Read A Book of Death and Fish Online
Authors: Ian Stephen
‘The ebb is good for us,’ they said. ‘The wind is well in the east now so we will have no need to beat against it so hard on the way home. It will not take us long. We will grab the chance before she veers back to the south.’
We were still making good way with two reefs in but the motion was not good, banging right on our beam. Then I could sense another shift but she wasn’t veering, she was backing further. Even a bit of north in her.
It was then our skipper put his hand over my own. He nodded back towards Holm Point and I could see dark low clouds. We all knew there would be a blast in these but we were not going to try to fight it. It was too late to turn back to harbour. We were well out the door now. I was to hold my course and they would drop the sail altogether.
Nothing was being rushed but the whole rig came down as gently as before. A blast of hail hit us with the wind: the edge of the front. You will often get that with the anvil clouds.
‘There will be more to come,
a bhalaich
,’ said himself. ‘But we can take it, with your help. We are in a real seaboat here. This is what they use in the Pentland Firth and they have worse conditions there than anything we might meet tonight.’
Even so, the smallest scrap of cloth we could show was too much for what was happening on the Minch. So we had just to run, on the bare pole, as they said: steering as before. There was still no hope of coming through the wind to fight back to Stornoway. They left me on the tiller.
I do not know if it was because my muscles were young and they needed me there or if they were keeping me occupied so I would not be too scared. If these old boys were scared, they did not show it. There was a lot less spoken but it was still all calm in the boat itself. And I still had to catch the eye of himself, with the rest of them slumped all around the boat, snatching some rest.
My arms were heavy but you found a way of wrapping yourself around the tiller so you were a part of it. The veins were up in my own arm, like the grain of the wood. The cold was something that bit at you. Hail is more fierce in the late summer because you are not prepared for it. The spray that just comes over the tops of the waves is very nearly a pure white. The old boys warned me not to bother looking back. There was no use in seeing these big green ones coming from a distance. I would hear and feel them soon enough. I knew what to do now.
We were surfing on but that old stick of a mast was our sail.
‘We’ve nothing to worry about,’ the old boys said. ‘We have the whole Minch to play with.’
So we were just responding with the tiller while we still had way, when you felt the surge. He said I was doing just fine.
You have to be slower or faster than the wave to keep steerage. If the speeds are equal you have no power in the helm. It was that night I learned that the same transit that takes you out away from home, will
take you back in again, if you can find it.
When the squalls were down a bit, I got the message to scan that skyline, coming towards us, up out of the dark.
‘Can I borrow your eyes, now?’ himself asked. We had run past our entrance. They reckoned we were well out abeam Loch Erisort. Better that way, further off the land. But I had it, The Sail and then the Gob. None of them could make out the marks but they trusted my younger eyes and sent the smallest, reefed-down sail up the traveller.
That took us in. There is a huge relief in recognising what you already know: a course well clear of the reefs, nothing fancy, and we were at the narrows.
Bhalaich Ghriomsiadair
had been sighted. Some figures were running along the skyline. Then, with the old boys awake and drawing on their last reserve, we rowed to the muddy shingle. The whole village was out to meet us.
My own sense of relief was over when I saw my mother to the fore but a hand went on my shoulder. Now they had trusted me and it was my turn to trust them. This was something they could do for me.
The man whose eye had taken us through everything, waded ashore first. If he was exhausted, he did not show it. He went directly to my mother and had a quiet word. I could not tell you now what was said. When I came ashore I had first to do as the youngest aboard always did – turn his back as the fry of herring that had been held back from sale was shared into piles. There were five shares, to include the one for the boat. My job was to call out the names, while my back was turned.
‘Who is having this one?’
‘Murchadh.’
‘This one?’
‘Iain Mhor.’
‘And this?’
‘Aonghas Dubh.’
‘And this one?’
‘That must be my own, if I’m getting one.’
‘Oh you’re getting one all right,’ Murchadh said.
‘Well, the last one must be for the boat,’ I said.
Then we did the same with the folding money. That was also counted into five equal shares.
