Sacrament (44 page)

'What did Steep love?'

'Me,' she said, with a sly smile. 'At least.. .' the smile went '... I imagined he did, and that was enough. It is
sometimes. Women understand that; men don't. Men need things certain. All certain and fixed. Lists and maps
and history. All so that they know where they are, where they belong. Women are different. We need less. I
could have been quite happy to have children with Steep. Watch them grow, and if they died, have more. But
they always perished, almost as soon as they were born. He'd take them away, to save me the pain of seeing
them, which showed he felt something for me, didn't it?'

'I suppose so.'

'I named them all, even though they only lived for a few minutes-'

'And you remember all the names?'

'Oh yes,' she said, turning her face from him to hide her feelings, 'every one.

By now The Claymore was ready for departure. The mooring ropes were cast off, the engines took on a livelier
rhythm, and the last stage of the voyage was underway. Only when they were some distance from the island did
Rosa finally look around at Will, who was sitting down, lighting up a cigarette, to say: 'I want you to understand
something about Jacob. He wasn't barbaric all his life. At the beginning, yes, he was a fiend, he really was. But
what did he have for inspiration? You ask most men what it is that makes them men and it won't be a very
pretty list. But I mellowed him over the years-'

'He drove entire species out of existence, Rosa-'

'They were only animals. What did it matter? He had such fine thoughts in his head; such godly thoughts.
Anyway, it's there in the Bible. We've got dominion over the birds of the air

-and the beasts of the field. Yeah, I know. So he had all these fine thoughts.'

'And he loved to give me pleasure. He had his troubled times, of course, but there was always room for music
and dancing. And the circus. I loved the circus. But he lost his sense of humour, after a time. He lost his
courtesies. And then he began to lose me. We were still travelling together, and there'd be times when things
were almost like the old days, but the feelings between us were slipping away. In fact the night we met you we
were planning to go our separate ways. That's why he went looking for company. And found you. If he hadn't
done that we wouldn't be where we are now, any of us. It's all connected in the end, isn't it? You think it's not,
but it is.'

She returned her gaze to the water.

'I'd better go and find Frannie,' Will said, 'we'll be arriving soon.'

Rosa didn't reply. Leaving her at the railing, Will wandered the length of the deck, and found Frannie sitting on
the starboard side, sipping a cup of coffee and smoking a cigarette.

'I didn't know you smoked.'

'I don't,' she said. 'But I needed it. Want some coffee? The wind's chilly.' He took the plastic cup and drank. 'I
tried to buy a map,' she said, 'but the ship kiosk's closed.'

'We'll get one on the island,' Will said. 'Speaking of which...' He got to his feet, and went to the railing. Their
destination was in view. A line of land as unpromising as Coll, the waves breaking against its rocky shores.
Frannie rose to stand beside him and together they watched as the island approached, The Claymore's engines
slowing so that the vessel might be safely navigated through the shallow waters.

'It doesn't look very hospitable, does it?' Frannie remarked.

It was certainly spartan at this distance, the sea surging around dark spits of rock which rose to bleak headlands.
But then the wind veered and carried the scent of flowers off the land, their honey fragrance mingled with the sharp scents of salt and kelp, and Frannie murmured: 'Oh Lord...' in appreciation.

The Claymore's approach had become a tentative crawl now, as the vessel made its cautious way to the jetty.
And as it did so the charms of the island steadily became more apparent. The waters through which the vessel
ploughed were no longer dark and deep, but as turquoise as any Caribbean bay, and swooned upon beaches of
silver-white sand. There were a few cattle at the tides' edge, apparently grazing on seaweed, but the beaches
were otherwise deserted. So too were the grassy dunes which rose from them, rolling away to meet the lush
meadows of the island's interior. This was where the scent of vetch and sea-thrift and crimson clover originated:
expanses of fertile pasture dotted here and there with modest houses, whitewashed and brightly roofed.

'I take it all back,' Frannie said. 'It's beautiful.'

The village of Scarinish, which was little more than a couple of rows of houses, was now in view. There was
more activity on its pier than there'd been at Coll: fully twenty people waiting for The Claymore to dock, along
with a lorry loaded with goods and a tractor with a cattle-pen in tow.

