Entry Island

by Peter May

  ‘Didn’t sleep much myself last night. With all that damned noise. I thought the roof was going to lift off the hotel, or the windows were going to come in. They were creaking like they were ready to shatter.’ He took a mouthful of coffee. ‘I got a call about fifteen minutes ago. The King Air got struck by debris on the apron at the airport during the night. Damage to the windshield, apparently. If they can’t fix it here, they’re going to have to send over a replacement aircraft with the parts. Upshot is, we ain’t getting off the islands today. So the body and all the other evidence is going to have to sit on ice till we can get us back in the air.’

  ‘Tough break.’

  Black eyes darted quickly in Sime’s direction, as if perhaps Crozes suspected sarcasm. Both men knew it would reflect badly on Crozes if their investigation dragged on beyond a day or two. He delved into his pocket to retrieve a set of car keys and tossed them across the table. ‘Lapointe has rented us a couple of vehicles. Those are for the Chevy. It’s out front. Take it and go talk to Kirsty Cowell’s cousin, Jack Aitkens. If you think it’s worthwhile, bring him back to the station here on Cap aux Meules and we’ll video a formal interview.’

  ‘What do you think he might be able to tell us?’

  Crozes tossed a frustrated hand into the air. ‘Who the hell knows? But I’ve been looking at the tapes. She’s a weirdo, right? The Cowell woman. Maybe he can give us some insight into her personality, her relationship with the husband. Anything that’ll give us something more than we have.’

  ‘You’ve reviewed the interview tapes already?’ Sime was surprised.

  ‘What else was I going to do? Couldn’t sleep and it seemed like the best use of the time. I got Blanc out of his bed to set it up for me.’ He glanced a little self-consciously at his junior officer. ‘Guess I’m beginning to learn how it feels to be an insomniac like you.’

  Sime lifted the keys from the table and stood up. He drained his mug of coffee. ‘Do you have an address for the cousin?’

  ‘He lives at a place called La Grave, on the next island down. Île du Havre Aubert. But he’s not there right now.’

  Sime cocked an eyebrow. ‘You have been busy.’

  ‘I want this done and dusted, Sime. And I want us out of here by tomorrow, at the latest.’

  ‘So if he’s not at home where will I find him?’

  ‘He’s working the night shift in the salt-mines at the north end of the islands. He’s off at eight.’ He glanced at his watch. ‘If you hurry you should be just in time to catch him.’

  II

  The road to Havre aux Maisons took a diversion to avoid roadworks where they were building a sleek new bridge to link it to Cap aux Meules. Sime drove through water-filled potholes, past shacks that advertised themselves as restaurants, or bars, or nightclubs. Flimsy, storm-battered structures painted in garish colours that belied the seedy night-time entertainment they offered the youth of the islands.

  As he drove north through Havre aux Maisons, the land levelled off and the pine plantations and all signs of human habitation disappeared. Roadside reeds were flattened by the wind, and sand from the long, narrow strip of dunes on his right blew in swirls and eddies across the surface of the road. And all the time, sitting out across the bay, the shadow of Entry Island lurked in his peripheral vision.

  The sky, at last, was beginning to break up, shredded by the wind to reveal torn strips of blue, and release patches of unusually golden, shallow-angled sunlight to fan out across the islands from the east.

  The sea vented its wrath all along the shore, breaking in spume-filled spray over the causeway that linked Cap aux Meules and Île de Point-aux-Loups. Wolf Island was, in fact, a small cluster of islands in the middle of a long sandbar that linked the southern isles with a loop of three large islands at the north end of the archipelago. On his left the gulf stretched away to the unseen North American continent. On his right, the emerald-green waters of the Lagune de la Grande-Entrée were calmer, protected from the surging waters of the storm by a sandbar that ran parallel to the one on which they had built the road.

  As he approached the final stretch of the sandbank on the west side, he saw the tanker terminal off to his right, where huge ships docked several times a week to fill their holds with salt. A long shed with a silver roof caught flashes of sunlight from the broken sky. A concrete pier extended out into the lagoon where a red-and-cream tanker was now docked, an elevated length of covered conveyor belt feeding salt into its belly.

