CHAPTER EIGHT

THERE WAS AN INCIDENT during that winter that made a deep impression on Kenn. It had to do with the snaring of a rabbit, and it is not so much the dramatic interest of the affair that has lingered in his memory as the insight it gave him into his mother’s hidden mind.

While the snaring of birds was in the nature of a game, the snaring of rabbits, like the poaching of salmon, was akin to the deep-sea fishing upon which the family depended. As a sport it was intensified a thousandfold by the knowledge that it meant food for the home—at a time when it might be gravely welcome.

Kenn’s immediately older brother, Angus, was fifteen and the youngest member of the crew on his father’s boat. Kenn would have followed him anywhere, like a dog; and though Angus was good-natured and kind, he frequently sent Kenn home when setting out on ploys with youths of his own age. Sometimes Kenn would be stubborn and would follow. Angus would order him back. Kenn would still follow. Angus would hit him. Sobbing, half in rage, Kenn would persist. Then Angus would give him a proper hiding, and while Kenn was blinded with his tears, would, with his companions, take to his heels.

This was the usual educative process amongst the young of all families.

One Saturday afternoon in early February, Kenn’s brother Joe, who was three years older than Angus, came home for the weekend. That Joe, who with his natural feeling for the wild had been an expert poacher, should now be undergoing the process of conversion to a gamekeeper was the sort of joke that seemed inevitably right to everyone. Of middle height, he was broad-shouldered, explosively strong, and lithe as a cat; dark, with a pale skin, deep-brown eyes and a slow attractive smile. At the local Annual Games, he carried off the prizes for jumping. To Kenn, he was heroic.

This Saturday, he sent Kenn for three coils of snare wire, and out of the change gave him a penny to himself. Kenn did not want to take the penny. Joe smiled. Kenn flushed, and, when Joe invited him up to the old barn to help make the rabbit snares, he felt that life was very full.

For each snare four strands of yellow wire were smoothly twisted together by inserting a pencil through the end loop and turning it round and round. With Kenn’s help, Joe made the snares very deftly, while Angus cut and pointed the wooden stakes.

When everything was ready, Joe turned to Kenn and said that he had better run home. They wouldn’t be long and it was as well not to let everyone see what they were after. ‘So off you go, boy!’

The very kindness of the tone overcame Kenn. His heart was set on going with them, his whole being given to it. His lip began to quiver. His eyes filled.

‘Away home now, like a good lad! We won’t be long.’

Blindly Kenn began to follow them, dumbly, moved by a compulsion he could not control. Often when he had run after Angus he had been stirred by a stubborn rage. There was no rage in him now. He was desperately awkward, ashamed of what he was doing, yet he could not help himself. It was like walking in some dreadful nightmare.

Joe waited till he came near.

‘Where are you going?’ he demanded.

Kenn hung his head, his body twisting pitifully.

‘Didn’t I tell you to go home?’

The cold tone and the brown eyes were piercing him. He choked back his sobs.

‘Go home!’

He could not move. Joe was walking on again. He began to follow.

Joe waited a second time.

Kenn now knew that he would have to experience the bitter degradation of being slapped by Joe. Yet, like one drugged, he went towards him, and hung his head, his teeth clenched against his sobs, hands and legs writhing slowly.

Some dark power in this persistence came out to Joe and angered him unreasonably. His voice snapped: ‘Go home, or I’ll welt you!’

But Kenn could not go; he was imprisoned.

Because Joe was only on a visit, there was a reluctance in him to hit Kenn, to destroy his friendly, holiday feeling.

‘Ach, never mind him,’ suggested Angus with his half-derisive smile.

‘Go home, man!’ said Joe at last, in a tone of contempt, and abruptly turned away.

Kenn followed, but slowly now, and where the wire fence ran through the park, he stopped altogether. His two brothers never looked back and at last disappeared in the birch wood.

There was little feeling in Kenn now, as if all the excitement of the drug had passed and left only the misery. His sobs were spasmodic, a snuffling of tears in the nostrils. His body felt wretched and pummelled, like miry ground that had been trodden on.

Slowly his fingers, plucking at the wire fence, broke and untwisted a strand. Presently he found himself with about two feet of the wire in his hand, walking back towards the barn. He shut himself into the barn and with a stone began hammering out the little twists that were set in the wire at short intervals, pausing now and then to squeeze the wet sniff out of his nostrils. He had no real hope that a snare could be made out of this rough material. But when at last he had formed a little eye at one end and threaded the other end through it, a very natural noose was the result. It ‘ran’, too, pretty readily. If the rabbit happened to be going at speed, it would be bound to be all right.

