The People of the Sea, page 19
‘He changed the hiding-place of the skin from year to year and he preserved it as well as he was able. It was not an easy thing for him to hide it, you will understand, for the children were growing up in years, do you see, and he couldn’t turn without having them around him. And always it was she made the children go with him.’
Mairi was by now absorbed in the story. She rested her chin in her hand and watched her grandfather. He looked at me and went on.
‘But this day they were stacking corn,’ he said, ‘and didn’t one of the boys see his father coming with a sealskin and putting it into the heart of the first stack that they made. The boy wondered greatly why his father put the skin into the stack. But the stack was made and others after it, and when the work was finished the father had to go away and leave the mother and children alone at the house.
‘She would question the children every day to know did they see anything like a skin about the place. Well, she was one day baking bread, and, “Indeed, I did,” said the eldest boy. “I saw my father put a beautiful, beautiful skin into the heart of the first stack of corn.”
‘“You saw him?” said she. And she was delighted. She went on with the baking as quick as she could bake and when the baking was over she made everything ready for the father to come home.
‘“Well,” said she, “I am now going away from you. You will not see me again if I get the skin.”
‘“What are you saying?” said the children.
‘She went to the stack of corn. She took the stack to pieces till she came on the skin.
‘“Oh,” said she. “This is my own skin and you will go down with me to the shore and as long as I live I will keep you in fish every day.”
‘So they went along with their mother to the shore. She took off all her clothes and folded them up neatly.
‘“You will bring those home,” said she, “and bring them to your father.” Then she put on the skin.
‘“Look at yonder smooth rock,” said she. “Come down to that rock every day and there will be fish there waiting for you. You will see me rising up in the sea and I shall call to you, but do not go out to me in case you should be drowned.” And she swam away, but before she swam away, she did sing her joy of the sea.’
Ronald Iain paused and looked at me.
‘She swam away,’ he went on, ‘and the children went sorrowfully back to the house. When the father was coming near to the house he saw that the cornstack was taken to pieces.
‘“Oh where is your mother?” said he, and they told him.
‘“It must have been that she saw me,” said he, “when I was putting the skin into the heart of that stack of corn, and I am without a good woman to-night. Oh isn’t it a pity that she got that skin for I was very happy when she was along with me.”
‘They went home to bed and early next morning the children went down to the sea and there they found every kind of fish on the rock and their mother came and waved to them and called to them and she went on giving them fish until they grew up and prepared for marriage. Her sons and her daughters married and that is how the Clan MacCodrum came to this earth.’
Ronald Iain spat towards the stove and turned to me again.
‘Is that the story you heard?’ he said.
‘I never heard the full thing. I have heard others like it.’
‘You have? Well now I tell you that is how the Clan MacCodrum are called the Clan MacCodrum of the Seals, for it was on a reef that the father found the mother, and it is in North Uist that the Clan MacCodrum are, and, if they are, they are lucky. But the seals are under spells.’
He got up stiffly, took a cap from the peg behind the door and a long hayfork from the corner of the stove.
‘I have two beasts to feed before night,’ he said to me, and he went out.
‘I saw the ringboats,’ I told Mairi. ‘And I spoke to Niall Mackellaig in the bar.’
She nodded, went out, came back with a basin of potatoes and began to peel them.
‘Were you ever in North Uist?’ she said.
‘No.’
‘It was my father’s home.’
‘Yes, I know.’
‘I thought maybe it was there you heard tell of the MacCodrums.’
‘It was here, on this island, the last time I came.’
She said nothing for a while. Her face was hidden by her long black hair as she leant over the basin on the floor.
‘Old people talk strangely,’ she said, not looking up.
‘Do you like to hear them talk?’
‘Sometimes I like to hear the stories, if I haven’t got a book. But it is not often my grandfather tells them. It is only when there’s some old person in to see him, or a stranger like yourself, and the evenings are long when you have no book.’