Mine was a full share. But the fifth wasn’t given to the owner of the boat. No-one could say who owned it anyway and the only expenses were a bucket of tar, some peats to melt that and a brush or two. No, but the fifth share was given in full to my mother: the herring-girl who had seen how it was done in the Shetlands. My own mother remembered it all, for the boat of the old men.
Angus, from South Lochs, and my uncle Ruaraidh were the best of mates. That’s what they called each other – a mhate. The Gaelic version. I knew Angus first as my pal Kenny’s uncle. He became our skipper but he never talked about being in the war, with my uncle Ruaraidh.
There were whispers of what they’d been through. Something in the war, for sure, but neither of them ever talked about it. I think I asked if they’d been in the air force or the navy or in tanks like my own olman but I think they just said they were foot soldiers. Common foot soldiers.
When they got going, one story sparked off the next. I couldn’t say now which one of them told me this one. I heard it when I was a student, back home visiting. It was my first time out of town for long enough. Angus had his own stock on the croft at Griomsiadair now. Ruaraidh didn’t have much stomach for it, these days. They were pleased to see I could still get my hands dirty even if I wasn’t eating properly.
By God when you’d had nothing but one slice of bread with jam and the other with spam and you put the two bits together right away before the flies got to them and got it down you when you could, you wouldn’t turn your nose up at food after that. But that’s about the only detail you would get. Same with my father. It was as if the three of them had got together and made a pact. But their non-talking pact held up a lot longer than Adolf and Joe’s non-aggression agreement. I can only remember a couple of hints that maybe Ruaraidh was almost ready to tell it as it was.
‘A good job the Nazi-Soviet agreement fell apart. Do you think the Allies could have defeated the Nazis if Hitler hadn’t taken on that mad assault into Russia? Aye and what if there had been no attack on Pearl Harbour? Would the Yanks have been in on it then?’
They’d talk out these issues all right but it was late on in their lives, when these men knew their number was coming up sooner rather than later. It was only then they’d drop their guard. You’d get a memory, from either of them, sharp and tight enough to steal the wind out of you.
Maybe some of the experience was in the choice of stories. There were funny ones all right but then you’d get something like the one I’m going to try to tell you. I couldn’t say which one of them told me this. They were like twins when they got going.
So you walked over the moor today, Peter? You didn’t take the short cut in by the loch? No? Aye, it was probably safer to hug the coast, in case the mist came down.
Well, you wouldn’t be the first student to take that route to Lochs. There were two students, one time. And they were out gathering birds’ eggs when they should have been studying. Out the Arnish moor, just the way you’ve come. One of them gets to an eyrie first and he’s in luck, he takes the egg. The other is mad because he saw the nest first, and he thought they should share it, there were collectors would pay good money for that. So there was a quarrel. And the one that took the egg smashed it right against the forehead of the other. It didn’t hurt him but he saw red and reached for a stone. His friend had turned round so he went at his head with the stone and that was that.
He got hold of what he could lay his hands on, some old bleached animal bones, lying there and used them to dig a crude, shallow grave.
No-one knew they’d gone out there together so the lad that did the deed, he made good his escape. He probably took a berth on a boat and one ship led to another and the years passed.
But after all that time he thought it was safe to return to Stornoway. Maybe he said they’d run away to sea together but then lost touch when they were put on different ships. Sure enough, everything was forgotten. Maybe they all thought the missing lad was making his fortune in the colonies. Or maybe he’d just turn up when his ship berthed in SY.
And the fellow who did that terrible deed, he was not long back, looking for work and visiting the relatives. Out here like yourself today, out from the town. Some things haven’t changed. They’d make sure and serve up the best
they had. And then they’d look to a story from the young man who’d run off to see a bit of the world. They’d want to hear about his travels.
Except that these people were as poor as you could get. You made use of what you could find. But there was usually fish anyway and maybe some meal. They’d have shown hospitality to their cousin some way. So the former student is sitting and eating and being back in the family. Usually you’d just eat with your fingers but they had a few simple spoons and knives made from staghorn and bone.
