Authors: Peter May
New highways cut through the forest now in long, straight lines, riding the contours of the land, like the Roman roads in Europe that so represented the single-minded determination of a race. Woodland in full colour stretched out before him as far as the eye could see, like a gently undulating ocean.
And he recalled with great clarity the moment his ancestor had first set eyes on it.
It has taken us five days of walking to arrive at our destination, and this is the first chance I have had to update my log. We have been sleeping in the woods, or under hedges, begging for food and water from the houses we passed on the way. Everyone we’ve met has been incredibly generous. Maybe because they, too, at one time this way passed.
What amazes me most are the trees. Where I come from, you could walk all day and never see a single tree. Here it is impossible to take two steps without bumping into one. And the colours, as the days shorten and the temperatures drop, are like nothing I have ever seen before. It’s as if the land is on fire.
As we came further south we started to chance upon villages and townships establishing themselves along the river valleys. Log cabins, some of them little more than huts, built around crudely constructed churches. There were general stores, and sawmills springing up on streams and burns, and little schools where immigrant children were learning to speak a new tongue. Trees were being felled and land cleared,
and I was amazed at just how many people there were in what at first had seemed to be such a vast and empty country.
We arrived at the village of Gould in the township of Lingwick, towards noon yesterday morning. Sunday. It was here that we were told we should come if we wanted land. The village is built around a crossroads, with the road dipping away steeply at the north side, towards the valley of the River Salmon. There is a general store, and a church, and a school, and when we arrived there was not a soul to be seen.
That’s when I heard the Gaelic psalm-singing coming from the church. It’s not like normal singing. More a kind of chanting in praise of the Lord, with the congregation led in their unaccompanied song by one or more precentors. It was so familiar to me, and so redolent of home, that all the hairs stood up on the back of my neck. There is something about that sound, a sort of primal connection with the land and the Lord, that has always affected me.
‘What the hell is that?’ Michaél said.
And I laughed. ‘It’s the music of my island,’ I said.
‘Well, I’m glad I don’t come from your island. Sounds bloody weird to me.’
We were standing outside the church when the congregation streamed out into the noonday sun. They cast curious glances our way, two raggedy young men with beards and matted hair standing there in tattered shoes clutching little more than a handful of personal possessions.
When the minister had finished shaking the hands of his flock he walked towards us. A tall, thin man, with dark hair and cautious eyes. He introduced himself in English as the Reverend Iain Macaulay and welcomed us to what he called the Hebridean village of Gould.
‘We’ve come to the right place, then,’ I replied to him in Gaelic. And his eyebrows shot up. ‘My name is Sime Mackenzie and I come from the village of Baile Mhanais on the Langadail Estate on the Isle of Lewis and Harris. And this is my friend, Michaél O’Connor from Ireland.’
All the caution left the minister’s eyes then and he shook our hands warmly. And the congregation, when they heard that I was a fellow Hebridean, began to gather round, each of them welcoming us in turn and shaking our hands.
Mr Macaulay said, ‘You have indeed come to the right place, Mr Mackenzie. Gould was established by sixty Hebridean families cleared off their land in 1838. And they were joined by another forty destitute families from the west coast of Lewis just three years later. It’s as close to home as you can get without actually being there.’ I felt suffused by the warmth of his smile. ‘What’s brought you to us?’
‘We heard that they’re giving away free land,’ I said.
An old man in a dark suit said, ‘Aye, they are that. You’ve timed it well, laddie. The clerk from the British American Land Company arrives in the morning to start allocating parcels.’ He pointed a finger vaguely beyond the church. ‘Just to the south there, in what they call the St Francis tract.’
Michaél said, ‘But why would they be giving away land for nothing?’ He was still deeply suspicious of anyone who claimed to own land, but I was relieved that he was at least moderating his language.
Mr Macaulay said, ‘If there’s one thing there’s plenty of in this country, boys, it’s land. The company is giving it away so that it will be populated by settlers. That way the government will give them contracts to lay in roads and build bridges.’
