Sun Dance (8 page)

A white-washed home of red tin roof and attic windows, the days of summer shone through tiny windows into ‘the good room’ with its heavy winter curtains and faded photos sitting atop a walnut upright piano. Across the hallway was a wood lined kitchen of deep stone sinks that had bathed each child in turn. Against the gable wall a peat hungry stove warmed the towels which wrapped healthy infants. Outside of the hall, a front porch laden with pegs full of oilskins and wellies, served as the headquarters of their collie dog, ‘Rab’. Nose on paws, eyes alert, nothing moved on the croft without requiring his attention.

The crofthouse of Ach-na-Mara had known love and birth, ceilidh nights and the anguish of death. Once the focal point of an island community, Eachan and Ella, his young wife, held open house to fiddle and dancing feet and even now, seldom was its lum without a trail of smoke or the welcoming reek of peat at a flagstone step had been worn by the tramp of calling feet. Eachan found a head looking in the door an excuse for a dram. Their brood of children were overseas and the ever patient Ella felt the house quiet. The kettle steamed gently on the stove and always her morning’s baking found a ready uptake. Ella, broad and placid, her forehead unwrinkled, had been the beauty of village dances before the days of face cream and mascara. By many years she was the junior of Eachan, indeed a generation existed between them and for a strange reason.

A young and handsome Eachan had the fashion of walking the miles across the hill to the east side of the island. Saturday nights, without fail, he would be at a fireside talking to an old crofting couple. Sheep conversations apart, his mind was on their daughter who sat quietly, awaiting a tap on the door which would take her to the local dance. The light of the Tilley lamp shone on a lustre of flaxen curls, made her eyes liquid pools of deep attraction. Eachan was in love, unashamedly and distractedly. He attended her wedding, dancing, drinking, and longing.

Out of affection for her folks he kept up his visits to their crofting fireside. One night with a gale out of the west hastening his walk he arrived to find the village midwife busy heating towels. As always a welcoming dram from the ‘bodach’ and they sat to the fire, talking. The night drew on, women’s work went on. In the wee hours the midwife brought through a crying bundle to wash at the warmth of the hearth. The birth of a daughter to the girl he had lost to another man. By and by he tiptoed through to the back bedroom. The girl he loved looked up from feeding her baby. He kissed her tenderly and went out to walk, long, long, miles.

Full twenty years were to pass, hard work alone on the croft of Ach-na-Mara. And one night when the hillside lay in soft velvet light, he proposed to the girl he had seen washed, a new born baby by the fire. And the light of the moon fell with the eyes of her mother, and she said ‘Yes.’

Graying a little, but handsome still, fresh air and soft rain had kept Ella young. A powerful woman, she’d helped at the digging of the peats, the sowing and harvest. She rolled wool at the clippings, kept corn to the hens and fed collie dogs, cooking stove and family alike. A busy woman, trained from childhood in the ways of a crofting household. When a ‘nor-wester’ tuned the slates and the boom of breakers kept it time, all would feel snug in their tiny kitchen, then the warmth of the peat fire helped produce a sizeable brood of children. The frequency of winter gales was to fill a home of scrubtop table and bunk beds beneath the wood lined eaves. Ella presided over her man and brood with the eyes of kindness.

Evenly featured offspring, blue eyed and willing. Dependent on age, work about the croft was part of their upbringing. A bottle and teat to feed the pet lambs fell to the youngest. The oldest by ten, would be digging the ‘tatties’ they’d helped to plant and perhaps before bedtime, peeping into the byre with the hurricane lantern on a nail above the stall throwing its yellow light on the pressing cow, until out came a wet, spluttering calf.

Round the fields on a spring morning they followed their father to see him draw the front legs, then a head, and gently bring out a living lamb from a ewe in difficulty. With school pals at communal sheep clippings when neighbours gathered, they carried fleeces to pack the wool bags, all the time working and learning the skills which made possible an island life. Jobs were given to all the children, simple disciplines without question or pay and happiness ruled.

Patched-hand-me-downs, their barefoot children ran the summer long, lively expeditions to the hill, building stone and heather shelters, or down to the beach when the white sand burnt their feet and only the beady-eyed gulls dozing one- legged amongst the seaweed complained at the intrusion. Green edged rock pools filled with treasure, open razor shells and mauve pebbles were spread to dry. Heedless of time, driftwood games and homespun adventures by the light off the sea filled their childhood days

Below ‘The Field of the Sea’, a double ended sailing boat lay winched on its launching track, clear of the tide. Headlands enfolded the bay, green topped and fertile. Spring and autumn alike, the passing geese would rest and feed. Tapering headlands fell away to creviced rocks where the cormorant stood holding their outstretched wings to the sun, a safe haven to all when plumes of spray burst in crannied gullies and the booming Atlantic was in voice.

As the high days of summer waned and moon put her harvest light upon the sea Eachan would run out his sturdy little boat and take the children fishing. The brown lug sail would pull them clear of the headlands on a faint breeze that followed the sun to the west. The herring would be running and the net would fill, and the lithe silver bodies would pour about their feet. A last haul and the moons orange path, broad and dappled reached from a darkening horizon. By her dying beam he would steer his boat for their rock bound haven, the breeze just a ghostly hand.

Each spring when the great wild flocks calling in the night steered north by the stars, there came a restlessness for the stravaiging days, it tightened the sinews and coursed through the man whose ancestors had fought on the high seas of adventure. By way of easing the yearning Eachan would sail his children across the Sound to Sandray. They’d sit about him at the old house, scones and buttermilk, and the mood would be on him to tell of his people’s coming to the island a thousand years before. And he would drift to sleep and they would take off to play.

