The Road Dance

1

LIFE ON THIS ISLAND was a constant struggle against the raw power of nature. It lay on the very western edge of Europe and was first to bear the brunt of the uninterrupted Atlantic storms and last to feel the warmth of the continental air streams from the south. It was the outpost of the continent, and it had about it the wildness and harshness of the frontier.

Boils of rock betrayed the thinness of the soil; like eruptions on a pale face, they were evidence that this was not a healthy land. The people survived the poor earth and stood against the driving rain and constant wind. With the yield from their crofts, their beasts and the sea, the people survived, and they thanked God for His goodness and sang His praise. The seeds of faith sown in a foreign land in a different millennium had no deeper, stronger root than here, here where the soil was thin but the soul was fertile.

For six days of the week they toiled in the harshness of the land He bequeathed them, and on the seventh day they thanked Him for it. Eternal peace and salvation brought joy to those who believed, although their faces when in church to hear His word showed little exaltation.

This was the only world Kirsty MacLeod knew, but she dreamed of more. There had always been restlessness within her; it was the very essence of her. She read in her Bible of peoples and of lands so different from anything she knew. Her father would enthral her with his tales from the ports he docked at down the west coast and further over to the east. For a girl who’d never left her own district, there was an excitement about all that was beyond her.

Ten years before, a ship had arrived on the sea loch. It had come to take some émigrés away to the Americas. The sight of the ship thrilled her.

‘Did God make that, Father?’ she had asked in wonder.

‘No, my darling, that was made by men.’

‘How could men make something so big, Father?’

‘It takes hundreds of men to build big ships like that. And they go all over the world. They bring tea back from India, silk from China, tobacco from America. And they take things from here back to these countries. Sadly they take our people away too.’

‘A boat like that has been to America, Father?’

‘Many times. A boat like that will have crossed the ocean many’s a time. That boat you see there has probably been to places like New York and more.’

‘But no one ever comes back from New York, Father. Mam told me so.’

Her father chuckled.

‘Your Mam might well be right, m’dear. No person might come back from New York, but the ships,’ he said with admiration, ‘ships like that can come and go to New York as often as the wind.’

‘But why do the people not come back?’

‘Oh there are many reasons. Money more than anything. It is a lack of money that makes them go and the same that stops them coming back. And a lot of them don’t ever want to come back. It’s a grand life some of them have over there, better than they could ever have here. There is nothing for them to come back to.’

‘But this is home.’

‘It comes to us all. We all leave home sometime, it’s just that some travel further than others. Home is where you make it. And in America, from what I hear, it’s a better place to have a home.’

‘Would you like to have your home in America Father?’

Her father was silent for a moment as he looked to the ship before he stooped and swept her up in his strong arms.

‘How could I have my home in America while I have my own big girl right here on the island? You’re here, your Mam is here and Neil and Annie. This is my home.’

Years on she remembered the bubbling emotions of that day. Young men struggling to contain their tears as their mothers, faces crushed in sorrow, hugged them for the last time. The bewilderment of children too young to understand what was happening, the only certainty amidst the rabble being the instruction they had to hold tight to their tiny bit of luggage. One boy, maybe three years younger than herself, sat on top of a trunk with both hands wound round the handle of a black kettle. She had felt strangely envious of him, knowing the adventure that lay ahead of him. It had been the source of much guilt for her. How did Annie, her twin, love being at home so much, helping her mother, while Kirsty dreamt of being far away? Perhaps she loved her mother and father less, though she knew she loved them plenty.

Rowing boats had taken the travellers from the pier to the boat, and Kirsty had stayed for much of the afternoon watching the embarkation while her father had helped row the boats out. Some would sit waving repeatedly at those they had just left until they climbed onto the ship. Even then, they quickly returned to the decks to look back at the world they were leaving and would continue to do so until it fell away behind the horizon.

There were others, though, having said their goodbyes, who were now looking ahead to their future. Kirsty was captivated by one young woman who had climbed onto her father’s boat with only a trunk and a bag. She was travelling alone and no one had come to say farewell. Kirsty had fantasised about who she might be and why she was alone. The woman had sat quietly in the rowing boat and had not looked back once. She had graciously accepted assistance to get onto the ship and then she was gone from view.

