Entry Island (11 page)

We crouched down behind the chicken wire at the door and peered into the fire room. The iron lamps that hung from the rafters gave off the stink of fish liver oil, cutting through the acrid peat smoke that rose from the fire in the centre of the room.

It was full of people. All women, except for my father. Annag clutched my arm, tiny fingers bruising my flesh. ‘The midwife came ten minutes ago,’ she whispered, and paused. Then, ‘What’s a midwife?’

There had been enough births in my short life that I knew the midwife was the woman who came to help
with the delivery. But, actually, she was just one of our neighbours.

‘She’s come to take the baby from
mamaidh
’s belly,’ I told her. And I saw her bent over the prone figure of my mother in the box bed at the far side of the room.

I am not quite sure now how I could tell, because there was no outward sign of it, but there was panic in the fire room. Silent panic that you could feel, even if you couldn’t hear or see it. Water was boiling in a pot hung from the chain above the burning peats. The other women were busy washing bloody rags and my father stood looking on helplessly. I had never seen him so powerless. He had a word for every occasion, my father. But right then he had nothing to say.

I heard the midwife urging, ‘Push, Peigi, push!’ And my mother screamed.

One of the neighbours gasped, ‘It’s coming out the wrong way.’

I had attended many animal births and knew that the head should come first, and straining my eyes through the smoke and shadows I could see the baby’s arse between my mother’s legs, as if it were trying to climb in and not out.

One at a time the midwife carefully freed the baby’s legs, then turned and twisted to release first one arm, then the other. It was a girl. A big baby, but her head was still inside my mother, and there had been a dreadful tearing of the flesh. I could see blood on my mother’s legs and on the hands of the midwife. I could see it soaking into the sheets.
There was sweat glistening on the face of the birthing woman as she tilted the baby up, one hand searching for its upturned face, trying to ease it free. But still the head wouldn’t come.

My mother was gasping and crying, and the neighbours were holding her hands and softly urging her to be calm. But everyone in the room knew that if the baby’s head were not freed quickly, the newborn would suffocate.

Suddenly the midwife leaned over, cradling the baby’s body in one arm, her free hand feeling across my mother’s belly for the head inside of her. She seemed to find it, and took a deep breath before pushing down hard. And, ‘Push!’ she shouted at the top of her voice.

My mother’s scream brought soot dust tumbling from the rafters and turned my blood cold. But in the same moment, my new little sister’s head popped out, and with a sharp smack on her bloodied arse she drew breath and echoed her mother’s cry.

But my mother was still in distress, and the baby was taken quickly away, wrapped in blankets. Fresh sheeting was brought to try to stop my mother’s bleeding. The midwife caught my father’s arm and he dipped his head to hear her whispered advice. Her face had the white pallor of the dead.

My father’s eyes burned like coals and he came running for the door, almost falling over Annag and me as we tried to scramble out of his way. He yelled out and grabbed me by the collar of my threadbare tweed jacket, and I thought I was in
trouble for being where I shouldn’t. But he brought his big whiskery face down next to mine and said, ‘I want you to go for the doctor, son. If we can’t stop the bleeding your mother’s going to die.’

Fear shot through me like a bolt from a crossbow. ‘I don’t know where the doctor lives.’

‘Go to the castle at Ard Mor,’ my father said, and I heard the anxiety that choked back the words in his throat. ‘They’ll get him quicker than any of us. Tell them your mother’ll die if he doesn’t come fast.’ And he turned me around and pushed me out, blinking, into the daylight, charged with the saving of my mother’s life.

Propelled by a mixture of fear and self-importance, I ran pell-mell up the slope between the blackhouses and on to the path cut into the hillside. I knew that if I followed it far enough, it would take me to the road that led to the castle, and although I’d never been there I had seen it from a distance and knew how to find it. But it was a long way. Two miles, maybe more.

The wind hit me as I crested the hilltop and nearly knocked me off my feet. I felt the rain spitting in my face, as if God was contemptuous of the efforts of one small boy to save his mother. That, after all, was His business.

