Archie and the North Wind Read online

  But the cold! To sink hands into the freezing sea-water each morning, time and again, lifting the dripping stocks round your wrists. And the fumbling for the pen-knife and the hacking away, leaving the bare stalk which you split with both hands as if you were indeed the giant, separating main from main on your plunge into the freezing waters.

  Again and again and again, breaking the stalks, one after the other, each winter morning. The 1St of January, bitterly cold with a north-easterly. The 2Nd of January, equally cold with a stronger wind from the north. The 3Rd of January, hailstones sweeping in from the north-east, hammering against the soaking oilskins. The 4Th of January, real snow falling on the sand; and on it went, forever, ceaselessly, as Archie walked down to the shore each morning, head bent into the wind, to his appointed task.

  By the beginning of April the giant’s arm was bent. Archie had accumulated about a quarter-of-a-mile’s worth of tangle, stretching in a thin line above a row of barrels carried from the disused fish-curing factory which had closed before the last great war. The seaweed itself had already been spread on the fields, but the tangle was the magic profit margin: one of the few sources of surplus income available to an unskilled boy.

  On the first Monday after Easter the boat would arrive and take the tangle southwards, in exchange for money. ‘You’ll get £5 for that,’ some of the other lads said, though Archie kept his mouth shut and listened to the older men who mentioned much higher sums – £20, £30, even £40.

  John the Goblin – so-called because of his weakened leg – hirpled into view one day and sat down, rolling a cigarette. ‘Do you know something?’ said John the Goblin. ‘That stuff,’ – pointing to the tangle – ‘is used to make French letters.’ He inhaled his cigarette. ‘Just think of that. Stalks for stalks, eh?’

  Archie had no idea what he was talking about. ‘Also,’ continued John the Goblin, ‘they use it to make toothpaste and hair spray and fireworks and cannons.’ He spat out fragments of tobacco. ‘Makes you think, doesn’t it? Almost makes you think, eh? Would you like a fag?’

  ‘Sure,’ said Archie; and there, sheltering behind the tangle-bank from the gusting wind, clumsily rolled his first cigarette, taking five goes at lighting it in the face of the swirling breeze. Finally, huddled beneath his jacket, the paper caught light and the glow was like the glow of his granny’s tilley lamp in the early evening, signalling warmth and pleasure and a long night of stories.

  Inevitably, he coughed at the first rough draw of nicotine, but John the Goblin merely smiled, saying, ‘It happens to all of us at the beginning. But by the time you’ve finished it, you can’t get enough of it.’ And it was true. So the Goblin divided his shredded tobacco in two, saying, ‘We’ll go halfers. And I’ll get you a proper tin later, to make a real man of you.’ He smiled. ‘Of course, you’ll need to pay me. A stalk for a stalk, as they say. What about going halfers on the tangle? Half the tangle for as much tobacco as I can supply?’

  ‘I’m not half as daft as I look,’ said Archie. ‘Why don’t I just buy my own tobacco?’

  The Goblin laughed. ‘Aye! And where? Where do you think I get mine? Do you think I just wander out to that shitty shop at the pier to buy their overpriced rubbish? No way, José.’

  The pier shop was the only shop in the place. That mythic establishment where you could buy everything from a needle to an anchor.

  ‘And if you did buy it, it’s like smoking horse-shit,’ said the Goblin. ‘God only knows where he gets that rubbish from. If I were you, I would just crush that tangle down and smoke it instead.’

  ‘So where do you get your stuff from?’ Archie asked.

  ‘Ah, but that’s a trade secret,’ smiled the Goblin, tapping his nose. ‘That’s what you would pay half your tangle for.’ He rolled another cigarette, lit it, and handed it to Archie. ‘Think about it,’ he said. ‘As you bend into that wind cutting the tangle, wouldn’t it be nice to look forward to a really good smoke every hour or so? Just you think about it!’ And John the Goblin hirpled off across the sand dunes, the tin in his back pocket glinting in the watery sunlight.

