Dancing at the Rascal Fair Read online

  America. Montana. Those words with their ends open. Those words that were ever in the four corners of my mind, and I am sure Rob’s, too, all the minutes since we had left Nethermuir. I hear that set of words yet, through all the time since, the pronouncement Rob gave them that day. America and Montana echoed and echoed in us, right through my mistrust of journeying on water, past Rob’s breeze of manner, into the tunnels of our bones. For with the Jemmy underway out the Firth of Clyde we were threading our lives into the open beckon of those words. Like Lucas Barclay before us, now we were on our way to be Americans. To be—what did people call themselves in that far place Montana? Montanese? Montanians? Montaniards? Whatever that denomination was, now the two of us were going to be its next members, with full feathers on.

  • • •

  My first night in steerage I learned that I was not born to sleep on water. The berth was both too short and too narrow for me, so that I had to kink myself radically; curl up and wedge in at the same time. Try that if you ever want to be cruel to yourself. Too, steerage air was thick and unpleasant, like breathing through dirty flannel. Meanwhile Rob, who could snooze through the thunders of Judgment Day, was composing a nose song below me. But discomfort and bad air and snores were the least of my wakefulness, for in that first grief of a night—oh yes, and the Jemmy letting forth an iron groan whenever its bow met the waves some certain way—my mind rang with everything I did not want to think of. Casting myself from Nethermuir. The drowned horse Ginger. Walls of this moaning ship, so close. The coffin confines of my bedamned berth. The ocean, the ocean on all sides, including abovehead. Dark Neptune’s labyrinthine lanes/’Neath these savage liquid plains. I rose in heart-rattling startlement once when I accidentally touched one hand against the other and felt wetness there. My own sweat.

  I still maintain that if the Atlantic hadn’t been made of water I could have gone to America at a steady trot But it seems to be the case that fear can sniff the bothering places in us. Mine had been in McCaskills for some eighty years now. The bones of the story are this. With me on this voyage, into this unquiet night, came the fact that I was the first McCaskill since my father’s grandfather to go upon the sea. That voyage of Alexander McCaskill was only a dozen miles, but the most famous dozen miles in Great Britain of the time, and he voyaged them over and over and over again. He was one of the stonemasons of Arbroath who worked with the great engineer Robert Stevenson to build the Bell Rock lighthouse. On the clearest of days I have seen that lighthouse from the Arbroath harbor and have heard the story of the years of workships and cranes and winches and giant blocks of granite and sandstone, and to this moment I don’t know how they could do what was done out there, build a hundred-foot tower of stone on a reef that vanished deep beneath every high tide. But there it winks at the world even today, impossible Bell Rock, standing in the North Sea announcing the Firth of Forth and Edinburgh beyond, and my great-grand-father’s toolmarks are on its stones. The generations of us, we who are not a sea people, dangle from that one man who went to perform stonework in the worst of the waters around Scotland. Ever since him, Alexander has been the first or second name of a McCaskill in each of those generations. Ever since him, we have possessed a saga to measure ourselves against. I lay there in the sea-plowing Jemmy trying to think myself back into that other manhood, to leave myself, damp sackful of apprehension that I was, and to feel from the skin inward what it would have been like to be Alexander McCaskill of the Bell Rock those eighty years ago. A boat is a hole in the water, began my family’s one scrap of our historic man, the solitary story from our McCaskill past that my father would ever tell. In some rare furlough from his brooding, perhaps Christmas or Hogmanay and enough drinks of lubrication, that silence-locked man my father would suddenly unloose the words. But there was a time your great-grandfather was more glad than anything to see a boat, I’m here to tell you. Out there on the Bell Rock they were cutting down into the reef for the lighthouse’s foundation, the other stonemen and your great-grandfather, that day. When the tide began to come in they took up their tools and went across the reef to meet their boat. Stevenson was there ahead of them, as high as he could climb on the reef and standing looking out into the fog on the water. Your great-grandfather knew there was wrong as soon as he saw Stevenson. Stevenson the famous engineer of the Northern Lights, pale as the cat’s milk. As he ought have been, for there was no boat on the reef and none in sight anywhere. The tide was coming fast, coming to cover all of the Bell Rock with water higher than this roof. Your great-grandfather saw Stevenson turn to speak to the men. “This I’ll swear to, Alexander the Second,” your great-grandfather always told me it just this way. “Mister Stevenson’s mouth moved as if he was saying, but no words came out. The fear had dried his mouth so.” Your great-grandfather and the men watched Stevenson go down on his knees and drink water like a dog from a pool in the rock. When he stood up to try to speak this time, somebody shouted out, “A boat! There, a boat!” The pilot boat, it was, bringing the week’s mail to the workship. Your great-grandfather always ended saying, “I almost ran out onto the water to hail that boat, you can believe.”

