By the Light

by Donald S Murray

A few months before the end of our time in primary school, Dunky MacCaig touched down in a new desk in the headmaster’s room, joining the other five members of our class. At first glance, he appeared to fit into our surroundings more than the rest of us. His brown hair resembled tufts of heather; his eyes – a similar shade – looked as if they had been swamped within a bog. There was his size, too. Somehow, he appeared as stunted as the moorland we looked out on from the classroom window, a foot or so smaller the rest of us.

Yet despite all this, he did not quite belong. His voice came from somewhere in Scotland’s North-East. ‘Ah dinnae fancy that,’ he might say sometime. ‘It’s nae somethin’ Ah ken.’ The rest of us would look at him when he spoke like that, unable to understand a word that spilled from his lips. And then there would be the way he would talk of moor and machair, the acres that surrounded him on the island.

‘Ah miss trees,’ he would say. ‘Ah dinna ken how folk can live without them.’

He did not explain for a long time why he felt that way about them. One of us asked if it was the leaves he missed, how their coming and going marked their seasons. He shook his head, shrugging in response. One day, when we shivered beside the school below the lash of wind and rain, I asked him if it was it was the shelter of their branches he longed for when he was here. Again, there was a quick shake of his head, a snort of dismissal.  

‘Naw… No’ really.’

It was only when the remnants of this huge tree were washed up on the village shoreline that the mystery began to be solved. He laughed when he saw it there, smacking his hand against the outside of his thigh.

‘Ah’ll have to gae hame,’ he said. ‘Back to my uncle’s hoose,’

We didn’t have the chance to ask why, gaping as we watched him race up the track that ran down the middle of his uncle’s croft, back to the house where both he and his mother now lived. When he returned, he carried a saw in his hand, one that hung on the wall of the byre behind the old building where his mother’s family had been brought up in the years before she had travelled to the opposite side of Scotland to marry the man she later left to come home again. As he lifted it in his fingers, it caught the light of the sun, sparkling in the same way as his eyes as he chuckled again and again.

‘Oh, wow! Wow! Wow!’ he declared.

And then he kneeled before the wreck of the tree, drawing the blade back and forth. He began cutting a branch before later performing the same task on a trunk, an action he undertook in constant, perfect rhythm, never failing or faltering for a moment as the teeth of the saw dug deeper into the wood. It was as if the beat and flow of each cut was a form of music, one that was as regular and predictable as the motion of the tide sweeping up on the shore.

‘Oh, wow… Wow … Wow …’ he said once again.

And then he said something else, giving a reason for his actions.

‘It’s sae guid tae ha’e the chance tae burn wood again. Much better than a’ that bloody useless peat that’s stacked ahint ma uncle’s hoose. Nae warmth in it at a’.’

We were in the early months of secondary school before what happened that day began to make sense. He spoke one morning about how his father had worked for the Forestry Commission for years, planting and growing trees on a size and scale that was impossible us who had lived most of our days on the island to imagine.

‘Miles and miles of them. Near Huntly where Ah wis before. Pine and fir trees. Tall and green a’ year roond.’

His father had worked among them, cutting trunk and branch down with an electric saw more quick and jagged than the one we had seen that day in his hand, making sure too that the pine and fir that grew did not encroach too close upon another or topple downwards to block a path or road.

‘He’d sometimes tak me tae see them on his days aff. Show me the different kind of tree that grew around there. Even point out the animals. The odd squirrel. Fox. Stoat. There’s naething like that roond here. Naething at a’.’

When I mentioned these tales to my Dad, he cast a strange look in my direction, his eyebrows arching as he cast another slab of peat onto the sitting room fire.

‘Take care and keep your distance from him,’ he warned me. ‘There’s a lot about that lad you don’t know.’

I questioned him about this, trying to find out more information.

‘Ssshhh…’ he said. ‘Best you don’t find out. Less danger of all of it slipping from your tongue.’

‘Dad,’

‘Really. Best to stay ignorant.’

All that changed one morning when some of the older boys dragged us to the place they called the Arches, a passage that was underneath the school building, allowing us to go from one side of the building to the other. It wasn’t the first time we were taken there. They did it sometimes just to hiss cigarette smoke in our faces, calling us yokels, country bumpkins, maus, peasants, insults they loved to direct at some of us who came from the rural areas of the island.

‘I hate you. You stink. You smell. Don’t you have a bath at home? You bring the stink of cow-shit with you wherever you go.’

This time, however, their words were different. They ignored me. Sharp as blades, they were all directed at Dunky, cutting into him.

‘I hear your old man tried to burn his next door neighbour’s house down. Over in Huntly. That’s why your Mam left him, ended up in yokel-land. Is that true?’

For a long time, Dunky didn’t answer, looking in the direction of the bully who was questioning him. It was as if the words didn’t penetrate the surface of his skin, becoming bogged down somewhere in his head.

‘Is that bloody true?’ the bully snapped again, hissing another mouthful of smoke in his direction.

Dunky’s eyes blinked.

‘Well?’

Finally, Dunky nodded. ‘Aye. My Dad did that.’

And then instead of being humiliated and crushed by his questioner, he looked up at those who terrorised him. This time, there was a gleam in his eyes, their shade of brown lit up by a defiant spark.

‘Aye,’ he said again. ‘It’s a’ true.’