  That turned out to be the actual day of An Siabadh Mòr, The Great Shaking. No sooner had John the Goblin disappeared out of sight beyond the sand dunes than the wind began to rise, shaking the very barrels on which Archie’s future rested. Behind him the sea began to boil, and to the west and north the sky turned dark purple as if someone in the heavens had spilt an inkwell. Archie immediately regretted not having accepted the Goblin’s offer. A fag would be great consolation now. It would give him time to think, as he huddled beneath the barrels, rolling it slowly. Instead, there was one less thing between himself and eternity. For not having a cigarette he was barer, more at the mercy of the coming storm.

  He hardly got home before the wind was at its full hurricane strength. For the first time in his life his abject poverty was an advantage. Too poor to have ever moved beyond a blackhouse, the family’s low-lying stone house was their salvation. More underground than overground, they were like beavers huddled in the darkness beneath the chaos. They heard the wind, but were physically untouched by it. As objects flew by outside, Archie and his parents and brothers and sisters and aged aunt sat on stools round the fire, conscious of the need to be silent.

  Death, they all knew, was outside, so this was no time for tea or scones or idle chat. Each sat quiet, listening to the great storm raging, knowing that this time round it would not call for them. They all remembered the old stories they’d heard, of how Death always came in disguise. The Grim Reaper was, of course, a joke, for who could be frightened of one so familiar as he travelled through the villages in his grey cloak and with his shining scythe over his shoulder? They had seen him so often that he seemed a permanent inhabitant with his own croft and boat, his own potatoes and milk. He even tipped his cap at them.

  But the man was a master of disguises, according to the old people, and could turn himself into any shape or form, animate or inanimate. What else were the rocks against which the fowlers had fallen for all these years? Or the sea, into which so many had fallen, drowned? Or the Fever, which came as a yellow-spotted guest from the visiting ship which had called all these years ago?

  ‘He was beautiful,’ one old woman was heard to say, ‘when he came ashore. You should have seen him, swimming towards us in a yellow polka-dot bathing suit, glinting in the noonday sun. By evening, all the young people in the village had a raging temperature with their skins erupting all over with yellow spots. By morning, none of them were alive. And that’s the strange thing, the Fever didn’t affect anyone over the age of twelve. They were all buried in shrouds which turned yellow as soon as they touched the corpses. Am Galar Mòr Buidhe, The Great Yellow Fever we called it, on account of the shrouds.’

  And the yellow-shrouded one was all-blowing outside, for all his strength. They could hear his lungs wheezing as he ran through the air, his heart beating strongly as he pounded against the stone, his tongue and fingers and toes and tail trying to squeeze in through each tiny chink which disfigured the crumbling stonework keeping him at bay.

  Why didn’t we repair that tiny section by the window while we had the chance? they all thought, as they watched his sharp fingernail easing through the miniscule hole which they had all ignored too long. Archie moved to crumple an old cut of tweed into a ball which he stuffed into the small hole, crushing his fingernail.

  They all listened as he raged outside, roaring with anger as he flung the universe to shreds. He breathed down through the chimney, adding black billows of smoke to the darkness. His nostrils smelt of peat as he crawled through the house, suffocating them. He was all wind and rain and hail and snow. He was rock and sea and river and bog. He was famine and hunger and sickness and poverty. He was sun and moon and light and stars. A family member and a terrible stranger.

  Grandfather, taken in the broad light of day as he lay resting in the shade of the sun in his homemade wicker basket. Joanna, stricken down in the height of her y
outh, the morning of the day before her wedding. She had been trying on her bridal gown when the headache came, soft and dull and throbbing, as if he’d rolled himself into a spark of perfume turned sour, a great sweetness gone rancid.

  I remember the man’s watch, Archie’s father thought. It was marked one minute after mid-day. And the sun was shining in all its glory, even through the smoke and fire and carnage.

  ‘Did you say something?’ Granny asked.

  ‘The Somme,’ Archie’s father answered. ‘July 1916. A bright summer’s day. A head flew past me. I thought it was a football, at first. Rags of flesh fell on me and when I looked down, this severed hand lay beside me with the pocket watch still held firm in the grip of the hand. He must have been an officer, for they were the only ones who carried timepieces. He must have been checking for the next advance.’