  “You ask was I afraid, Alexander the Second?” My father’s voice became a strange, sad thunder when he told of my great-grandfather’s reply to him. “Every hour of those three Bell Rock years, and most of the minutes, drowning was on my mind. I was afraid enough, yes. But the job was there at the Bell Rock. It was to be done, afraid or no afraid.”

  The past. The past past, so to speak, back there beyond myself. What can we ever truly know of it, how can we account for what it passes to us, what it withholds? Employ my imagination to its utmost, I could not see myself doing what Alexander McCaskill did in his Bell Rock years, travel an extent of untrustable water each day to set Abroath stone onto reef stone. Feed me first to the flaming hounds of hell. Yet for all I knew, my ocean-defying great-grandfather was afraid of the dark or whimpered at the sight of a spider but any such perturbances were whited out by time. Only his brave Bell Rock accomplishment was left to sight. And here I lay, sweating steerage sweat, with a dread of water that had no logic newer than eighty years, no personal beginning, and evidently no end. It simply was in me, like life’s underground river of blood. Ahead there, I hoped far ahead, when I myself became the past—would the weak places in me become hidden, too? Say I ever did become husband, father, eventual great-grandfather of Montana McCaskills. What were they going to comprehend of me as their firstcomer? Not this sweated night here in my midnight cage of steerage, not my mental staggers. No, for what solace it was, eventually all that could be known of Angus Alexander McCaskill was that I did manage to cross the Atlantic Ocean.

  If I managed to cross it.

  • • •

  Through the night and most of the next day, the Jemmy steamed its way along the coast of Ireland to Queenstown, where our Irish came aboard. To say the truth, I was monumentally aware of Queenstown as the final chance to me to be not aboard; the outmost limb-end where I could still turn to Rob and utter, no, I am sorry, I have tried but water and I do not go together. So far I had managed not to let my tongue say that. It bolstered me that Rob and I had been up from Steerage Number One for hours, on deck to see whatever there was, blinking now against the sun and its sparkle on the blue Queenstown harbor. And so we saw the boats come. A fleet of small ones, each catching the wind with a gray old lugsail. They were steering direct to us and as the fleet neared we could make out that there was one man in each boat. No. One woman in each boat.

  “Who are these, then?” I called to a deckhand sashaying past. “Bumboats,” he flung over his shoulder. “The Irish navy. Ye’ll learn some words now.”

  Two dozen of the boats nudged against the steamship like piglets against a sow, and the deckhand and others began tossing down ropes. The women came climbing up like sailors—when you think of it, that is what they were—and with them arrived baskets, boxes, creels, buckets, shawls. In three winks the invaders had the shawls
spread and their wares displayed on them. Tobacco, apples, soap. Pickled meat. Pinafores. Butter, hardbread, cheese. Pots of shamrock. Small mirrors. Legs of mutton. Then began the chants of these Irishwomen singing their wares, the slander back and forth between our deckhands and the women hawkers, the eruptions of haggling as passengers swarmed around the deck market. The great deck of the steamship all but bubbled over with people.

  As we gaped at the stir of business Rob broke out in delight, “Do you see what this is like, Angus?” And answered himself by whistling the tune of it. I laughed along with every note, for the old verse thrummed as clear to me as an anthem.

  Dancing at the rascal fair,

  devils and angels all were there,

  heel and toe, pair by pair,

  dancing at the rascal fair.

  From the time we could walk Rob and I had never missed a rascal fair together—that day of fest when Nethermuir farmers and farm workers met to bargain out each season’s wages and terms and put themselves around a drink or so in the process. The broad cobbled market square of our twisty town, as abrupt as a field in a stone forest, on that one day of magic filled and took on color and laughter. Peddlers, traveling musicians, the Highland dancer known as Fergus the Dervish, whose cry of hiiyuhh! could be heard a mile, onlooking townfolk, hubbub and gossip and banter, and the two of us like minnows in that sea of faircomers, aswim in the sounds of the ritual of hard bargaining versus hard-to-bargain.

  I see you wear the green sprig in your hat. Are you looking for the right work, laddie?

  Aye, I am.

  And would you like to come to me? I’ve a place not a mile from here, as fine a field as ever you’ll see to harvest.

  Maybe so, maybe no. I’ll be paid for home-going day, will I?