In the drained misery of the body, a small point of warmth began to glow. It was growing dark inside the barn. He looked up at the cobwebbed skylight and heard the quiet of the coming evening. As he listened, something in the silence of twilight, that strange, grey silence that so often had had an air of menace or dreadful loneliness, was all at once if not exactly friendly at least beckoning in some intimate way, like a vanishing face.

He opened the door to the daylight and looked outside. There was no one about. A thrush was singing from the top of a tree in the plantation that separated the old barn and the grass park from the houses. There was a touch of green in the blue sky over towards the west; it shone through the wintry branches, making dark patterns of the bare twigs. In the air was a faint smell of the awakening earth, a wintry premonition of spring, like a scent of distant whin fires, not real so much as remembered vaguely from former springs, and, somehow, from springs going far back into time.

Quietened, he cast about him quickly, and soon had the stake that Angus had started whittling when Joe had said that eight snares would do. With his knife he sharpened the point and cut a little groove for the holding cord. In no time he had his snare all ready. He shoved it up under his dark-blue gansey and, closing the door behind him, set out for the birch wood.

He went warily, along by the edge of the plantation of deciduous trees; lingered on the cart road that skirted the birch wood so that anyone could see he was doing nothing in particular. Unnoticeably the wood absorbed him.

Now he was all alive again. As he stood, listening, he could hear the quick soft beat of his heart against near and distant sounds. Then quietly, taking care not to shake the small brown trees, he set off.

The birch wood covered the winding slope that rose from the flat river lands. Presently, well screened, Kenn stood looking down on these lands, on the river itself with its wooded island and its sluice for diverting part of its water into the mill lade, and, beyond the river, on the green braes that formed the opposing slope to what may in remote times have been an inland loch, bottle-necked where both slopes swept towards each other a little distance above the Well Pool.

Except for one woman in black, carrying a hand-basket of goods from Sans’ shop, no one moved on the path that followed the river. Carefully Kenn’s eyes ran along the twisting wooded slope looking for the slightest sign that would betray the presence of his brothers. But the trees were silent.

He did not know where Joe would set to work, as rabbits burrowed all along the braes, but he knew one or two likely places where the grassy outrun was full of tracks and very suitable for unobtrusive snaring.

Keeping to the birches, Kenn began his trek along the steep slope. His one fear now was that his brothers might discover him, and when he trod on a rotten stick he stopped instantly and listened with mouth open so that even his breathing might not dull his ears. For it would be unspeakably humiliating to be discovered by his brothers. He imagined himself coming upon them as they sat hidden and silent, and could hear not their anger but their derisive laughter. Moreover, some instinct told him that when they did reach the selected spot, they would sit down for some time to ‘feel’ the security of the place and ensure they had it to themselves.

Kenn was soon so strung up that his responses to sight and sound became abnormally acute. In everything, from the brown twigs and dark-silvered bark to the freshness of rabbit droppings in new ‘scrapes’, was a vivid reality, with the concealed power to surprise and startle. The wood had to be watched and its grasp avoided, while he passed through it. In fact his instincts so possessed the wood that to this day he can walk through it in his mind and feel the rough bark, see the crooked stem, slip in the brown earth, smell its exhalation, listen to its silence, and be unable to know where his own spirit ends and the wood begins.

When the thud! thud! of a stone driving home the stake of a snare fell on his ears, he drew up instantly, and over his face went a fugitive smile. He had them!

On tiptoe now, with a glee that held its breath, he threaded his way until he caught sight of them. Then he wormed himself into a thicket of young hazel.

They were setting their snares in a grassy bay, a secluded spot, just above the wood. They spoke in murmurs as they examined each rabbit track and proceeded to peg and set each snare. Their quiet movements fascinated Kenn. They were like actors in a play, withdrawn into a world of their own. Once Angus pointed with an eager finger; Joe looked and nodded; and Kenn knew that Angus was indicating a new track, still very faint because untrodden by the many, but all the more likely to be fruitful on that account. Then Joe got down on his knees and while the thud-thudding proceeded, Angus looked round on the world he had left.