  The conveyor tracked back along the line of the shore for nearly a kilometre to the tower of the mine shaft itself, where a high fence topped by barbed wire delineated the secure perimeter of the mine. Thirty or forty vehicles were parked along the fringes of a muddy, semi-flooded car park. Sime parked up and found his way into the administration block where a secretary told him that Jack Aitkens would be off shift in about twenty minutes, if he would care to wait. She waved him towards a seat, but Sime said he would wait in his car and walked back out into the wind. It had been hot and claustrophobic in there. And he found it unimaginable that people could spend twelve hours a day underground in dark confined spaces. It would be worse than a prison sentence.

  Sime sat in the Chevy with the engine running, hot air blowing on his feet, a window open to let in air. He gazed across the waters of the lagoon towards rock that rose almost sheer out of the sea, and the brightly painted houses that ran along the strip of green that topped it. Hardy folk, these. Fishermen mostly, the descendants of pioneers from France and Britain who had come to claim these uninhabited and inhospitable islands and make them their home. Until their arrival, only the Mi’kmaq Indians had ventured here on seasonal hunting forays.

  Sime felt the wind rock his car as it blew in gusts across the open water, fading only a little now in strength. And he let his mind drift back to the diaries. Somehow it seemed important to understand why his subconscious had picked that particular moment from them to animate his unexpected dream.

  It was odd. He could only have been seven or eight when their grandmother first read them the stories. Sitting out on the front porch in the shade of the trees during the hot summer holidays, or huddled around the fire on a dark winter’s evening. He had lost count of the number of times he and Annie had asked her to read them again. And being the same age as the young boy described in the first of them, Sime had always remembered it in great detail.

  But somehow it wasn’t his grandmother’s voice that he had heard. Not after being drawn into the story. It was as if his ancestor himself had read it out loud, as though he had been speaking directly to Sime and his sister.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  When I was very young, it seemed I knew lots of things without ever really remembering how or where I learned them. I knew that my village was a collection of houses in the township they called Baile Mhanais. And if I were to try to spell it in English now it would look something like Bally Vanish. I knew that our village stood on the west coast of the Isle of Lewis and Harris in the Outer Hebrides, and I remember it was at school that I learned that the Hebrides were a part of Scotland.

  The teacher was sent by the Church, which seemed to think that it was important for us to learn reading and writing – if only so we could read the Bible. I used to sit and listen to that teacher, overwhelmed by everything I didn’t know. At eight years old, my world seemed such a tiny place in the greater world beyond, and yet it filled my life. It was everything I knew.

  I knew, for example, that there were nearly sixty people living in my village, and almost double that if you took account of the crofts that extended north and south along the shore on either side. I knew that it was the Atlantic Ocean that beat its relentless tattoo on the shingle shore below the village, and I knew that somewhere far away on the other side of it was a place they called America.

  On the other side of the bay, fishermen from Stornoway sometimes laid out their catch of whitefish on the rocks to dry in the sun. They paid the children of the village a pen
ny each to spend the day there and scare away the birds.

  There was a jetty, too, built by the estate before Langadail was bought by its new owner. My father used to swear that the new laird spent nothing on improvements and that the place would go to rack and ruin.

  There were a dozen blackhouses in our village. They sat at angles to each other on the slope, and my sister and I often played hide and seek among the dark alleys between them. Each house was built with the byre at the bottom end to let the animal waste drain out. At the end of each winter I would help my father break down the gable at the end of our house to shovel the cow shit on to a cart and haul it to our wee strip of land to use as fertiliser. It was always shit and seaweed we used to grow barley. And the thatch from the roof, blackened and thick with the sticky residue of peat soot, that we laid on the lazy beds with kelp to feed the potatoes. The oats seemed to grow fine without any encouragement. We reroofed each spring with fresh sheaves of barley stalks, then covered the thatch with fishermen’s netting and weighted it down with hanging stones. The smoke from the peat fire somehow managed to make its way through the roof eventually, and the few hens we owned found warmth and comfort in winter by roosting in it.

