The Chessmen (10 page)

‘Did we lose someone? Our family, I mean?’

She shook her head slowly. ‘No. The Macleods of Crobost were one of the lucky ones. Your grandfather was a boy of nineteen, returning after just a year away. God knows how, but he survived.’ She looked at me, tipping her head at an oddly curious angle. ‘Your father’s father. You wouldn’t have been here today if he’d drowned like the rest.’ And I shivered, just as I had when the bus passed the shieling earlier in the evening.

‘Who was John Macleod?’ My own voice sounded very small. ‘Was he related?’

‘John Finlay Macleod, you mean?’ She drained her glass. ‘Not that I know of. That man was a hero by all accounts. Somehow he made it ashore with a line, right below where
that monument is today, and as a result forty men’s lives were saved. Including your grandfather’s.’

I passed the weekend in a cloud of uncertainty and depression, unable to escape the thought of all those poor men surviving the war only to die on their own doorstep. And the fact that my grandfather had survived it lingered oddly in my mind like a faintly unpleasant taste in the mouth. It took me a while to identify it.

Guilt.

They say the survivors of major disasters are often afflicted by a sense of guilt. Why had they survived when so many others had not? I suppose I was experiencing it by association. If my grandfather had died like all the others, then I wouldn’t have been there. And it made me wonder why I was.

The bad weather finally arrived on the Saturday night. Storm-force winds driving in from the south-west, big dark clouds, contused and bleeding rain. I watched it run down my window on a miserable Sunday, and couldn’t wait to be on the bus back to Stornoway in the morning.

The storm had passed by the Monday, but it was still overcast, dull light suffused with a grey-green, as if we were all somehow trapped inside a Tupperware box. But the wind had dried the roads and grasses already, and I tried to empty my mind on the bus ride to town by focusing on the bog cotton that danced among the peat.

There was no chance of me being able to concentrate on schoolwork, and straight off I made my way up through
the town to where the library was housed in a jumble of half a dozen or so Portakabins on the corner of Keith Street. I thought they would probably keep archives of the
Stornoway Gazette
there. Yes, the woman at the issue desk told me. They kept the archives in a locked room to my right. What year would I be wanting to look at? 1919, I told her.

She raised an eyebrow. ‘A very popular year this morning, it seems. Are you doing a project at the Nicolson?’ And in response to my frown she said, ‘There’s another lad looking at microfilm of that same year in the Gaelic and Local History section down the hall.’

I found Whistler in the reference room, sitting at a table slowly spooling through the newspaper’s coverage of the
Iolaire
disaster. He turned as I came in, but said nothing. I pulled up a chair and sat down beside him to watch scratched and ageing images of words written long ago about a tragedy that folk never spoke of. They passed before my eyes like history itself.

We sat a full half-hour in front of that machine, never a word between us, and finally left the library with a nod and a muttered thanks to the librarian, only to find Big Kenny standing beside the wheelie bins on the pavement outside. The wind swept through his ginger hair in waves, and he appeared to be undecided on whether to go in or not. He was startled to see us and raised his eyebrows in tentative query. ‘What did you find out?’

‘Nothing that you probably don’t already know by now,’ Whistler said.

‘My dad couldn’t tell me much. He said his dad would never talk about it.’

Whistler shrugged. ‘Mine wasn’t sober long enough to ask.’

Kenny nodded. ‘I’ve been at the town hall,’ he said. ‘The registrar’s office.’ I don’t know why we should have been so surprised, but we were.

‘And?’ Whistler asked.

‘Apparently there are three survivors still living. One of them’s at Bhaltos, down in Uig. I know his family.’

Norman Smith lived in an old white house at the foot of the village looking out towards the islands of Pabaigh Mòr, Bhàcasaigh, and the inappropriately named Siaram Mòr. If Siaram Mòr was the big island, we couldn’t imagine how small Siaram Beag might be, not that any of us had ever seen or heard of a Siaram Beag.

We rode down on two bikes, me sitting pillion behind Whistler. By the time we arrived my backside was aching. The wind had dropped, and the sea was a dull, dimpled pewter.

