Lookout Cartridge (52 page)

A breeze brought the rain racing across the loch and from the far cottages and over along the road and over the car, but the late sun on the headland lit the Callanish stones.

I decided there was nothing in his having picked me up. He made this run from Stornoway often on a weekday afternoon an hour or so after the Glasgow plane.

Peat fires, the man said, were an acquired smell; it was one reason he’d always planned to come back to Lewis, the smell was different in India.

But, I said, they use ox and camel dung there.

Yes, mainly, he said—but there is an Indian peat that forms from decaying rice plant material, it hasn’t that brackish acrid odor of peat in the Western Isles.

You’ve traveled, I said.

He looked at me closely as I reached back for my pack and I was about to ask if he knew of an American in these parts named Paul (and it hit me I’d never asked Dagger Gene’s surname), but the man (now looking through me as if out beyond the Callanish stones to the great loch from the sea, a meaning, a Norse source, an old sequence inspiring him) said the word
sphagnum
and said it again; yes, it was where some of this came from—amazing stuff, a moss that thrives on acid conditions, and grows at the top while it decays at the bottom so the heather is maintained above and the decayed matter sinks and settles in deposits that eventually form peat which if it were put under great subterranean pressures would in fact become coal. Ancient forests at different levels, he said.

He shook his head, and I nodded mine. I said, So there were trees here in Neolithic times. The Callanish stones look from here like old weathered trunks.

He hadn’t heard of an American named Paul. He hadn’t picked up any Americans going to or from Callanish in a year, the stones were probably a calendar, he said.

I felt his own words about peat had made him think. He shook his head again. I thanked him again. He said he’d expected to take me all the way. I hauled out my rucksack, and he said it didn’t look very full.

I wanted to get away. I put up my hood. The landscape was bare and low and rolling.

He said I was going to get wet.

I shook hands, closed my door, hoisted the pack, and walked out ahead of the car. But I turned when his voice came again: Don’t try walking far on the moors. You’ll sink in.

He grinned behind the windscreen wipers which had started swinging again.

Time seemed far away. A thousand days passed in a blink of the eye. I knew nothing or tried to, except the man in front of me and the stones and the crofter’s cottage across the vale behind me—and the cottage right here where the woman was watching through the vertical slit between the curtains. That was what I knew. The browns and faint rusts and purples fading into the firm fine gray of the rain seemed almost enough to die into, and a voice, my own, called suddenly, Who was that last American you picked up a year ago you said?

A beautiful woman, he called back. And she knew about the stones, she knew about the northward avenue—I forget what it was if she ever said. She had green eyes and she said the god Apollo used to visit the island every nineteen years, and she was most concerned about the Great Menhir, the big stone there in the center. Its shadow falls over the cairn which you’ll see; she was concerned about that.

When
does the shadow fall?

At the spring equinox, said the man, as if giving me something just because I deserved it.

So it was March, I said, passing around to his side where the window was open.

This year. And something about twenty days after the equinox, a constellation rising before sunrise. Mean anything? I don’t know if she stayed twenty days.

I smiled at him and said without hesitation and beyond doubt, and hovering in the rain between truth and truth: And her hair—her hair was red.

The man looked up into my eyes and then he smiled and marvelously found no cause to say what we both knew. That I was right. And perhaps he guessed that I knew her name, though I knew I was far from sure.

I said, You know your peat.

I should, he said.

Which left something between us as I went away down across the vale.

The rain god received here a superfluity of propitiation and rained steadily if gently all year long, twenty days, twenty thousand days.