'I should probably go and fetch Rosa,' Will said.

'Give me the car-keys,' Frannie said. 'I'll meet you downstairs.'

Will headed back to the bow, where he found Rosa at the railing still, studying the scene ahead.

'Do you recognize anything?' he asked her.

'Not with my eyes,' she said. 'But ... I know this place.'

There was a gentle bump and creak as The Claymore nudged the pier, then the sound of welcoming shouts from
both land and ship.

'Time to go,' Will said, and escorted Rosa down into the hold, where Frannie was already in the car. Will got
into the passenger seat beside her, and Rosa slipped into the back. There was an uncomfortable silence while
they waited for the ferry's door to be opened. They didn't have to wait long. After a couple of minutes, sunlight
flooded the hold and one of the crew played at traffic control, signalling the half dozen vehicles alighting here
out one by one. There was a second, longer delay on the pier itself, while the laden lorry moved out of the way
of the exiting cars, this manoeuvre performed with great hullabaloo, but no sense of urgency. Finally, the
congestion was cleared, and Frannie drove them down the pier into the village itself. It was no larger than it had
appeared from the seaward side: just a few rows of small but well-kept houses with even smaller, well-kept
walled gardens, all facing the water, and a scattering of older buildings, some in despair, several in ruin. There
were also a few shops, amongst them a post office, and a small supermarket, its windows bannered with news of
this week's bargains, their silent advertisements still too loud for the hush of the place.

'Do you want to go and get us a map?' Frannie suggested to Will, bringing the car to a halt outside the
supermarket. 'And maybe some chocolate?' she called after him, 'and something to drink?'

He emerged a couple of minutes later with two bags of purchases, 'for the road', as he put it: biscuits, chocolate,
bread, cheese, two large bottles of water and a small bottle of whisky.

'What about the map?' Frannie said, as he loaded the bags into the back seat beside Rosa.

'Voila,' he said, pulling a small folded map from his pocket, and along with it a twelvepage tourists' guide to the
island, written by the local schoolmaster and crudely illustrated by the schoolmaster's wife. He passed the
booklet back over his shoulder to Rosa, telling her to flip through it for any names or places that rang a bell. The
map he opened on his lap. There wasn't much to study. The island was twelve miles long and at its broadest
three miles wide. It had a trio of hills: Beinn Hough, Beinn Bheag Bhailemhuilinn and Ben Hynish, the summit
of the latter the highest point on the island. It had several small lochs, and a handful of villages (described as
townships on the map) around its coast. What few roads the island boasted simply joined these townships -the
largest of which consisted of nine houses - by the most direct route, which, given the flatness of the terrain, was
usually something approaching a straight line.

'Where the hell do we start?' Will wondered aloud. 'I can't even pronounce half these names.'

There was a glorious poetry in the words, however: Balephuil and Balephetrish, BaileMheadhonach and
Cornaigmore; Vaul and Gott and Kenavara. And they lost little of their power in translation: Balephuil was the
Town of the Marsh, Heylipoll, the Holy Town, Bail-Udhaig, the Town of Wolf Bay.

'If nobody's got any better ideas,' Will said, 'I suggest we start here.' He pointed to Baile-Mheadhonach.

'Any particular reason?' Frannie wanted to know.

'Well, it's almost in the middle of the island, for one thing-' In fact that was its unglamorous translation: Middle
Town. 'And it's got its own cemetery, look.' There was a cross to the south of the village, and beside it the words
Cnoc a' Chlaidh, translated as Christian burial ground. 'If Simeon was buried here, we may as well start out by
looking for his grave.' He glanced over his shoulder at Rosa. She'd put down the booklet, and was staring out of
the window, the fixedness of her expression such that Will looked away immediately so as not to disturb her
meditations. 'Let's just go,' he said to Frannie. 'We can follow the coast road west as far as Crossapol. Then we
make a right inland.'