‘Is it difficult to get books?’
‘I only like Westerns and I have read them all.’
‘There are lots of new ones,’ I said.
‘Did you see new ones on the mainland?’
‘Yes. I’ll send you some.’
‘I wrote to Angus for them, but he does forget.’
When she had finished the potatoes, she took flour from a chest and prepared to bake bread.
‘Where’s your mother?’ I asked.
‘Is she long away?’
‘She went some time before you came in.’
‘She does go at this hour to get the tea for Mistress Campbell, who is sick.’
Mairi tossed her hair away from her eyes. ‘North Uist must be a backward kind of place,’ she said.
‘I don’t think so.’
‘Didn’t you hear other stories about it? Like the one my grandfather tells?’
‘Oh I see what you mean. No. When I said I’d heard stories like it, I meant in other places.’
‘About the MacCodrums?’
‘About people who got their wives the same way. In the Faroe Islands there is a proverb – “She could no more hold herself back than the seal wife could when she found her skin.”’
‘Then some of the Clan MacCodrum must have been to the Faroe Islands.’
‘I don’t think so. It’s told in Norway too, and in Iceland the man locked the—’
‘Were you in Iceland?’
‘No. But I have heard the story. In Iceland the man locked the sealskin in a chest and he carried the key in his pocket wherever he went, but one Sunday when he put on his Sunday suit to go to church he forgot to take the key out of the pocket of his everyday clothes. His wife had been ill and she wasn’t able to go to church with him, and when he came home he could not find her. The chest was open and the sealskin gone.’
‘Had she any children?’ said Mairi.
‘Yes, and the story says she was very unhappy about leaving them. But she couldn’t withstand the temptation. She put on the skin and threw herself into the sea, but before she did that she cried out and said, “I am at a loss to know what to do. I have seven children on the land and seven children in the sea.” The children saw a great seal waiting for her as she swam away.’
‘Did she never come back to her husband?’
‘The story says he was never as he had been, in his mind. But he had more luck fishing than before, and when he was out fishing there was often a seal swimming round his boat and there were tears in the eyes of this seal. When the children walked along the shore a seal swam along by them in the sea and cast up to them many coloured fish and beautiful shells.’
By pushing her hair every minute away from her eyes and the dough, Mairi had smudged her cheeks with flour. She looked very solemn.
‘Do you think does a seal really weep?’ she said.
‘It might be the sea-water dripping.’
‘My grandfather says they do weep and he says they do caress one another with kisses. They throw stones too.’
‘They throw stones, do they?’
‘He says it is dangerous to be below them on a rocky slope.’
Mairi watched me unsteadily.
‘It is only what he says,’ she said, stifled. Covering her face with her hands, she sat down at the table. She was sobbing, inwardly, with very little sound.
When it was possible to speak again, I tried to change the subject, but she stopped me.
‘It is all lies,’ she said. ‘You know well it is lies.’
‘What do you mean, Mairi?’
‘It is well for you to come and ask about the seals. And away home with you, then, to the mainland.’
‘But I don’t think of the stories that way – as lies or truth. I like to hear them; that’s all.’
She stared.
‘Like reading a Western?’
‘Perhaps.’
‘But the old people believe them.’
‘Well, I don’t see any harm in that, do you?’
‘On the mainland they wouldn’t believe them.’
‘No.’
‘Not even the old people?’
‘Very few of them would. But they believe lots of other things, just as strange.’
‘They are not backward on the mainland. Oh, I wisht I could go there to work.’
‘I think you should go, if you want to so much.’
‘My grandfather wants me to go to North Uist.’
‘Yes, he was telling me about the farmer there.’
Unexpectedly, she laughed. ‘That old curmudgeon! He has whiskers on him.’