When they had set all their snares, they turned and came straight towards Kenn, Joe rubbing his palms with a wisp of grass. ‘They should be good for one or maybe two,’ Joe said quietly as they reached the edge of the wood and swithered for a moment above the earthy declivity where the bank had recently fallen away, If they came to the left they would pass by Kenn’s thicket and certainly see him. It was the direct way home. His embarrassment became acute.

‘Ach, let’s go down by the Intake Pool,’ said Joe. ‘I haven’t been that way for a long time.’

They swung round and, as they passed away, a pellet of earth the size of a marble, reddish brown in colour, trickled down the face of the bank. So keen were Kenn’s senses that he seemed to see it actually rock in the earthy face, as if it were being pushed out by a serpent, and then followed it with extreme attention till it came to rest.

He was to remember that pellet of ground when death and its chances had himself as the thing to be snared.

Now with relief so complete that he became detached in a quiet wonder, Kenn began licking his bottom lip and smiling to himself, while his eyes stared at the tiny spots on the hazel wands. He touched the spots with his fingertips. There was no sound anywhere. He looked up through the delicate tracery of the branches at the evening sky. He turned his head over his shoulder. Shadows were creeping into the wood.

He chose his rabbit run or ‘roadie’ near the crest of a rise, arguing to himself that at such a spot a rabbit would ‘keep going’. He also made sure that he was not covering any of Joe’s snares. The sound of the thudding frightened him, for the evening was an echoing hollow. He was in the bottom of this hollow pinning it to the ground. The whole wood was listening. But he got the stake in, covered its head with grass, fixed the inner end of the wire in the slot of the ‘stickie’, poked the stickie into the earth between two leaps of the run, then smoothed out and tilted up the oval noose of the snare. It looked very well, for all the roughness of the grey wire, and he backed away from it, taking care not to leave his scent on the run. Then he turned and made off with such haste that he was at home before his brothers.

‘Where have you been?’ his mother asked him.

Out of his trousers’ pocket he took Joe’s penny and handed it to her.

‘Who gave you that?’ she asked, accepting it.

‘Joe.’

‘Are you hungry?’

‘Yes.’

He watched her put some milk in a pan. She was going to make milk-brose for him. He loved it, and suddenly felt very happy.

That evening he kept his distance from his brothers. But when, amongst other errands, his mother told him to go to the butcher’s for a sixpenny bone, the derisive amusement on their faces was very lively.

‘Don’t take any sort of bone,’ suggested Joe solemnly. ‘See there’s a good bit of meat on it.’

‘Shut up!’ said Kenn.

‘Quiet, you rascal,’ said his mother mildly.

Joe and Angus exhibited all the signs of suppressed mirth. They knew how Kenn hated going for the bone. It was a mean and unlordly order. They opened their mouths and chuckled silently.

Kenn’s moody anger increased.

But in the morning when Joe smiled to him in a friendly way and said, ‘What about coming to see what’s in the snares?’ he could only turn his face away.

‘Hsh!’ warned Joe, as they heard their father’s footsteps. It was a cloudy but dry Sunday morning. When the way was clear, he caught Kenn by the ear and led him round the corner of the house. Angus was already there.

‘Come on, boys!’ said Joe, and in an instant all the resentments Kenn had been piling up faded away.

They went through the plantation and, after a little scouting, were soon in the birch wood.

‘But if we get any rabbits, what’ll we do with them, seeing it’s Sunday?’ asked Angus.

‘Hide them till Monday,’ answered Joe.

‘But how could we catch them on Monday without setting the snares on Sunday?’ asked Kenn.

For it was wrong to do anything on Sunday, even to go for long walks. All work, including the brushing of boots, was done on Saturday night. Sunday was the Lord’s Day, the day of rest. The folk went outside only to feed the brute beast or attend divine service. Sunday—or ‘the Sabbath’ as the old always called it—was different from all week days. It was a day of sermons and prayer and psalm-singing and hushed gloom.

How exciting therefore to be going to visit rabbit snares in order to collect the fruits of poaching! Could anything be more awful?

But Joe did not seem to care a bit. And though Kenn knew that all this was wrong, he did not feel that it was evil. Joe’s easy-going, smiling air was friendly and reassuring.

‘That can be settled—when we see what we get,’ replied Joe, with a dry humour that made his brothers laugh.