  Maybe so, maybe no. That locution of the rascal fair, up there with Shakespeare’s best. I have wondered, trying to think back on how Rob and I grew up side by side, how the McCaskills and the Barclays began to be braided together in the generation before us, how all has happened between us since, whether those bargaining words are always in the air around us, just beyond our hearing and our saying, beyond our knowing how to come to terms with them. But that is a thought of now, not then. Then I knew of no maybes, for Rob was right as right could be when he whistled of the rascal fair there on the Jemmy’s deck; with these knots of dickering and spontaneous commotion and general air of mischief-about-to-be, this shipboard bazaar did seem more than anything like that mix of holiday and sharp practice we’d rambled through in old Nethermuir.

  Remembered joy is twice sweet. Rob’s face definitely said so, for he had that bright unbeatable look on him. In a mood like this he’d have called out “fire!” in a gunshop just to see what might happen. The two of us surged along the deck with everybody else of the Jemmy, soaking in as much of the surprise jubilee as we could.

  “Have your coins grown to your pockets there in Scotland?” demanded the stout woman selling pinafores and drew laughing hoots from us all.

  “But mother,” Rob gave her back, “would any of those fit me?”

  “I’d mother you, my milktooth boy. I’d mother you, you’d not forget it.”

  “Apples and more apples and more apples than that!” boasted the next vendor.

  “Madam, you’re asking twice the price of apples ashore!” expostulated a father with his wife and eager-eyed children in a covey around him.

  “But more cheap, mister man, than the ocean’s price of them.”

  “I tell ye,” a deckhand ajudged to another, “I still fancy the lass there with the big cheeses—”

  The other deckhand guffawed. “Cheese, do ye call those?”

  “—and ye know I en’t one that fancies just anyoldbody.”

  “No, just anybody born of woman.”

  “Muuuht’n, muuuht’n,” bleated the sheep-leg seller as we jostled past.

  “Green of the sod of Ireland!” the shamrock merchant advertised to us.

  So this was what the world was like. I’d had no idea.

  Then we were by a woman who was calling out nothing. She simply stood silent, both hands in front of her, a green ball displayed in each.

  Rob passed on with the others of our throng, I suppose assuming as I first did that she was offering the balls as playthings. But children were rampant among this deck crowd and neither they nor their parents were stopping by the silent woman either.

  Curiosity is never out of season with me. I turned and went back for a close look. Her green offerings were not balls, they were limes.

  Even with me there in front of her, the woman said nothing. I had to ask. “Your produce doesn’t need words, missus?”

  “I’m not to name the ill they’re for, young mister, else I can’t come onto your fine ship.”

  Any schoolboy knew the old tale of why Royal Navy sailors came to be called limies, and so I grinned, but I had to let Madam Irish know I was not so easily gulled. “It takes a somewhat longer voyage than this to come down with scurvy, missus.”

  “Tisn’t the scurvy.”

  “What, then?”

  “Your mouth can ask your stomach when the two of them meet, out there on the herring pond.”

  Seasickness. Among my Atlantic thoughts was whether the crossing would turn me as green as the rind of these limes. “How can this fruit of yours ward off that, then?”

  “Not ward it off, no. There’s no warding to that. You only get it, like death. These fruit are for after. They clean your mouth, young mister. Scour the sick away.”

  “Truth?”

  She nodded. But then, what marketeer wouldn’t.

  It must have been the Irish sun. I fished for my coins. “How much for a pocketful?”

  Doubtful transaction done, I made my way along the deck to where Rob was. He and the majority of the other single men from our compartment had ended up here around the two youngest Irishwomen, plainly sisters, who were selling ribbons and small mirrors. The flirting seemed to be for free.

  The sight of the saucy sisters elevated my mood some more, too, and so I stepped close behind Rob and caroled appropriately in his ear:

  “Dancing at the rascal fair,

  show an ankle, show a pair,

  show what’ll make the lasses stare,

  dancing at the rascal fair.”

  “Shush, you’ll be heard,” he chided, and glanced around to see whether I had been. Rob had that prim side, and I felt it my duty every so often to tweak him on it.

  “Confess,” I urged him. “You’d give your ears for a smile from either of these lovelies.”

  Before he could answer me on that, the boatswain’s whistle shrilled. The deck market dissolved, over the side the women went like cats. In a minute their lugsails were fanned against the sparkling water of Queenstown harbor, and the Jemmy was underway once more.

  • • •

  After Queenstown and with only ocean ahead for a week and a day, my second seagoing night had even less sleep in it than my first. Resolutely telling myself there was no back door to this ship now, I lay crammed into that stifling berth trying to put my mind anywhere—multiplication, verse, Irish sisters—other than Steerage Number One.