The kitchen had grown dark; suddenly, it seemed to me. Mairi’s mother came home with cold red hands. The wind again was whining, and when Ronald Iain came in his cap and knees and shoulders were drenched. He shook drops from the cap, but sat down to tea without changing his clothes. A smell of damp cloth and cowdung filled the room warmly.
Because of Mairi’s tears, I hoped not to talk of seals again that night, but I soon knew that Ronald Iain, in his old age, not caring for the wireless and never having learned to read, finding in me an audience as attentive as any he had known long ago, had cast his mind back with new pleasure among the fragments where it usually wandered, now usually unaided and alone. After tea he took me to the inner room.
‘There is something I have to show you,’ he said. ‘I did think on it while I was at the cattle.’
We stooped down by his high, iron bed and between us dragged from under it a heavy chest with rusted latch and hinges. We opened it with difficulty, and breathing hard he bent and lifted layer upon layer one by one of clothes: jackets and trousers, blankets, thick woollen porridge-coloured vests and underpants, old boots wrapped in yellow newspaper, empty bottles, sheep-shears carefully greased in leather sheaths, corks, buoys, some rolls of net, a rusty horseshoe. He took them up one by one in two hands, laying them deliberately on the bed or on the floor, while I stood by with a candle in my hand wondering, as towards the bottom the objects appeared more unexpected, exactly at what point of sentiment or desuetude they had been consigned to this private hoard. At last he came to a small bag, and after feeling it once or twice with both hands he took it across the room and laid it carefully on a chair. Briefly, I saw it in the candlelight, and my mind must have been filled at once with a vague memory, so that I did not hear him when he spoke to me again. When we got back into the kitchen I saw it was a seal-skin purse.
‘Did you ever see one like it?’
‘Yes. Once. When I was a boy.’
‘Was it shaped like this one?’
‘Almost the same, I am sure.’
‘Then it was an old one. They were made from the skin of the paw of the seal in my young days. And every man that had one had luck, after.’
‘Do you keep money in it?’
‘I do. Mairi, listen, will you step over and ask Calum Angus Campbell did he bring the tobacco for me from Lochboisdale? You can tell him we have company here.’
She took a mackintosh from the peg and went out saying nothing. As soon as she had gone he emptied the purse on to the table. There were a number of gold sovereigns and many half-crowns of Edward VII’s reign.
‘These were to be her mother’s dowry,’ he said, ‘but now they are hers when she is married.’
I took the purse in my hand, recalling slowly as I stroked the hair and looked at its undefined shades of fawn and black, much intimate foreboding and allusive thought until I arrived with a shock at the death of the selchie in the salmon bothy at Nairn.
I said, ‘It was a tobacco pouch I saw, not a purse.’
‘Very like. Very like.’
Mairi came back with Calum Angus and a bar of cut plug. Her eyes met mine lightly as she put it on the table. She moved away at once. She was swift, direct and quiet in everything she did.
Calum Angus was a gaunt and dark man of about sixty years, more than six feet tall, with a long, narrow face, deeply lined about the mouth. His eyes were set back in hollows. He saw the purse at once and took it up.
‘Man, man, it is years since I saw one of them,’ he said turning it this way and that.
‘There is luck in them,’ said Ronald Iain again. He cut off a piece of tobacco and handed the bar to Calum Angus. Calum Angus sat down on the flour bin. Mairi and her mother were by the stove, the old man and I at the table.
‘But there is no luck,’ said Ronald Iain after a long silence ‘in the presence of a seal that is dead.’
‘I never saw a dead one, thanks be to God,’ said Calum Angus.
‘There was many a man drowned after seeing one,’ said Ronald Iain.
‘’Twas the same with the mermaid.’
‘Is that so?’ said Ronald Iain.
‘It is. And she alive.’
They filled their pipes. Mairi bent over her sewing, and nobody spoke till the pipes were lit.
Then Calum Angus, looking at the window, said: ‘It will be sixty-two years, next Lammas, since a person was drowned by a mermaid.’