  Maybe it was a minute past midnight, Archie thought. As if that made any difference.

  ‘And they tell me that snowdrops and pansies now grow there, as if nothing ever happened. Donald-John was there a year ago and he says it’s now like a meadow, with proper gravestones at the end and plaques and markers and signposts and tourist information, with bees buzzing round the clover the day he was there. He even brought back a pot of honey which tasted as sweet as our own potatoes when mashed with milk.’

  And suddenly it was all quiet outside, as if the Somme Meadow had been rolled out, already bursting with clover.

  ‘He’s gone,’ muttered Granny, beginning once again to stir the pot which hung from an iron hook above the open fire. The sweet smell of soup filled the air, as if all the taste buds had been re-awakened, and Archie’s mother returned to kneading the bread on the long wooden table, raising up a storm cloud of flour about the room.

  Archie and his father went outside to survey the damage. All was still. Not a breath of wind in the air. Not a single cloud in the sky. The sea electric blue on the horizon. All the winter hayricks in the village had been swept away. Not a single cart remained on its wheels. All the houses were roofless. Rocks which hadn’t moved since the creation of the world were gone. The entire landscape was translated, as if a giant’s hand had swept across the district, flattening raised things, lowering exalted things, moving immovable things. The hills, of course, remained, as did the river and the fields and the lochs. What had changed was the human landscape: people’s houses and byres and possessions, all swept away.

  It was only afterwards that the real cost was counted, when funeral after funeral took place, each one paying his due to the great visitor.

  Archie’s tangle was destroyed along with all other things. When he walked down to the shore in the evening stillness, it was as if he had never been there before, as if he had never spent these frozen morning hacking away at the stalks in the pre-dawn light, as if he had never – stoically and patiently – build up his great wall of tangle, single stalk by single stalk, to the quarter-mile length which had tempted John the Goblin along with his sweet weed, the taste of which Archie could still feel in the back of his mouth and nostrils, and now all gone like a dream overtaken by the morning light.

  That was the day Gobhlachan came into his own. All things were broken, and the wizened man with the crushed balls was the only one in the area who could repair them. He had the anvil and the bellows, the fire and the tongs. A succession of widows and orphans made their way to him, carrying the remnants of a plough or of a kettle or of a cart and leaving them in separate bundles by his forge door.

  There was so much destruction that Gobhlachan sent word for help and Archie was the first to call by.

  ‘Don’t worry, boy,’ Gobhlachan immediately said to him. ‘That Goblin isn’t the only one around here who can lay his paws on good tobacco.’ And he lit his pipe, handing it to Archie, who puffed and coughed and drew in the sweet nicotine. ‘And I won’t charge you half your tangle either,’ added Gobhlachan. ‘In fact, I won’t charge you any tangle at all. In fact, you will never have to go back to your tangle again. Plenty work here, son, if you want it. Hard work. Warm work. Right here by the fire.’

  And he beckoned Archie over, telling him to lift the stoking shovel which lay by the oven door. And there, by the forge door, Archie learned all there was to learn about iron. How soft and fluid and watery it really was before it was plunged into the flames. How you could shape it into any form you wished – curved, opaque, translucent, hard, soft, thick, thin. How fast you had to be to control it, before it assumed a shape you had never desired or imagined. How impossible it was to reverse the curve or the fault or the crack once it hardened or set. Creation was irreparable.

  The amount which ended up on the scrapheap! Hooves which turned out like bits of turd, shapeless pans, kettles which could not hold a thing, parts of ploughs which were as useless as a star on a summer’s day. But all that – that physical stuff – was the least of it. Gobhlachan’s lore was what really mattered: stories and trade secrets which were as fluid, or as set, as the iron itself. How iron protected you from the Fairies and safeguarded you from the dead. How a nail above the lintel of the door ensured that no evil ever entered; how a reaping-hook placed beneath the bed was a surefire guarantee that no mother or child died in childbirth. Gobhlachan never used the word ‘magic’, but that’s what it was: manifold ways of avoiding death and misfortune.