There was no way I could keep up that pace, but I knew that time was of the essence, so I slowed to a trot that would eke out my reserves of energy and at least get me there. I tried hard not to think as I ran, switching my focus between
the path ahead and the bleakness of the rocky, treeless hills that rose around me. Low clouds bumped and bruised the land, and the wind whipped through my clothes, tugging at the nails I used as buttons to keep my jacket shut.

Vistas appeared and disappeared. I spotted the curve of a sandy cove between a spur of hills. In the distance dark purple mountains were ringed by clouds, and through an opening to my left I saw the standing stones on the rise beyond the big beach that we called simply Traigh Mhor. And still I ran. Settling to a pace that numbed my thoughts and calmed my fears.

At last I saw the road winding across the hills ahead of me. It was rutted and muddy, rainwater gathering in cart tracks and potholes. I turned north on to it, splashing through the puddles, feeling my pace slow as my strength was sapped. The land seemed to fold itself around me, closing off the sky. I could remember seeing men labouring to build this road, but the stones they laid were lost in the mud, and the ditches they dug were full of water.

I pumped my arms as I ran to try to get more air into my lungs, and then I came to a sudden standstill as I rounded a blind bend in the road. Ahead of me a horse-drawn trap was overturned in the ditch. The horse lay on its side, still attached to the trap, whinnying and struggling to get to its feet. But I could see that one of its hind legs was hopelessly broken. They would shoot the poor beast for sure. But there was no sign of a driver or passengers.

The rain began to fall in earnest as I approached the upturned vehicle. I jumped down into the ditch, which was half-hidden by the trap, and there sprawled among the roots of dormant heather lay a little girl, blue skirts and black coat fanned out around her, black hair pinned up under a royal blue beret. Her face was deathly pale, and the contrast with the bright red blood oozing from the gash at her temple was stark. Lying beside her, on his back in the ditch, was a middle-aged man, his top hat resting some feet away. His face was completely submerged, and somehow magnified by the water. Bizarrely his eyes, like saucers, were wide open and staring up at me. I felt myself trembling with the shock of it, realising that he was quite dead and that there was nothing I could do.

I heard a tiny voice moan, then cough, and I turned my attentions back to the little girl in time to see her lids flicker open and reveal the bluest eyes.

‘Can you move?’ I asked her.

But she looked back at me with vacancy in her face. A little hand reached up to grab the sleeve of my jacket. ‘Help, help me,’ she said, and I realised that she was speaking English, which I couldn’t understand any better than she understood my Gaelic.

I was afraid to move her in case there was something broken and I did more damage. I took her hand and felt the chill in it, and I knew that I couldn’t leave her there in the cold and the wet. I had seen how exposure to the elements could take a life in no time at all.

‘Tell me if it hurts,’ I said to her, knowing she couldn’t understand, and she looked at me with such confusion in her eyes that it almost brought tears to mine. I slipped one arm beneath her shoulders, and the other into the crook of her knees, and carefully lifted her up into my arms. She was smaller than me, younger by maybe a couple of years, but still she was heavy, and I could not imagine how it would be possible to carry her all the way to the castle. But I knew I must. And now I felt the weight of responsibility for two lives in my hands.

She did not cry out, so I was encouraged to believe that nothing was broken. She flung both arms around my neck to hold on to me as I climbed back up on to the road and started off again at a trot. I had gone no more than a couple of hundred yards before the muscles in my arms were screaming with the pain of supporting her weight. But I had no choice other than to carry on.

After a while, I fell into a loping rhythm, somehow managing to keep my forward momentum. From time to time I looked down at her. Sometimes her eyes were closed and I feared the worst. At others I caught her gazing up at me, but she seemed almost fevered and I was not sure if she really saw me at all.

I was at the end of my tether, ready to drop to my knees and give up, when I rounded another bend, and there ahead of me was Ard Mor. The castle sat on a spur of land that jutted out into a rocky bay. Lawns extended from the front of
it to a crenellated wall with cannon aimed across the water, the hill rising steeply behind it. The road wound down to a clutch of estate workers’ cottages, and a stone archway led to the castle grounds.

The sight of it gave me fresh energy, enough of it anyway to stagger the final few hundred yards, past the cottages and through the arch to the big wooden front door of the castle itself. Laying the little girl down on the step in front of me I pulled the bell ring and heard it sound somewhere distantly inside.