*
We set off from Gould early Monday morning along a track that took us maybe half a mile into the forest. The minister was with us, as well as a large crowd of villagers to accompany twenty or more hopeful settlers and the clerk from the British American Land Company.
We arrived at a small clearing after ten or fifteen minutes. The sun was barely over the tops of the trees and it was still icy cold. But the sky was clear and it looked like we were in for another beautiful autumn day.
Mr Macaulay asked those wanting land to gather round. We were going to cast lots, he said.
‘What’s that?’ I asked him.
‘It’s a practice that occurs in the Bible, Mr Mackenzie,’ he said. ‘Most commonly in connection with the division of land under Joshua. I refer you to Joshua, chapters 14 to 21. In this case I will have a bunch of sticks in my hand of varying length. You will each draw one, and he who draws the
longest will get the first allocation of land. And so on, right down to the shortest, who will get the last.’
Michaél grunted loudly. ‘What’s the point of that?’
‘The point is, Mr O’Connor, that the first parcel of land will be the closest to the village. The last will be the furthest away, and the most inaccessible. So this is the fairest way to decide who gets what. It shall be God’s will.’
And so we drew lots. To my amazement I pulled out the longest stick. Michaél drew the shortest, and had a face like thunder darkening beneath his beard.
We all proceeded then to the starting point of the first parcel, which was to be mine. The minister handed me a short axe and told me to cut a notch with it in the nearest tree. ‘What for?’ I asked. But he just smiled and told me I’d see soon enough.
So I cut a notch in the closest tree, a tall evergreen pine. ‘What now?’
‘When we start singing,’ he said, ‘begin walking in a straight line. When we stop make a notch in the nearest tree, then turn at right angles to it and start to walk when the singing begins again. Another notch when we stop, another turn, and by the time we’ve sung three times you’ll have marked out your parcel.’
‘It should be approximately ten acres,’ the clerk from the British American Land Company said. ‘I’ll accompany you to register your land on the official map.’
Michaél laughed and said, ‘Well, if you folk would sing a bit slower, and I ran as fast as I could through the trees, then I could have a much bigger piece of land.’
Mr Macaulay smiled indulgently. ‘Aye, you could indeed. And you could also break your back trying to clear it of trees and make it arable. Bigger is not necessarily better, Mr O’Connor.’ He turned then to the assembled crowd and raised a hand and the singing began. To my astonishment, I recognised it immediately as the 23rd Psalm. I was going to pace out my land to the accompaniment of The Lord is My Shepherd!
The voices grew distant as I marched through the trees with the clerk right behind me. But it carried across the still of the morning, a strange haunting sound pursuing us into the forest. Until they reached the end of the final verse and I cut a notch in the nearest tree during the silence that followed, turning then to my right and waiting for it to start again.
*
After many stops and starts and a break for lunch, it was nearly dark by the time that Michaél paced out his tract of land. We were almost hoarse with the amount of singing we had done. Never, I was sure, had the 23rd Psalm been sung so often in the course of a single day. As we walked back to the village in the falling dusk Michaél said to me, ‘It’s too far to my bit of land. So I’ll just help you do yours first, and we’ll leave mine till later.’
And I was secretly pleased that I wasn’t going to have to face the task on my own.
*
Last night Michaél and I spent our first night in my new home.
We have been working all the daylight hours of every day for the last two weeks to clear an area of land big enough to build a log cabin. Hard, hand-blistering work with saws and axes loaned to us by folk from the village. Felling the trees was simple enough, once you got the hang of it. But moving them once they were down was another matter, and digging out the roots next to impossible. Someone promised to lend us an ox in the spring to help pull out the worst of them, but the priority has been to get a basic cabin up before winter arrives. Temperatures have been falling, and we’ve been working against nature’s clock. One of the older villagers told me that I might have experienced the odd sprinkling of snow on Lewis and Harris, but nothing would prepare me for the snow that would soon fall here.
