by Neil M. Gunn
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
The Philosopher withdrew his eyes from that far distant scene to the world about him, and in his sight were the bushes, the tumbling curves of the close-cropped grass, glittering specks of mica in a grey boulder, the yellow broom and the wild roses below him, and, lifting to the blue skies, the wide uninhabited spaces of the air.
The shepherd had probably seen him for he was coming slowly along the hillside. They would have a talk together in the freedom of the day and that would be pleasant. The Philosopher’s eyes fell on his home and steadied thereunder the compulsion of the past now upon him like a dream.
And those days leading up to and immediately following the burial of his father had now a dreamlike quality about them, as if lifted out of an older age, wherein folk moved under the hand of destiny.
His father’s body was laid out and coffined in ‘the room’, where he himself had slept. There was a small place, a closet, between the two main rooms, which his mother now cleaned up for a shake-down bed. But he did not sleep there, and when he withdrew it was to a bed of shavings in the shop.
In accordance with custom, folk came and kept watch through the night. William Bulbreac was like one who had a special mission laid upon him, and prayed fervently, and read in the Bible, and read aloud the metrical version of one of the Psalms of David before leading in its singing. There was food and drink for all, and to this his mother attended with hospitality, rising through the sadness and the sorrow, the keening memories of the dead, of a just and a kind and an upright man, remembered now by the poor widow whom he had helped, rising through the hidden good deeds to offer food and drink to those who watched with her through the dark hours of death, to press food and drink upon them.
And because of the way in which death had come, there was an added fervour in devotion, a deeper feeling amongst them, a warmth of sorrow, an apprehension of God’s grace with the terror of God’s grace around it, like a strong hand around a fragile cup, a hand that had only to close in imperceptible motion for the cup to be shattered.
Outside this community of worship what was there in the world, the world of strife and vainglory and fleeting material things? Outside was the unreality that passed like a dream, like a coloured bubble that floated and burst upon the thin air, like a tale that was told and died in the mind. And there – there – stalking through that outside world, seeking whom he may devour, subtil as the serpent, crashing like a dark beast through forests, the Devil, the destroyer, the blasphemer.
They greeted Tom quietly, not looking at his face, on a gentle even tone, expressing their sorrow, one by one, at the first meeting. When he tried to avoid them, they made no effort to meet him. They came and they went, and he knew that they thought him cold and unrelenting, stone-faced and hard-hearted.
The burial service was held at the house in the usual way. Some of the old friends of the dead, like Sandy and Norman, gathered in the room around the coffin, while the bulk of the mourners, all men, crowded around the door outside, their hats in their hands as the minister’s great voice rose so that God would hear and look down upon them and into their hearts.
In the kitchen, with the widow of the dead man, were gathered a few women of her own age, her nearest friends, to keep her company and sustain her in this last trial. They were apart from the men, in their own world of women and women’s ways and thoughts.
Tom bore up, expressionless, under the long prayer and under the minister’s spoken thoughts that came at him like spears. For he was not spared. Not that the minister spoke at him directly. In the house of death the minister spoke to God, interceding for His servant, who had borne his trial with a patience and long suffering, a belief in God’s goodness and in His inscrutable wisdom, that was as an example set before them, even unto the last moment of his mortal life when, his powers failing and the darkening upon him, he yet strove to counter the ways of evil and the tongue of blasphemy. For the tongue was deceitful above all things and most desperately wicked. Yet behind all was the saving power of God’s grace, the promise of redemption, even for the most abandoned and depraved, through the suffering of the Lord Jesus Christ.
When the body was buried, Norman and Sandy and one or two others came and shook hands with Tom. But not many came, for Tom did not want them and they sensed this.
By the time he had come back into the middle of the village he was alone. Most of the blinds were still drawn, and he walked past the silent houses like one in a nightmare, visible to the unseen, so that he had difficulty in keeping his feet to an even pace on the deserted way.
When he came by the shop and house where dark-clad figures had so recently gathered and slowly moved away in the black river of death, silence lay on roof and ground. The sky was overcast and from the stillness of the autumn day descended a sadness that pressed against the eyeballs. He stopped at his shop door and looked about him. No life moved. Entering, he locked the door quietly and stood for a moment before the window. But the blinded light hurt as though his eyeballs had got distended. The sadness was of uncountable Sabbaths, and the silence was the silence of the head that is bowed after the last whisper.
Turning from the window, he went and sat behind a kitchen dresser not yet finished, and leaned his back and head against the wall. His body slumped in a weak quivering and a faint moan passed his lips. He sank into a slumberous state, his mouth fallen open, his breathing heavy. Down in the depths, his mind slowly thinned to a clarity so fine that all was seen.
The outcast moving apart from his own people, wandering in desolate ways through the horror of silence. The communal warmth in life and death. Cast out, bitterness in his soul, not giving in, cast out. And this he comprehended not in thought but in visual picture, seeing faces and eyes and the massed movement of bodies going away, seeing them with his own eyes – and seeing himself going from them, cut adrift like a criminal, white-faced upon his own empty road.
Voices coming up from the house. The women going home.