Kirsty was only a young girl, but the images and feelings of that day had never left her. Even now she wanted to be like that mysterious woman. She knew that so many who had been forced to sail away longed to return. The songs of the émigrés yearned for home. They may be prosperous in the New World, but home was the island they knew they would never see again, and how they wept for it. Kirsty could not understand why they cried. They may have had to leave to find work, to make a life for themselves, but that they had surely done. Not for them the back-wrenching labour of cutting the peat, lifting the potatoes, scything the hay and gutting the herring; the constant work, from the setting of the fire and milking the cow in the morning to the covering of the embers late at night. Those gone wrote of factories, huge buildings where hundreds, even thousands worked. And when the day was done they were free. She wanted to join the generations who had gone before, to go to the big cities where the letters said the buildings scraped the sky, and jobs and land were to be had by all. It sounded like the land of dreams, a New World for a new life. And whenever she looked to the west Kirsty so longed for that.

She lived near the end of the village road, a few hundred yards from the shore. Like most others in the settlement, the house was a Black House; a single-level dwelling which seemed almost to cling to the earth from which it had been torn. Solid chunks of stone arranged closely, with a thatched roof. It was so perfectly suited to its environment that it looked almost as natural as the moorland itself. In a place where the wind never rested it found the house of rocks a doughty barrier, with the moist earth between the wall cavities forming a final line of defence. Cattle were sheltered at one end of the house and the family lived in the other, separated by a small entrance lobby. Five of them shared two rooms: Kirsty’s parents slept in the living area, Kirsty, her twin sister Annie and brother Neil in the only bedroom. The house smelled of peat smoke and strong tea.

Kirsty was a handsome girl and she knew it. She knew that her shy smiles and cheerful laughs kept the boys looking at her for that second longer. Sometimes, when she passed, a group of them would share a confidence, a laugh and a snigger. There was something of the beast about them at times. They would tease her and banter with her. They would boast of the bull they had calmed, the storm they had endured at sea or the haul of fish they had landed. She would listen and she would laugh, but she would never believe.

Her mother told her how lovely she was, how bright her eyes were; ‘You have such beautiful red hair,’ she would say, as she brushed it at night. Ordinarily it was tied up close to her head beneath a scarf, but at the dances it would shake free and tumble around her shoulders bringing warmth, light and colour to her face, like the sun setting over the sea. And she would laugh and the boys would whoop as they spun her ever faster. And Kirsty would always be spinning and reeling, be it during the winter ceilidhs in the village hall, or in the road dances during the midsummer when darkness barely cast its cloak. And when the boys danced with her, they would hold her as close as they dared in their rough way, and as they sent her spinning onto her next partner their fingers would slip down her arm relishing the touch of her for as long as they could. And although their fingers may leave her, their eyes never did.

Old Peggy thought Kirsty a little too flighty for her own good. Something about the way she carried herself and the way she giggled. But then Old Peggy thought anyone who didn’t clad themselves in joyless colours was frivolous. Old Peggy would tell anyone who listened, and because she was an elderly widow and the village matriarch, people did listen. She would even tell Kirsty herself. ‘You watch yourself, girl,’ she would say.

Kirsty knew what the old harridan meant – closeness to the boys led to trouble. She’d heard the story of a girl in the village who had had a child. It had happened many years before, but the story was still told and retold. Like the flowers of the machair, it flourished in the right conditions. Like as not that would be a wet and wild night with a gathering at a house. The songs would have been sung and the poems and legends spun. The village gossip would be passed around like a communal quaich, often lighthearted, sometimes with a hint of scandal. Then there might be an oblique reference, a question of detail, and the legend of Mary Horseshoe’s daughter would blossom in all its tragedy.

Although most had heard it, few were capable of telling it. Those who could had refined their narrative over many years and recitals; each pause had its place, every look and glance laden with meaning, each sigh drawing out the drama. And as the years passed, the storytellers capable of reliving the events of nearly four decades before had diminished in number. Old Peggy remembered. Old Peggy had been there and Old Peggy would never forget, nor let succeeding generations forget.

Kirsty had never known the girl, although her mother lived in a house below the road as it curled back on itself round a rocky outcrop. The Horseshoe, it was called, and the old lady was known as Mary Horseshoe. Kirsty knew her as a quiet, timid woman who would avoid your gaze even as she spoke to you, for all the speaking that she ever did. She was stooped and frail and the story had it that she had been stooped ever since the night her daughter’s screams had heralded the birth of a child, a child that no one expected. The girl herself had barely understood what was happening, they said. Only as the months passed had the awful realisation dawned on her as she saw her stomach swell and felt the flutterings inside, and even then she did not know for sure, but guessed from what she had seen of other women. The long tweed skirts and woollen cardigans and shawls had kept her secret until it could be kept no more. She could not even seek help from her mother and the other older women of the village because they did not know and they could not know. It was only when the waters broke and the blood seeped and the pain pushed the girl to hysteria that anyone knew.

In time-honoured tradition, older women from the village came to help. There were no medical textbooks to follow, but there was the experience of generations of women who had nothing to support them but the sisterhood of other women who knew what needed to be done because they had been through the same themselves so often before.