And this rough knife of bone slipped and made a small cut in the young man’s thumb. It started to bleed and it just didn’t stop. Now a rough blade can cut worse than a sharp one and that blood just kept on flowing. They wrapped it as best they could, in this and that, trying to stop it. But the blood came seeping through everything. That night, the cut became infected. By the morning, the hand was looking terrible.
They sent word and eventually the doctor rode out to them. But the infection had taken a hold. The doctor asked how it all happened. They told him about the bleeding. He asked to see the knife.
‘Where did you find this?’ the doctor asked.
They told the doctor they’d just come across a pile of old antlers and deer bones, when they were out at the sheep, out the Arnish moor. All just bleached clean. So one of the boys had just passed the time carving out the spoons and knives from what he found.
‘Well,’ said the doctor, ‘I’ll need to take these utensils back with me and any others you may have. We have to trace where an infection like that comes from.’
The returning traveller never recovered from that infection. When the results came back, the doctor came to see the family again. Most of the spoons and knives were made from the antlers and bones of a large red deer. But the knife that did the damage was whittled out of a human bone.
But if it was Angus who told that one, it was his sidekick who chipped in the next bit.
Remember I told you, you’d never stay a night out at Creag a’ Bhodaich. Even if you got caught out in the mist. Most folk said they’d hear the voice of an
old man with a story he had to tell to someone. Up until very recently there’d be sightings out that way, near where our road meets the main one. Other folk said it wasn’t an old man at all. One fellow described a young man wearing something like a long woollen covering, not from our times.
Well, they found something when they were peat-cutting. They had to call in the museums people. They thought it was a preserved body from Neolithic times. But it wasn’t that old. It was the remains of a lad in his mid-teens. His woven long socks and long plaid thing were pretty much intact. He’d been killed by a crushing blow to the back of the head.
See the appetite we’ve got for stories like that, on Lewis. We’re insatiable. Once one cove or
cailleach
gets started, it prompts another and it could go on all night. Sometimes does. Same with songs. Only they’re worse. We like them a few shades below the
mì-chàilear
, when it comes to grief. And people will be cheery as you like, in between the songs or yarns. Smiling away and teasing each other. The very dab, as we used to say. You don’t hear that now and I’ve no idea where the phrase comes from. But you can bet someone will say, ‘O shut up.’ Which of course means, ‘Please continue.’
Now, I ask you, do you find that one plausible? I wouldn’t like to make a religion out of being sceptical – isn’t that what that Krishnamurti guy did? But I’m not going to buy that yarn. Doesn’t matter. You still want to hear them told.
The brass buttons on the dripping sailor’s jacket. Only it turns out he was lost some weeks before he was sighted. He says something which helps to find his body on the sand. You’ll meet him all the way from Sandwood Bay to the Ross of Mull. And there will be an Irish connection – either where his ship sank, or the origins of the mate who became the ghost.
Then there’s the fine boots which you know will be stolen from the drowned seaman, whether you’re in Uist or Shetland. You also know that they will be reclaimed by their dead owner.
All these meetings. The memories among patent-mops, plastic folders. I met the skipper at the goodie counter. All roads meet here in December. If you don’t see someone out at Marybank Garage, waiting for a tyre or exhaust, you’ll see them in the Woolies. I was looking along the presentation boxes for Terry’s Spartan. The olaid had never gone for soft-centres.
This was F W Woolworth, not long before the sign changed to Woolworth and the cheques had to be made out to Woolworth PLC. The skipper was Angus from Garyvard. Kenny’s uncle. It might be enough to be all Jock Tamson’s bairns in the rest of Scotland but in the Outer Hebrides, we need to know the details of the relationships.
The round face was even more round. A trace of white stubble coming through the red. The thick glasses. No Sellotape. The ones he had to hand on the boat were held together with the stuff. These must be his best wear. I’d first met this man, amongst others, in a fishing boat chartered for a sea angling competition. Then again when he bought my olman’s Morris Traveller. He put the brush over it with Charlie Morrison’s Paint – yacht enamel – wooden bits and all and it did him a couple of years. But that was as far as my track went. I didn’t know he was Kenny F’s uncle, till that first time out in the sea angling boat.
‘Do you still go fishing?’ It was his question, direct, no smalltalk.
