Chapter 24
fichead ’s a ceithir / twenty-four
His mother had laid him out on the enclosed porch.
Doll seemed so peaceful in the soft sunlight.
He was so tall, so broad, that the coffin maker had removed some of the padding.
The undertaker had bent his knees just to fit him inside.
His shoulders were hunched forwards and his crown was pressed against the wood giving a slight tilt to his head, as if he had closed his eyes a moment and was thinking to ask you a question.
Mourners came from all over the Western Isles.
There were van loads of former schoolmates and some prawn fishermen the Macdonalds knew from the boats.
All the faithful from the other parishes came, and all the young women who had at one time or another rolled their eyes at Doll now lined his mother’s hallway.
Cheeks and the boys looked ill at ease in borrowed suits.
Everyone visited except Shiv Malone. She ordered flowers from the mainland, a giant wreath in the shape of a cartoonish lobster. It was vulgar looking and such an affront to Calvinist simplicity that Sarah had her daughters disassemble the arrangement and set the flowers into plain white vases.
The men carried the coffin away from Falabay in a slow cortege.
Doll’s was the heaviest body Cal had ever carried.
Since he had grown old enough, he had helped bear six of their neighbours to the grave.
All of those dead had been blessed with long, stretched-out lives and in death their bodies were as desiccated as salted herring, the weight all bones and Bibles, all trimming cloth and calcified spite.
With Doll, the pallbearers felt every step.
They walked as far as they could before a rotation of men tapped them on the shoulder, took their place, and did their duty for a quarter mile more.
They carried the body out of the eyeline of the church where they loaded it into the back of Flash’s rusted estate.
Then Flash lowered the boot on the casket and secured it with a bungee cord as the men prepared to leave the women behind.
Doll could not be buried in Falabay, none of their dead could; the ground was too shallow, nothing but a miserly layer of dirt that had scabbed over the bedrock.
All their dead were buried on the Atlantic coast, in the fertile, sandy machair, the rolling grasslands that had seeded over the millennia of crushed shells and sea salt and flourished every spring in a riot of harebell, eyebright, and golden buttercups.
The women were to remain in the house. But Sarah Macdonald had fought to follow her son to his grave.
She had climbed into the back seat of a waiting car, and when the men asked her to step out, she only did so before scurrying away and climbing into another.
When the men refused her – gently, kindly, but a refusal all the same – she marched out along the road to the west coast, which would be twenty, thirty miles at least, and the other women had no choice but to follow for fear she do herself some harm.
In the end, the elders conceded and Innes collected the wandering women in his sheep van. He brought them to a hill some miles from the graveside. They climbed it together and watched at a distance as the men laid Doll to rest.
They buried Doll on the first truly cloudless day of the year, and as Cal walked upon the machair, he could smell the red clover crushed underfoot; its delicate scent caught the salt of the Atlantic and mixed with the lemon polish that Sarah had used to shine the rosewood.
There was a cauterising amount of whisky. The men swallowed it without pleasure. They gathered and chain-smoked behind the Macdonalds’ byre. They couldn’t bear being indoors, trapped with their women who could not be still.
Sarah had not been given the time to grieve.
She had been busy all week, hosting visitors, cleaning house, comforting daughters.
Now that her son was in the ground, the light went out in her eyes and the women watched it go.
She left her body sitting upright in her blue armchair as the grief swallowed her and she fell into a hole where no one could follow.
The women piled plates before her, buttered offerings, sugary treats.
They tried to coax Sarah back to them, and then grew irritated with one another, split between those who thought they were helping and those who thought they were being a nuisance.
As each woman sat forwards at an interval and rotated the plate slightly, turning something salty towards Sarah, then trying something sweet, the scene took on the colour of an uncomfortable comedy, a pantomime of clumsy good intentions.
Ella shot forwards. She gripped the plate to stop the other women turning it, to end its awful grating as it rotated on the tiled table.
She found it hard to celebrate the young man.
Doll had left them with only half a story.
He was a book with the back ripped out and soon the women started imagining their own endings: who he might have married (a pretty Protestant girl, well-educated, returned to the islands); the type of father he would have become (lenient, funny, good with his daughters because he was good with his sisters); and the fleet of freshly painted boats he would have bought from his labours (cardinal red and large enough to go out into the deepest seas).
They told all this to Sarah. They tried to console her with their stories. They meant no harm, but Ella found no comfort in it. She made her excuses and busied herself by cleaning the kitchen. Then she washed a heap of laundry she had gathered from the girls’ bedroom.
The men watched her come outside with a heavy basket. They had a hushed conversation and then Shockie stepped forwards. “It’s a sin,” he said. “Today is not a day for labour, Ella.”
She met him with an unblinking stare. “I can keep busy or I can get drunk.”
As she pegged out the girls’ underthings, she was affected by the innocence of it all, the sweet flowers printed on the thermals, the naive faggoting that edged the tiny underpants.
Her thoughts ran to Grace and she worried, as she often did, that she was a bad mother.
She had chosen her grandson over her daughter when the world was harder on women and when she had always known it to be so.
She blamed her remaining on Cal: on his need for someone to watch over him, on his young years, his helplessness when cutting up his dinner.
She blamed the croft, the church, John’s anger, the pittance she made, the bad weather, the good weather, the sunbed, the damp blackhouse full of past lives.
She offered it all as an excuse as to why she hadn’t followed Grace to the moor.
When the truth was she had stayed because she wanted to. She stayed because this was her home.
The men watched her work and she could feel John’s anger at not being able to stop her.
She let them glower a while. Then she approached them, clumping along on her swollen ankles, and started clapping and shooing the mourners from the modest underthings, pretending it was their cigarettes she wanted to chase away.
The men moved back from the washing lines, their leather soles clipping like hooves on the flagstones, as she hep-hepped and drove them onwards around the gable end like a herd of black ungulates.
They retreated into the burnt-out shell of the abandoned house. They stepped down into the pit, gathered in a semi-circle, and resumed their silent drinking.
Ella returned to the laundry. She unfolded a maternity dress, which was a hellish thing to find on the day of a funeral, and as she pegged it to the line, she was overcome with the feeling that she had also let Isla down.
Cal didn’t want to drink with the men. He couldn’t bear to be near Innes while his father watched his every move.
Doll’s death had widened the distance between them all as though everything that occurred had happened to other people in another time.
There was no ‘before’, or ‘back when’, there was only the awful, endless now.
He wandered up the stairs and went in search of Isla.
He found her napping on Doll’s bed, her back to the door.
The door was open so he entered the room quietly and sat on a bean bag in the corner, thinking he would wait until she woke up.
The room was just as he remembered it: too hot on sunny days, with the same musty, spunky smell he remembered from their youth.
The walls were covered with posters of a truculent, corpulent Biggie Smalls.
There was a car exhaust propped in the far corner.
He hadn’t heard Isla wake up. He was flicking through some vinyl and when he turned around, she had rolled over and was watching him. “I didn’t wake you, did I?”
“I wasn’t sleeping.” Isla was dressed for the gathering even though her father forbade her to come downstairs. Someone had cut her never-cut hair into a frumpy middle-aged bob.
They would have struggled to find her something suitable to wear.
Who would ever own a maternity dress in mourning colours?
The call would have gone out to their neighbours for a spare dress and with his grandmother being the heaviest of all the women, he wondered if the shift was an old frock of Ella’s, something from the sixties.
“Can’t be long now?”
“I don’t think my father would ever forgive me if my waters broke at my brother’s funeral.” She had difficulty raising herself up.
“Did you get to say goodbye to Doll?”
“I did,” she said. “I had a quiet moment this morning.”