Hellfire and Herring

by Christopher Rush

  ‘The funeral of Charles Davidson Marr will take place at two o’clock this Wednesday, from No. 5 Elm Grove, and from there to the old kirkyard.’

  The air sang with the sudden silence that surged back on this sentence, and we waited.

  ‘Charles Davidson Marr died of a heart attack at seven o’clock this evening. Friends are welcome at Elm Grove between nine a.m. and seven p.m. tomorrow, when the last kisting will take place. The Lord is my shepherd. I shall not want. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures. He restoreth my soul …’

  ‘That was a sudden call,’ said grandfather.

  ‘No, no,’ grandmother said, ‘he always had a bad heart, Chae Marr.’

  ‘Does that mean he’ll go to hell?’ I asked.

  Chae Marr’s bad heart meant only one thing to me: infernal wickedness. Epp had often called me a bad-hearted boy who would burn in hell.

  They told me to hold my tongue, but I asked what the last kisting was.

  ‘It’s when folk come to take their last leave of you,’ said grandfather. ‘After that they screw you down.’

  ‘Good God Almighty, don’t tell the boy stuff like that!’

  ‘Why not? He has to learn sometime, doesn’t he?’

  ‘Sometime – not now, for God’s sake.’

  But the sometime had already passed, with Epp.

  ‘That Penman ought to be put down,’ grumbled uncle Alec. ‘He rings that bloody bell before a body’s had a chance to grow cold.’

  ‘He’ll be ringing it in your face next, if you as much as catch a cold,’ said Billy. ‘You’d better watch out, Kiffer!’

  Grandfather stuck a thin strip of newspaper in the fire and relit his Woodbine.

  ‘He’s like a shark following a ship,’ he said. ‘Nobody welcomes the sight of him.’

  So the bell-ringer became the death-bringer. And whenever I saw the sad eyes and sepulchral step after that, I avoided him, even if he wasn’t carrying his bell. One look from him, I decided, could be enough to make my bad heart blacker – maybe even fatal. And old as he seemed when I first knew him, he lived on all through my childhood before finally succumbing himself to the common stroke. Even then he was not quite done with us. Some folk heard his bell the night he died, and on the following two nights, announcing his own funeral with slow and solemn tread, out in the deserted streets. My grandmother heard the story and pulled down the blinds and drew the curtains, utterly terrified until he was safely below the sod – as she put it.

  But even with Penman off the streets death would always have been unavoidable – death and birth and all the business of the flesh. Only two doors along from the braehead house lived Liza Leslie, midwife and dresser of the dead, in a small house surrounded by a huge sloping garden, walled in from the sea. The spaciousness and seclusion were ironically appropriate, as she was always out and around, at all times, seasons and weathers, and yet spoke to no one, never answering a greeting, which few took the trouble to give, knowing her habit. And never wearing a coat either, but with her grey shawl and hair flying about her shoulders, her long black skirt flapping at her heels, bare-armed, head held high, eyes fixed dead ahead unblinking as she made her way to houses of mourning or mirth.

  Not that mirth was up her street. ‘Man that is born of woman hath but a short time to live,’ she would say as she delivered a baby, ‘and his days are full of sorrow.’ That was about the extent of her conversation. She was another ancient, hailing from an age when men and women bred bleakly in the face of death, prepared for the loss of offspring and the waste of effort. We give birth astride a grave – the absurd dramatic image might have served as her motto. She simply arched our existence, a village rainbow, drained of colour, drained of hope, untouchable, elusive, spanning the polarities of crib and coffin, bearing the secrets of being and not-being in her hands. Speaking to nobody in particular, yet she held all of us when we came into the world and when we went out, washing away our first day’s blood and our last day’s sweat and tears, and ignoring us in between. She was the iron gates of life and death.

  Honeybunch was another inhabitant of seclusion, but she would have benefited from the service Liza Leslie provided to the community as washer-down of bodies. Quite simply, Honeybunch would never wash. Her scent was her main claim to village fame, though that is not my abiding memory of her. Honeybunch was the first woman I saw naked.

