazed, hurt tone. ‘All these years together. I thought we were close, but he kept this from me! How could he do that to me?’

  ‘He didn’t want you upset for nothing,’ Gannet said.

  Chrissie spun round, suddenly reminded that he was part of this treachery and advanced on him. ‘You knew too!’ she shouted. ‘His wife was kept in the dark, but you knew, and you didn’t tell me either?’

  Gannet sighed heavily. ‘He said there was no use telling you about something that was probably nothing. He was going to have the tests and if there was something there, well then, that would’ve been the time to tell you.’

  ‘He was my man!’ Chrissie shouted. ‘Mine, Ian Ross, not yours!’

  Father Mick now felt un
easy. This was a serious situation; she had called Gannet by his Sunday name. Something told him that hell could have no fury like Chrissie calling Gannet by his Sunday name.

  ‘I can’t believe he told you and not me,’ Chrissie continued weakly. ‘I just can’t. What was I to him then, if he couldn’t even tell me he was ill?’

  ‘You were everything to him, can you not see that, woman?’ Gannet asked angrily. ‘He didn’t tell you because there was nothing to tell, he was saving you worry.’

  ‘It was my place to be worried, not yours!’ Chrissie rounded on him.

  ‘Well, I wasn’t worried. I didn’t believe for a minute that there was anything wrong. He’d had that odd stomach all the years I can remember; that’s all I thought it was, just like him. He was right not to tell you! Look at the state you’ve got yourself into now. Think what you would’ve been like if you’d known, and likely for nothing, too!’

  ‘And don’t you ever call me “woman”. Only one man ever—’ She looked at the empty corner of the room where Sorley Mor used to sit and put her hands over her face.

  For the first time since the house had been built, the big sitting room seemed filled to capacity – with a taut silence. Eventually Father Mick spoke.

  ‘Chrissie, you have to look at it from Sorley Mor’s point of view.’

  ‘Oh, aye, you were always good at looking at things from his point of view!’ she returned fiercely.

  ‘Listen, Chrissie,’ Father Mick tried again. ‘If he had come home and told you that Gavin had suggested there might be something wrong with his heart and he needed tests, what would you have done?’

  ‘I wouldn’t have let him go on that trip,’ she said firmly.

  ‘Exactly,’ Father Mick replied. ‘But it would’ve gone further than that, wouldn’t it?’

  Chrissie looked at him suspiciously.

  He put a hand up – either to silence her or to stop her if she chose to charge at him; he wasn’t sure which. ‘What about his trips to the Inn?’