The old navy reservist sat in an armchair by the window, where he had an unbroken view out across the water to Pabaigh Mòr. His daughter showed us in. An elderly woman herself, she said he liked to have visitors, but that we weren’t to tire him out. She went off to make tea as we settled ourselves down around the old man in a room so small and cluttered there was hardly space for the four of us. The air felt damp, suffused by the smell of peat smoke from turfs
still smouldering in the fire. And I remember wondering how he had survived so long. But he had already cheated death once, why shouldn’t he do it again?

He was ninety-two years old, he told us proudly, his voice high-pitched and reedy, as if pared thin by the years. He had small dark eyes like black beads. They reflected the light from the window, sharp and still intelligent. I know that age can diminish men, but Norman Smith remained a giant of a man, sitting there in his chair, big-knuckled hands folded one over the top of the other on his stick. There was hardly a hair left on a broad, flat head splashed by age spots.

‘Took me years,’ he said in response to our question about the
Iolaire
, ‘to even let the name of that damned boat pass my lips.’

‘How did it happen?’ Kenny asked.

‘God only knows, boy! The captain made a mistake when he set course for the harbour. Just half a point off he was. We should have been a little more to the west.’ We heard his breath rattle in his chest as he drew in air in silent reflection. I couldn’t imagine what pictures he was pulling back to mind. ‘A lot of us were sleeping, had our boots off and our heads down wherever we could find space on deck. There was a strong wind behind us, but it was strangely quiet when I heard someone shout that they could see the lights of Stornoway ahead. That’s when we struck the rocks. The noise as they ripped open her hull was almost human, like a cry of pain. And then there was panic. Panic as I’ve never seen before or since. If only we had grounded closer
to the shore then maybe most of us would have been saved. But the rocks we struck were the furthest out.’ He shook his head slowly. ‘There were only two of us survived from the part of the ship I was on.’

I sat listening in concentrated silence, images appearing in my mind, evoked by simple words conveying abject horror.

‘The ship turned broadside and one man got ashore with a rope.’

‘John Finlay Macleod,’ Whistler said.

The old man nodded. ‘I remember moving his rope from the stern to the side. To this day I don’t know how I managed it. But that line saved me and a lot of others. We’d never have got ashore without it.’ His breathing became more rapid. ‘It was black as hell that night, boys, and we could all feel the presence of the devil come to take us.’

He breathed out long and deep, as if sighing, and appeared to relax again in his chair.

‘I still had no boots when I got ashore and climbed up on to the machair. I was soaked to the skin and chittering with the cold, and I knew I had injured my chest and my legs, though I couldn’t really feel anything. I saw a group of men huddled at the nearest house, but I decided that I would walk into town.’

We looked at each other. We knew just how long that walk was. We had ridden it often enough on our bikes.

‘When I got there I headed for the Admiralty building. There were some others who had made it off the boat, too. All sitting along the wall, wrapped in blankets and smoking, and not a word spoken among them.

‘Admiral Boyle came up to me and put a hand on my shoulder. I’ve got a car for you, Norman, he said. It’ll take you and Uilleam and Malcolm back to Uig. In fact, it only took us as far as Calanais. And from there Duncan Macrae’s motor launch brought us down here to the pier at Bhaltos. Morning it was by then. New Year’s day. My family didn’t know I was coming home. I had been hoping to surprise them.’

A single bead of clear mucus hung from his nose, and he reached up absently to wipe it away with the back of his hand.

‘They were surprised all right. I met my sister Morag on the road and she took me home to where my mother was already preparing the New Year’s dinner. The news about what had happened to the
Iolaire
wasn’t put up in the post office at Uig until the following day, so no one knew yet.’

I saw his jaw tighten, then, and the clarity went out of his eyes, blurred by tears.

‘And I couldn’t tell them. My chest and legs were hurting like hell by then, but I kept it from them and made like nothing had happened.’ His breathing was becoming stertorous. ‘Until Mr and Mrs Macritchie and the MacLennan family came to the door, and I couldn’t face them. Because I knew their boys were all dead, and they had no idea of it. I ran to my room and shut the door and no one could understand what was wrong with me.’ Big silent tears fell now from red-rimmed eyes.

The old man’s daughter came in with a tray of tea, and her face creased with concern when she saw her father’s
tears. ‘Oh, boys, what have you done to upset him?’ She laid the tray on the table and hurried to wipe away his tears with a hanky. ‘It’s okay, Dad. You calm yourself now.’