  ‘Poor lass, she’s not right in the head,’ my grandmother would say whenever Honeybunch passed by the house on her way down to the shore.

  I asked what was wrong with Honeybunch’s head.

  ‘She lost her wits for love, they say, poor soul.’

  Grandmother saw life outside the window in terms of Bett’s library romances. But for me Honeybunch was the girl in the song that Georgina had brought from Yarmouth, the one that sat sighing by a sycamore tree. Down on the beach Honeybunch would gather stones and make the outlines of boats, their stone prows pointing out to sea. Then she’d sit inside them on their sandy decks – and cry. The fresh streams ran by her and murmured her moans. Her salt tears fell from her and softened the stones. Life into art and back again, the two coming together for me in a perfect enchantment.

  Honeybunch must have been about forty, but she was willowy and wonderful to look at from the perspective of my half decade that didn’t yet divide women into ages. In my teens I’d have dreamed of meeting such a woman in the meads and gone groaning to her grotto. I was under the spell of Keats. At five I’d never even heard of Keats. I’d heard of Honeybunch, though, as one of the wonders of the little world. Honey-haired, bee-footed and almond-eyed, she came down from the country, folk said, from some estate, a mad aristocrat, cast off by the upper crust, her mouth musical with a magnificent English, quite unlike my father’s, in which she drooled and drawled all to herself.

  In the long summer she sat whole days on the sands as the blue tides swished in and out, twelve hours at a time, touching her toes and withdrawing from her with slow courtesy. She pondered the pebbles which she picked up and held in her hands all day long, staring at them and saying nothing. She walked inland through woods and fields, children following her like trains of pages, and back again through long lines of surf, following the curving patterns on the beach, printing her footsteps with a child’s care between the brown ribs of sand left by the ebb. She paddled in ditches, lay on piles of old nets at the back of the harbour, her bare feet among fish-heads and crabs’ toes and rotting bait. She spent long hours at the rubbish-dump on the west braes, playing with the joyless jetsam of the community. She combed her hair with bones and broken combs. Then she wandered through open doors, sat down in shops and houses and asked for cups of tea. Or she appeared in church on Sundays, in the middle of the sermon, still barefooted and bedraggled, sitting down in the pews among the coffin-coloured fox-furs, the festooned and bird’s-nested hats, exuding the smells of the waste places of the town rankly amid Presbyterian polish, mothballs and pan-drops. She stank to high heaven. From six feet off you could have adored her: from three feet you could have died. Children accept smells as part of the universe. Church-going ladies scatter, their embroidered handkerchiefs clapped to their noses.

  So Alec Fergusson, the old sexton who’d given me my salt-water baptism, was the man who performed the act of charity that not a single woman would have dreamed of doing – he washed her. Took her through his burnside cottage, out to the back garden and into his wash-house, stripped her bare buff, laid her down like a sleepy queen on a marble slab, and gave her a good soaping and rinsing before he let her go.

  The Women’s Guild complained to the minister. ‘That mad madam with the marble in her mouth! Washes her down, back, belly and in between! It’s got to come to a stop!’

  Kinnear was no kitten and gave them his answer.

  ‘Cleanliness is next to godliness. And if the godly ones around here aren’t going to make her decent for the kirk, then either Alec does it or I’ll damn well see to it myself!’

  The old gr
avedigger went on attending to the bathing of Bathsheba.

  Once I saw her come out of his front door, her hair spread out by the wind, her torn dress draped about her like a flag around a sun-bleached column. I stood and watched as she walked past me into the waves, laughing, and I imagined what it must have been like to have washed Honeybunch. Then I crept up the steps and looked over Alec’s wall. He was still out there in his back garden, mending a puncture on his bicycle. Behind him the door to the wash-house was open and I could see the slab, soapy water still trickling from it. Less than five minutes ago Honeybunch had lain there stark naked and been washed from head to toe.

  I don’t think it was sex that reared its lovely head so soon, to make me look out for Honeybunch’s washdays from then on. Curiosity, I suspect, plain old-fashioned childish wonder, that’s all. I didn’t have long to wait.