  The walls of our blackhouse were thick. Two walls really, drystone-built, with earth and rubble in between, and turf on top to soak up the water that ran off the roof. I suppose that to someone who wasn’t accustomed to it, the sight of sheep grazing along the top of the walls might have seemed a bit odd. But I was used to seeing them up there.

  All these things I knew because they were a part of me, as I was a part of the community of Baile Mhanais.

  I remember the day that Murdag was born. I’d been sitting that morning with old blind Calum outside the door of his house near the foot of the village. Protective hills rose up to the north and east, though we were exposed to the weather from the west. The ridge beyond the bay provided a little shelter from the south-westerlies, and I suppose that my ancestors must have thought it as good a spot as any for the settling of their village.

  As always, Calum wore his blue coat with its yellow buttons, and a time-worn Glengarry on his head. He said he could see shapes in the daylight, but not a thing in the darkness of his blackhouse. So he preferred to sit outside in the cold and see something, rather than be warm inside and see nothing.

  I sat often with old Calum and listened to his stories. It seemed there was very little he didn’t know about the people there, and the history of Baile Mhanais. When he first told me that he was a veteran of Waterloo, I didn’t like to say that I had no idea what a veteran was, or what Waterloo might be. It was my teacher who told me that a veteran was an old soldier, and that Waterloo was a famous battle fought a thousand miles away on the Continent of Europe to defeat the French dictator, Napoleon Bonaparte.

  It made me view old Calum in a different light. With something like awe. Here was a warrior who had defeated a dictator and he lived in my village. He said he had fought nine battles on the Continent, and was blinded in the last by his own misfiring flintlock.

  It was cold that morning, with the wind blowing down from the north, and there were spits of rain in it with a hint of sleet. The winter could be wicked sometimes, and mild at others. My teacher said it was the Gulf Stream that stopped us from being under permanent frost, and I had a picture in my mind of a hot stream bubbling through the sea to melt the ice of the northern oceans.

  I heard a voice carried on the wind. It was my sister, Annag. She was just over a year younger than me, and I turned to see her running down between the blackhouses. She wore a pale-blue cotton skirt beneath a woollen jumper that my mother had knitted. Her legs and feet were bare like mine. Shoes were for Sundays. And our feet were like leather on the soles.

  ‘Sime! Sime!’ Her little face was pink with exertion, her eyes wide with alarm. ‘It’s happening. It’s happening now!’

  Old Calum found my wrist and held it firm as I stood up. ‘I’ll say a prayer for her, boy,’ he said.

  Annag grabbed my hand. ‘Come on, come on!’

  And we ran together, hand in hand, up between the black-houses, past our stack yard and into the barn at the back. We were both still wee and didn’t have to stoop to enter the house, unlike my father, who had to duck every time or crack his head on the lintel.

  It was dark in here, and it took a moment for our eyes to grow accustomed to the light. The floor was rough-cobbled with big stones, hay stacked high at one end, and the potato store boxed off in almost total darkness at the other. We ran through into the tiny space between the fire room and the byre, startling the hens. There were two cows in the byre at that time, and one of them turned to low mournfully in our direction.

  We crouched down behind the chicken wire at the door and peered into the fire room. The iron lamps that hung from the rafters gave off the stink of fish liver oil, cutting through the acrid peat smoke that rose from the fire in the centre of the room.

  It was full of people. All women, except for my father. Annag clutched my arm, tiny fingers bruising my flesh. ‘The midwife came ten minutes ago,’ she whispered, and paused. Then, ‘What’s a midwife?’

  There had been enough births in my short life that I knew the midwife was the woman who came to help with the delivery. But, actually, she was just one of our neighbours.

  ‘She’s come to take the baby from mamaidh’s belly,’ I told her. And I saw her bent over the prone figure of my mother in the box bed at the far side of the room.

