Hellfire and Herring

by Christopher Rush

  I tried to sleep. But the winds were blasting the walls and windows, while the sea shattered itself uselessly on the cold sands night after night, the tides coming in and going out endlessly and to no purpose. The foghorns started up, baying like brutes in the darkness, voices out of hell. I lay awake asking myself for the first time who I really was, while the night turned over and over without sleep.

  But nobody wanted to sleep on Hallowe’en, the last night of the month.

  I dressed myself up one more time in my father’s old navy uniform – next year I’d be too old for guising, I was told – and bell-bottomed, striped and navy-blue, went out into the darkness to meet my friends, pretending for the last time to be my father, before returning him to the bottom drawer.

  Golly was a caped lady in crinoline and yellowed pearls. Lipsticked, powdered and rouged, he was bestoled with fox furs stolen from his grandmother’s best wardrobe. Peem was a Red Indian, Big Chief Sitting Bull, with seagull feathers dyed scarlet and green, and the hatchet from the woodshed in his hand for a tomahawk, whooping all to himself by his back door.

  We went into the turnip fields to make our witches’ heads, and as we crouched down in the damp earth with clasp-knives and candles, we saw the scattered lights of other guisers come bobbing through the dark, the jagged teeth and orange eyes floating through the field at various levels, depending on the ages and heights of the decapitated ghosts who approached us with strangely thrilling invisibility. Who were they? We grinned uncertainly, trying to see beyond, into the false faces of our friends. Once up close we could relax again. Boys and girls, that was all, in long trailing skirts, feathered hats and strings of beads, soot and satisfaction all over their unrecognizable faces, grinning behind the warpaint.

  ‘Who is it? Who is it?’

  ‘You first!’

  ‘No, don’t you come near! Not till you tell me who you are!’

  ‘Don’t you know my voice, you idiot?’

  And when the recognition scenes were over, we pointed and screeched at one another and joined up in a band with our communal tin, to knock on all the doors and beg a few coppers to help the guisers. Some doors never opened, year after year, but most folk let us in, and we stood in a weird wet huddle in halls and vestibules and warm yellow kitchens, or in front of roaring fires that made our make-up run.

  ‘Right then, do your turns. You first, Lady Muck. And what about you, Buffalo Bill?’

  Sweating and self-conscious, even under our disguises, we all sang or recited something, one by one or all together – ‘Old Meg she was a gypsy’, ‘Oh I do like to be beside the seaside’, ‘O wha will shoe my bonny foot?’

  ‘You with the sailor’s clothes, whose are you?’ an old crone cawed at me from the inglenook.

  I gave my name.

  ‘But you’re Christina Marr’s laddie, aren’t you?’

  I shook my head. I’d never heard of Christina Marr. But my grandmother’s mother’s maiden name was indeed Marr, and old wives who wanted an answer to the usual question would blithely omit the males of four generations and ignore your father. Especially if he was an incoming English sailor. Insular and matriarchal, that was St Monans.

  ‘Well, give us a sea song anyway. Your dad was a sailor. But Captain Marr was a much greater one.’

  I knew all about Captain Marr from Leebie, my four times great-uncle who’d captained a man-o’-war against Napoleon. The exact replica of his ship still swung suspended above the pulpit of the Old Kirk by the age-old umbilical that connected religion and the sea. So I astonished them by singing about Francis Drake, lying in his hammock, slung between the round shot in Nombre Dios Bay

  ‘What kind of a song is that now?’

  ‘Is that one of Georgina’s weird numbers?’

  ‘Can’t you sing the Skye boat song?’

  ‘Ssh! We all sail the same sea.’

  After that we walked the mile to Balcaskie and made our way through the moaning woods, huddling as close as we could along the Bishop’s Walk where the trees reached out and touched and our feet waded through cold rustling waves of leaves. At last we arrived at the mansion, hidden behind its ivy, except for the chimneys crenellating the sky. Hardly any lights were on. Enormous cockerels were pretending to be hedges. Lions stood on guard. We rang the bell and waited. Nothing happened.

  ‘Let’s ring again,’ insisted Golly.