  My uncle Billy had told me about Leebie’s belief that if you walked three times round the Old Kirk ‘widdershins’, you’d meet the Devil on your completion of the third circuit. ‘But you have to do it against the sun,’ he insisted, taking great care to explain to me the anti-clockwise import of ‘widdershins’. Otherwise, he assured me, it wouldn’t work.

  I asked him if he’d done it himself.

  ‘Of course, lots of times.’

  And met the Devil?

  ‘Every time.’

  And what did he look like?

  A pause.

  ‘A bit like Tom Tarvit.’

  Another pause.

  ‘Only with horns.’

  Billy had been round the church at midnight, of course, but he recommended I try it out on a nice sunny day, when it would be less scary and easier to run away. So it was perfect weather when I came down through the cornfield under a summer sun, early in the morning, making for the church. It was built on the west side of the burn and the only crossing was a great stone slab that had once been a tombstone. The skull carved at the top end had been worn by wind and wave and weather, though women still complained to Kinnear that their high heels got stuck in the eye-sockets if they crossed without care and attention. The minister explained that they were helping the soul of the departed. The stone came from the grave of an old aristocrat, up Abercrombie way. After lording it over ordinary people all his life, he’d settled down to an eternity of atonement. Being trampled by the common folk was an act of penitential restitution. So the church women were advised not to avoid the spot.

  ‘Dig your heels in, ladies, and let the toff have it in the eye – it’ll do you both good!’

  On other stones the eyes were deep green. But here the moss had been winkled out by a succession of stilettos. I stuck my fingers into both sockets, dilly-dallying and shillyshallying, as my teachers later complained of me, though on this occasion with heartfelt excuse. I was beginning to lose interest in seeing Tom Tarvit leap out at me with horns on his head. I went up the steps slowly and turned right, hugging the huge edifice, feeling its cold stones, reading the headstones as I went, and studying my faltering feet. Nothing. Only an old hose, lying in the grass, leading to the sexton’s toolshed. I came round again on the sea side and did my second circuit, slower than the first time, then started on my third. This time there seemed to be more distractions than before – dandelion clocks to blow, butterflies to catch, a ladybird beetling its way across an inscription, scurrying as fast as its little legs could carry it but still taking ages to traverse even the first name of many: Alexandrina Peterina Johnston. Why did they give them such long names in those days?

  It was while I was stopped in thought that I heard the sound of singing.

  Rock of Ages, cleft for me,

  Let me hide myself in thee …

  It was an old man’s voice, but he was singing lustily, as if it were a Sunday, though the hymn wasn’t coming from inside the church but from the west side of it, the far side from the village. I still had to get round there before I could complete my final circuit. I stole among the memorials and, clasping one that was just my size and provided the perfect cover, peered round its flaky edge.

  And there she was – Honeybunch without a stitch on. Alec had laid her lengthwise on one of those table-top tombstones with carved legs, and at first I thought that she was dead, and that Liza Leslie was on her way. A bucket of soapy water stood on the grass and Alec, wearing his yellow oilskin apron, was wielding a large scrubbing brush with washday vigour. The hose was turned on and the cold water was streaming over the naked form. I could see the goose-pimples standing out on its flanks and two curious strawberries standing out brightly on its chest. But Honeybunch’s eyes were closed and there wasn’t a movement from her to suggest that she felt a thing. Alec parted her thighs slightly and got busy with the soap again, following up swiftly with the hose. I was amazed to see the dark brown bush that grew between Honeybunch’s legs. It was then that she turned her head with startling slowness, opened her eyes, and looked straight at me, unblinking and unsmiling. Alec continued to wash and to sing.

  Nothing in my hand I bring,

  Simply to thy Cross I cling;

  Naked, come to thee for dress,

  Helpless, look to thee for grace,

  Foul, I to the fountain fly;

  Wash me, Saviour, or I die.

  I was running madly back through the headstones by now, the holy words following me like retribution, when I crashed straight into a big black coat and felt a pair of burly arms about me. I looked up the row of buttons to the dog collar and black hat, eclipsing the sun.

