Short Story: Sand Ceremony

Short Story: Sand Ceremony

The bairn, a little girl unseen in the half-lee of the cemetery wall, crouched and watched. She was caught now, between the chance to skip away safe, unnoticed, and the fascination of looking: A man, in a white dress, with his back to the sea, and the wind that came hurling off it. He had it better than the others. They were standing with salt air drilling into their faces. They clenched their jaws and stood, pushing their heels into the sanded peat, making their legs into tree-trunks. It was no place for trees and no place to be standing about, unless you had good reason.

The bairn hunkered closer to the wall. Now that she was here, up from the sands, she’d have to stay and see it out.

“And listen to me,” cousin Iseabail had said, “Eisd dhomh!” The bairn had looked round. “Keep away from the Mackenzie funeral today, a’Chairol. “A’Chairol! Are you hearing me? You’ll stay where I can see you! None of this wandering off. A’Chairol!”

“My name’s Carol.” she’d said. Her name, her own name, they took it and coughed it up at her. ‘A’Chairol.’ Like a throatful of spit. “It’s Carol. Carol! You stupid … it’s ‘C’ it’s ‘C’ … Carol!”

She ran. She dragged the door open and ran. She grabbed for her coat and ran with her woollen hat in her hands, out into the wind. The rain was coming in off the sea; fast and cold. Struggling into her coat, she hopped up and down on the road, scuffing along in her boots half-on, half-off. The hat, a knitted, useless thing, swung on a garrotte of navy-blue wool round her neck. She tore at it, and about took her ears off with its sharp, rib-edge. Clawing at it, she ran through puddles; through the sprawling, stringy village; past the mean looking houses that sat along the road. The road disappeared into the distance but she knew it petered out just over the hill and it might as well have been a wall twenty miles high that was beyond; it was the sea, and she couldn’t cross it. She tore at the hat. The rain was trickling through the holes in it. It stretched like some wet, four-ply kinna fish. It was liquefying in the rain, clapping itself like a sucker over her face. She ran faster and faster towards the beach and then, once rid of its tentacles, she fired the squid into the sea and to hell with it and her aunty’s patterns.

Her aunty had brought her here on a boat. “Just for a spell.” There was something going on at home that she would spoil, so she’d been put away, out the road, to this place from where she couldn’t even walk home.

Her ears were stinging and red from the wind off the sea. It was cluttering her face with the whip ends of her hair but she poked her nose over the wall and strained to hear, siphoning the words out of the whirling air, words in gusts, but none of them clean and separate; it was that sick talk, that outpouring, that backward talk. It was a clotted, splattering noise. It was religion but … wrong! Wrong! How could they listen so … so normally? Like … like real people. She watched the dreadful dealings.

They had cut a square out of the hill and they were fitting a box into it. Snug. The hill gripped the sides of the box. Tight, and deep; look how deep they put you. The bairn’s gaze was fixed. The picture was printed inside her. “Are you going to the funeral, aunty Triona?” the child had asked. “Aye,” she’d said. But where was she? It was just men standing. No. There was one woman. The one in the box. And the bairn went, in her mind, to be with her. She lay with her in the dark and listened to the sounds: the box scraping on the wall of the pit; the settling of the wood as it eased itself down to the bottom, the ropes coiling on the lid; the thud - and thud - of the falling shovelsful of earth. “Are you crying to get out?” she whispered to the face on the pillow. “Are you wanting to get out? They’ll no hear you. And even if they do, they’ll no let you.” And the old face said, in a voice so soft and far away that the bairn didn’t hear it, that it was good, and she was glad to be out the road, and that she laughed at the men with their freezing spade-handles, hurting their hands; that she wanted the sounds of the sea to fade away with each thud of the welcoming earth.

The bairn heard a gull, soaring against the up-draught of the cliff. It laughed over the men’s heads and winged away to sea. She looked back at what was going on. The earth went on top, but they didn’t stamp it down or hit it with the back of their spades. Under it, the dead cailleach, the dead old girl, was waiting. When the last mourner was gone, she would lift herself away to other things and forget … even herself, and forget their names, these … men.

One of them was standing alone, and back from the others. His hair was white and cut as close as the clippers could go without drawing blood. His hat, black with a wide brim, was rammed down to his eyebrows. He turned his head out of the wind and lifted his face to the hill above the bairn’s hidey-hole; looking, looking up at the hill. The bairn jinked down and peered at him through the stones. His eyes were dry, pale, sea-salt eyes that looked and saw and never spoke. The raw pink of his neck was purpling in the cold. He’d shaved. Soap and razor and a steady hand, he’d shaved this morning, for her in the box and her late-winter funeral. His collar and tie funnelled the rain into his overcoat. He took his eyes off the hill; off the place where she had sat, once, on a rock in the sun. She had smiled at him, he cutting the peats with a steady rhythm on a mild day.

