T. Boyle - Tooth and Claw

One night when the wind was up they lingered in Magnuson’s past the dinner hour, murmuring to each other in a soft indistinguishable fusion of voices, and Robbie drinking steadily, pints and whiskies both. We watched him rise for another round, then weave his way back to the table where she awaited him, a pint clutched in each of his big red hands. “You know what we say this time of year when the kittiwakes first return to us?” he asked her, his voice booming out suddenly and his face aflame with the drink and the very joy of her presence.

Conversations died. People looked up. He handed her the beer and she gave him a sweet inquisitive smile and we all wished the smile was for us and maybe we begrudged him it just the smallest bit. He spread his arms and recited a little poem for her, a poem we all knew as well as we knew our own names, the heart stirrings of an anonymous bird lover lost now to the architecture of time:

Peerie mootie! Peerie mootie!

O, du love, du joy, du Beauty!

Whaar is du came frae? Whaar is du been?

Wi di swittlin feet and di glitterin een?

It was startling to hear these sentiments from Robbie Baikie, a man’s man who was hard even where he was soft, a man not given to maundering, and we all knew then just how far overboard he’d gone. Love was one thing — a rose blooming atop a prickly stem risen up out of the poor soil of these windswept islands, and it was a necessary thing, to be nourished, surely — but this was something else altogether. This was a kind of fealty, a slavery, a doom — he’d given her our poem, and in public no less — and we all shuddered to look on it.

“Robbie,” Magnus cried out in a desperation that spoke for us all, “Robbie, let me stand you a drop of whisky, lad,” but if Robbie heard him, he gave no sign of it. He took the bird woman’s hand, a little bunch of chapped and wind-blistered knuckles, and brought it to his lips. “That’s the way I feel about you,” he said, and we all heard it.

IT WOULD BE USELESS to deny that we were all just waiting for the other shoe to drop. There was something inhuman in a passion so intense as that — it was a rabbity love, a tup’s love, and it was bound to come crashing down to earth, just as the Artist lamented so memorably in “When Doves Cry.” There were some of us who wondered if Robbie even listened to his own CDs anymore. Or heeded them.

And then, on a gloomy gray dour day with the wind sitting in the north and the temperatures threatening to take us all the way back to the doorstep of winter again, Robbie came thundering through the front door of the pub in a hurricane of flailing leaves, thistles, matchbooks and fish-and-chips papers and went straight to the bar for a double whisky. It was the first time since the ornithological woman had appeared amongst us that anyone had seen him alone, and if that wasn’t sign enough, there were those who could divine by the way he held himself and the particular roseate hue of his ears that the end had come. He drank steadily for an hour or two, deflecting any and all comments — even the most innocuous observations about the weather — with a grunt or even a snarl. We gave him his space and sat at the window to watch the world tumble by.

Late in the day, the light of the westering sun slanted through the glass, picking out the shadow of the mullions, and for a moment it laid the glowing cross of our Saviour in the precise spot where Robbie’s shoulder blades conjoined. He heaved a sigh then — a roaring, single-malt, tobacco-inflected groan it was, actually — and finally those massive shoulders began to quake and heave. The barmaid (Rose Ellen MacGooch, Donal MacGooch’s youngest) laid a hand on his forearm and asked him what the matter was, though we all knew. People made their voices heard so he wouldn’t think we were holding our breath; Magnus made a show of lighting his pipe at the far end of the bar; Tim Maconochie’s dog let out an audible fart. A calm settled over the pub, and Robbie Baikie exhaled and delivered up the news in a voice that was like a scouring pad.

He’d asked her to marry him. Up there, in the crofter’s hut, the wind keening and the kittiwakes sailing through the air like great overblown flakes of snow. They’d been out all morning, scaling the cliffs with numb hands, fighting the wind, and now they were sharing a sandwich and the stout over a turf fire. Robbie had kissed her, a long, lingering lover’s kiss, and then, overcome by the emotion of the moment, he’d popped the question. Junie Ooley had drawn herself up, the eyes shining in her heaven-sent face, and told him she was flattered by the proposal, flattered and moved, deeply moved, but that she just wasn’t ready to commit to something like that, like marriage, that is, what with him being a Shetland sheepman and she an American woman with a college degree and a rover at that. Would he come with her to Patagonia to photograph the chimango and the ñandú ? Or to the Okefenokee Swamp in search of the elusive ivory bill? To Singapore? São Paolo? Even Edinburgh? He said he would. She called him a liar. And then they were shouting and she was out in the wind, her knit cap torn from her head in a blink and her hair beating mad at her green eyes, and he tried to pull her to him, to snatch her arm and hold her, but she was already at the brink of the cliff, already edging her way down amidst the fecal reek and the raucous avian cries. “Junie!” he shouted. “Junie, take my hand, you’ll lose your balance in this wind, you know you will! Take my hand!”

And what did she say then? “I don’t need any man to cling to.” That was it. All she said and all she wrote. And he stood in the blast, watching her work her way from one handhold to another out over the yawning sea as the birds careened round her and her hair strangled her face, and then he strode back to the minivan, fired up the engine, and drove back into town.

THAT NIGHT THE WIND soughed and keened and rattled like a set of pipes through the canyon of the high street on till midnight or so, and then it came at us with a new sound, a sound people hadn’t heard in these parts since ‘92. It was blowing a gale. Shingles fled before the gusts, shrubs gave up their grip on the earth, the sheep in the fields were snatched up and flung across the countryside like so many puffs of lint. Garages collapsed, bicycles raced down the street with no more than a ghost at the pedals. Robbie was unconscious in the sitting room of his cottage at the time, sad victim of drink and sorrow. He’d come home from the pub before the wind rose up in its fury, boiled himself a plate of liver muggies, then conked out in front of the telly before he could so much as lift a fork to them.

It was something striking the side of the house that brought him to his senses. He woke to darkness, the electric gone with the first furious gusts, and at first he didn’t know where he was. Then the house shuddered again and the startled bellow of the Ayrshire cow he kept for her milk and butter roused him up out of the easy chair and he went to the door and stuck his head out into that wild night. Immediately the door was torn from his grasp, straining back on its hinges with a shriek even as the pale form of the cow shot past and rose up to tear away like a cloud over the shingles of the roof. He had one thought then, and one thought only: Junie. Junie needs me .

It was his luck that he carried five hundred pounds of coal in the back of his minivan as ballast, as so many of us do, because without it he’d never have kept the thing to the road. As it was, he had to dodge the hurtling sheep, rabbits that flew out of the shadows like nightjars, posts torn from their moorings, the odd roof or wall, even a boat or two lashed up out of the heaving seas. He could barely see the road for the blowing trash, the wind slammed at him like a fist and he had to fight the wheel to keep the car from flipping end over end. If he was half-looped still when he climbed into the car, now he was as sober as a foude, all the alcohol burned away in his veins with the terrible anxiety that drove him. He put his foot to the floor. He could only pray that he wouldn’t be too late.