The last few days we have been stripping trunks and cutting them to length, and then yesterday the whole village turned up for the raising of the cabin. Certainly, we could never have done it on our own, and would have had no idea how to notch and interlock the logs at the four corners.
The walls are seven feet high – which is as high as men can lift a log. The roof is steeply pitched, laid with hand-split shingles and covered with turf.
I would never have believed it possible, but by the end of the day, the cabin was done. A pretty sorry-looking dwelling, but it was a roof over our heads, with a door to shut against the weather.
Someone brought an old box bed on a wagon and reassembled it for me in my newly finished home. On the same wagon came a kitchen table that someone else was donating, and a couple of rickety chairs that might just about take our weight. A bottle of spirit was opened, and everyone took a slug of it to christen the new house. Then a prayer was said as we all stood around the table. The next priority will be the building of a stone chimney at one gable, which is something I might even be able to do myself. Then we’ll be able to light a fire and heat the place.
The problem is how to keep ourselves warm in the meantime.
When the villagers had finally gone, and Michaél was hauling water up from the river in buckets, I gathered some kindling and split some logs to build a fire in the centre of the cabin. There are no floorboards yet, just beaten earth, so I made a stone circle to contain the burning wood.
Although the room quickly filled with smoke it would, I knew, soon disperse through all the cracks and crevices between the logs, just as the smoke in our old blackhouse made its way out through the thatch.
But the next thing I knew, the door had burst open, and Michaél came running in, yelling, ‘Fire, fire!’ at the top of his
voice, and threw a bucket of water all over my carefully tended blaze.
‘What the hell do you think you’re doing?’ I shouted at him.
But he just stared at me with big, manic eyes. ‘You can’t light a fire in the middle of a wooden house, man! You’ll burn the fockin’ thing down!’
I didn’t speak to him for the rest of the evening. And it wasn’t long after dark that it became so cold that there was no option but to turn in for the night. It was Michaél who broke our silence finally and wanted to toss a coin to decide who got the bed. But I told him that since it was my house it was my bed, and he could sleep on the bloody floor.
I don’t know how much time passed after I extinguished the oil lamp, but it was black as pitch when I became aware of Michaél slipping into the bed beside me, freezing hands and feet bringing all of his cold air with him. I thought long and hard about kicking him out again, but in the end decided that two bodies were likely to generate more heat than one, so pretended that I was still asleep.
This morning, neither of us have commented on it. By the time I was awake, he was up and had built a fire out in the clearing and got a pan of water boiling on it. When I came out with my tin mug to brew a cup of tea, he mentioned very casually that he intended to build a bed for himself today. ‘That fockin’ floor’s far too hard,’ he said.
At Chemin Kirkpatrick, Sime turned off to drive north into the town of Bury. It nestled among the trees in the valley of a small river of the same name. Bury had sent men to die in two world wars and commemorated them on plaques at the Bury Armory.
The road that led down to the town was called McIver, and it cut past the Bury cemetery. The last resting place of Sime’s parents lay on the slope on the west side of the road. Carefully cropped grass was punctuated by headstones that bore the names of Scots and English, Irish and Welsh. But in the town itself almost all traces of English and Celtic culture had been supplanted by French, with the exception of some street names. And even those were gradually being replaced.
He had arranged to meet Annie at their grandmother’s house in Scotstown, but he wanted to stop off first to visit his childhood home. A pilgrimage to the past.
He drove by the end of Main Street and followed the bend out of town, then turned left to cross the river just beyond
the timber yard. A restored, bright red fifties pickup truck stood in the drive of a green and cream-painted clapboard cabin with rockers on the porch. A little further on, set back behind the trees, stood the house that had always fascinated him as a child. A folly with turrets and a multifaceted red roof. The house itself was clad with rounded shingles, like fish scales, and painted blue and green, red and grey and peach. Like a fairytale house made of coloured candies. It hadn’t always been so colourful. The old lady who lived in it when he was a child had despised children.