Graeme Burnet: His Bloody Project

At the service to mark my mother’s funeral, he discoursed at length on the theme of torment. Man, he said, was not only guilty of sin, but was a slave to sin. We had given ourselves in service to Satan and wore the chains of sin around our necks. Mr Galbraith asked that we look around us at the world and its numberless miseries. ‘What means,’ he asked, ‘the sickness and discontentment, the poverty and the pain of death we witness every day?’ The answer, he said, was that these iniquities were all the fruits of our sin. Man alone is powerless to throw off his yoke of sin. For this reason we require a redeemer: a deliverer without whom we will all perish.

After my mother was committed to the earth we formed a solemn procession over the moors. The day, as is often the way in these parts, was entirely grey. The sky, the mountains of Raasay and the water of the Sound offered only the smallest variations on this hue. My father shed no tears either during the sermon or afterwards. His face adopted the obdurate cast from which it would henceforth rarely deviate. I have no doubt that he took Mr Galbraith’s words greatly to heart. For my own part, I was quite certain that it was not for my father’s sins that our mother had been taken, but for my own. I reflected on Mr Galbraith’s sermon and resolved there and then with the grey sod beneath my feet, that when the opportunity came, I would become my father’s redeemer and deliver him from the wretched state to which my sinfulness had reduced him.

Some months later, Mr Galbraith received my father as an elder in the church, this on account of my father’s acceptance that his sufferings were just recompense for the sinful nature of his life. My father’s suffering was instructive to the congregation and it benefitted them to see him prominently exhibited in the church. I believe that Mr Galbraith was quite glad of my mother’s death, as it bore witness to the doctrine he professed.

The twins cried constantly for their mother and when I think of that time it is to the accompaniment of their unremitting wailing. On account of the disparity in our ages, I had never felt anything other than indifference towards my younger siblings, but they now aroused positive enmity in me. If one was quiet for a moment, the other would commence to weep, thus setting off the other. My father had no tolerance for the infants’ lamentations and sought to silence them through blows that served only to renew their bawling. I well remember them clinging to one another on their mattress, a look of terror on their faces as my father made his way across the chamber to administer a beating. I left it to Jetta to intervene and had she not been there to do so, I could quite imagine my father doing the poor wretches to death. It was suggested that the twins should also be sent to Toscaig, but my father would not hear of it, insisting that Jetta was old enough to play mother to them.

My dear sister Jetta was as greatly transformed as if her fetch had overnight taken her place. The gay and charming girl was replaced by a morose, brooding figure, hunched over at the shoulders and clad, at my father’s insistence, in widow’s black. Jetta was obliged to assume the role of mother and wife, preparing the meals and serving my father as our mother had previously done. It was at this time that Father decreed that Jetta should sleep in the back chamber with him as she was now a woman and merited a degree of privacy from her siblings. In general, however, Father disdained her, as if, in her resemblance to his wife, it pained him to look upon her.

As the most cheerful among us Jetta must have felt the general despondency which pervaded our household most keenly. I do not know if she had fore-knowledge of my mother’s death, for she has never spoken to me of it, but rather than abandon the rituals and paraphernalia which had done nothing to ward off this ill fortune, she clung all the more fervently to them. I saw no efficacy in such things, but understood that Jetta was privy to intimations from the Other World to which I was insensible. In a similar way, my father turned more fervently to the reading of scripture and away from the modest pleasures he had previously allowed himself, as if he believed that God was punishing him for the infrequent dram he had taken. For my part, my mother’s death demonstrated nothing more than the absurdity of their respective creeds.

As the weeks passed, none of us wished to be the first to leaven the atmosphere with some mischief or a few lines of a song, and the more time elapsed, the more fixed we became in our gloomy ways.

* * *

My mother died in the month of April and some weeks later I was alone on the shieling, charged with keeping watch over the sheep and cattle grazing there. The afternoon was very warm. The sky was clear and the hills across the Sound were various hues of purple. The air was so still that it was possible to hear the lapping of the sea and the occasional cry of children playing far below in the village. The animals which I had been charged to watch were rendered slothful by the heat and did not stray far from one hour to the next. The stirks lazily flicked at horseflies with their tails.

I was lying back in the heather, watching the slow progress of the clouds across the sky. I was glad to be away from the croft and from my father, whom I had left leaning on the handle of his cas chrom, puffing on his pipe. I pictured my mother next to him, bent over the ground, thinning weeds from the crops, singing to herself as she always did, her hair falling over her face. It was some moments before I realised that she was not there, and was instead beneath the earth of the burial ground in Camusterrach. I had often come across the carcasses of animals, and I wondered whether the process of decomposition had already taken hold of her body. I felt quite keenly then the reality that I would never see her again and closed my eyes to prevent myself from weeping. I tried to concentrate my thoughts on the sounds of rustling grass and the bleating of the sheep, but I was unable to banish the image of my mother’s decaying body. An insect landed on my face and this had the effect of rousing me from my thoughts. I waved it away with my hand and raised myself onto my elbows, blinking in the sunlight. The hornet then landed on my forearm. I did not draw my arm away, but slowly raised it to the level of my eyes, so that the tiny creature loomed larger than the cattle in the distance. Mr Gillies had, once, with the aid of a diagram drawn on the blackboard, taught us the names for the parts of insects, and these pleasing words I now recited: thorax, spiracle, funiculus, ovipositor, mandible. The hornet negotiated the dark hairs on my arm, as though uncertain of the terrain upon which it had alighted. It was with the detachment of a scientist that I watched the creature halt and bring its gaster down on my skin. I instinctively slapped my hand down upon it and brushed the little corpse from my arm. The insect’s tail had left a tiny barb in my skin and the area around quickly swelled into a pink bleb.

I decided to climb to the waterfall further up the Càrn to bathe my sting, now and again casting a glance over my shoulder to check on the livestock. The waterfall was among a cluster of birch, with a deep pool at its well. It was cool among the trees. The rocks were worn smooth by the centuries’ passage of water. I cupped my hands into the pool to take a drink, then splashed water over my face and head. I took off my clothes and stepped into the water. I closed my eyes and let myself float on my back. Light flickered orange through my eyelids. I listened to the roar of water on water and felt that when I emerged Culduie, Aird-Dubh and everything else would be gone, and I would be entirely alone in the world. I wished only that when I opened my eyes Jetta would be standing on a rock, stepping out of her clothes and joining me in the pool. I opened my eyes and watched the droplets of water fly up like sparks from a fire. I would have happily remained there for the rest of the afternoon, but I was conscious of my duty to the livestock. I allowed the sun to dry my skin, before dressing and setting off down the hillside.