  I am not quite sure now how I could tell, because there was no outward sign of it, but there was panic in the fire room. Silent panic that you could feel, even if you couldn’t hear or see it. Water was boiling in a pot hung from the chain above the burning peats. The other women were busy washing bloody rags and my father stood looking on helplessly. I had never seen him so powerless. He had a word for every occasion, my father. But right then he had nothing to say.

  I heard the midwife urging, ‘Push, Peigi, push!’ And my mother screamed.

  One of the neighbours gasped, ‘It’s coming out the wrong way.’

  I had attended many animal births and knew that the head should come first, and straining my eyes through the smoke and shadows I could see the baby’s arse between my mother’s legs, as if it were trying to climb in and not out.

  One at a time the midwife carefully freed the baby’s legs, then turned and twisted to release first one arm, then the other. It was a girl. A big baby, but her head was still inside my mother, and there had been a dreadful tearing of the flesh. I could see blood on my mother’s legs and on the hands of the midwife. I could see it soaking into the sheets. There was sweat glistening on the face of the birthing woman as she tilted the baby up, one hand searching for its upturned face, trying to ease it free. But still the head wouldn’t come.

  My mother was gasping and crying, and the neighbours were holding her hands and softly urging her to be calm. But everyone in the room knew that if the baby’s head were not freed quickly, the newborn would suffocate.

  Suddenly the midwife leaned over, cradling the baby’s body in one arm, her free hand feeling across my mother’s belly for the head inside of her. She seemed to find it, and took a deep breath before pushing down hard. And, ‘Push!’ she shouted at the top of her voice.

  My mother’s scream brought soot dust tumbling from the rafters and turned my blood cold. But in the same moment, my new little sister’s head popped out, and with a sharp smack on her bloodied arse she drew breath and echoed her mother’s cry.

  But my mother was still in distress, and the baby was taken quickly away, wrapped in blankets. Fresh sheeting was brought to try to stop my mother’s bleeding. The midwife caught my father’s arm and he dipped his head to hear her whispered advice. Her face had the white pallor of the dead.

  My father’s eyes burned like coals and he came running for the door, almost falling over Annag and me as we tried to scramble out of his way. He yelled out and grabbed me by the collar of my threadbare
tweed jacket, and I thought I was in trouble for being where I shouldn’t. But he brought his big whiskery face down next to mine and said, ‘I want you to go for the doctor, son. If we can’t stop the bleeding your mother’s going to die.’

  Fear shot through me like a bolt from a crossbow. ‘I don’t know where the doctor lives.’

  ‘Go to the castle at Ard Mor,’ my father said, and I heard the anxiety that choked back the words in his throat. ‘They’ll get him quicker than any of us. Tell them your mother’ll die if he doesn’t come fast.’ And he turned me around and pushed me out, blinking, into the daylight, charged with the saving of my mother’s life.

  Propelled by a mixture of fear and self-importance, I ran pell-mell up the slope between the blackhouses and on to the path cut into the hillside. I knew that if I followed it far enough, it would take me to the road that led to the castle, and although I’d never been there I had seen it from a distance and knew how to find it. But it was a long way. Two miles, maybe more.

  The wind hit me as I crested the hilltop and nearly knocked me off my feet. I felt the rain spitting in my face, as if God was contemptuous of the efforts of one small boy to save his mother. That, after all, was His business.

  There was no way I could keep up that pace, but I knew that time was of the essence, so I slowed to a trot that would eke out my reserves of energy and at least get me there. I tried hard not to think as I ran, switching my focus between the path ahead and the bleakness of the rocky, treeless hills that rose around me. Low clouds bumped and bruised the land, and the wind whipped through my clothes, tugging at the nails I used as buttons to keep my jacket shut.

  Vistas appeared and disappeared. I spotted the curve of a sandy cove between a spur of hills. In the distance dark purple mountains were ringed by clouds, and through an opening to my left I saw the standing stones on the rise beyond the big beach that we called simply Traigh Mhor. And still I ran. Settling to a pace that numbed my thoughts and calmed my fears.