‘Was it off Benbecula he saw her?’
‘It was not. It was a party of Lochboisdale fishermen that saw her. They saw her rise up on the water near to their boat and every man of the crew threw some object at her. But the last man, when he threw what he had in his hand, she sank down. That man was drowned after. The others were safe.’
Mairi’s mother said, ‘What need was there to throw things at the creature?’ Mairi did not look up.
‘It is right to throw some object at a mermaid, and if she does not sink, you are safe. A knife is a very good object to throw at a mermaid.’
‘A knife, or anything that’s made of iron,’ said Ronald Iain. ‘That will be good against a creature under spells.’
There was silence again until I asked what spells the seals were under, and Ronald Iain answered.
‘I do not rightly know. But I heard they were the children of the King of Lochlann, and whatever happened in the beginning I do not know, but it is given to them that their sea-longing shall be land-longing and their land-longing shall be sea-longing.’
Mairi stopped sewing and looked at her grandfather.
‘Where is Lochlann?’ she said.
‘Lochlann is the Norse lands, child. Did they teach you nothing at school?’
She glanced at me.
‘And the King of Lochlann,’ her grandfather said, laying down his pipe against the purse, ‘by him came the seals and out of them came the Clan MacCodrum of the seals, in the island of North Uist; and you will be able to know one that has the blood of the seals in his body by the rock where he sits or lies, for no matter how warm the day, and his clothes being dry upon him, when he rises, there the rock will be damp where he was and the vapour from it lifting will leave crystals of sea salt beneath the sun.’
Mairi looked at me for a second again, and it is by those separate seconds when our eyes met briefly that I now remember her.
CHAPTER NINE
The young people have gone from the village high up on Bolus Head in County Kerry. The whitewash is no longer on the houses. The thatch is torn and there are no children playing in the mud outside the doors. I was there in the morning early, at the end of the month of March.
When the travelling man came, with long strides shuffling down the road from the west, I was leaning on a wall that guards the village from the cliffside grass, looking at the sea quiet below me, at the three ghost islands to the south on the horizon and at the headland where the seal-killer’s caves were two miles away from me across Ballinskelligs Bay. I had been there a long time gazing and was glad to be alone, but when I heard his shuffling steps I turned to look.
He was walking with a bundle on his back from the west, from the very point of Bolus Head, where the road is all uneven, and with two overcoats about him and his wide old hat he seemed to be tied up with hayrope and tin cans. His boots were greenish and half laced. His neck was bare and wrinkled, his face long and covered with grey half-inch stubble, his eyes black, their whites a bloodshot yellow, and his hand when he held it out to take what I gave him was curled like the foot of a bird. But when he spoke his voice rang clearly like a young man’s voice.
‘May God reward ye,’ he said, ‘and may the Holy Mary Mother of God bring ye health and good keeping. Ye are making for the point across?’ He held his long ashplant towards the seal caves. I stared at him. His lower lip hung forward and the wings of his nose looked as if they had at one time been split.
I said, ‘I am, but what makes you think that?’
‘I know you well, sir. If you’ll excuse me.’ He laid the ashplant on top of the wall and delved the money deep among his rags.
I said, ‘Did you see me in Galway or somewhere?’
‘Now if ye was to be in Galway at the time of the races, it is likely I saw ye there, for I am at the races the first week of August every year, and at the latter end of March I pass by Bolus Head. For forty years I am that way, on the roads of Ireland.’
‘In the winter too?’
‘Winter and summer, God help me. But there is no comfort in this village any more.’
‘A lot of the houses seem to be empty,’ I said.
He picked up his stick and pointed to them. ‘And would you believe this,’ he said, ‘I have seen it on an evening when the people were home from the fair, and ye wouldn’t be able to pass by for the ass-carts that were standing and the pigs and fowl and the power of bullocks that was in it, and fine milk cows. There was not less than a family of six, young and old, to every house, I dare say.’