The crofter’s widow I stayed with had the cheekbones of a Pawnee, and blue eyes deep as a skull’s. She translated my queries and her answers into Gaelic for an old person who sat upright in a shawl snuffling at the fire of fibrous quiet peat-squares. The cells of the moss must hold plenty of water. But the water didn’t get a chance to increase the dilution of the plant; the water impeded bacterial decay, the man had said: and the dead bottom of the plants sank to form peat. There was a cycle of mounds and hollows where a water-loving moss grew upward, got drier, gave way to slower-growing heather which became the new hollow now to be outgrown and overgrown by moss coming up from below to make new mounds. I went round and round trying to get straight how the water could spread downward, yet the osmosis, if it was osmosis, rather than diluting the system’s capacity to do work, increased that capacity—through creating peat. But maybe it wasn’t a closed system. I had a great wish to know, to be thorough. A god could allow himself to be diverted by a study of this kind. I had to have more time, a year to myself, twenty thousand days, but instead as in a dream I had to settle for the things that were jammed together. The bog peat between Stornoway and Callanish wasn’t all from sphagnum.

If there were messages in the stones they would not be magic-markered on the base of the Great Menhir or on some huge arrowhead stone of the avenue.

Yes, said my host, there was Thanksgiving in the Western Isles, it was going to be made earlier next year, she’d heard, on account of the weather. She knew of no recent Americans, but a boy and a girl had come on a motorbike the other day and had stopped up at the stones and then later came back down and before they went away, the girl came to the door and asked for a drink of water. Yes the girl had light hair, the boy dark. They had rucksacks.

The woman did not ask anything except when I would like my tea.

She said, You’re American, and faintly smiled.

From my second-floor room, which seemed under its low ceiling to be bigger than my outside view of the cottage had made it look able to hold, I looked east over the bleak vale and moor along a black strip of trench to where the vacant road appeared. The light was lowering, but lowering slowly, respecting the great arc of the north.

It took me five minutes to walk past the few cottages and up through the gate to the stones, and then past a post with a Ministry of Monuments plaque which I did not read except the dates 2000–1500
B.C
. and felt from the southerly direction in which I now followed the right or west-side of the two lines of stones forming the avenue, weak reminders of the British Museum and the Highgate Scientific Institution with its white paint and peaceful newspaper room visited each morning by a stocky gentleman in a white beard to whom I had nodded for years, and the musty library in the back rooms and a book Jenny had taken out once when she was doing biology that told of plant freaks such as the squirting cucumber that builds up in its interior against its elastic casing such osmotic pressure taking water that anything can set it off—the stalk pops like a plug, and seeds squirt thirteen yards. Not the same thing as a bog-burst where peat or swamp having been bound in by the roots of bushes builds up water pressure till it lets go as a kind of mud flow. Think of a peat bomb.

The gate had no lock, the site no watchman. Few came. For that matter, why guard Stonehenge? Against the Welsh nationalist splinter group planning to return the bluestones to where they were quarried.

I didn’t have to be up in the air to see what I had here at Callanish.

A Celtic cross.

The long lower limb was the so-called avenue, a rungless ladder running roughly north to the arms, which were single lines reaching left or east and right or west. The top limb was another single line of stones pointing over the crest of the headland down toward the inland reach of the sea-loch that on the map looked so like a fjord—I stood here and a sodden paper cup caught my eye, and near it a flap of some plastic covering that seemed to have been half tucked under the next-to-last stone, probably a bag full of orange peel.

At the convergence of the four limbs was the circle of high irregular stones that may have stood for centuries before the cross was added, but more likely was itself added to efface some earlier system of heavenly worship using the avenue and perhaps the east and west single lines, which if true means that the upper limb of the cross was added with the circle. Yet looking at it and moved on a mood by Stonehenge much more even than by our strange scene of it, I couldn’t believe the circle wasn’t the basis. The circle was thirty-some feet across with the Great Menhir my peat man had named guarding the well-like cairn and standing more than twice my height like a freely sculpted quite flatly oblong headstone, its top blade canted upward north to south.

It was all meant. No question there.

Alignments east, west—and from what I’d heard about moon-set seen from here over Mount Clisham I could now just make out its slopes as the weakening light and the dimly dissolving cloud left the peak an issue, one stone of the top limb of the cross was leaning east but the stones were remarkably upright.