It was like we were in the movies. Marbled vinyl of the floor going wavy. Here we go. We’re away. A bit like LSD. But that’s how it was. The shoppers passing us by like other vessels in transit. I was afloat.
Kenny F and me took turns being anchor-man and mate. A bristling rivalry between us. Usually, it was Kenny who was up the pecking
order. He was ahead of me in seamanship. A guy who knew what he wanted to do. But we’d work as a team to start the Lister. One on the handle, the other ready to pull over the lever on the first cylinder when she was turning over fast enough. Then the second two got recompressed when she was chuntering. Since then, I’ve never fully trusted an electric start.
Kenny’s uncle Angus gave us the marks once. Then he let us argue between ourselves until we remembered them and found anchorage uptide from the pinnacle. Quite a knack in judging the slack so you’d hold but not drift too far down. I learned not to coil that warp, on the way out, but to flake it, end for end, loose so it would run.
All around The Carranoch it’s thirty fathoms and then it climbs. Twenty, then eighteen and you’re right on it. Abeam the tits up on the hill over Loch Erisort, the mark open on the island – Tavay. We couldn’t wait to get the lines down.
A real Christmas tree rig, Angus called Kenny’s set of lures. I blame all these angling magazines.
But there was something to be said for hedging your bet between the bigger hook on the bottom and a smaller one on a snood. You might get something interesting half a fathom up. Maybe because the three of us fished a different set of terminal tackle, the box would fill with colours. Twelve species was nothing out of the ordinary and sometime we’d be struggling for names, between our town English and the skipper’s Gaelic. Was a red bream the same as a Norwegian haddock? He would often start to sing but composing in English, for our benefit.
‘If you catch a Balallan Wrasse,
You can stick it up your ass…’
Cuckoo wrasse had the tropical colours, ballan wrasse, often larger fish, had a soft shift of shading from kelp red to a green I haven’t seen anywhere else. The ling coming up, mottled like pike but a valued fish in our parts. All sure signs you were over the hard ground. Every village in North Lochs would have its own set of marks for the reef. Balallan was further up Loch Erisort, almost inland. Not taken too seriously by guys like our skipper from further down the loch.
All gasping colours, darkening on wrinkled skins as the day went on. The light always seeming to be refracted so it came from the clouds as rays from a protractor. Spreading to link us, over The Carranoch, spreading further west to Eilean Calum Chille – St Columba’s Isle. If that Irishman visited half the islands that bear his name, he’d have got around as much as Bonny Prince Charlie. The Prince’s cairn was another of our marks, muddy ground for thornback ray, in his case.
‘Did you ever see such a fluke as –
A skate on a haddock hook?’
It was only a matter of time before Angus’s big rod would go right on over, as far as the water and we’d think he had the bottom and was winding us up. But no, nine times out of ten, a grey slashing conger would come up on his single Scandinavian hook. Mustad. Best forged Swedish steel.
But it was one of Kenny’s congers that nearly caused a mutiny.
‘If that bloody thing is coming into this boat, I’m leaving it.’ His uncle’s judgement. And I played along. Kenny was getting worked up.
‘Come on, I don’t have a wire trace on. Just the thick mono. It’s getting frayed. Don’t piss about, gaff that eel before we lose it.’
I was guided by Angus. We lifted several of the bottom boards before taking up the gaff. Put them aside in order. As I swung the big black thing in, Angus took his knife to the thick nylon snood so the whole thing fell into the place prepared for it. He chucked the boards back and sat on them. There was a drumming. But you couldn’t risk your fingers near that. He’d stun it, aiming at the spine near the vent, in a minute. That one would be in the salt by tonight. Feed half his own village unless we townies wanted it.
‘No, you’re welcome to it.’ Kenny was recovering. ‘You have to live at least three cattle grids out from town to eat salt eel.’
Even if none of it’s said, sometimes you know the other guy is reliving it with you. Memories meeting. Passing vessels exchanging courtesies. Angus was still in the aisle of the shop. The voice that came through to me at last, said how was his nephew, Kenny, doing?
Hadn’t he heard?
He wouldn’t be blooming well asking me if he’d heard.