  The rest of us were ready to turn tail, secretly relieved that the nobs hadn’t come to look round-eyed at us for our audacity. But Golly explained that they’d all be busy dancing and drinking champagne and that the butler wouldn’t come to see who it was until all the ladies had smoked their cigarettes right down to the silver holders and gone to the bathroom to check their make-up.

  ‘And have a pee,’ somebody said.

  ‘Shut up! Ring again.’

  And after the third ring the sound of shuffling footsteps could be heard, approaching so slowly that at times they almost seemed to be receding. But eventually the door was opened and we all stood staring at a wizened little old man almost lost in a pale-green tweed suit. A drooping moustache, a pale dome shining through the last of his hair, eyebrows out of control, and the eyes themselves moist blind blue sapphires that had long since ceased to register astonishment – or any other emotion.

  ‘Ah, the guisers,’ he nodded to himself. ‘Of course.’ And he waved us inside as ceremoniously as if we were long expected honoured guests.

  It was decided that ‘Auntie Mary had a canary’ would not be in order and that I was best qualified to come up with something congenial to the occasion. Stared at by stags’ heads and standing among pieces of furniture made for titans, I sang the whole of the song about love and death which I had unearthed from Georgina’s piano stool.

  Come away, come away, death,

  And in sad cypress let me be laid;

  Fly away, fly away, breath;

  I am slain by a fair cruel maid.

  My shroud of white, stuck all with yew,

  O prepare it!

  My part of death, no one so true

  Did share it.

  The old man listened gravely, standing with both hands on the knobbly head of his black stick as I went on to the verse about the flowerless coffin and the solitary grave and the corpse without a sigh or a tear to mourn it. He stared intently into the worn carpet while his little wisp of a wife sat by the fire with her faded head to the side, nodding and smiling faintly. Then he tottered towards me.

  ‘Good man, good man.’

  We waited while he fumbled in his pocket.

  ‘A most unusual piece for a young man, yes. And it’s by a very great writer. Well done, well done.’

  He pressed into my palm the clinking coins, cold from his stone cold fingers. Then we were offered some fruit to take away from a gleaming bowl on the sideboard – some shrivelled apples and oranges whose skins had turned to bark.

  We went outside into the wind.

  ‘What did he give you? Let’s see.’

  Two half-crowns.

  ‘Five bob! It’s a bloody fortune!’

  After that the group made me sing Georgina’s songs back at the village. But they never made an impression on anyone else.

  Then it was home to the braeheads to dook for apples and eat treacle scones and count our winnings. We sat by the fireside in our creased and muddied costumes, our faces streaked with treacle and the remains of our make-up. The dowsed turnip lanterns, too close to the grate, started to stink and shrivel in the hearth. And Leebie told us stories of ghosts and ghouls, and of witches and vampires flying about the cobwebbed sky.

  ‘Those born tonight’, she croaked, ‘will have the taish.’

  ‘What’s that?’ we gaped.

  ‘The taish is the second sight – you see something happening before it happens, sometimes years and years before.’ And she told us the story of Captain Meldrum.

  His grandmother had the second sight, and on the day he was born, the old woman pointed at him in the
bed where he lay on his mother’s breast, and this is what she said: ‘Many’s the green wave will he go over – and many’s the green wave will go over him.’

  And that’s how it turned out. Agnes married him much against her mother’s wishes, the old woman being herself a seer, and he died in the China seas, drowned there for ever.

  I shivered at the thought of knowing the future, like Saul who knew in the middle of the night before the battle that he was going to die the next day. I was tired and cold and it was after midnight now. We were into November – the gloomiest month of the year.

  The wind month. Not the clear winds from the north-west and north that brought quiet frosty weather, but the heavy easterlies that ferried the Flanders frosts to the coast. The wild winds, together with the fierce groundswells in the sea, ran for such a long time that mountains of weed were thrown up all along the sands – not the slack heads now but whole masses of oarweed and tangle, torn up by ground-swell and gale from the seabed and dragged inshore. They stretched for miles and the farmers came and collected them for manure.

