Hellfire and Herring

by Christopher Rush

  I’ll tell you something else. Old as I am, I still don’t feel I’ve had enough of the world. I enjoy my job, whether it’s a fine rimy morning in November or an afternoon of butterflies and bees. I like reading and listening to the wireless, smoking my pipe and drinking a jug of beer. Most of all I enjoy just watching the world go by, the boats going up and down the firth, the gulls sailing about me, coming down for the worms, the seasons turning over. When I think that all that can still go on without me, I suppose I do feel a sort of fear, stronger than fear even – a kind of black panic, a rebellious frenzy, an unwillingness to accept extinction. You have to control that sometimes.

  And then there’s the fear of what comes next. You just don’t know – and there’s nothing more frightening than not knowing. Even a bairn knows that kind of fear, fear of the dark. And the older you get, let me tell you, the more of a bairn you become, maybe because you’re getting closer to the dark again.

  Not that I’m an atheist – don’t think that. I don’t think I could do the job if I was an atheist. If I thought death was just a mass grave, a bottomless pit into which the generations have been tumbling blindly since the beginning of time, I’m sure I’d go off my head. I don’t know what happens to the mystery that is me once they sling the rubbish that’s left into the kirkyard here, but I do know that a man is more than muscle and bone and brains and blood.

  Once when I was opening up a really old grave, a man came and looked in at what I was doing. He said he was a lecturer from the university at St Andrews – a geologist, that’s what he said he was, so he must have been one of the clever folk. I came on some bones that were so old they were badly discoloured and just flaked away like rotten wood when I touched them with the spade.

  He said to me, ‘The bible says that these bones will live again. Looking at them now, can you really believe that?’

  I said to him, ‘Looking at them now, can you really believe that they ever lived in the first place?’

  That quietened him. But that’s the thing, you see. When you’re in my job you’re coming across human remains all the time – teeth, bones, skulls, they’re all over the place. It’s hard to picture flesh on them again, and to remember that muscles once moved them, that they danced and sang and steered ships, that they had eyes that looked at the sea, a brain that understood it, a soul that loved it and lips that spoke about it. All that’s hard to believe and yet everybody knows it’s true. Frankly I don’t find the reverse any harder to credit – that they’ll live again, I mean.

  From that point of view I reckon my job puts me in a privileged position. There are some folk that have never seen a corpse in their lives. The undertaker comes between them and the dead, saves them from even having to look. But even the undertaker sees a body much as it looked in life. I see further than that, further than any man, after corruption has done its work and the spirit has gone to God. Between the undertaker and God there’s only me. That’s quite a field, believe me.

  I see them all on their way – schoolteacher, doctor, provost. They may have had better brains than some, and they may have better headstones than the town drunkard, but the same grass covers them, and beneath that it’s a classless society, let me tell you. Coffins? Don’t talk to me about coffins. Solid oak or pitch pine, they all rot away and earth’s what you’re left with. An orange box would have done the business. Or nothing at all. After that, break up the honeycomb and you find one man smells as sweet as another. Pride, arrogance, selfishness, good looks – all have an ending here.

  I’ll tell you another thing. There’s folk buried side by side here that would never have given each other as much as the time of day. They would have passed each other in the street with their faces turned and their noses in the air. And now they’re sleeping partners till the last trumpet. There’s families too that bitched among themselves till there weren’t two left to row with one another. Now they’re lying together as peaceful as you like, them that would never have shared the same room, let alone a bed. I’ve crammed them all in. Sometimes it’s been a squeeze and I’ve had to go down deep and pack them like kippers, cheek by jowl. But there’s never a murmur, you can be sure of that.

  Which suits me just fine, the peace and quiet. Fine decent folk, the dead – that was the punch line of a sexton up north, in a story I once read, and he hit the nail on the head.

