AFTER THE FIRST FORTNIGHT, Calum Mackinnon decided it might be better if he stopped talking to sheep and seabirds. He had the notion they were beginning to look at him oddly, as if they were starting to resent the way he kept intruding into their grazing or the manner in which they dipped and dived for fish. Instead, he wandered round the houses of Main Street, drumming at the doorway of each house with his fingers as he passed.
‘Madainn mhath, Iain… Good morning, John…’ he might say.
‘Feasgar mhath, Raonaid… Good evening, Rachel.’
For the first while, no one answered him, apparently preferring the gloom and silence that surrounded them in their homes to any human company. Undaunted, he might sit outside their houses and tell them what had brought him to these shores again.
‘It was after those idiots came here,’ he explained, speaking of how his exile had come to an end. He had been asked to return after a group of fishermen had arrived on the island, shattering windows and smashing doors, damaging roofs, knocking down chimney pots. After all that, some of the sheep and fulmars had succeeded in getting into number 12 and fouling the place. The birds had built their nests where old men and women used to perch for hours, chatting about all that was happening in the narrow confines of the world. He had spent some time cleaning this up, speaking as he did so to a young ram that occasionally felt bold enough to prod its nostrils in his direction; its fear of humans, perhaps, lessened by the fact that there were so few of them around these days.
‘I never knew people could act like that when I was on the island. No idea at all…’
It wasn’t long, however, before the people in the houses started talking to him again. At first, it was the women peeking out of the tartan shawls they wrapped around their faces, squeezing out a word or two.
‘It’s a fine day, Calum… A fine day.’
After that, made bold, perhaps, by their wives and mothers talking, it was the turn of the men to begin using their voices. At first, they might remonstrate with him. The missionary would quote Spurgeon in his direction, trying to bring his endless conversations to a halt.
‘There are times when solitude is better than society, and silence is wiser than speech,’ he might say, bringing his finger to his lips in an attempt to hush him.
But for all his advice, talk returned to the island, as slowly and determinedly as the tide. It might be Ferguson rambling on about his work in the Post Office, all the people for whom he stamped mail and postal orders during his years behind that counter.
‘They came from all over, Calum. Oban. Glasgow. Edinburgh. Even America…’
Or others talking about how they had lost sons on the cliff-faces, trying to capture the seabirds that still reeled above his head like those from his own household who had died near the rock they called the Mackinnon Stone. They were the ones who had coped. They were the ones who had survived in this place.
Slowly the tales and verses began to echo, the words he had heard in all the different houses he visited on the island…