Archie and the North Wind (2 page)

Once the wind abated, this was the first sound the survivors heard: the thunderous roar of the hooves on the hardened machair as the horses ran southwards, away from the cradle of the remembered storm. She herself arrived later, on foot, dressed in man’s clothing – something unheard of in the district except in the sailors’ tales of women in far-off lands who wore turbans on their heads and wielded scimitars as wildly as the Turks.

By that time the horses were subdued and grazing on the seaweed-strewn thin grass. They snorted and neighed quietly when she came in sight, continuing their slow munching as if nothing had ever happened except this eternal chewing, here, in this stubbly sand, on the very edge of the world.

When the woman came to Gobhlachan, the talk was inevitable: the strange horsewoman and the unballed man. What a fine match they would make, she with her long wild hair and he with his small, sharp claws. The meeting of fire with earth, or of ‘
òrd le ighne’
, hammer with anvil, as they named it.

In actual fact, despite their physical differences, Olga Swirszczynska and Gobhlachan were the perfect match. Not so much fire with earth or hammer to anvil, as hand to glove and swan to lake. They were gentle with other, like wild horses tamed, or like sheared sheep.

‘Of course, he’s the woman,’ the men sneered enviously, watching Olga each morning as she harnessed the horses, tethered the ploughs to their haunches then set off to furrow the ancient fields between the two rivers which had lain unused for generations. And she would be seen in the thin dawn light leading her horses through the phosphorescence down to the seashore, where they could be glimpsed moving through the misty binoculars like ghosts in an old story.

She did all the work which had hitherto belonged to men, from peat-cutting to thatching the byres, from line-fishing to burying the horses when they died.

‘
Chaidh an tarbh beag a’ spothadh
,’ they said of Gobhlachan – ‘The small bull has been truly castrated’ – though he was as happy as Fionn the Warrior resting on the Hill of Plenty and continued daily to sit astride his anvil, a cup of tea in one hand and in the other a hammer, which he regularly rattled against the iron, imagining the sparks flying as in the believed olden days.

But none of this had happened when Archie was first taken on as Gobhlachan’s apprentice, for at that time Olga had just arrived in the district. Once the storm had ceased, much repair work needed to be done and Gobhlachan’s services were required everywhere, to fix broken axles and wheels and carts and bits-and-bobs for which Archie had no name but which were essential for survival, from the small chain which hooked the pot to the fire to the anchor-hooks which held the boats fast against the tide.

The day he was fourteen he left school forever,
as he was
legally entitled to do. ‘The law has its uses,’ the schoolmaster said to him when the bell rang for the last time.

It was now Monday. Instead of lying in bed as usual till sunrise, he rose while the sickle moon still slept in the sky. Instead of the woollen school clothing, he put on his dungarees and wellingtons and went outside where the arc of his urine perfectly reversed the sickle of the lying moon.

He smelt the air, which was frosty and sweet, a mixture of rain and manure, and looked up at the expanse of the skies where the stars were twinkling in all their beauty. The Great Bear dancing to the north, dragging the Plough behind him. What an eternal job, with Andromeda sparkling high to the south like a cran of herring flung into the skies.

He went into the byre, where the cows snorted smoke into the air. Their dull eyes looked at him, knowing that it was still the middle of the night, and they lay their heads down again in the straw, waiting for the real dawn and the cockerel’s call which would come at the proper time.

Archie went back outside, suddenly realising that this was it: his life was to be made here, between the byre and the shore, between The Great Bear and Andromeda. He thought of that place – that institution – he’d been in for the past nine years: the school, and what it had all meant. A hot lunch each day – broth – and lots of things told him by the one teacher, which sounded magnificent, but made little sense.

How Richard the Lionheart – what a hero he was! – had conquered Jerusalem and tamed Saladin and had had his heart taken across Europe after his death by a singer called Blonden who had found his body abandoned in the Forest of Rouen. At least, that was the version Archie heard, well before the later versions emerged depicting The Lionheart as an unfaithful homosexual war criminal.