  Mind you, this place has its horrors. There was a typhoid epidemic here just before the first war and it had me working myself down to a shadow. It got so busy that some of the bereaved had to come and do their own digging. I just didn’t have enough hours in the day. The kirkyard looked like a field of giant mole-hills. Sometimes the doctor told me not to bother filling in the grave after a burial – it would be needed again within the week, or even within the hour, with members of the same family falling victim to the disease. It went like wildfire.

  Anyway, it had only just blown itself out, the weeping and wailing were over, and the whole town was walking about wearing black, when somebody reported that an old tinker who camped in the field opposite where the school is now – Tinker Johnny, they called him – had caught the tail-end of the storm and died.

  Six men were paid a high price to take a coffin up to his tent, and they nailed him down on the spot. They were all wrapped up in gloves and masks. Then they hoisted him shoulder-high and started off with him to the kirkyard. That’s the other end of the town, as you know, so it was a long haul. There was no minister and no procession. He got a hymn, though.

  They were only halfway to the kirkyard when one of the pallbearers thought he heard something. But they were passing the boat-building shed and with all that commotion going on they weren’t sure. Then after a while they all heard it and they stopped and listened. Sure enough, there was a groaning coming from inside the box. They laid it down and looked at one another. Then without a word they hoisted it back up on their shoulders and walked on. They didn’t want the whole thing starting off again, did they? No, the sick man was safer inside his box.

  Then the old tinker actually started knocking on the lid of the coffin. By this time they were in Shore Street, where folk were going about their business, and the man was fairly hammering away and shouting. So to drown out his cries for help, they struck up one of the Paraphrases.

  O may the grave become to me

  The bed of peaceful rest,

  Whence I shall gladly rise at length

  And mingle with the blest!

  That’s what one of them started to sing, so I’m told, and they all joined in. Raising their voices like a congregation, they carried him all the way to the grave I’d already dug for him. I couldn’t believe my eyes and ears.

  ‘But the man’s alive!’ I said. ‘Good God Almighty, he’s as alive as you or me!’

  And all these eyes looked at me, staring at me between the hats and the black crêpe masks.

  ‘Yes, he’s alive, Alec,’ one of them said. ‘But he’s going to die anyway. Are you going to die along with him? Take off that lid and you might as well lie down in the grave with him!’

  What would you have done? Would you have opened the box? And taken a blast of all that diseased air, right in your face? I’m sorry to say I turned my back and said it was up to them. I was off to the lobsters. They lowered him into his grave then, and all six of them went mad, spading in the earth, and him screaming and hammering all the while.

  Can you imagine what it must have been like for him, hearing the first clods come thudding on to the coffin lid, and the sound of the spades gradually dying away? Then a darkness and a silence that you just can’t conceive.

  Worse than that, though, is picturing what it was like for them. How long before the earth muffled his cries, if at all? Would cries like that ever leave you, even in your sleep? For the old tinker the struggle would have been short compared to theirs. Every time they looked up from their work, in the direction of the kirkyard hill, wouldn’t they hear that endless scream coming out of it?

&nb
sp; Well, that’s not the end of it either. Seeing as it was a tinker’s grave and never paid for, the plot was reserved for victims of fortune – vagrants, suicides, corpses washed up on shore, that sort of thing. You’d think there would have been a taker or two, wouldn’t you? But it was quite some years till I had occasion to open up that plot again. And I’ll never forget the sight that met my eyes. It made my blood run cold. The man had gnawed off the fingers of one hand in his despair. You could see it at a glance. The rest of the bones were like a Chinese puzzle, all twisted into the most awful shapes you could imagine. It was the sound-picture of a scream, white as you like against the black earth, a scream that had never stopped. They had a voice, those bones. And I’ll tell you what, I was damned if I was going to be the only one left with the nightmares. So I rounded them up, the men that had done it, and made them come up and look. They cursed me for it, I can tell you. After that I smashed the pattern to bits with my spade and the noise in my ears went away. But it was hellish, the worst thing I’ve ever seen in my life. And I dream about it to this day.