I kept away from him after that. It felt safer to do so. There was not only the story I heard in more detail that night from my parents – how Dunky’s dad had set fire to a neighbour’s house by stacking logs of wood outside their door one night, lighting them in the darkness, slipping, too, a roll of toilet paper dipped in petrol inside their letter box. ‘I had tae find a way of shutting them up. Put an end to all these parties they had going on.’

‘That’s why Janet, Dunky’s Mam, moved back here to stay with her brother,’ my own Mam said, ‘She was living with a man who was half-crazy. Said she was waiting for the day he would turn upon her and Dunky too.’

And then there was the way it was safer to stay out of Dunky’s company. Some of the older boys would drag him to the Arches most mornings and afternoons. Gathering round one of the pillars there, they would thrust one of their cigarettes in his direction - roll-your-owns, Embassy, even an occasional cigar stabbed towards his lips.

‘Fancy a fag? I hear your father loves his smoke.’

‘Suck it in. Breathe it out. Enjoy it.’

Once or twice, they even stubbed a lit cigarette on the back of his hand, burning skin.

‘You’ll have to get used to that,’ someone said, ‘Think of it as a tattoo. Part of a family tradition.’

The only time he was free of all this was on the school-bus going home. Silence surrounded him as he sat behind the driver in the front seat. The rest of us kept away from him as much as possible, having a sense that life had fouled and contaminated him, his existence soiled not just by the behaviour of his father but also by those individuals in the town who made much of his school-life miserable and frightening. We added our own layer to that, isolating and ignoring him, as if coming even close to him would render us liable to share a similar existence, suffering the same disease. We would watch him from a distance, conscious of the set of his mouth, the distance in his eyes.

The only moment I ever saw him come to life was when we were travelling across the moor. There was a line of fire on the slope of a hill, a short distance from the road. A low orange blaze, it curled like the heather that grew there, a different, brighter shade than how it appeared in August when it bloomed bright and purple. Above it, there was a grey skirl of smoke, wafting upwards.

‘Whit’s that?’ Dunky asked, turning in his seat.

‘Muirburn,’ Scottie the driver answered. ‘It’s what some people round here do to encourage new growth on the moor. A fresh line of heather. A burst of two of grass.’

‘Oh …’

‘It can be dangerous,’ Scottie continued, keeping his eyes on the road. ‘Sometimes the fire can go out of control. It can do a hell of a lot of damage then.’

Dunkie nodded his head, his gaze returning to the window of the bus, watching a couple of men a short distance away. They had scarves around their faces as they stepped near the blaze, threshing flames with broomsticks in their hands, as if they were indulging in some form of witchcraft as they sought to keep the fire they had lit in strict obedience to their will.

‘Ah can see that,’ he said.

Two days later, Dunky did not turn up in school.

He had come in with the rest of us on the bus this morning but disappeared somewhere between the buspark and the school. Carrying a sack upon his shoulder, he hung back from the rest of us for a moment before slipping away through the streets of town into the distance, heading out beyond the edge of the community towards the local dump, a place, too, where lochs and streams spilled and flowed into one another. He wandered down a peat road slightly beyond this, deeper into the heart of the moor, disappearing from the sight of others, even from the range of binoculars some who lived near there used from time to time.

Not that any of us were aware of any of this till the following morning. He travelled on the school bus as usual, sitting once more in his usual seat behind the driver. There was, however, something different about him from usual. His clothes were permeated by smoke. A fog clung to him, present in his shoes, thick brown hair, even the skin on his fingers. It laced, too, the sweat on his forehead, the sweat of his armpits. We all smelled it circulating round the bus, though at first, we weren’t sure of its source.

‘What the hell?’ one or two looked quizzically at each other.

‘That’s awful,’ another said.

‘What’s causing that stink?’ someone coughed.

And then there was the itching, sneezing, people lifting scarves and handkerchiefs to squeeze out all trace of the smell. It wasn’t possible. Not even when people opened the bus windows to allow the greyness of the air outside to swirl and cleanse those on board. The stink was still there, becoming thicker and more intense the closer we came to town. It seemed to permeate the air even more each time the bus stopped at a traffic light or waited at a roundabout. The moment too we paused to allow one of the local fire engines to swirl past, its alarm ringing loudly.

‘Something’s happened,’ a voice declared. ‘Some of the moor outside the town’s ablaze.’

‘Aye. That’ll be it.’ Scottie the driver nodded. ‘It’s the time of year these things take place.’

‘Worse than usual this year. Worse than I’ve ever seen.’

Barbed and dense, the mist clung to the buildings of the town, smearing doors and windows with its clouds. The spire of a local church disappeared in the haze. The chime of the town hall clock became muted to a whisper in the greyness of the morning. The road blurred. Pavements turned dull and indistinct. Even the school turned almost invisible, the ring of its bell barely heard as we drove into the buspark.

‘Some day,’ Scottie said as we left the bus. ‘Not seen many quite like this.’

‘No. No. You’re right there.’

And then at the morning interval, there was Dunky standing in front of these older boys who had bullied him for months. For once he had not been the one dragged and brought to the Arches. He was waiting for them instead, his face burning with a grin while all around him, the others were coughing and smoking, gagging on the air that swirled everywhere, choking the people of the town.

‘Fancy a smoke?’ he said.

Puzzled and bemused, they looked at him.

He smiled at them again. ‘Oh, go on. Suck it in. Breathe it out. Enjoy it.’

They looked at him before they turned to gaze at one another.

‘Were you the one to blame for all this?’ one asked. ‘Did you do this?’

He didn’t answer, just grinned at them all through the grey, watching as they all grew nervous around him, continuing to gaze as they walked away …