One of the girls with a sprawling mop of the curliest flaxen hair, perhaps the most daring of their family, had fallen. The children came running to tell him. Out on the headland she’d climbed the cliff where the fulmar nested. There on a ledge at its foot, he found her, and in his boat they sailed her home.

Careless of things that winter, a storm had splintered his boat. Without a boat he was a man without a hand. His family built him another, the finest of Norway larch and double ended, she had the sturdy lines of the galleys that came to Sandray in the stories he’d told.

She was all he wanted of a boat, sleek and beautiful, truly a maid of the sea,

In memory of the girl they’d lost, he called her ‘Hilda’.

The light was failing, yet its dimness drew radiance from the sea. The luminous gleam of the sun remained a dying presence beneath the surface of the glowing sheet of water. The air, the atmosphere, every particle of existence became tinged in a delicate suffusion of the palest lemon.

Time’s passage slowed to a total fixation. As the changing light told me of a turning world, so my life was turning beyond recognition. Nothing mattered but to watch the transforming glimmer, its reflection on the sea, the land, a clock spire of worship oblivious to the puniness of an earth that spun in obedience to the dancing waves of space; a revolving, trivial dot in the mysterious grip of the sun’s gravity, a planet at the mercy of the Sun God, radiation.

The boat turned gradually, its mast a silhouette against the horizon. She epitomised all I needed. A boat, instantly determined, I needed a boat, a journey, follow the elements. Sail by the wind, taste the sea. Shaking with excitement, I tried to rise. A coughing bout raked through me. I bent, hand on the bollard, a rope tripped my foot and I stumbled.

Somebody caught me.

“Steady, steady, too late for a swim tonight.” Hard hands lifted me to my feet. I stood swaying. The man remained holding me firmly. The coughing subsided, and turning, “Thanks, thanks,” I managed to say.

“You’re not too well boy,” the deep ring of his voice startled me. I looked up. My head spun, thoughts twisted, I grasped at memory. Where before, where had I seen this face, those eyes?

After the pause, “Yes, I ..er.. I was.. my lungs were damaged by an explosion.”

Minutes elapsed. We looked at each other, no fleeting glance but a searching intensity. His eyes shone, clear as the horizon. A strange bonding. Without ceremony he shook my hand.

“Sit there just now,” a quiet command. Seated again on the bollard I watched as he rowed a tiny dingy out to the boat. An outboard engine broke the silence of the bay, the ripple of his boat its calm waters. She came alongside. The man climbed the short iron ladder and made fast.

“Now,” the voice brooked no dissention, “I’ll go aboard. You’ll come down, step by step.”

He caught me on the last rung, “Sit at the mast, a’bhalaich, I’ll get your case.” Too exhausted to protest or enquire, I said nothing. Casting off, sure footed at every move, he sat in the stern. A man, strong faced, old and white haired.

The engine rattled into life. We swung away from the pier. An island beyond the bay tapered into the darkness, slim and faint, beyond comprehension.

Was I touching this boat? I looked into the night, was I touching the boat which drugged my thoughts with both sadness and a longing?

Had she risen out of that dream which creeps without warning into dimensions of fantasy and desire? Had I descended into a sleep which had opened the portals of fate, where all tomorrow is a refection yesterday’s hope and tragedy?

At the first roll of the swell she rose gently and dipped gracefully.

I held her mast. My head reeled.

Was I at sea, aboard the ‘Hilda?’

“Josh, how splendid to see you,” the P.M. turned from studying papers on a large leather topped desk and rose to a cordial handshake with his Chief Scientific Advisor. “Do sit down. My jove you’re looking so well. Been on holiday?” he queried, smiling warmly.

Sir Joshua Goldberg, tanned and urbane, sat heavily on one of the three armchairs, “Well yes, I have as a matter of fact, no, not quite a holiday, I nipped over to Geneva for a few days but as it happened, the weather was magnificent.” His eye flitted over to the brightly lit operations panel which covered the end wall. Large scale, Middle East, he noted, Israel to Iran.

The P.M. returned to his swivel chair. The strong light from behind him left his face in shadow and focused on Goldberg. A longish, narrow room without windows, blanching and airless, one of a complex of nuclear proof bunkers below Downing Street, it served for strictly private conversations, un-minuted, totally un- recorded. An extractor fan whirred softy from the low oppressive ceiling.

“Geneva, mm, that’s interesting,” a non-committal remark, yet it evoked a thoughtful look. “Anyway,” the P.M. continued, “we’ve had all the fall out.” He checked himself with a boyish grin, “I’ll re-phrase that. We’ve had to deal with all the complications from that hellish tube bombing. This is the first chance I’ve had to talk to you about the nuclear issue. You remember we discussed it after that bloody ignorant scientist had to be more or less thrown out.”

His face reddened and smacking a fist on the desk, “How the hell he had the cheek to mouth all that stuff at me, right in my face! I’ve never had that kind of impudence before. Don’t worry, Josh, I’ll see his project clipped,” ..adding in a grinding tone, “maybe his wings too.”

Steadying himself with a deep breath, “More to the point, I’m sure you’ll know the U.S. manufacturers are already tooling up for these mini nuclear power plants. I was furious that the bugger seemed to know about that as well. We can’t risk any hitch which might frighten the financiers. Is there any truth in what he said about the storage of nuclear waste?”