  That’s one of the few disadvantages of the job – you see some sad sights. It’s not folks’ remains that bother me, it’s the things they get buried with that sometimes get me. Wedding rings, still round the bone, though mostly they’re taken off. But on occasion a partner refuses to have the ring removed. Photographs are usually blotted out by the time you get to them, but now and again you can make them out. What I hate most are bairns’ toys, dolls and stuff like that. In fact it’s these tiny wee skeletons that bother me the most. I can never get used to them. There are precious few infant burials these days, but they happen all the same, and the older graves are full of them. What’s the point of being born at all, I ask myself, if you’re buried within a year? I’ve never yet heard a decent answer to that one. Another cherub in heaven. One more sunbeam for God. Hasn’t he got enough of them? What kind of answer is that to a heart-broken mother?

  Digging up somebody you’ve known, to make room for a relative, that’s something that puts me neither up nor down as a rule. I do it all the time. But every now and then it gets under my skin. It depends on who it is.

  I felt like that when I came across Rob Lumsden, for example, eleven years after I’d put him in. Lord Lumsden, they called him – he was the chimneysweep for years and years, and a kinder man you couldn’t hope to meet. He’d a heart of gold and a fund of funny stories, and he told more lies than there are hairs on a cat, though they made good listening, that’s for sure. But the bottle was what made and unmade him. It was great to see him up there, roaring drunk and lurching along the rooftops in all weathers, singing like a lark among the lums. Maybe that’s why they called him Lord Lumsden – that and his fondness for the drink. He was always as drunk as a lord. It was drink that put him to his grave, with a broken neck.

  I remember the morning I looked in on him. I’d never seen him with anything but a black face. Even his wife begged Jimmy Miller not to clean him up for his coffin. ‘Let him go with a bit of soot on him,’ she said, ‘just the way he always was.’ And for some reason the sight of that white skull – not a spot of soot to be seen – gave me a bad turn. I just sat down on the edge of his grave and blubbed.

  I felt weird too when I came across Peggy Wilson, the day I was putting her old father to bed. She was a local beauty here fifty years ago, a real stunner she was. The young men would give anything just to walk her along the braes and hold her hand for half an hour by the kirkyard wall. I often used to see her hereabouts and she always gave me the time of day, not like most of the women round here. Who wants to go out with the gravedigger, after all? Even a young gravedigger, as I was then.

  She stopped speaking to me, though, after what happened one Sunday. I was taking a walk up at Balcaskie when I heard these screams coming from an open field. It was Peggy Wilson. There were hives in the field and she’d got over-curious. I dare say she fancied some honey. She didn’t know much about bees, though, that’s for sure. They were fizzing round her in a great big swarm, hundreds of them, and she was going frantic. There was nobody else about. I ran across the field like mad, but by the time I got to her they were all over her like she was jam, and right inside her clothes, underwear and all. There was only one thing to be done. She was wearing a light summer dress and I just gripped her and ripped every stitch off her back in one go. Then I ran with her bare buff to the cattle trough at the edge of the field and plunged her in. I had to shoulder my way through the beasts, they were that thirsty with the heat, but it got rid of the bees, all right. After that I carried her dripping wet into the farmhouse. You should have seen their faces. She was nearly unconscious by that time, she’d been so badly stung, and I’d collected a few stings myself. Lucky for her there happened to be a doctor there at the time, otherwise she’d have died for sure.

  Well, she avoided me after that, she was so embarrassed that I’d seen her all. Little did she know that I’d see her down to the bare bone. Less than a year later she was gored to death by the Balcaskie bull, running mad in the meadows – a right bad beast that was – and the young man that was with her was maimed for life trying to save her. Lord, you’d think she’d have stayed away from Balcaskie, but the young folk liked to do their courting up there, it being nice and private like, and Balcaskie had marked her card for her. She was put to an early grave and a bloody shame that was.