  What I found I could spend longest thoughts on, between periodic groans from the Jemmy that required me to worry whether its iron was holding, was Nethermuir. Rascal fair town Nethermuir. Old grayrock town Nethermuir, with its High Street wandering down the hill the way a drowsy cow would, to come to the River Carrou. Be what it may, a fence, a house, a street, the accusing spire of a church, Nethermuir fashioned it of stone, and from below along River Street the town looked as though it had been chiseled out complete rather than erected. Each of the thousand mornings that I did my route to open the wheelwright shop, Nethermuir was as asleep as its stones. In the dark—out went the streetlights at midnight; a Scottish town sees no need to illumine its empty hours—in the dark before each dawn I walked up River Street from our narrow-windowed tenements past the clock tower of the linen mi
ll and the silent frontages of the dye works and the paper mill and other shrines of toil. Was that the same me back there, trudging on stone past stone beneath stone until my hand at last found the oaken door of the ’wright shop? Climbing the stair to the office in the nail loft and coaxing a fire in the small stove and opening the ledger, pen between my teeth to have both hands free, to begin on the accounts? Hearing the workmen say their day-starting greetings, those with farthest to come arriving first, for wasn’t that always the way? Was that truly me, identical with this steerage creature listening to a steamship moan out greetings to disaster? The same set of bones called Angus McCaskill, anyway. The same McCaskill species that the Barclays and their wheelwright shop were accustomed to harboring.

  To see you here is to lay eyes on your father again, Angus, Rob’s father Vare Barclay told me at least once a week. A natural pleasantry, but Vare Barclay and I equally knew it was nowhere near true. When you saw my father there over his forge in an earlier time, you were viewing the keenest of wheelsmiths; the master in that part of Scotland at making ninety pounds of tire-iron snugly band itself onto a wagon wheel and become its invincible rim. Skill will ask its price, though. The years of anvil din took nearly all of my father’s hearing, and to attract his attention as he stood there working a piece of iron you would have had to toss a wood chip against his shirt. Do that and up he would glance from his iron, little less distant when he was aware of you than when he wasn’t. Never did I make that toss of contact with him, when sent by my mother on errand to the ’wright shop, without wondering what it would take to mend his life. For my father had gone deaf deeper than his ears.

  I am from a house of storm. My parents Alex and Kate McCaskill by the middle of their marriage had become baffled and wounded combatants. I was their child who lived. Of four. Christie, Jack and Frank, who was already apprenticing with my father at the Barclay ’wright shop—in a single week the three of them died of cholera. I only barely remember them, for I was several years the youngest—like Rob’s sister Adair in the Barclay family, an “afterthought” child; I have contemplated since whether parents in those times instinctively would have a late last child as a kind of insurance—but I recall in all clarity my mother taking me to the farm cottage of a widow friend of hers when the killing illness began to find Nethermuir. When my mother came for me six weeks later she had aged twice that many years, and our family had become a husk the epidemic left behind. From then on my father lived—how best to say this?—he lived alongside my mother and me rather than with us. Sealed into himself, like someone of another country who happened to be traveling beside us. Sealed into his notion, as I grew, that the one thing for me was to follow into his smithy trade. I’m here to tell you, it’s what life there is for us and ours. A McCaskill at least can have an honest pair of hands. Oh, there was war in the house about that. My father could not see why I ought to do anything but apprentice myself into hammer work in the Barclay wheelshop as he had, as my brother Frank had; my mother was equally as set that I should do anything but. His deafness made their arguments over me a roaring time. The teacups rattled when they went at it. The school-leaving age was thirteen, so I don’t know how things would have gone had not my father died when I was twelve. My mother at once took work as a spinner in the linen mill and enrolled me with the ’venture schoolteacher Adam Willox. Then when I was sixteen, my mother followed my father into death. She was surprised by it, going the same way he had; a stroke that toppled her in the evening and took her in the early morning. With both of them gone, work was all the family I had. Rob’s father put me on as clerk in the ’wright shop in the mornings, Adam Willox made me his pupil-teacher in the afternoons. Two half-occupations, two slim wages, and I was glad enough to have them, anything. Vare Barclay promised me full clerkwork whenever the times found their way from bad to good again, Adam Willox promised I could come in with him as a schoolkeeper whenever pupils grew ample enough again. But promises never filled the oatmeal bowl. So when Rob caught America fever, I saw all too readily the truth in what he said about every tomorrow of our Nethermuir lives looking the same. About the great American land pantry in such places as his uncle’s Montana, where homesteads were given—given!—in exchange for only a few years of earnful effort. The power of that notion of homesteading in America, of land and lives that would be all our own. We never had known anything like it in our young selves. America. Montana. This ship to them. This black iron groaner of a ship that—