  ‘Well now,’ said Mr Kinnear, ‘is it Kiffer or Kipper, I wonder?’

  I looked up at him – and over my shoulder to the singing sexton, now hidden by the church. Kinnear grinned.

  ‘Great old hymn, that one. Good voice too, old Alec. He’s in the choir, you know. Did you know?’ I shook my head, trying to get away.

  ‘And what’s he doing, singing round there now, at this time of day? Shall we go round and see?’

  I struggled like a fly in his fists.

  ‘Did you see what he was doing? Did you see who he was singing to?’

  I shook my head.

  ‘Didn’t you see anything at all, Kiffer?’

  I shook my head again.

  The minister grinned wider and held me more gently.

  ‘So you didn’t see a naked woman?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Ah, you’ve found your tongue! What an unruly member the tongue is – always saying the wrong thing.’

  He took his hands from my shoulders and tousled my hair.

  ‘You should always see what you see, Kiffer.’

  I nodded and started to sidle away.

  ‘That’s two of God’s good works you’ve just seen round there – a beautiful woman and a clean-living man. There are women with their clothes on who may be cleaner – but not so pure. And there are other kinds of men.’

  I was running down the steps by this time, and back over the burn. As I looked over my shoulder I saw the black hat beyond the churchyard wall.

  ‘I didn’t see you in Sunday school last Sunday – make sure you’re there this week!’

  I ran faster for the braehead.

  ‘Or I’ll have to get Alec to come and hose you out of bed!’

  His laughter filled the churchyard.

  When I came cautiously back that way the same afternoon the place was deserted. Honeybunch was a speck on the beach, west of the castle. I looked down from the huge drop and saw another boat taking shape. Slowly I came down and approached her, which I’d never done before. I lifted a large stone from the sands and placed it next to the one she’d just laid. She smiled and said nothing. And we carried on building. I’d come to know Honeybunch. We were bound by a secret neither of us could understand. A warm wave of pride flooded through me. We finished the boat, stepped on deck and sat there together, side by side, saying nothing, for what seemed like the longest time I’d ever known in the whole world.

  Honeybunch was my first love – and it came to nothing
. There were plenty of other females on the loose but they didn’t have Honeybunch’s fascination. She was romantically mad – they were simply mad. And they floated about the village as part of its moving scenery.

  Bella Bonnysocks went to the shops with not a penny in her purse, selected a few simple items, enough to keep her from starvation, and said to the shopkeeper, ‘Tom’ll pay for it, when he gets back from the lines.’ But bridegroom Tom was never coming back from the lines. The young man was lying where he had lain for forty years, at the bottom of the grey North Sea, caught in a deep-sea fishing line which had wound him like a bobbin out of her life, leaving the unworn wedding ring to lie empty on her display cabinet, a barren circle of gold for the rest of her days.

  Kate the Kist walked into James Miller’s boat-building office first thing every morning, lay down on his floor and demanded to be measured for her coffin. Exasperated, he eventually gave her one and sent it up to her house free of charge. But she was soon back on the floor again, claiming she’d shrunk. He sent up a second box but made her pay for it, as she insisted on keeping the first. In time she reappeared saying she’d grown again, and had grown out of the first one. Miller lost patience and informed her that from now on she would be treated like everyone else and would have to wait till she was dead before he would supply her with a coffin. She duly died. Miller and his assistant went up to her house, wondering if they’d have to ‘go for a third’. They didn’t – but they discovered the coffins sitting on the flagstones in her wash-house, crammed with pots of homemade jam. Kate fitted into the first and the jam was extracted in lieu of payment. The second load of jam was auctioned at the next church fair, complete with coffin, as Miller said he couldn’t in all decency offer anyone a second-hand one.

  It was bought, however, complete with jam, by Wilhelmina Well, who refused the new sink which the Council had installed in her cottage. She drove a pick-axe into the shiny porcelain and carried on drawing water from the old well at the foot of her garden. It had no bottom, she said, and so the water was purer than pure. Then one day Wilhelmina simply disappeared. They tried the well, of course, pumping it for hours, but when there was no sign that they were getting anywhere they gave up.