He almost pushed her away. ‘Nothing to be calm about. It’s how it was.’ He looked at Kenny, then. ‘I know you,’ he said. ‘Or your father.’

Kenny looked startled. ‘My father, I think. Kenny Dubh Maclean.’

Old Mr Smith nodded. ‘Oh, aye. Knew his grandfather, too: Big Kenny, we called him.’

‘Really?’ Kenny was taken aback to learn that his great-grandfather had been known by the same moniker.

‘He was at the back of the boat with me when it struck.’ He shook his head. ‘Never made it. I don’t know why, but your family never brought him home. He’s buried with a lot of others at the cemetery at Sanndabhaig.’

We both looked at Kenny and saw his shock, as if he were hearing of the death of a close relative for the first time.

The old man swivelled his watery gaze towards Whistler. ‘Your father’s that drunk over at Ardroil.’

Whistler’s mouth tightened into a grim line, but he neither acknowledged nor denied it.

‘Not half the man his grandfather was. Calum John. Risked his life, he did, taking another man with him when it would have been easier to grab the line and pull himself ashore on his own.’

And then I felt his gaze fall on me.

‘I don’t know you, I think.’

My mouth was dry, as if I were sitting in the presence of God Himself and He was pointing a finger at me. ‘I’m Finlay Macleod from Crobost in Ness,’ I said. ‘My father was Angus.’

‘Ahhh.’ It was as if cataracts had been peeled away from the old man’s eyes and he could see clearly for the first time. ‘And his father was Donnie. That’s why you boys are here.’

I glanced at Whistler, but he just shrugged. ‘What do you mean?’ I said.

‘It was Donnie Macleod that Calum John Macaskill risked his life to pull from the wreck of the
Iolaire
that night. For sure, you wouldn’t have been here today, son, if this lad’s great-granddad hadn’t brought your grandfather ashore.’

Outside we stood by our bikes for a long time without speaking. In the distance you could see the waves breaking all along the shore and the wind was the only voice among us. It was Kenny who broke the silence. He swung a leg over his bike. ‘I’m going back to Stornoway,’ he said. ‘To take a look at the grave.’ We nodded, and watched as he kicked his bike into life and puttered away up the hill. I looked at Whistler and said, ‘I think there’s something we need to do.’

Charles Morrison Ltd, the ship’s chandlers, was in Bank Street in Stornoway, a wonderfully old-fashioned hardware shop with all manner of tackle behind its big dark counter. We came out, blinking in the sunlight, Whistler and me, clutching a bottle of white spirit, and walked down to the inner harbour where we had parked our bikes.

The ride out to Holm Point took less than fifteen minutes, but we stopped on the way, at Sanndabhaig Cemetery, to pick up Big Kenny. We had seen him from a long way off standing at what must have been his great-grandfather’s grave. And the three of us abandoned our bikes at the road end and walked out to the monument.

I had an old rugby shirt in my saddlebag, and we spent the next hour working patiently and carefully at the stone, to clean away the decades of dirt and neglect which had almost obliterated the words of this memorial to the men who had died that dreadful night.

When we had finished we sat with our backs to the railing, and gazed out over the Beasts of Holm below. Slow-heaving slabs of green water, moving in cautious swells around the shiny black gneiss, broke white around its jagged edges, slurping and sighing almost as if it were alive.

So many had perished there on the dawn of that New Year’s day so long ago. Kenny’s great-grandfather among them. And all I could see as I looked out over the rocks was the image of the photograph I had seen that morning in the
Stornoway Gazette
. The mast of the
Iolaire
, poking up out of the water. The only part of the boat still visible. At first light rescuers had seen one man clinging to it for dear life. There had been others, but they had been taken by the cold during the night, and one by one dropped off to be claimed by the sea.

Kenny stood up. His scar was oddly inflamed. ‘I’ll see you tomorrow,’ he said, and left without another word.

It wasn’t until the rasp of his moped motor was finally lost in the distance that Whistler lit another cigarette and
said to me, ‘I suppose this means I’m going to have to look out for you now.’

I frowned, not understanding. ‘What do you mean?’

‘Saving a life makes you responsible for it. I see no reason why that responsibility shouldn’t pass on across the generations.’