‘… Poor woman. She’s had a hard struggle.’
‘Ay, she was not helped much. There was a hard heart in him and a flinty face. I don’t know how he could have done it.’
‘What could you expect – thinking as he thinks? The like of it has never been known in this place.’
‘He was bold. I don’t know how he could have done it. A judgement will come on him …’
They spoke mournfully, awe in their voices, but with a core of hardness, of anger.
They had described his face exactly as he felt it: gone thin and hard, the air whitening it. He knew the women well – decent kindly mothers of grown-up families.
His face creased of itself in a furtive humour. Then he groaned. God, he was tired.
Soft footsteps, heavy, padding round the shop. The knob rattled. ‘Are you in, Tom?’ His mother’s hushed voice.
He did not answer. No women ever accompanied a funeral to the cemetery. She would be wondering where he had gone, wondering and fearing.
When he thought she would be back in the house he got to his feet, dusted his Sunday clothes, cautiously unlocked the door. Then he walked down to the house.
She was not in the kitchen, and through the silence he lifted his voice: ‘Are you there?’ The table was spread for guests. The iron soup pot steamed above the fire. To invite relatives, close friends, the old men who had to go a long way, to partake of a meal after the funeral was the honourable custom. He should have spoken to the men and taken them home. Sandy had a long distance to walk, nearly three miles, and half of it was a steep hill. Round the meal elements of the community gathered, and where death had been, life started again. ‘Are you there?’ he shouted. Going to the door, he met her coming in, breathless as if she had been running. She gazed at him. ‘Oh,’ she said. ‘Where were you?’
‘Nowhere,’ he answered, turning back into the kitchen.
She followed him and they both stood at a loss.
‘You have brought – no-one?’ she asked, turning
her eyes on him.
‘No,’ he answered, breaking out of his stance.
Her eyes wandered over the soup plates in a dumb stupid way. She could not realise the emptiness that had come upon the house, its desertion.
They were forsaken.
‘Why – didn’t you?’
‘I didn’t get much chance,’ he replied.
It was no excuse, not even a lie; the bitterness of truth was in it. Yet not the whole truth, for, had they been asked, in duty they would have come. But how could he have asked? Couldn’t she see?
But she couldn’t see anything. Her small eyes were round and stared as if they were blind. She leaned with her left hand on the table, overcome it seemed by the sudden weight of her body. Her head bowed and she drew in a shuddering breath. Standing there she wept in harsh whining sounds.
As he was going out the door, she called to him: ‘Tom, don’t leave me.’
He muttered that he would be back in a minute.
When he came back, she was composed and spoke in a quiet voice. ‘Sit in to your food.’
She pretended to eat to keep him company. He forced the food down his throat. They never spoke. At night his bed was ready in the room where his father’s body had been laid out.
The humiliation of that night, the moments of ugly abject fear, when the mind became as the mind of a child, acquired knowledge of no avail, futile and swept away. At twenty-three youth can be more positive than age, but there is a sensitiveness, a capacity for pain and horror, for sheer formless apprehension, that age forgets.
Next day was Sunday, for the father had died on the Wednesday and been buried on Saturday.
Tom was not going to church. When his mother realised it, she sat down. So this, too, had come upon her.
‘I don’t want to go to church – to be preached at,’ he said in a cold voice.
She did not speak. But presently she asked in a quiet pleading way, ‘Will you not go, Tom?’
‘No, I’m not going,’ he answered and walked out.
He saw her set off alone.
The sermon preached that Sunday was of extraordinary power. It had a whelming effect on the people. Even the young men who had heard Tom’s arguments were overborne and glad to be able to withdraw in silence into the old ways, secretly recognising the luck by which they had not been found out. Clearly William Bulbreac had reported the matter of his argument with Tom, and the minister, awakened to the profound need of denunciation, had prepared himself for battle and no mercy. Even years afterwards, when a man might speak of that sermon in composure, he found it difficult to remember with any precision what had been said. But the incommunicable effect was remembered powerfully, as of a spear of light stirring the dark ancient sinful roots of being. Each man in the congregation, each woman, knew in the secrecy of the heart how he and she had sinned. And God knew all. God had known the sins of men mentioned in the Old Testament. That was not hidden. That was made clear. At each moment man was on the brink of eternity. At each moment, at this moment now, he could draw back – as the men of old, who had sinned, had drawn back, and been forgiven, and had even found favour in the sight of God, whose mercy was infinite. At this moment, now. But for the one who did not draw back, stiff-necked in his pride, treacherous as the serpent in his blasphemy, for that one – Satan waited in the abyss.
As the preacher warmed, he did not merely argue. He spoke in parables and drew pictures, pictures of gargantuan myth that came from inside them and lived upon the air.
They saw the coils of the serpent.
In all ages, men of all creeds had seen the serpent, had used the serpent as a sign. Why?
The devil had only needed to speak once through the mouth of the serpent. Never again. Once was enough, because from that speaking and man’s disobedience, sin had come upon us and death. The coils of the serpent – the coils of sin – the glistening constricting coils of living death.