And all the time Kenn had the extra exciting knowledge of his own snare. If there should be anything in it! How often already had he imagined a rabbit in his and none in theirs! He had said to himself, It might be. The end of the world might come tomorrow. No one could be certain it wouldn’t. But now all he could pray for was that his empty snare might not be seen. If it was seen, would he try to look astonished? His beating heart told him he wouldn’t succeed. Joe would only have to gaze at him for a moment and he would go all red and guilty.

He could not stand any more derision from his brothers. And his rough fence-wire! They would rock with laughter. They would roll on the grass, pretending to hold their bellies, even though it was Sunday. Indeed Kenn had the awful feeling that everything was intensified because it was Sunday, could in an instant be more reckless and rollicking.

And then they came to the edge of the wood and looked out on the grassy bay where the snares were set.

In after years when Kenn could deal with numbers and the theory of probability, he once amused himself by stating all the factors, and then working out the odds against his own primitive springe. They were so great that he would not seriously expect anyone to believe what did in reality happen. For as they stood on the edge of the wood, Kenn saw that the only snare with a rabbit in it was his own.

Joe’s brows were wrinkled. Angus looked puzzled. So used were they to the wild, that they could at any moment have produced a chart of the ground, of each run on it, and of the precise place of each snare.

‘That’s not ours.’ Joe spoke to himself; looked about him with some consternation, a little anxiety. Then he went towards the rabbit. It was a fine heavy brute and from the full-length throw of its body it had obviously killed itself outright.

Joe stooped to the wire. The incredulous look on his face was grotesque. He turned towards his brothers—and saw Kenn’s expression. The amazed exclamation died on his lips.

Kenn was deeply flushed. His eyes and fingers were restless. His smile was evasive and nervous. There was a gulping sensation in his throat. His eyes were deep with light as if drenched with dew.

‘You?’ questioned Joe.

Kenn made an affirmative sound. Joe sat plump on the ground.

To hide his emotion, Kenn tried to shove back the noose, but it had got too deeply entangled in the fur.

‘Right to the bone!’ Joe was so astonished he could hardly chuckle. He questioned Kenn; got the story out of him; and then lay back and laughed. Angus laughed too. They teased Kenn. They were delighted with the whole thing.

Kenn could see that Joe was proud of him.

It was a lovely morning. The grey of the sky was a soft spring mist that might part like a veil. The grey Sabbath gloom had vanished from the world. The trees were alive and their breath aromatic. The dampness of the earth was like the wet on Kenn’s lips. Birds chirped and sang. He had never known that a Sabbath could be a real day in this sweet, secret way.

It was arranged that Kenn should carry the rabbit into the back kitchen and hide it in a corner. But when this was done, Joe and Angus could not suppress the dangerous fun of going as near as possible to the point of telling their mother what had happened without actually touching it. Their father they took care to avoid.

But from the hints of the night before and out of a knowledge of the poaching ways of her sons, the mother gradually divined the truth. She let it be known that any conduct approaching that which had been hinted at would be unthinkable on the Sabbath day, and that nothing arising out of it could be brought into her house.

‘What’s that you’re saying?’ demanded the father, fixing his starched collar, his hair on end.

‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I don’t know what they’ve been up to.’

‘What?’ He looked at them suspiciously.

‘Nothing.’ Joe smiled, turning away. ‘Kenn just took us a little walk. That was all.’

His father looked sternly at Kenn. Joe winked to Angus.

‘Where were you?’ demanded the father.

‘Nowhere,’ muttered Kenn.

‘You’d better hurry up, the whole of you, or you’ll be late for church,’ the mother said.

And in that moment of time, Kenn knew not only that she was aware of what he had done and was shielding him, but also that when the rabbit was produced on the morrow she would accept it. And there and then was born in him a deep understanding of his mother, of something in her that transcended the religious observances in which she believed, that was bigger than place or time because it recognised the inexorable nature of the needs of daily life.

This impression, felt at the time as something that would free him from unhappy consequences, gathered its mythological value as the years went on, until now he can see her as the mother that abides from everlasting to everlasting.

    

Throughout that winter—throughout all winters—she was in truth the figure that tended the fire and dispensed life, and must often have created her bounty out of material resources so slender that their management assumed in Kenn’s thought an air half-magical.

