第68章 Kilvane

The road gave out two miles short of Kilvane, exactly as promised, and became a drover's path along the top of low cliffs, and the country opened out northward into moor and lochan and sky with nothing in it but weather. The township straggled along the shore of a bay like an afterthought of the landscape: a dozen white houses, a working quay the size of a parlor, fields running down to a strand of broken shell. And above the bay, on a raised terrace of ground where the old sea had once reached, stood the chapel. It was roofless and gabled to half height, its walls furred with lichen the colors of old gold, its burial ground still tended — that was the first thing Lila noticed; the grass was mown, the few stones upright — and below it, between it and the shore, lay the white sweep of the beach where, according to a schoolmistress writing in June of 1911, a stone lay face-down in the shingle, turned by men who feared it, waiting for better readers. The better readers were expected. Flora Macneill met them at the head of the brae, seventy-five, small as a wren and twice as quick, great-great-niece to Christina the donor and keeper of what she called our account of it — an oral ledger three generations deep, delivered now in full while she walked them down through the burial ground with the confidence of a woman giving evidence. "My aunt's aunt made the rubbing and posted it south and got nothing back but a printed card, and she said to my grandmother, there will be others asking one day, and when they come you will tell them true. So." She stopped at the chapel doorway, or where the doorway had been, and pointed down at the turf between her feet with a foot itself, in the manner of one treading on the subject. "The doorstep. That's what came down to me. The roll of the drowned is under the doorstep, walked over soft by every soul that ever came to kirk, which my grandmother said was not disrespect but keeping — your feet telling it, morning by morning, we've not forgotten, we're still coming. And when the roof fell, the stone stayed, because moving it needed leave nobody could give." The doorstep was a slab six feet long, its edges rounded by centuries of soles, turf grown over it to a depth of inches. Neve knelt and peeled the grass back with her fingers, gently, the way you unbandage something, and the surface underneath came up dark and dense with carving, edge to edge — columns, clusters at their heads, the whole face a page written solid. "Underfoot," Neve whispered. "All those years, and everyone walking gently." She looked up at Flora with wet eyes. "Your grandmother was right. It's the opposite of disrespect. It's communion every Sunday." The burial ground around them held its own quiet record. The upright stones were few and mostly recent, Macneills two deep in one corner; but along the chapel's north wall ran a line of older markers, plain and sea-pitted, their lettering cut by unpracticed hands. Flora named them without needing to consult anything. "The carriers," she said. "MacArthurs. They carted for this coast three hundred years — meal, peats, coffins, whatever needed moving that a boat couldn't reach. My grandmother said her own grandmother could mind when the last of them died out of this yard, and that the family was never the same after, because a township without carriers is a hand without thumbs." She glanced at Lila, shrewd under her shawl. "You'll have heard the name already, or I'm the wrong side of eighty. Christina wrote it in her book, didn't she. The MacArthurs' cart." "She did," Lila said slowly, looking down at the weathered stones. The family that had carried a box north into silence had its roots here, in this yard, under these very walls — which meant that somewhere up the line of their marriages and migrations there might still be an attic, a kist, a memory. Another thread to pull, added to the growing bundle. Inside the chapel, at the east end where the table would have stood, they found the other thing Christina's notebook had led them to look for without quite naming it: a plinth-stone, waist-high, and in its top a square socket, box-sized, edges worn round, empty. Lila put her hand into the hollow and felt at the far corner something clinging — brought it out into the light on her fingertip. A flake of wax, deep red-brown even after a century open to the weather, the color of dried blood. The seal-wax of the bottle, of the letter in the cleft, of the box beneath the tide. "The kirk box," Flora said quietly, watching from the doorway. "Went away in a cart before my grandmother's wedding-day. The MacArthurs' cart, she always said, and never came back, and never sent word, and the family held that silence too, the way families do — shame, maybe, or maybe just sorrow. My aunt wrote in her book about sending it north. Nobody here knew where north it went." She folded her hands. "So you know as much now as this township does, and I'd judge from your faces you know a deal more." They sat that evening in Flora's kitchen while the light lasted late around the curtains, and it was Flora herself who set out the last difficulty, plainly, because accounts in Kilvane were kept plain. "You can't lift that doorstep tomorrow on your own say-so," she said. "There's them in the township will stand on it glad enough once they know what they've been standing on, and there's them that won't have it lifted for love nor money, and both sorts are good people and both sorts are right. You want the stone, you call the township together and ask. That's the custom here since forever. Asking leave is the half of remembering, my grandmother always said, though I doubt she knew how far her sayings would travel." "And if the township says no?" Neve asked. Flora shrugged, unbothered. "Then you'll have asked, and been told no by people who heard you, and the stone stays walked on, and that's an answer too. But come to the hall first and make your case. And—" she cocked her head, listening to something outside the window, out over the water— "you might mention there's still folk here that keep more than they let on. Hear that? No? Wind off the headland, you'd say." But her eyes were amused and certain. "That'll be Raouline, singing at the Point again. Fifty years she's hummed out there of an evening and never told a soul what for, and nobody ever asked, because asking after Raouline is like asking after weather. Tomorrow you might ask."