Peter May - Entry Island

‘What’s that?’ I asked him.

‘It’s a practice that occurs in the Bible, Mr Mackenzie,’ he said. ‘Most commonly in connection with the division of land under Joshua. I refer you to Joshua, chapters 14 to 21. In this case I will have a bunch of sticks in my hand of varying length. You will each draw one, and he who draws the longest will get the first allocation of land. And so on, right down to the shortest, who will get the last.’

Michaél grunted loudly. ‘What’s the point of that?’

‘The point is, Mr O’Connor, that the first parcel of land will be the closest to the village. The last will be the furthest away, and the most inaccessible. So this is the fairest way to decide who gets what. It shall be God’s will.’

And so we drew lots. To my amazement I pulled out the longest stick. Michaél drew the shortest, and had a face like thunder darkening beneath his beard.

We all proceeded then to the starting point of the first parcel, which was to be mine. The minister handed me a short axe and told me to cut a notch with it in the nearest tree. ‘What for?’ I asked. But he just smiled and told me I’d see soon enough.

So I cut a notch in the closest tree, a tall evergreen pine. ‘What now?’

‘When we start singing,’ he said, ‘begin walking in a straight line. When we stop make a notch in the nearest tree, then turn at right angles to it and start to walk when the singing begins again. Another notch when we stop, another turn, and by the time we’ve sung three times you’ll have marked out your parcel.’

‘It should be approximately ten acres,’ the clerk from the British American Land Company said. ‘I’ll accompany you to register your land on the official map.’

Michaél laughed and said, ‘Well, if you folk would sing a bit slower, and I ran as fast as I could through the trees, then I could have a much bigger piece of land.’

Mr Macaulay smiled indulgently. ‘Aye, you could indeed. And you could also break your back trying to clear it of trees and make it arable. Bigger is not necessarily better, Mr O’Connor.’ He turned then to the assembled crowd and raised a hand and the singing began. To my astonishment, I recognised it immediately as the 23rd Psalm. I was going to pace out my land to the accompaniment of The Lord is My Shepherd!

The voices grew distant as I marched through the trees with the clerk right behind me. But it carried across the still of the morning, a strange haunting sound pursuing us into the forest. Until they reached the end of the final verse and I cut a notch in the nearest tree during the silence that followed, turning then to my right and waiting for it to start again.

After many stops and starts and a break for lunch, it was nearly dark by the time that Michaél paced out his tract of land. We were almost hoarse with the amount of singing we had done. Never, I was sure, had the 23rd Psalm been sung so often in the course of a single day. As we walked back to the village in the falling dusk Michaél said to me, ‘It’s too far to my bit of land. So I’ll just help you do yours first, and we’ll leave mine till later.’

And I was secretly pleased that I wasn’t going to have to face the task on my own.

Last night Michaél and I spent our first night in my new home.

We have been working all the daylight hours of every day for the last two weeks to clear an area of land big enough to build a log cabin. Hard, hand-blistering work with saws and axes loaned to us by folk from the village. Felling the trees was simple enough, once you got the hang of it. But moving them once they were down was another matter, and digging out the roots next to impossible. Someone promised to lend us an ox in the spring to help pull out the worst of them, but the priority has been to get a basic cabin up before winter arrives. Temperatures have been falling, and we’ve been working against nature’s clock. One of the older villagers told me that I might have experienced the odd sprinkling of snow on Lewis and Harris, but nothing would prepare me for the snow that would soon fall here.

The last few days we have been stripping trunks and cutting them to length, and then yesterday the whole village turned up for the raising of the cabin. Certainly, we could never have done it on our own, and would have had no idea how to notch and interlock the logs at the four corners.

The walls are seven feet high — which is as high as men can lift a log. The roof is steeply pitched, laid with hand-split shingles and covered with turf.

I would never have believed it possible, but by the end of the day, the cabin was done. A pretty sorry-looking dwelling, but it was a roof over our heads, with a door to shut against the weather.

Someone brought an old box bed on a wagon and reassembled it for me in my newly finished home. On the same wagon came a kitchen table that someone else was donating, and a couple of rickety chairs that might just about take our weight. A bottle of spirit was opened, and everyone took a slug of it to christen the new house. Then a prayer was said as we all stood around the table. The next priority will be the building of a stone chimney at one gable, which is something I might even be able to do myself. Then we’ll be able to light a fire and heat the place.

The problem is how to keep ourselves warm in the meantime.

When the villagers had finally gone, and Michaél was hauling water up from the river in buckets, I gathered some kindling and split some logs to build a fire in the centre of the cabin. There are no floorboards yet, just beaten earth, so I made a stone circle to contain the burning wood.

Although the room quickly filled with smoke it would, I knew, soon disperse through all the cracks and crevices between the logs, just as the smoke in our old blackhouse made its way out through the thatch.

But the next thing I knew, the door had burst open, and Michaél came running in, yelling, ‘Fire, fire!’ at the top of his voice, and threw a bucket of water all over my carefully tended blaze.

‘What the hell do you think you’re doing?’ I shouted at him.

But he just stared at me with big, manic eyes. ‘You can’t light a fire in the middle of a wooden house, man! You’ll burn the fockin’ thing down!’

I didn’t speak to him for the rest of the evening. And it wasn’t long after dark that it became so cold that there was no option but to turn in for the night. It was Michaél who broke our silence finally and wanted to toss a coin to decide who got the bed. But I told him that since it was my house it was my bed, and he could sleep on the bloody floor.

I don’t know how much time passed after I extinguished the oil lamp, but it was black as pitch when I became aware of Michaél slipping into the bed beside me, freezing hands and feet bringing all of his cold air with him. I thought long and hard about kicking him out again, but in the end decided that two bodies were likely to generate more heat than one, so pretended that I was still asleep.

This morning, neither of us have commented on it. By the time I was awake, he was up and had built a fire out in the clearing and got a pan of water boiling on it. When I came out with my tin mug to brew a cup of tea, he mentioned very casually that he intended to build a bed for himself today. ‘That fockin’ floor’s far too hard,’ he said.

At Chemin Kirkpatrick, Sime turned off to drive north into the town of Bury. It nestled among the trees in the valley of a small river of the same name. Bury had sent men to die in two world wars and commemorated them on plaques at the Bury Armory.

The road that led down to the town was called McIver, and it cut past the Bury cemetery. The last resting place of Sime’s parents lay on the slope on the west side of the road. Carefully cropped grass was punctuated by headstones that bore the names of Scots and English, Irish and Welsh. But in the town itself almost all traces of English and Celtic culture had been supplanted by French, with the exception of some street names. And even those were gradually being replaced.