“A person never knows what you’re thinking,” she’d said. And yet, his thoughts had been so loud! Surely a person could have heard without any need for him to speak? He had stopped the rhythm of his work, he remembered, to look at her, straight in the face, to say to her … to say … but he couldn’t, even now, in his mind. Here he was, at the closing of her grave, standing back. Earth to earth.

The dead old girl was impatient for the burial to be over. What a time it all took! And hail arrived out of the sky, like a fall of rivets, battering them, shoo-ing them away and the figures ran for the gates. They would be going back to the village to the house where the women waited with whisky and sandwiches, lumps of cake, cups of tea ... The bairn’s aunty would be there with her big tea-pot and extra forks and dish-towels for the clearing-up. Out of the gate, their good shoes loaded with muck, the men carried the spores of the dead place back to their homes. That’s how it does it, thought the bairn. They’re all away home with the stuff sticking to their feet. They tramp it through the kitchen. It gets on to their socks … under their toenails … into the beds.

The last of them vanished over the road-end and she straightened up from her hiding place, her legs tingling with new blood. The storm had cleared the sky and the wind was letting-up. She walked sun-wise round the graveyard, looking at the headstones shifting their shapes against the sea. This was a barren forest. Like the pines on the moor. They’d stuffed too many trees, too close together, and the blight had got at them. No bird sang. No vole burrowed. Nothing lived in the forest that was too wet to burn, too ill to cure, too dead to resurrect. And here, inside these walls, they planted and carried the seeds of blight home.

The bairn had found a posyful of primula in the dunes. Even at this time of year the tiny yellow stars seemed to be able to bloom. As soon as the frost began to lift they pushed their tiny heads through the grass. But she didn’t want to give them away to the buried woman. She’d have had to have jumped the gate for that. She’d have got ‘it’ on her feet.

With the posy in her hand, she skirted the wall and walked down the burn to the beach. She held the flowers out and followed them to the water’s edge. She lifted her arms and flung the flowers into the sea. A new wave rushed up the beach and she had to run backwards away from the galloping foam. She fell on her back and picked herself up, laughing, and began to tread around softly in the sugary sand. Bubbled in froth here and there, the beach lay risen and gaseous, like the first proving of bread, but if you jumped into it, it puffed and it fell and the macaroon sponge of it crackled all around your feet. She pictured her cousin Iseabail, sweating over a mess of sticky flour and water and she played, pushing her heels in, making patterns in expert circles, her footprints becoming shallower as she moved off towards the hard sand.

There was a figure walking in the distance. Like a blank page, the beach lay wide and empty. From cliffs behind to the headland beyond she could see nothing on it but this small, walking pencil-mark.

He’d not followed the men to the dead woman’s house, where he’d never been in her life. He couldn’t go now, so late in his. He was coming closer, back along the beach, back towards the cemetery again, and the bairn, loitering on the sand. The bairn struggled with a skein of sea-weed at the water’s edge. She dragged the weed backwards, scraping out her footprints, the sea washing the marks away with every surge. “Why were you on the sands?” they would say. “What were you doing there?” The man would tell. He would tell.

He’d not seen her. But, walking at the water’s edge, the waves had cast up flowers under his feet and he’d seen them. A fresh posy of yellow flowers had … come from nowhere, and landed on the sand in front of him. He picked them up and walked on, holding them upside down, hidden, even from himself, in his swinging hand. Without breaking his stride, he walked to the graveyard, and found the broken spot in the wall where the bairn had crouched. She was up on the hill now, beyond the range of his eyesight. He was at the grave and then, without pausing, he was walking back, the flowers lying on the mound of swollen earth.

He stopped at the wall and looked up at the hill. The bairn stood there. And beside her, in sunshine, stood the dead old girl. This, the last mourner, held them both like a kite on a thread, all of them longing for the thread to break or the hand … to let go. The weight of the flowers on her grave pressed down on her, but she could neither accept them nor give them back. A gift given in love should be accepted, just as a word, once spoken, couldn’t be taken back.

The clouds were advancing out of the sea and a fresh storm was preparing itself for a landfall. He was still at the wall. But instead of climbing over, he went back to the grave. The flowers lay there, small, useless as a word uttered too late. The bairn watched and, as he stretched to pick the little stems off the earth, a wind got up suddenly and hurled itself in his face. He left the flowers and ran, as best he could, out over the wall and away, up the road.

The bairn, running back by the sea’s edge, found her hat. Stranded. And went home, wringing it.