Sung and Spoken For

You’ll know Kilndarroch if you’ve ever taken the back road from Crieff toward Comrie and missed the turning at the war memorial. Everyone misses it. The memorial sits at such an angle that the stone soldier appears to be pointing you onward, down the glen, when in fact the road he’s guarding bends sharp left and drops through birch wood into the village. His rifle is at port arms and his face has the patient expression of a man who has been giving directions that nobody follows for the better part of a century. We keep meaning to put up a proper sign.

Sunday the clocks had gone back and the light was that pale watery thing it becomes in late October when Scotland decides it’s had enough of pretending to be cheerful. I was up at six, which is my habit. Porridge with salt, tea with nothing in it, the radio on low for the weather. Frost on the car and frost on the path and silence before the birds remembered they were supposed to be singing. I scraped the windscreen with a card from the Co-op because the scraper was in the boot and the boot lock had seized again and I’d been meaning to oil it since Eileen was alive.

Eileen was my third wife. I’ll get to Eileen.

The kirk at Kilndarroch sits on a rise above the burn, grey stone, grey slate, a yew tree in the yard that predates the building by two hundred years at least. The yew was there before the Reformation. Some of the older members say the church was built around the yew rather than beside it, that the original congregation simply gathered under the branches and the walls came later as a kind of formalization of what was already happening. I like that idea. I like the thought that the building is secondary to the gathering, that what matters is the people showing up, week after week, standing together under whatever shelter presents itself, and singing.

I am the session clerk. Have been for fourteen years. Before that I was an elder, and before that I was just a man in a pew, which is what my father was and his father before him. The Geddes family has been at Kilndarroch since 1843, which is to say since the Disruption, when half the congregation walked out of the established kirk and built their own on the hill. We walked out. We built. We’ve been here since. Three Geddes men have served as session clerk, and the pew we sit in — third row, left of centre, hard against the pillar — has a groove worn into the wood from a century and a half of Geddes elbows.

That groove is mine now. I sit in it and it fits.

Reverend Macleod was struggling with his robe when I arrived. The zip had gone and he was standing in the vestry with one arm through and one arm not, looking like a man being slowly consumed by a large black animal. I helped him. I always help him. The Reverend is sixty-three and has the fragility of a man who has spent his life thinking about suffering without ever having experienced much of it, and the fragility has settled into his hands and his hips and the way he turns his head, slowly, as if checking that the world is still arranged the way he left it.

“Alistair,” he said. “Good. Good. The boiler’s playing up again.”

“I’ll speak to Callum.”

“Could you? He listens to you.”

Everyone listens to me. That’s not vanity. It’s the condition of the role. The session clerk is the one who knows where things are and who does what and how much it costs and whose turn it is to do the flowers and whether the roof fund has enough in it to fix the leak above the south transept or whether we’ll need another jumble sale. I know these things. I carry them. The congregation brings me their questions and I answer them, and the answering is a kind of singing — a steady, reliable note that holds the harmony together while the melody wanders about.

Agnes used to say I was the church’s metronome. Agnes was my first wife. She had a way of noticing things about me that I hadn’t noticed myself, and then saying them in a tone that was halfway between admiration and diagnosis, so you couldn’t tell if she was praising you or reading your results. Agnes took the cold in the winter of 2009. February. The pipes froze and I couldn’t get the heating sorted and she sat in that house for three days in her coat and her scarf and her gloves, drinking tea that went cold before she could finish it, and by the time I got Callum round to fix the boiler she was in her chest and by the time I got her to the doctor she was in her lungs and by the time the ambulance came from Perth she was gone.

The parish sang for Agnes. The whole parish. Not just the kirk folk but the pub folk and the school folk and the farmers from up the glen. They sang “Be Thou My Vision” because it was Agnes’s favourite, and the Reverend said she was a woman of quiet faith and steady kindness, and I sat in my pew — our pew, the Geddes pew — with my hands on the groove and my eyes on the yew tree through the window and I thought: well, that’s done.

I read the lesson that morning. Isaiah 40. “Comfort ye, comfort ye my people.” The Reverend likes me to read because I have what he calls a carrying voice, which means the old ones in the back can hear me without their aids. I stood at the lectern and I looked out at the congregation and I saw them the way I always see them: as a body. Not individuals. A body. The body of Kilndarroch, gathered under the yew, sitting in the pews that their families have sat in for generations, wearing the faces they wear on Sundays, which are not quite the faces they wear on other days but not entirely different either. Sunday faces are a shade more open. A shade more willing.

I spoke to them. “Comfort ye, comfort ye my people, saith your God. Speak ye comfortably to Jerusalem, and cry unto her, that her warfare is accomplished, that her iniquity is pardoned.”

Jean Beattie was in her usual place. Two rows behind me, on the right, against the wall where the plaster is coming away and the stone shows through like bone through skin. Jean has been in that spot for as long as I’ve been session clerk, and for all I know she was there before that. She’s one of those women the parish produces the way the yew produces needles — quietly, steadily, without anyone planting them. Small and grey-haired and always in the same dark coat, the kind that buttons to the neck. She teaches Sunday school. She brings shortbread to the coffee morning. She watches.