Meant, however, by who knew what interlapping desires? The constellation whose rise the red-haired woman had said she would wait for I guessed might be the Pleiades to the east—and the link of this with the end of the nineteen-year cycle of lunar revolution. But that rising here would have been virtually invisible to the naked eye, not just the Electra star always invisible out of shame for having married a human, but the other six daughters too. I ran my hand over the gray speckled roughnesses and looked east. I had loved Jenny too much. But I was not looking for her now. It was the film. But I knew now I was not sorry someone had destroyed the film. But I must know why they had.

A figure was on the road two or three miles to the east.

A man at a distance has no eyes.

If he knew where the Callanish stones from there were he still could not see me standing near the Great Menhir with the ruined tumulus and its pit at my back. From a distance the stones may seem to lean toward one another.

The Indian had not walked all the way so soon.

Maybe my man had met him, turned around, and completed his disquisition on peat.

The Ministry’s 2000
B.C
. was doubtless conservative; I did not know if radio-carbon dating had been used at Callanish but I did know that errors in the application of its use to Stonehenge had inclined less conservative archaeologists to start thinking about Stonehenge as being in the vicinity of the Pyramids.

The Indian’s pale trenchcoat was unmistakable if you knew to look for it. This was no time to ponder peat.

I looked toward Clisham, my tea was waiting. I turned back toward home. I reviewed what Krish might do.

Two children outside a cottage waved.

Lower down now I couldn’t see the figure on the road.

The crofter’s widow told me so readily and simply about the red-haired American woman when I sat down to my tea and about the man her husband who had met her here in March, that the news seemed old and meager. I said I knew her. I asked how long she had stayed. As I’d hoped, my host got out the book. It showed five days. The name given was Claire Wheeler, which despite my foresight in not saying the name Jan Graf or Jan Aut made me once more doubt she was Jan. But my host described the man her husband who met her on the fifth day as the same man who had come more than once before to Callanish over a period of a year and who had asked her questions she couldn’t answer about the stones. Had Jenny drunk her water in here?

I looked out the window. I had not seen the Indian. I said, Claire is a painter and Paul is an archaeologist.

My host at once said,
Paul
, that was his name.

So the red-haired woman had spent the night here with Paul some time after the spring equinox.

The Indian was nowhere in sight when I had a look out the window.

I had had a succession of small courses, chalky white bread and butter, toasted spam and two sausages and a fried egg, biscuits and some kind of currant bread in wedges. It was dark now and a free fatigue was upon me.

The woman did not know where Paul lived. I was too tired for a bath.

I felt as if I had not been quite conscious since Glasgow.

There was no chink for me to float in. I was the means by which two bodies either side of me could merge.

But gods can live on carbohydrates and not get like this.

I was upstairs.

I took off my new shoes sticky and getting stiff.

And at once I woke to moonlight and rain.

I did not have my clothes on and I was in the crisp-packed fresh bed that made me feel as if I’d taken a bath.

I was at the window, and the Indian Krish stood in moonlight in the road outside the widow’s gate and was looking right at me though he may not have seen me in the opacities of curtain and glass. It was as if his eyes had wakened me.

I dressed.

I looked again and he was still standing in the road but not in the same spot, as if he’d been moving till I’d looked.

I lit a match to see my socks and saw the wedding photo on the bureau that I’d seen in the hall upstairs and the room downstairs where I’d eaten. The men in their dark suits with the high shock of dark hair and skinned above the ears.

The front door when I got downstairs stuck as it opened, and I felt the widow’s eyes deep in her room come toward me like the cat-eyes of the Indian in his white trenchcoat as I stepped outside.

I approached him in the road, and he said, Don’t speak, you’ll make a noise. He pointed toward the end of the road where the Ministry’s fenced enclosure began and where the central stones on their eminence showed like negatives of shadows.