For he has no clear memory of actual need or want; and certainly has none of the associations that must surely have been born out of destitution. Indeed the material anxieties that his parents must have had seem somehow to have made no impression upon him. Always one had only to ask one’s mother for food and the food would be there. Nor was there any pretence or undue concealment indulged in by his parents in the matter of running the home. There is perhaps something a little mysterious in this, and yet he imagines that he understands it at least to some extent. For it was all part of a way of life, in which with the winter supply of a few simple, cheap foods—oatmeal, potatoes, milk, fish—the bodily cravings, keyed by hunger, were met and satisfied, and often so completely that the memory of a meal can take on something in the nature of a pagan mass, where the eyes glance and smile out of the heart of life, the teeth flash, and all the senses are servitors.

It requires little effort of imagination on Kenn’s part now to watch his mother after she saw them off to church with their pennies or half-pennies for ‘the plate’.

She would stand for a time looking at them to see they were decently turned out; then she would go back into the empty house.

Thoughtfully she would fix the peats on end, until the flame was concentrated under the great black pot wherein the sixpenny bone was giving sweetness to the soup. Always on Sunday there was a special dinner; a heavy dinner, at which they all gorged themselves a little.

From the cooking fire she would go, still thoughtfully, into the back kitchen, there to stand a moment and cast her eyes about.

She is wondering now if the rabbit is actually here and, if so, where. Quietly she moves a tub and a herring basket, stoops under a low shelf, looks behind pots and pans, considers the coiled mass of a handline, and at last lifts the old bag in the corner. She contemplates the rabbit steadily, then puts the bag back, and so deep is her thought now that she goes to the back door and stares out. Some of the hens see her and come scurrying hopefully.

Without looking at them and without any impatience, she shoos them away.

The expression on her face is one of wise contemplation. There is something in it like the memory of a smile or the memory of kindness, but so elusively that it does no more than suggest character.

Her eyes, grey and wide-spaced, are lifted towards the trees of the plantation. Her straight dark hair is parted smoothly midway over her pale smooth forehead, and caught back behind the ears, so that the ears, flat to the head and shapely, are seen. All her features are shapely; and the skin has that unlined fullness that suggests the word comely.

Her heavy body is neither unshapely nor billowing, but is deep-bosomed and solid, and stands with quiet poise.

So vividly does Kenn become aware of her presence that he finds himself looking where she is looking as though he might glimpse the thing she sees. But the trees are quiet, save for the odd notes of birds, little twists of song, like twists of crystal water in sunlight. There is no sunlight, however. Beyond the trees the sky is grey, with the greyness not of wet clouds but of smoke, of distant promise. There is a soft warmth descending from it and penetrating the earth so that life stirs there in its sleep.

That is all she can see, and it is nothing strange. There is perhaps something a little strange in the silence that enfolds everything and that is only made all the clearer for the isolated bird notes and the croaking of a hen. But it is not the sort of silence one wants to listen to, any more than is the suggestion of immense distance in the dark moor-horizon the sort of thing one wants to stare at. For by listening and staring hard enough, one may become a little uncomfortable over one does not know what, as though Something might come quietly up over the hills of space that are also the hills of time, and suddenly be there before one (it being the Sabbath day) like the Spirit of God.

But a glance back at his mother’s face and the fear that accompanies every thought of God vanishes. So quiet and contemplative and abiding she is, that from the shelter of her skirts one may brave God and all the unknown and terrifying things that go back beyond the hills to the ends of the earth and the beginnings of time.

All the history of her people is writ on her face. The grey seas are stilled in her eyes; danger and fear are asleep in her brows; want’s bony fingers grow warm at her breast; quietly against the quiet trees the struggle of the days lies folded in her hands.

He can see her there in the moment of calm between struggle and struggle; in his generation and in the generation before, and far back beyond that till the ages are lost in the desert and she becomes the rock that throws its shadow in a weary land.

But he does not know what she is thinking.

And yet in the fugitive glimmerings of vision out of which the pattern of thought is woven, he can see himself away down on the field of her mind as a very tiny figure bringing his gift of the rabbit to the store that must never be empty or she and he and all mankind will pass away. And because of the impulse that moves him to do this, and of his love in doing it and his pride, he believes the glimmering spider-thread of his path is essential to the whole pattern, more essential in the ultimate, perhaps, than any observances of church or creed; and profoundly in her, without exercise of reason or logic, he believes his mother apprehends this, and bears the burden of it—as she bears the burden of all mortal things— against the earth and against the sky.