Frannie eased the car out into what would have been the flow of traffic if there'd been any traffic, and within
perhaps a minute they had passed

the outskirts of Scarinish, and were on the open road; a road so straight and empty she could have driven
blindfolded and more than likely brought them to Crossapol.
V

There were amongst the Western isles places of great historical and mythological significance; where battles
had been fought and princes hid, and stories made that haunted listeners still. Tiree was not amongst them. The
island had not passed an entirely uneventful life; but it had been at best a footnote to events that flowered in
their full splendour in other places.

There was no more obvious example of this than the exploits of St Columba, who had in his time carried the
Gospel throughout the Hebrides, founding seats of devotion and learning on a number of islands. Tiree was not
thus blessed, however. The good man had lingered on the island only long enough to curse a rock in Gott Bay
for the sin of letting his boat's mooring rope slip. It would be henceforth barren, he declared. The rock was
dubbed Mallachdaig, or Little Cursed One, and no seaweed had grown on it since. Columba's associate St
Brendan had been in a more benign mood during his fleeting visit, and had blessed a hill, but if the blessing had
conferred some inspirational power on the place nobody had noticed: there had been no revelations or
spontaneous healings on the spot. The third of these visiting mystics, St Kenneth, had caused a chapel to be
built in the dunes near the township of Kilkenneth, which had been so named in the hope of persuading him to
linger. The ruse had failed. Kenneth had gone on to greater things, and the dunes more persuaded by wind than
metaphysics - had subsequently buried the chapel.

There were a handful of stories through which St Columba and his gang did not wander, all of which remained
part of the anecdotal landscape, but most of them were dispiritingly domestic in scale. A well on the side of
Beinn Hough, for instance, called Tobar nan naoi beo, the Well of the Nine Living, because it had miraculously
supplied a widow and her eight homeless children with a lifetime's supply of shellfish. A pool close to the shore
at Vaul where the ghost of a girl who had drowned in its depths could be seen on moonless nights, singing a
lonely lullaby to lure living souls into the water with her. In short, nothing out of the ordinary; islands half the
size of Tiree boasted legends far more ambitious.

But there was a numinosity here none of the rest of the isles possessed, and at its heart a phenomenon which
would have turned St Columba from a gentle meditative into a wild-eyed prophet had he witnessed it. In fact, this wonderment had not yet come to pass when the saint had hopscotched through the islands, but even if it had he would most likely have been denied sight of it, for those few islanders who had glimpsed the miracle (and presently living they
numbered eight) never mentioned the subject, not even to those they loved. This was the great secret of their
lives, a thing unseen, yet more certain than the sun, and they were not about to dilute its enchantment by
speaking of it. In fact, many of them limited their own contemplation of what they'd sensed, for fear of
exhausting its power to enrapture them. Some, it was true, returned to the place where they'd been touched in
the hope of a second revelation, and though none of them saw anything on their return visits, many were
granted a certainty that kept them content for the rest of their lives: they left the place with the conviction that
what they had failed to see had seen them. They were no longer frail mortals, who would live their lives and
pass away. The power on the hill at Kenavara had witnessed them, and in that witnessing had drawn them into
an immortal dance.

For it lived in the island's very being, this power; it moved in sand and pasture and sea and wind, and the souls
it saw became part of these eternals, imperishable. Once witnessed, what did a man or woman have to fear?
Nothing, except perhaps the discomforts that attended death. Once their corporeal selves were shed, however,
they moved where the power moved, and witnessed as it witnessed, glory on glory. When on summer nights the
Borealis drooped its colour on the stratosphere, they would be there. When the whales came to breach in
exaltation, they would rise, too. They would be with the kittiwakes and the hares and with every star that
trembled on Loch an Eilein. It was in all things, this power. In the sandy pastures adjoining the dunes (or the
machair as it was called in Gaelic); and in the richer, damper fields of the island's midst, where the grass was
lush and the cattle grazed themselves creamy.

It did not much concern itself with the griefs and travails of those men and women who never saw it, but it kept
a tally of their comings and goings. It knew who was buried in the churchyards at Kirkapol and Vaul; it knew
how many babies were born each year. It even watched the visitors, in a casual fashion, not because they were
as interesting as whales or kittiwakes, they weren't, but because there might be amongst them some soul who
would do it harm. This was not beyond the bounds of possibility. It had been witnessing long enough to have
seen stars disappear from the heavens. It was not more permanent than they.