The community helped bring the child into the world, was a part of it as it passed through its life, and stood over it as it was laid to rest in the burial ground.

It had been so different for this child, a boy with a thatch of black hair and lungs that had forced the sound of his cry along the village road. By the following evening there was no more crying to shatter the night. The bastard child was gone, huddled away to the other side of the island. No one knew where he had gone from there, but Old Peggy said he had been taken to the mainland. Instead of watching a child grow to manhood the village saw a legend mature.

As for the girl who had mothered the child, she too disappeared. There were stories of her moving to a family on another island, of her following the child to the mainland, but those who nursed her that night recalled that she had never returned from the wild frenzy of her childbirth. She had been taken away in a cart, huddled in a shawl with her mother’s protective arm around her. She had been trembling like a puppy. Her father had not even been able to wave farewell, his love for his daughter soured by disgust. Her disgrace was his shame. He had failed in his guidance of her.

Mary Horseshoe returned the following day, walking up the road from the bridge, her shawl pulled tight around her head to keep out the wind and the questions. She never again spoke of her daughter in public. And even at night in the privacy of the darkness and her home, her husband never asked. Now the only one who really knew where she had gone was Mary Horseshoe and she never said and she never travelled.

No one knew who the father of the child had been. There were stories of the girl’s friendships with this boy or that. The pier on the sea loch was a landing place for fishermen from other parts of the country, sometimes even from different countries. And some of the girls would have gathered to work with the fish and sometimes just to watch these exotic strangers with their strange accents and unusual ways. There were those who said that she misunderstood the rituals and had been drawn too far by one of those men from far away. Even darker allegations were hinted at, never uttered, but insinuated by a look or a mumbled mutter. Wasn’t her brother a strange one? Whoever he was, wherever he was, the father of her baby was away from her now, abandoning her to her fate.

At the church the minister softly asked for compassion for the girl and prayed for health for the child and said that in time God would reveal why He had allowed such pain. It was not for man to know such things, but to accept that the Lord worked in mysterious ways. For a few moments he had rested his hands on the pulpit, his head sunk below his shoulders as if he was weighed down by the sorrow of it all.

And then he condemned; this was a lesson to all the young, that looking away from the Lord was to look towards Hell itself. And although everlasting torment was the certain end for those who did not believe, there could be a living Hell for those on earth, when acts not worthy of the Lord could lead to heartbreak and suffering. Face away from the Lord and you face blackness even in sunlight. The shame brought upon a household in the village was the work of evil, and the Devil would stop at nothing to ensnare you. Every impure thought, every moment your mind strayed from His Glory, every temptation was Satan grasping to you, drawing you to him, enslaving you. The Lord worked in wondrous ways, but the Devil was never far behind.

For an hour and more he blistered the congregation before him, his eyes scorching from face to face, his chest heaving like bellows to the flame. The flushed red of his neck and face stark against the white dog collar told everyone that this was a Man of God. His voice rose and fell like the stormy sea. The people before him were at his mercy, tossed from peak to trough by the power of his rage against sin. And in their midst sat Mary Horseshoe, pressed against the pew by the force before her.

When he was done and had entreated that the grace and peace of the Lord be with them all now and forever more, they filed out, still trembling. The memory of it burned through the decades. Mary Horseshoe had walked home that Sabbath as so many before, but despite the people walking with her, she walked alone.

In the years that followed many a girl heard the story of Mary Horseshoe’s daughter. And if, like Kirsty, the girl was popular with the boys, the story carried a warning. Kirsty understood the message and it left its mark on her as it did the others. Paul had written to the Ephesians of the mystery of man and wife becoming one flesh. The intimacy between man and woman was for marriage alone and for now, for Kirsty, that must wait. She knew she could have her pick of the men, but she wanted none of them. That would bind her to the island.

Iain Ban told her, she couldn’t remember how often, of the croft he was to take over from his ailing father, his plans to build one of the new style of houses which were appearing on the island. White Houses they were called, two storeys high with slate roofs and a kitchen with a stove. Iain had his plans alright: more sheep, more cattle and a new loom for the weaving. Iain wanted to have money in his pocket. He made it clear he wanted to have Kirsty too. And Iain Ban was a real catch, a tall powerful man who had the look of the Vikings from whom he was descended. Iain Ban, they called him, White Iain. He was the prime of his generation in the district and the district thought that whoever Iain chose, Iain would have. Who could not wish to be his wife? He would speak to Kirsty after church, he would walk her home from the village store, all the while telling her of what he was doing to his land and the prospects for his beasts. The time would come soon when he would need someone to be there with him and what a life they would