Like leaves of a book, the two things which lay before him were the land and the sea. The earth, from which came the few things which sustained life – potatoes and sheep and cattle – and the sea, from which came the sweet things – herring and cod and saithe and lythe, as well as death.

They were married, of course, the earth and the sea. Mating like the bull and the cow, which he’d seen so often in the rocky fields. The cow bellowing for days and then the bull rising high and thrusting that stiff red thing inside as they slithered forwards in the drizzly mist.

Without the sea the earth was dry and barren, and that morning he could see the spindrift wooing the earth, spraying it with its salty mist. Archie walked down through the winter fields to the edge of the machair, where the mating was remorseless, the huge Atlantic waves thrashing on to the shore, the beach strewn with the debris of the thrusts – tangle and seaweed and nets and bottles and fragments of broken timber.

This was no division between land and sea: such a choice was unimaginable. To survive on land was to rely on the sea, and Archie had long known that his adult life would begin here, gathering the sea’s jewels to fertilise the land for the spring sowing. So as the sun rose low to the east above Ben Mòr, he bowed to the task, back to the Atlantic wind.

‘Never wear gloves,’ had been the chant since childhood, ‘they make your hands soft.’ So Archie bent into the seaweed, striking at its roots with the curved sickle in his bare hands, beginning to build up the first real heap of his life. The heap which would grow and lengthen, then be carried inland on his back in a creel and spread thin on the ground out of which emerged the potato in early autumn.

But the real work was the tangle, each root like snatching a hair out of the giant’s head. The story was that the sea was merely the sky for the
Fuamhaire Mòr
– the Great Giant – who had been exiled beneath the waves for once having touched the sky above with his outstretched arms. The full story was that when the earth heaved into shape, dividing itself into continents, it rose up in giant form and stretched itself its full length, the fingertips which subsequently became China and America inadvertently touching the sky where the gods dwelt, disturbing their slumber.

In their anger, the giant was exiled back down to the bottom of the ocean, and as he fell from the sky back into the sea huge lumps fell off him which – of course – became the earth as we know it today, melted and moulded and forged by time and heat and tide.

‘The giant’s arse,’ they say, when someone mentions England.

‘His toe,’ when Italy is displayed.

‘A snot from his nose,’ when they see Iceland.

Though, of course, the giant’s parts are all moveable, depending on time and place and tribe and prejudice.

Archie knew all that to be nonsense, though that knowledge did not diminish the myth. The sea’s power was evident whether a giant stayed beneath it or not. The sky’s infinity was obvious despite the blue school globe which contained it all. The Earth’s ultimate willingness to be harvested, in spite of the frost and the blight and the hard soil, was proven year after year. Archie knew that life had always been a contest with the giant, and that to pluck a single hair from his head, or yield a corner of his toenail away, was a constant triumph.

But the cold! To sink hands into the freezing sea-water each morning, time and again, lifting the dripping stocks round your wrists. And the fumbling for the pen-knife and the hacking away, leaving the bare stalk which you split with both hands as if you were indeed the giant, separating main from main on your plunge into the freezing waters.

Again and again and again, breaking the stalks, one after the other, each winter morning. The
1
St of January, bitterly cold with a north-easterly. The
2
Nd of January, equally cold with a stronger wind from the north. The
3
Rd of January, hailstones sweeping in from the north-east, hammering against the soaking oilskins. The
4
Th of January, real snow falling on the sand; and on it went, forever, ceaselessly, as Archie walked down to the shore each morning, head bent into the wind, to his appointed task.

By the beginning of April the giant’s arm was bent. Archie had accumulated about a quarter-of-a-mile’s worth of tangle, stretching in a thin line above a row of barrels carried from the disused fish-curing factory which had closed before the last great war. The seaweed itself had already been spread on the fields, but the tangle was the magic profit margin: one of the few sources of surplus income available to an unskilled boy.