  I had to dig into that ground twenty years back. What a turn it gave me! Her hair used to light up her face like sunlight. God, she was lovely! And to look at her then! ‘To this favour she must come.’ That’s what Hamlet says, you see. Talking about Lord Lumsden too, it puts me in mind of another verse.

  Golden lads and girls all must

  As chimney-sweepers come to dust.

  That’s Shakespeare too, isn’t it? Anyway, these are some of the shocks you get.

  You wouldn’t think gravedigging had its lighter moments, but it does. One time I had to fill up a grave I’d just dug because it turned out the old man it was for wasn’t dead after all. They call him Cheat-the-Grave round here. He got the length of the mortuary then sat up and asked for a cup of tea. Since then he’s been on his death-bed times without number, till his family are fed up to the back teeth with him. To make matters worse he’s a Catholic, and the priest in Pittenweem who just has his push bike for transport, he’s pedalled that journey God knows how often to administer the last rites. Once he had a puncture and just turned back. He said it was a sign, and that by the time he got back to the chapel the old bugger would be well again. And that’s the way it turned out. I heard somebody say that if there’s one more false alarm he’s threatened to send the last rites by telegram.

  As for me, I’m like doubting Thomas. I’ll want to poke him in the ribs a few times, and maybe stick a pin in, before I lift up my spade to turn a foot of soil on his behalf again. He’s unkillable. Sometimes you just have to laugh.

  A real killer, though, and anything but a laugh, is one of the Flanders frosts in January or February, which is my busy time. I know some men that will use a drill to break up the first foot or two of earth. But not me. I don’t hold with machinery under any circumstances. Mattock and spade, these are my tools, even in a Flanders frost. And a pickaxe if I’m stuck. One winter I couldn’t get the leeks out of my garden even with the pickaxe. That season the frost went on for three months solid without a break, and folk were dying at the rate of knots. Digging graves that year was no joke, let me tell you.

  Trees can be a pest as well. The roots spread everywhere and I’ve sometimes had to put down the spade and get out the saw. I’ve seen skeletons looking as if an underground octopus had got hold of them, roots twisting right through eye-sockets and everything, it’s incredible.

  I must tell you, though, there’s one compensation and that’s my elderberry trees – these are the trees that line the west wall. I make my own wine from the berries and I can tell you I’ve had some great vintages from them. What else would you expect?
They’re fed with the best compost you can get, these trees, their toes are right in among the boxes, tapping all the goodness. I offered the last minister a glass of the stuff and he just couldn’t get enough of it. It made him fair tipsy. He wanted the recipe. Then, when I told him what it was and where it had come from, he was mortified. Literally. Now that’s something I can’t understand. All flesh is grass, I told him – he ought to have known that, it’s his business to know it, after all. The whole universe is eating and drinking itself, isn’t it? But he thought it was gruesome, my store of elderberry wine, made from mortality and drawn from the cellars of the dead. Château La Mort, I call it. Kinnear’s not squeamish about it, though. He’ll drink any amount.

  I’ve an elderberry tree in my own garden and I make wine from that as well. Not with human compost, though. I’ll tell you what I do. I dig in dead cats wherever I can find them. They’re the best. The farmer once gave me a whole sheep, but a sheep can’t compete with a cat. Cats improve the flavour of your fruit no end. I won’t take cats from McCreevie, though. I don’t approve of drownings. I’ve got nothing against cats. I’ve got a cat at home myself and we’re the best of friends. But after he’s dead he’ll do me one last service. Why not? Waste not, want not, that’s what I say.

  If anybody sees anything wrong in that, it just goes to show that what I was saying earlier is true. There’s too much squeamishness about death these days, and not enough poetry. Every year, before the fruit forms on these elders, you get the white flowers. On summer nights the fragrance can be really piercing and they’re like scented stars hanging just above your head. As if the dead had come out for the night in another form. That’s when I’m always put in mind of that other bit from Omar Khayyám.