  These heavy swells, and the gales ceaselessly blowing in the North Sea, kept the big white waves pounding the shore. The divided labours of sun and moon conspired with them to stop the waters from ebbing effectively, and so the sea never went to sleep but went on with its worrying all through the month, when wind and water, the oldest sounds in the world, seemed to be all that ever were. When the tides did recede, the coast was strewn with bare rock pools in which nothing winked or waved, only the bitter ruffling of water all day long under a stiff wind. Standing disconsolately in one of these pools, I lost sight of my rubber-booted feet in just three or four inches of muddy water. The clarity would not return to it now until spring.

  The harpist wind played everywhere, accompanied by rain. There was uproar in Balcaskie, where the Bishop’s Walk was a long whirling mile of leaves and the wind screamed through the trees. Rotting sodden flowers and their dead seed-vessels were beaten into the earth, the black smells answering them, oozing out of the ground. This was November, the dismal trough of the year, choked with filth and fallen black branches streaming wetly. It was rawness and rotting and rain, the bleak blasting month when the earth’s empty stage was swept by curtains of fog and the old men of the woods went storming to their graves. It was voices in the wind and clouds trailing thin rags of light, armies always on the march. When it seemed things couldn’t get worse, they did. The rains fell harder, the skyline disappeared, the gales gathered again, the trees tightening their toes in the earth, screeching and bending in the sea of wind, clutching at stones and bones.

  And yet it was at this time, when you thought nothing could live, that the winter migrants came back to the coast – flocks of fieldfares clinging to the softer ground of the shore, where they scratched for their existence. Tough as they were, I often found one of them after a few days of hard frost, huddled in behind a dyke, dead where it had lain for shelter. Snow swaddled it in the Christmas month, and when spring came there would be a few feathers left in a tiny cage of bones – and in last year’s nests some deserted eggs, staring out like cracked blue moons.

  The curlews too were active on the land along with the lapwings and crows, the sky echoed with arrows of geese, whistling wintrily down from the north, and just offshore great flocks of mallards came in on the smooth water made by the north wind. All day they bobbed silently in the bay, as if they had come for no special purpose. Then at sunset they rose and flew in over the bare fields to pick up any stray potatoes that the onslaughts of frost and rain hadn’t yet turned to purple stones and black mush. Often as I stood on the landward side of the house I could hear their quack-quacking coming from the moonlit fields where they continued to feed well into the night.

  But by the end of the month I was listening for a different sound – the throb of returning engines on the water. They would all be coming home with the changing weather, back from Yarmouth with the hardening moons and the first dustings of snow. If there had been heavy rains early in the month, with the swollen streams running high, then a period of dry quiet weather followed by a hard and rapid frost, the waterdrops clinging to the overhanging grasses quickly froze, and the weeds hung like wintry chandeliers across the solid ballroom floors of the streams, whorled and patterned as if by ghostly dancers during the night. That first whiteness was the sign of the last month of the year, when winter would blow through our bones.

  Every day grew colder. There was no wind with it, just this huge hand, hard and cold as iron, gripping the earth, its fingers creeping out of the north, tighter during the soundless nights when only the stars tingled in space, and the black sea snapped at the shore. I took to creeping out of the house when everyone else was asleep and walking along to the kirkyard. Staring at the gravestones, glittering against the crackling sea, I knew that George’s April lesson would prove true, that the time would come when I’d be nothing more than white bones frozen beneath an impenetrable armour of ice.

  But April was a long way away and George’s lessons had stopped. Something told me that my own fate was as nothing compared to the sheer splendour of the suffering world and its extremes, and the unutterable iciness of the stars. I knew this and yet exulted in it – knowing it was a kind of triumph over a universe that didn’t know it, because it couldn’t think at all, unlike the unprecedented unrepeatable me. I’d never heard of Descartes or Pascal, but my nocturnal senses told me then what reason taught later.

  Tighter and whiter gripped the fingers in the clenched fist. In the sparkling mornings Geordie Haines’s milk horse still stood in the meal-white streets like a horse of bronze, newly forged, the steam coming out of it and its head fuming in its nosebag as it snorted and stamped. Geordie himself stood slamming his arms across his chest and round his back, beating the ends of his frozen fingers and laughing and cursing loudly.

