T. Boyle - T.C. Boyle Stories II - Volume II

He drove her all the wind-blasted way out to the bird sanctuary at Herma Ness and helped her set up her equipment in an abandoned crofter’s cottage of such ancient provenance that not even Duncan Stout could say who the landlord might once have been. The cottage had a thatched roof, and though it was rotted through in half a dozen places and perfervid with the little lives of crawling things and rodents, she didn’t seem particular. It was in the right place, on a broad barren moor that fell off into the sea among the cliffs where the birds made their nests, and that was all that mattered.

There was no fuss about Junie Ooley. She was her own woman, and no doubt about it. She’d come to see and study the flocks that gathered there in the spring — the kittiwakes, the puffins, terns and northern fulmars nesting the high ledges and spreading wide their wings to cruise out over the sea — and she had her array of cameras and telephoto lenses with her to take her photographs for the pricey high-grade magazines. If she had to rough it, she was prepared. There were the cynical among us who thought she was just making use of Robbie Baikie for the convenience of his Toyota minivan and the all-purpose, wraparound warmth of him, and there was no end to the gossip of the biddies and the potboilers and the kind who wouldn’t know a good thing if it fell down out of Heaven and conked them on the head, but there were those who saw it for what it was: love, pure and simple.

—

If Robbie never much bothered about the Moorits and Cheviots his poor dead and buried father had bred up over the years, now he positively neglected them. If he lost six Blackface ewes stranded by the tide or a Leicester tup caught on a bit of wire in his own yard, he never knew it. He was too busy elsewhere. The two of them — he and the bird woman — would be gone for a week at a time, scrabbling over the rock faces that dropped down to the sea, she with her cameras, he with the rucksack and lenses and the black bottles of stout and smoked-tongue sandwiches, and when we did see them in town they were either taking tea at the hotel or holding hands in the back nook of the pub. They scandalized Mrs. Dunwoodie, who let her rooms over the butcher’s shop to Junie Ooley on a monthly basis, because she’d seen Robbie coming down the stairs with the girl on more than one occasion and once in the night heard what could only have been the chirps and muffled cries of coital transport drifting down from above. And a Haroldswick man — we won’t name him here, for decency’s sake — even claims that he saw the two of them cavorting in the altogether outside the stone cottage at Herma Ness.

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 among 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!”