I noticed the watching years ago. Not because it’s unusual — everyone watches everyone in Kilndarroch, that’s the structure of the place, mutual observation as social contract — but because Jean’s watching has a quality to it that the general watching does not. The general watching is warm. Communal. We watch each other the way a flock watches itself, each member confirming its position relative to the others. Jean watches the way a single bird watches from outside the pattern. Fixed. Specific. Her eyes on one thing.

That morning her eyes were on me and the quality had changed again. I felt it the way you feel a draught in a room where someone has opened a window you can’t see.

I finished the lesson. I returned to my pew. The Reverend began his sermon — something about the prodigal son, the Reverend loves the prodigal son, returns to the prodigal son the way the prodigal son returns to his father, with the exhausted gratitude of a man who has tried everything else — and I sat with my hands on the groove and I did not turn around.

After the service there’s coffee. This is an institution as rigid as the service itself, perhaps more so, because the service has a structure that everyone can see — the hymns, the readings, the sermon, the blessing — whereas the coffee hour has a structure that everyone can feel but nobody would describe. Who stands where. Who speaks first. Who carries the biscuits and who pours and who takes the first sip and says “That’s grand” in the way that means the socializing can begin. I pour. I have poured since Agnes died, which was when Mrs. Fairlie decided I needed a function to keep me from going into myself, and she assigned me the urn with the quiet authority of a woman redistributing a widow’s duties to a widower.

Mrs. Fairlie herself was at the door, steadying herself on the frame. Eighty-six and shrinking but still here, still watching. She took my arm going down the steps. She weighs nothing. Carrying her is like carrying a coat.

“Your Eileen’s stone looks well,” she said.

“Callum cleaned it.”

“Good man, Callum. He did Agnes’s too, didn’t he?”

“He did.”

“And Morag’s, is Morag’s needing done?”

Morag was my second wife. Morag came from Fort William and never quite settled in Kilndarroch, which is something the parish understood the way it understands all things — collectively, without discussion, as a fact of the landscape. Morag didn’t take to the village and the village didn’t take to Morag and the marriage lasted four years and then she went south. That’s the version. She went south. People say it the way they say the rain came on or the ferry was late — a natural event, part of the weather.

Morag’s stone is in the kirkyard. A small one, near the wall, away from the Geddes plot. The parish accepted the stone without comment. A woman goes south and her husband puts a stone in the kirkyard and the stone says nothing about how she went or why she went or whether going south is the same as dying and nobody asks because asking is not what the voice does. The voice says: Morag went south, Alistair was good about it, he put up a stone, which was decent.

“Morag’s is fine,” I said. “Granite lasts.”

Mrs. Fairlie patted my arm. “You’ve had your share, Alistair.”

“I’ve had the parish.”

“Aye. Well. The parish has had you.”

The Stag’s Head opens at twelve on Sundays, which means by twenty past twelve the kirk folk have migrated from coffee to beer in a movement so natural you’d think the two buildings were connected by a corridor. Some of the older men go straight from the pew to the bar without stopping at coffee, which the Reverend pretends not to notice and which everyone else pretends not to notice and which the men themselves treat as an act of such ordinariness that noticing it would be a kind of violence.

I was at the bar by half twelve. Dougie poured my usual — a half and a dram — without being asked, because he has been pouring my usual for fifteen years and the not-asking is part of the ritual, the same way the not-turning-around to look at Jean Beattie in the kirk is part of a different ritual, one that only the two of us observe.

The pub was full of the usual Sunday faces. Callum, who fixes everything. Rob Tulloch from the hill farm, smelling of sheep and diesel. Young Ewan from the post office, who isn’t young anymore but acquired the adjective at twelve and will carry it to his grave. They were talking about the football and the road past Dunmore, and the conversation moved the way parish conversations move — circular, returning always to the same ground.

I bought a round. I always buy a round. The buying is part of the architecture. Alistair buys the first round and Callum buys the second and Rob buys the third and by the third the talk has loosened and somebody mentions something that shouldn’t be mentioned and everybody laughs and the laughter covers the mention and the mention is absorbed into the body of the parish the way everything is absorbed — Morag going south, Agnes taking the cold, Eileen.

Eileen fell down the stairs. This is what happened. Eileen came down the stairs in the dark because the light on the landing had blown and she was going to the kitchen for water and she fell. I was in the bedroom. I heard her go. The sound a body makes falling down twelve steps is not what you’d imagine — not a crash, not a tumble, but a series of distinct impacts, each one separate, like someone knocking on a door. Twelve knocks. I counted them from the bed the way you’d count the chimes of a clock, and when the counting stopped I got up and I went to the landing and I looked down and she was at the bottom, arranged in a position that no living body would choose, her left arm underneath her and her right hand reaching for the newel post.

That was April. Last April. The undertaker said it was a mercy it was quick and the Reverend said the Lord gathers His own and the parish sang again and I sat in the pew again and the groove held me and Jean Beattie sat two rows behind me and watched.