  Iron itself was, of course, magical. With hooves, your steeds ran faster, across all kinds of terrain, than anyone else’s horses. With a reaping hook you harvested bread. With an iron plough you eased the goodness out of the earth. With keys you locked – and opened – chests. With swords you conquered. With a gun barrel you triumphed. With a knife you could skin and dismember the deer.

  Gobhlachan had other, even more fantastic stories. How the Devil had tried to marry the most beautiful girl on the island. The time another Archie swam backwards up the Niagara Falls, watched by his rival. Why beggars were called Pilgrims of the Mist. How Donald was tamed by whisky in the well. How women made clay effigies. How you could travel all the way to America on a single wisp of straw. Transformation was everywhere. He said:

  Long ago, there lived a king and queen and they had five lovely sons. Then late in life they had this wee daughter. And she was beautiful. And they all adored her. Every one of them, the boys and the king and the queen. And they were all so happy. And the boys used to take her out to play, you see, because there was a big meadow and parks and trees that led down to the water. And they had ample place to play.

  So the mother says, ‘Mind you look after your wee sister now.’

  ‘Oh, yes, we’ll look after her, Mother.’

  But you know what boys are. They like to climb trees and play with bows and arrows and things like that. So they would leave her – she was very young, you see – and tell her to sit and make daisy chains or something in the meadow while they rampaged through the woods.

  But one day she’s sitting there trying to make daisy chains, when this white bull came making circles round about her. Wide circles at first. But every time it went round, it came closer and closer, you see.

  And it says, ‘Hello.’

  And she says, ‘Oh, hello.’

  And the wee white bull says, ‘Why are you sitting there on your own?’

  ‘The boys are away playing,’ she says. ‘They’re coming back for me soon.’

  He says, ‘Now, wouldn’t you like to have some fun as well as the boys?’

  ‘Oh yes.’

  ‘Well, come on. You jump on my back and we can have a nice run around the meadow and you’ll love it.’

  ‘Oh no, no, I don’t think so,’ she says. ‘Oh, I’m frightened to go on your back. You’re too big.’

  ‘I’m not really big,’ the bull says. ‘And anyway, I’ll kneel down and then you can get on my back,’ he says. ‘You’ll love it. Come on.’

  And after a while he persuades her – circling round about her in that way, he sort of mesmerised her, you see.

  She says, ‘All right.’


  So the bull kneels down, this white bull. And she got gets his back as he says, ‘Now hold on to my horns.’

  She held on to the horns, but this bull took off with her. And it kept going and it kept going until it came to the shore. It was then that the boys noticed. And they ran and ran, thinking they would catch it, because they never thought it would go into the water, you see. But it did go into the water and it kept going into the water and it kept going. And she’s holding on to the horns and shouting, ‘Let me down, let me down, let me down.’

  And this bull says, ‘No, you’re not getting down.’

  And these boys, when they finally reached to the shore, the last thing they saw was their sister and the bull disappearing over the horizon, over the water. So they were terrified to go home and tell their father and their mother. But they just had to. So the king and the queen were absolutely hysterical about their wee lassie – and so were the boys. They all just loved her.

  The king was getting on a bit by this time, you see, quite unable to go in search for her. So the three oldest boys, they say, ‘Look, Father, we’ll go and we’ll get her.’

  And the oldest one, his name was Jack, he says, ‘I’ll not come back, Father, until I get her. I promise you that.’

  So off the boys went.

  Now they had been well taught with swordsmanship and all the things boys were taught at that time, you see. So they took their swords and things with them and away they went.

  And they went from one place to another, from one place to another, till their money went down and their feet were sore with walking. The horses were worn out. They had to give them up. And they started walking and walking and their feet were terribly sore. Their hair was growing long. Now and then they would stop and have a shave in some old body’s house, because they would ask any old person if they needed wood chopped or whatever and get a wee bit of food and a bed for themselves in exchange, you see.