To fulfil his further purpose, the Devil had to speak only through the mouths of men. Many say they have seen the Devil. Many have described him, in all tongues, in great poems, in terrible tragedies. Great and learned men, Christian and heathen alike. But you may not have seen him, and I may not have seen him, but – we have heard him speak. We have heard him speak – and we have seen what has befallen.
Mounting, step by step, the preacher came at last to his climax of denunciation, each terrible strophe beginning, ‘Woe unto ye’ … And because of one metaphor which he used, it was to the secret mind thinking of Tom – and which mind was not, even while also thinking of himself? – as if the serpent had uncoiled itself inside Tom and had sunk its invisible jaws in his throat.
When his mother returned from the sermon Tom saw that she was defeated at last, and broken. The small lids of her eyes were red. She had been weeping in church. They would all have heard her weeping. The smothered sound of her weeping amid the awful silence of the congregation.
He had attended to the soup pot – yesterday’s plethora of broth heated up – but his mother sat down, she was so weary.
Tom dished two plates of broth.
‘Won’t you take something?’ he asked.
‘No,’ she answered, gazing at the fire. She sighed, and suddenly began weeping. ‘I did my best,’ she cried, to no-one. ‘I could do no more.’ She wept, and with the quivering breaths her stout body twisted and shook. The thin sounds she made were sounds of pure anguish.
Tom deliberately ate through his soup, got up, and went out.
When he came back in the evening, she was sitting where he had left her. In the deep gloom of the kitchen, she had the forsaken look of the dead. But she stirred when she heard him, and got up, and went silently about her household tasks.
That night he heard her from his bed, to which he had retired early, making strange broken speaking sounds. By a queer intuition he knew she would not take it upon herself to speak to God. And the Bible was not for her. She was speaking to the invisible No-one.
Next day he started on the scythe. She came and worked behind him, gathering and binding the sheaves. The weather was still dull and looked like breaking, but no rain fell.
He worked into the darkness, stooking the sheaves, while she went home to prepare supper. None called that day. Towards noon on the following day it started to rain. When he had set up the sheaves she had bound, he hung his scythe in the barn and presently went in for food. When he had eaten, she broke the silence, asking, ‘Have you been to the shop?’
As he opened the shop door a draught blew in his face from the window, which had been smashed with stones. The stones had also damaged some small things displayed on the shelf before the window. He picked up the stones, looked at them, stared through the vacant window with incredulity and a slow gathering and narrowing of understanding and hate.
While he was nailing boards across the window outside, the two women, whose voices he had overheard on Saturday, came down past him. He kept his back to them and they did not speak.
After their visit his mother started sighing at odd moments in a vacant way. What mind she had was getting clouded over. This sighing sadness would become her mode of life henceforth. Mindless and sighing and sad. All at once she was aged, a dumb beast, the quickness and the bustle gone.
Before he went to bed, she said, ‘Alec is getting on.’
‘Alec? What Alec?’
‘Alec Wilson. They say he will live now.’
‘Live?’
‘Did you not know?’ she said sadly. ‘When he was going for the doctor, he ran into Peter Grant’s dog. The dog had to be destroyed. But Alec is getting on, it seems. His collarbone is broken.’
The news appeared old to her. She turned away from it.
But the news for Tom had an edge of infernal humour. For the first time in many days he smiled, sitting on his bed. Then a thought struck him and he went out and up to the shop. The bicycles were always wheeled into a corner which he had built for them, with wooden racks to hold the front wheels. There was
only the one bicycle. The other would have been badly damaged and cleared off the road. No-one had brought it back.
And Alec – he had not asked about him. He dare not go and ask. Alec’s parents would …
He let the thought die, with the infernal humour.
The wind was strong, with stinging raindrops. It was pitch dark. He turned his face to the hill path, but up there the wind was a mournful howl, ridden by hounds. Beyond the byre it staggered him, and he had to feel with his feet for the path. He thought of Janet, and before he knew it a yell of defiance at the hounds had ripped from him, a harsh tearing yell that emptied and silenced him. His body, like a thin husk, shuddered in the rain-spitting cold wind.
Shortly after daybreak the wind died and by the forenoon the sun was shining. The standing corn and the fallen stooks were bone dry from the high wind, and after an early midday meal they were setting out for the harvest field when a shout made them turn round. The town policeman was coming from the road towards the shop and as they looked he raised his right arm.
No policeman had been stationed in the village since the liquor licence was taken from it many years ago. At intervals, a policeman from the town met here a policeman from the village of Cardin, which lay inland beyond the Glen where two roads merged in the one road to the west. They could sometimes be seen standing by the roadside talking together, often for nearly an hour, before they parted and returned each his own way. Only once or twice in all Tom’s memories had the police had any official duties to perform in the Glen. Crime, as the word was understood in the cities, was unknown.
The uniform and the commanding arm sent a shiver over Tom’s body, and it was only when he heard his mother’s broken intake of breath that he got his legs to move. He went to meet the policeman, who, before opening his mouth, gave him a long and searching look.
‘Are you Tom Mathieson?’
‘Yes.’
‘Is that your bicycle lying by the end of the post office?’
‘Yes.’
‘Why haven’t you removed it?’