Young Ewan was asking me about the Remembrance service. Did we have enough poppies. Were the Scouts confirmed for the wreath-laying. Had I spoken to the piper. I answered him the way I answer everything — fully, helpfully — and while I answered him I was thinking about Jean Beattie’s eyes during the reading and the quality of attention that had changed, and I was thinking about a fox I’d seen that morning on the road in from Crieff, standing in the middle of the tarmac in the half-light, looking at my car with an expression that wasn’t fear and wasn’t curiosity but something closer to recognition.

“Alistair?”

“Sorry, Ewan. Aye, the piper’s confirmed. Gordon’s lad, same as last year.”

There was a man in the pub I didn’t know. This happens — a walker, a tourist, someone who’s taken the wrong road at the war memorial. This one was sitting by the window, nursing a pint, looking at the photographs on the wall. The photographs go back to the 1920s and the faces in them are the same faces that are in the pub now — the Tullochs and the Fairlies and the Geddes, the same names recurring through the decades.

He caught my eye. I nodded. This is what you do.

“Grand old place,” he said.

“It is that.”

“You’d be local?”

“Born and raised.”

He gestured at the photographs. “Generations, eh? You can see the same faces coming back.”

“Aye. The parish keeps its own.”

He smiled at that. He was maybe fifty, English by the sound of him, the kind of man who walks in the Highlands and imagines he’s discovering something. I’ve met a hundred of him. They come and they say “grand old place” and they go back south and they never understand the first thing about what holds a parish together, which is not history and not landscape but agreement.

I bought him a drink. Why wouldn’t I? The parish welcomes strangers. The parish has always welcomed strangers. The parish absorbed Morag from Fort William and Eileen from Inverness and Agnes who was born here, who was one of us from the start, whose death was the simplest to explain because the cold is the cold and the pipes are the pipes and the ambulance from Perth takes forty minutes on a good day and on a bad day in February it takes longer, and none of these facts require anything of the voice except repetition.

I walked home at six. The light was gone and the cold had that October sharpness that gets into the space between your collar and your neck and stays there. The road from the pub to my house passes the kirkyard, and I stopped the way I sometimes stop, not to visit the graves but to stand at the wall and look at the yew, which is the one thing in Kilndarroch that has been here longer than the Geddes family, and which stands in the dark the way it has always stood, not patient and not impatient, just present, the way a fact is present.

Three stones in that yard with my name on them. The name of the husband, cut into granite, which lasts.

I was nearly home when I saw her. Jean Beattie, standing at her gate, which is on the lane that runs between the kirkyard and my house. She was wearing the dark coat buttoned to the neck. She had a torch but it wasn’t on. She was standing in her garden in the dark and she was looking at me, and the looking was the thing I had felt in the kirk that morning — not the congregational look, not the flock confirming its positions, but something singular and aimed, the way the fox had looked at my car on the road from Crieff.

“Evening, Jean.”

“Alistair.”

She didn’t say anything else. She didn’t need to. The space between us held the shape of everything she hadn’t said, the way a room holds the shape of furniture that has been removed — you can’t see it but you can feel where it was. She had been sitting two rows behind me for fourteen years and she had been watching for fourteen years and the watching had been general and now it was specific and the shift from general to specific was the most dangerous thing that had happened in Kilndarroch since the congregation walked out in 1843.

“Cold night,” I said.

“It is.”

“You’ll want to get inside.”

“I will.”

But she didn’t go inside. She stood there. She stood there and she looked at me and her looking had the quality of the yew — not patient, not impatient, just present. A fact. The fact of a woman who had seen what the parish had agreed not to see, and who was standing in her garden in the dark with an unlit torch, and who was not afraid, which was the worst part, because fear I could have managed the way I manage everything else, with the voice, with the steady reliable note, with the warmth that the congregation expects and requires and trusts. But Jean Beattie was not afraid. Jean Beattie was looking at me the way you look at something you’ve already reported.

“Good night, Jean.”

“Good night, Alistair.”

I walked on. My house was two hundred yards up the lane, dark, the porch light out because the bulb had gone and I hadn’t replaced it, the way I hadn’t replaced the landing light before Eileen fell. I walked toward it. I walked the way I walk — steady, unhurried, the walk of a man who belongs to the ground he’s walking on, whose family has been walking this ground since 1843, whose name is on the stones and in the books and in the groove in the third pew. I walked and I did not turn around.

Behind me, Jean Beattie stood in her garden. Her torch stayed off. The dark was between us and the cold was between us and the kirkyard with its three stones was between us and the yew that was older than anything stood in the middle of all of it, not watching, because a tree doesn’t watch, but present, the way the parish is present, the way I am present in Kilndarroch, which has been my home and my father’s home and his father’s home, and which knows me the way a pew knows the shape of the body that sits in it, absolutely, without question, the groove worn smooth by years of faithful attendance.

Tomorrow I’ll speak to Callum about the boiler. And the landing light. I’ve been meaning to fix the landing light.