A quiet sigh breaks her abstraction and she turns away among the known things of her household; a short cough behind her closed lips has something in it of acceptance; her lips part in an unconscious ‘Yes’; and at the sound she stirs with a practical movement as if about to utter the familiar words, ‘Come away, bairns, to your food.’

But the house is empty, and, as the quietude of her mood is still upon her, she goes to the front door and looks forth on the folk going to church.

The church lies beyond the school in the middle distance of the slope of crofting land that rises slowly and irregularly to the horizon some two miles away.

Along the roads and pathways figures, singly or in twos and threes, are slowly converging on the place of worship. They are all dressed respectably in black. She cons their names to herself, for her eyesight is good, and in any case she knows the scattered houses they have come out of. ‘That is George Sinclair, and the boy, and the girl Mary—though it seems big for her.’ She sees the stocky figure of Alick Manson of the loud voice—with his young family some distance behind him. The shepherd from Bunessan, though far away, can be distinguished by his walk. Little groups from crofting townships on both sides of the strath have their individual characteristics, and she thinks of them in terms perhaps of one or two women who call on her or of a man among them who may drive peats and be well known and liked. Up over the steep rise from the harbour, ‘the shore folk’ are now appearing. ‘There is a good turnout today.’ She recognises this figure and that, but is occasionally a little doubtful, and her mind wanders among questions of illness and recovery, and wonders with a touch of pity or of calm acceptance. Her husband and her three sons are getting on towards the school. Her eyes find them now and then with a remote detached pleasure. It is good to have your men folk going quietly to church; to have nothing in the family to be ashamed of. It is the goodness above all for which one should be thankful; for what success or position or worldly wealth can be weighed in the balance against ‘a bad name’?

The feeling of this goodness flows over her like soft bright air.

Soon the church has drawn all the dark figures into itself and left the landscape empty.

During the sermon and the singing and the prayers she goes quietly about her business of preparing the Sunday dinner. They will be hungry when they come home and she is glad to have her son Joe with her. He looked well today in his new navy-blue suit. …

    

Kenn wonders now why it is that she rarely went to church— until it occurs to him to consider other mothers of families in the neighbourhood, and to realise, with some surprise, that very few of them went.

The main excuse would doubtless be that they had the house—and perhaps a young child or two—to look after and the dinner to cook.

But he is certain there was something more to it than that, something of age-old custom. She need not go to church and yet no harm will come to her. In man’s spiritual aspiration, she is forgotten or ignored. In his ascetic moments, she is seen darkened with passion, soiled with the pain of creation, bearing the burden of sin. So long has she been outside the mysteries and cults and secret associations man has made for his own pleasure and importance, that she is beyond the ethic of each age and every age, as life itself is, and continues as life continues, and endures as the hills endure. Possibly it was some such dim apprehension of her state that made Kenn conceive of her as being from everlasting to everlasting.

And if there appears to be mystery here, in the woman’s own mind there is no mystery. Kenn’s mother did not go to communion on the Sabbath of the Sacrament simply because she believed she was not worthy. Never in her life did she sit at communion table, never broke the bread nor drank the wine. She had done nothing to make herself unworthy. She was seen in her life as a good woman and without reproach.

Yet she believed herself unworthy and accepted her condition in the calm spirit with which she had turned away from the back door and gone to the front to see the worshippers drawn into the church.

It was a humility that was never confessed, as if the core of it were a shyness delicate as the compassion of Christ.

Neither, however, did her husband, who attended church regularly, go to communion. When the tables were being ‘fenced’ by the ministers, he and his brother seamen remained in their seats, worshipping with prayer and praise. When shots of herring had been plentiful and the quays of Stornoway or Castlebay or Wick had been quick with life, they had looked on the whisky when it was raw and sang and dared and danced. They knew their lives in the past had not contained enough solemnity of holiness to justify them in going forward to the tables. They were in act and fact not good enough. And should a drop of whisky come their way at any time they would, God help them, not pass it by.

They worshipped decently and quietly, strong incurious men, with no envy in their hearts. To this position they had been called and they would maintain it without fear; and if their church had been a vessel in distress, with the bread and wine its cargo, they would there and then have undertaken to navigate it through the brimstone loch of hell, and on getting a fair discharge would have set off again for another shot, leaving respectfully the elders, and the holy widows, and the old maids to the glory of the Kingdom.

Kenn has promised himself that sometime he will try to find out how it came about that Jesus had fishermen for his disciples; though it may be difficult to contemplate, without a smile, the Loch of Galilee over against the thunder of the northern seas.