The skipper’s language was more subdued these days. I’d heard he was on the tack. Religion usually went along with that. He looked well on it.
I told him Kenny F had blown it.
‘Blown what?’
‘Blown a good job at the Arnish yard.’
The yard out over the harbour Approaches, near the old quarantine buoy. I’d jotted the figures down for the surveyors who prepared the ground. That was one summer job. Next season I’d looked at the smoke from the town side, as they burned the farm cottage and bulldozed the hill behind it. Kept a lot of young guys at home. Brought a few travellers back. Jackets and collars in steel for North Sea platforms. Cash to be spent in the shops down town. Accommodation for welding inspectors.
To be weighed against the loss of the more adventurous townie’s Sunday stroll. The pollution of one shore which was thick with horse-mussels. The clappy-doos you see at the Barras in Glasgow. Once, when it was blowing too much of a hooly even for us to go out past the light, the skipper had taken us into Glumaig Bay at Low Water to fill a fishbox with them. First you saw nothing. Then you became sensitive to the barnacled black stone that wasn’t a stone. You needed a decent knife. Meaty shellfish, asking for a garlic sauce.
Angus told me my mate hadn’t been out to Garyvard for a long time. I told him I hadn’t seen him, myself. I’d been at Uni, back and fore. And on shiftwork, when I was working at home.
‘Is he at the welding? He was at Nigg for a while.’
No, Kenny hadn’t been a welder. A scaffolder and, the word was, a bloody good one. He had it all planned. A definite share, each week into the boat account. Sure as Pay As You Earn. He had the keel laid in a yard at Buckie. Small enough to work single-handed, if he had to, big enough to put out in a bit of sea.
‘So what’s gone wrong?’
The twelve-hour shifts. You could see it coming. First it was only one on the way home, when you knocked off. There were a few places you could tap at the door, whatever the finishing time.
‘Aye, I used to know a few of these knocks.’
Then it was after the night shifts, before you got to your bed. Only a matter of time before there was something in the back pocket or in the tea flask.
Angus only had to give the smallest nod. ‘So it came to a head?
‘In style. They thought he’d gone crazy one night. Nobody realised what he was up to, carrying all these poles outside the main shed. Then someone misses him for a tricky bit where they were welding. Goes out to find this amazing bit of scaffolding, pretty well the full height of the shed. And there’s Kenny, swaying, with a big can of that indelible paint, making this huge mark.
‘When you stood back, it was a big white cross. First they think it’s a big Scottish nationalist sign and a lot of guys start cheering till it looks like a war’s going to break out. Then somebody think’s he’s got religion in a big way. Could be that kind of cross.’
But the skipper knew what it was the way I’d known what Kenny was up to. Our northward mark for the Carranoch Reef was gone, since the old Coastguard aerial at Holm had been shifted. Then the Arnish sheds obscured another mark. So Kenny had painted a white cross you could see from five miles out at sea. Just what we needed to line up on the war memorial. Only of course some tidy so and so painted over it before we had a chance to test it out properly. And Kenny was down the road. I hadn’t seen him for a while.
‘He’ll get his boat another way if he gets off the sauce,’ Angus said.
And I could see now how the red in our skipper’s face was somehow different, clearer, not broken by small veins. I remembered someone saying he was an Elder, these days. But he was saying something else. I hadn’t answered his question, did I still go fishing?
No, not that way, not to sea, not for a while. But I went to fresh water. The longer the hike over the moor the better. Maybe that was like enjoying the clearing up more than the party. But I was a bit that way as well, believe it or not. And himself?
‘Eels. No, not congers. Freshwater. Like reptiles.’ He had a small business, laying traps and fyke-nets in the lochs near home. Then he had a
stainless-steel smoker set-up. Got oak chips from the boatyard at Goat Island. They fetched a better price than smoked salmon, these days, with all that farmed stuff about.
He’d seen them often enough, Hamburg or Rotterdam, out on the stalls. About the only thing that stayed in his mind from the blur of all these shore visits. He’d never eat one himself.
‘If you ever taste one,’ he said, ‘it might be one of mine. You’ll need to report back to me, what they’re like.’