On the first Monday after Easter the boat would arrive and take the tangle southwards, in exchange for money. ‘You’ll get £
5
for that,’ some of the other lads said, though Archie kept his mouth shut and listened to the older men who mentioned much higher sums – £
20
, £
30
, even £
40
.

John the Goblin – so-called because of his weakened leg – hirpled into view one day and sat down, rolling a cigarette. ‘Do you know something?’ said John the Goblin. ‘That stuff,’ – pointing to the tangle – ‘is used to make French letters.’ He inhaled his cigarette. ‘Just think of that. Stalks for stalks, eh?’

Archie had no idea what he was talking about. ‘Also,’ continued John the Goblin, ‘they use it to make toothpaste and hair spray and fireworks and cannons.’ He spat out fragments of tobacco. ‘Makes you think, doesn’t it? Almost makes you think, eh? Would you like a fag?’

‘Sure,’ said Archie; and there, sheltering behind the tangle-bank from the gusting wind, clumsily rolled his first cigarette, taking five goes at lighting it in the face of the swirling breeze. Finally, huddled beneath his jacket, the paper caught light and the glow was like the glow of his granny’s tilley lamp in the early evening, signalling warmth and pleasure and a long night of stories.

Inevitably, he coughed at the first rough draw of nicotine, but John the Goblin merely smiled, saying, ‘It happens to all of us at the beginning. But by the time you’ve finished it, you can’t get enough of it.’ And it was true. So the Goblin divided his shredded tobacco in two, saying, ‘We’ll go halfers. And I’ll get you a proper tin later, to make a real man of you.’ He smiled. ‘Of course, you’ll need to pay me. A stalk for a stalk, as they say. What about going halfers on the tangle? Half the tangle for as much tobacco as I can supply?’

‘I’m not half as daft as I look,’ said Archie. ‘Why don’t I just buy my own tobacco?’

The Goblin laughed. ‘Aye! And where? Where do you think I get mine? Do you think I just wander out to that shitty shop at the pier to buy their overpriced rubbish? No way, José.’

The pier shop was the only shop in the place. That mythic establishment where you could buy everything from a needle to an anchor.

‘And if you did buy it, it’s like smoking horse-shit,’ said the Goblin. ‘God only knows where he gets that rubbish from. If I were you, I would just crush that tangle down and smoke it instead.’

‘So where do you get your stuff from?’ Archie asked.

‘Ah, but that’s a trade secret,’ smiled the Goblin, tapping his nose. ‘That’s what you would pay half your tangle for.’ He rolled another cigarette, lit it, and handed it to Archie. ‘Think about it,’ he said. ‘As you bend into that wind cutting the tangle, wouldn’t it be nice to look forward to a really good smoke every hour or so? Just you think about it!’ And John the Goblin hirpled off across the sand dunes, the tin in his back pocket glinting in the watery sunlight.

That turned out to be the actual day of
An
Siabadh Mòr,
The Great Shaking. No sooner had John the Goblin disappeared out of sight beyond the sand dunes than the wind began to rise, shaking the very barrels on which Archie’s future rested. Behind him the sea began to boil, and to the west and north the sky turned dark purple as if someone in the heavens had spilt an inkwell. Archie immediately regretted not having accepted the Goblin’s offer. A fag would be great consolation now. It would give him time to think, as he huddled beneath the barrels, rolling it slowly. Instead, there was one less thing between himself and eternity. For not having a cigarette he was barer, more at the mercy of the coming storm.

He hardly got home before the wind was at its full hurricane strength. For the first time in his life his abject poverty was an advantage. Too poor to have ever moved beyond a blackhouse, the family’s low-lying stone house was their salvation. More underground than overground, they were like beavers huddled in the darkness beneath the chaos. They heard the wind, but were physically untouched by it. As objects flew by outside, Archie and his parents and brothers and sisters and aged aunt sat on stools round the fire, conscious of the need to be silent.