  ‘Right brass monkeys’ weather, this, bugger me!’ he roared. ‘Hang in there, you young fry, watch your tits don’t drop off out here! The milk’s frozen solid near enough!’

  I ran out behind Jenny with the pitcher, holding it beneath Geordie’s urn to catch the rich white waterfall that he sloshed carelessly off the back end of his cart, together with the frozen chunks that clashed in a welter of bubbles into the jug. In the wake of his cart the pools of spilt milk were already starting to freeze the whole length of the glazed street.

  ‘All the way from the North Pole this morning, my lad!’

  Once he handed me a long frozen poker of milk.

  ‘There you are now, cockie, stick that in the hottest place you can find!’ And he bent down from the cart and whispered something into Jenny’s tingling ear.

  She screamed and let fly at him with her jug. He bellowed loud laughter, his hands on his hips, while I hugged the pillar of milk and ran gasping with it into the house, crashing it into the sink among the startled women, then stood back slapping my burning finger-ends round my back and howling and hopping up and down as if the ghost of Shuggie had risen from the ice-bound graveyard and given me six of the best.

  ‘Right brass monkeys’ weather, this, bugger me!’ I roared at them. ‘Watch your tits don’t drop off into the milk!’

  Then I ran out whooping into the white tight world.

  The day came when the great hand relaxed its grip a fraction, releasing the first few flakes of snow. They drifted down like the early gannets sometimes seen round the Bass in mid-December. But the sky darkened and the flakes thickened, fell in soft fast flurries into the fields and streets, wove a quick white shroud about the bare bodies of the trees. Sky and sea disappeared as the ghostly shoal enveloped us and we swam all night without bearings, bound for nowhere, prisoners of this soundless drifting.

  But in the morning the shoal had vanished and the world was a white bride, clutching a bouquet of winter jasmine, the only flame in our garden. Somebody had stood the sun like a pitcher of cider on a high blue shelf. The whole countryside glittered like an army, distant ponds
flashing their shields at us. Even the rock pools had frozen, and the seawater on the sands, where the marram-grasses glinted like swords in the sun. The seagulls standing sentinel on the kirk steeples had turned to stone, their hearts cracked in the cold like the sculptured doves on the kirkyard tombs. A robin turned his breast up to the sun, a rusted brazier. Now and again a tiny red footprint in the snow appeared – the blood of a rabbit or hare, wounding the immaculate fields. Even indoors we gulped down freezing draughts of air, drunk in dark dawns before the first hot cups of tea, when our numb fingers fiddled blindly with buttons and strings and we stood and shivered uncontrollably. And on Sundays sprays of kirkyard coughs were passed round like wreaths in the pews.

  There were mixtures of syrup and honey and rum for the coughs. Or there were kill-or-cure sledgings and slitherings and daredevillings on studded feet down braes become glaciers and wynds that were lumpy rivers of glass. We were soldiers and explorers. The Bass was a giant white polar bear, asleep on the skyline, liable to be wakened by the first gannets that had perched on his back since October. Glued leaves crackled like rifle-shots underfoot, alerting us to the retreat from Moscow, and with Cossacks picking us off all the way from Balcaskie to the Blocks, we had no option but to run the slippery zigzag all the way to the furthermost point, while giant waves crashed across our path and rose into the air like white churches before collapsing thunderously on the other side, tons of water thundering down in smithereens and salt. And not a man was lost on the final run.

  Our blood was up. Back we came, running red-faced and sea-splashed all the way to the white frozen wave of the kirkyard where we yelled fit to waken the dead. Then we made for the homes of the aristocrats, Mr Brock the banker and Mr Pagan-Grace the lawyer, their houses side by side, their gardens always immaculate, just as they were now, not a crumb of bread for the birds disturbing the spotless tablecloths of pure white snow spread out from window to wall. Conquest by division was our strategy. One platoon prepared the snowballs while the other crept up to the doors and laid hold of the knockers – doorknockers that burned our fingers yearly with their flickering white fire – and hammered loudly and long with the iron heads of lions and Greeks before running back to the gate and waiting for the fun. Two doors opened simultaneously, a brace of astonished red faces – and the combined force hurled its missiles, peppering the slippered, becardiganed enemy with double-barrelled white fire.