If it may thus appear that woman was outside the mystery, at which her husband at least assisted, the final scene of that Sabbath comes back into Kenn’s mind with an odd mixture of amused excitement and reverence.

His mother is sitting in her hard chair by one side of the fire; his father, at the opposite side, has induced a mood of silence and preparation.

‘Let us take the Books,’ he says, in a voice withdrawn from them. He turns over the pages of the big Bible. ‘Let us read the eleventh chapter of the Gospel according to St John.’

When they have all got the place in the small print Bibles, he looks at Kenn the youngest, who starts and hurriedly mutters through the first verse: Now a certain man was sick, named Lazarus, of Bethany, the town of Mary and her sister Martha.

In a clear voice, Joe reads the second verse; and is followed, sunwise, by his father, his mother, and Angus.

Now this is the chapter that contains the shortest verse in the Bible, namely, Jesus wept. It is verse thirty-five. It has always been a game amongst the boys that it is hard luck to get a long verse or one with difficult names and embarrassing to get one dealing with certain bodily organs or acts. But to get the shortest verse in the Bible is to score.

There was a certain shyness and fear about this public reading. When Kenn had got over his first verse, he immediately began ‘counting out’ to find the lucky one. Angus, who had been quicker on the count, was waiting for him, and, closing his left eye, shoved out his tongue.

The droll mockery excited Kenn irresistibly. Joe nudged him with his knee. He stumbled so badly over his next verse that his father looked at him. He grew red and terribly confused.

The reading went on. Twice Angus coughed importantly.

And said, Where have ye laid him? They said unto him, Lord, come and see, said his mother.

Jesus wept, said Angus.

There was silence.

Kenn’s mother sat quiet and aloof. She did not even look at her young son. Correction here lay with the man of the house.

Kenn gulped— Then said the Jews—and gulped again— Behold how he loved him!

While his father was still looking at him, his eyes whipping-angry under ridged brows, Joe quietly read the next verse.

Kenn did not look up. Tears were not far away. Then he heard his father’s voice going on as if nothing had happened.

His shame was held by a strange and petulant fear. He could not look up; could not look anywhere. The figure of Jesus, weeping.

Joe had read on to cover him up. And then his father. There was that bigness about them. And though he saw this, he resented it, too.

The reading of the chapter over, his father meditated a little while, then turned to the twenty-third psalm. The Lord’s my shepherd, I’ll not want. …

While he read the psalm, the fingers of his free hand crushed audibly against the rough skin of the palm. His voice was charged with fervour, and his head moved as if he were telling the lines to himself in a lonely place.

He finished and there was silence.

The mother was sitting upright in her hard chair, the Bible closed on her lap, her face towards the fire. Without a movement of her body she began singing the psalm.

These first notes of his mother’s voice always had a strange effect on Kenn. They were balanced and unhurried; they sang with grace and calm; their rhythm entered his breast, took possession of it on a surging swell, surging upward and out of him, on great, slow, expanding rings, till the floor of heaven itself was circled and sustained.

After a little time, Kenn joined in, his voice moody and muttering, but gradually thinning and growing clear, yet never quite winning free of the jealous burden of self- consciousness. When the singing ended, they all got down on their knees on the stone floor, put their elbows on their chairs, and bowed their heads.

His father prayed for a long time, and he prayed well and fluently and without a pause or stutter. There were phrases that he used every Sunday night; favoured quotations from the Bible were frequent and apt; yet the whole was always a new creation.

It could not be otherwise and come so winged from the heart. In the urgency of his supplication, his voice rose and fell. The power of God was like the power of the sea. He had to navigate the sea, to cry out in the storm, to be quick in his flesh and his spirit if he were not to founder in the wrath to come.

The heart of the seaman in utter humility, open and laid bare, was yet the heart of the seaman who, lashed to his tiller in a winter’s storm, fought the real sea with a grim and even exultant courage. There were stories of seas fought through that brought the shiver to Kenn’s spine.

The abiding calm of his mother, old as the earth; the cleaving force of his father, like the bow of his boat.

Kenn became aware of the stealthy movement of Angus’s body. But even in the very moment of making up his mind that he would not look at him, he turned his head and at his brother’s mockery stuck out his tongue to the root. Then, feeling better, he bowed his head again.

‘… and all we ask is in Thy name. Amen.’