It is hard to describe the maid’s expression as she opened the door, her pink face wide-eyed with astonishment above her black blouse and white pinny.

And then, it seemed, I lost all control of events, as servants were called to carry the little girl into the castle, and I was left standing in the big stone-flagged hall as people ran around like mad things. I saw the laird on the stairs, his face pale and etched with concern. I heard his voice for the first time. But I didn’t understand his English.

No one paid me the least attention and I began to cry, desperately afraid that I had failed my mother and that she was going to die because I had been deflected from the purpose of my errand. The maid who opened the door hurried across the flags and knelt beside me, consternation in her eyes. ‘What’s wrong?’ she said to me in Gaelic. ‘You have done a brave thing. You have saved the life of the laird’s wee girl.’

I clutched her hand. ‘I need the doctor to come.’

‘The doctor’s been sent for,’ she said reassuringly. ‘He’ll be here in no time.’

‘No, for my mother.’ I was close to hysteria then.

But she didn’t understand. ‘Whatever do you mean?’

And I told her about my mother, and the birth of my little sister, and the bleeding. Her face paled.

‘Stay here,’ she said, and she hurried away up the big staircase.

I stood there for a miserable eternity, until she returned at a run and knelt beside me again, a warm, comforting hand brushing the hair from my eyes. ‘As soon as he has seen to Ciorstaidh, the doctor will go with you to Baile Mhanais.’

I felt a huge wave of relief. ‘Ciorstaidh,’ I said. ‘Is that the name of the laird’s daughter?’

‘Aye,’ she said. ‘But they call her by her English name. Kirsty.’

*

I’m not sure now how much time it took for the doctor to come and see to Ciorstaidh. But as soon as he was done we set off on his horse, back along the road towards my village. At the overturned trap we stopped. The horse was still alive, but had almost given up the struggle. The doctor took a look at the man in the ditch. He stood up, grim-faced. ‘Dead,’ he said. Though I could have told him that. ‘Ciorstaidh’s tutor from Glasgow. Only been here six months.’ He got back on his horse and half turned to me. ‘If you hadn’t brought her back to the castle, son, she’d have died out here from the exposure.’

He hit the horse’s flank with his crop and we set off at a gallop, until we reached the turn on to the path and had to slow to let the horse pick its way gingerly among the stones and heather roots, before descending the hill finally to the village.

Somehow, it seemed, they had managed to stop my mother from bleeding any further and she was still alive. The doctor was led into our fire room, and Annag and me were hustled outside to wait in the rain. But I didn’t mind. It seemed that I had saved two lives that day, and I related the whole story to my wee sister, all puffed up with pride in the telling of it.

Then my father came out, and the relief on his face was visible to both of us. ‘The doctor says your mother should be all right. She’s weak and she’s going to need rest, so it’ll be up to all of us to fill her shoes for a bit.’

‘What’s the baby called?’ Annag asked.

And my father smiled. ‘Murdag,’ he said. ‘After my mother.’ He put a hand on my shoulder. ‘You did well, son.’ And I felt such pleasure in the light of his praise. ‘The doctor tells me you carried the laird’s daughter all the way back to Ard Mor. Saved her life, without a doubt.’ He pushed his chin out and let his eyes drift thoughtfully across the hillside above us. ‘The laird will owe us for that.’

*

I can’t remember exactly how long afterwards it was that the new term at school began. Sometime after the New Year, I suppose. I do remember being on the path to the school-house
that first day, passing below the church that served the townships of Baile Mhanais and Sgagarstaigh. The school sat out on the machair overlooking the bay on the far side of the hill and the strips of farmed land that rose beyond it. There were usually around thirty of us who attended, though that number could vary depending on the needs of the croft. But my father always said that there was nothing more important than a good education, and so he hardly ever kept me away.

My mother had made a good recovery, and baby Murdag was doing well. I’d been up at first light that day to fetch in a creel of peats and fill my stomach with the potatoes we’d left roasting among the embers of the fire overnight. Then when the fire was blazing my mother had boiled up more tatties, which we had with milk and a little salted fish. So with a full belly, I didn’t feel the cold too badly, barely noticing the crust of snow crunching beneath my bare feet.