“No man is an island” — John Donne 1624
It’s a cliche that it always rains at these things. In my case, it did too. Not even decent rain, mind you, but that cold drizzle that never stops, but slowly seeps right through to the bone no matter what you’re wearing. But then again that’s hardly surprising up here in the far North where all you get is rain, every bloody day of the year. People and sheep perched on a couple of rocks thrown into the ocean, trying to live off slim patches of rough grass and what they can pull out of the water.
They did manage to get me into the church, something they had tried for a lifetime to do and failed up to this event. On a Wednesday morning at that. Woden’s Day, not that most of these hard-faced bastards would know who Woden was. Despite being surrounded by a couple of thousand years worth of pagan artifacts everywhere you look, these people knew only one god, and he was a jealous one. A harsh god for a harsh land.
A big black crow perched behind the box talked about the dead man in it. Talking nonsense to be honest. On an island this small you’d think everybody knows everybody, but he didn’t know me. Oh, he probably thought he did. Knew me enough to wave with a carefully practiced casualness if he met me while he was on the way to some old biddie’s house to have tea with her and talk about how she might want to make her peace with god before it was too late. Great afternoon chat that.
But now he was desperately trying to pick at the bones of the man I had been. “He wasn’t a church-going man, but…” Aye, that sentence was sure to appear. Twist the narrative to finally bring me back in line behind Jesus. “He was a good man, in his own way.” That one always appears. Even when the man in the box was a murderer or a rapist, in death all sins were forgiven. That’s what they said, anyway.
But that wasn’t going to fly for me though, was it? I already had all their sins. All those other boxes that had gone into the church before me. Before they sent those men on their last journey they would call me in. They’d send a boy to my croft with a note. So-and-so has passed away, and could you come and have a wee bite with him to ease his passing? Never a telephone. Maybe sometimes. I’d hear the ringing from the public phone box in the dead of night, and struggle over to it in an overcoat thrown over my pyjamas. Standing there in a box, listening to someone give me directions to the other end of the island, or maybe as far as Uist or Skye if I was unlucky. But normally they’d send a boy. On a bicycle, panting up and down those hills in the rain.
Then the next day, putting on the tweed 3-piece suit that got sent to me by some grand English lady when her ould boy passed on. She couldn’t bear to have it in the house, the suit he died in, so she gave it to me. Not personally you understand, she sent a man over in a Land Rover with it, tied up in brown paper and string. But it fitted well enough, considering, and it’s lasted. Aye, you couldn’t beat Marion Campbell’s tweed, right enough. Her suits lasted longer that she did, bless her soul.
And then to the house, to sit there, alone with the body, eating. Oh, they always put on a big spread for me, I’ll give them that. The wife or the sister would be there making sandwiches, maybe even a mutton bone stew, for it was chilling work that I did, and hot stew would go down nicely. They’d never look me in the eye when handing it to me though. If they did hand it to me. Most of the time it would be sitting waiting for me when they let me in.
And I’d sit, and eat, and watch the body, and say the words they wanted to hear:
“I give easement and rest now to thee, dear man. Come not down the lanes or in our fields. And for thy peace I pawn my own soul. Amen.”
I’d eat the dead man’s food, and in doing that, I’d eat the sins of the dead man too.
Aye, I pawned my own soul. I took their sins on top of my own. And sins there were a-plenty. Oh aye, beneath those pious prayers on Sunday, they sinned all right. Some of them hated everything and everyone, their families, their lives, the fish they got up at crack of dawn to catch, the sheep they walked through the hills to herd. A couple of them even hated their own sheepdogs. That was a hard one to stomach. How can a man become so twisted that he even hates his dog? But I ate all their sins anyway. With every bite. I took those sins on my own soul, and eased their passing. Sometimes it was hard not to choke on that bread and mutton, and I’d be grateful for the mug of beer or the whisky they would have on hand.
I could tell they didn’t like giving me the whisky though. Good whisky, too good for the likes of me. Aye, I could save their souls, but I still didn’t deserve a drop of the good stuff. Not like the crow. He’d come after I’d leave and he would say some prayers that they all knew in their hearts would do nothing. That’s why they’d have me in first. But they’d still save the good whisky for the Minister. And I’d go away with the bitter taste of another man’s sin in my mouth instead.
And now, it was my turn. I stood outside that church, watching through a door warped with years of frost and rain and sun and more rain so that it didn’t close right any more. I stood outside there and watched the crow Minister stumble around to find something nice to say about me. Anything, as long as he didn’t have to mention what I really was, and what I really did. That wouldn’t fly, would it crow? Oh, you know what I was, sure enough, but you can’t admit it, can you? Can’t admit that your god couldn’t cleanse them of their sins, I had to.
And now here I was. Standing there outside the church, in the rain, with all the sins of the island piled on my shoulders. Where was I going to go? Oh, not to heaven, that much was certain. But then, I always knew better than that. I knew when I was eating those sins of those men that they weren’t going to heaven. Or hell. They were going nowhere. That was the big secret of my job. It wasn’t to get them to heaven. It was just to get them away. Get their spirits out of the house and away from the living. So the living could keep on living.
But I couldn’t do that now, could I? I couldn’t just fade away like all those others through the years. Not with all this sin on my shoulders. No, that wasn’t something for me. I had pawned my soul for a mug of beer and a loaf of bread.
So, at last, they got what they always said they wanted. I finally came to the church and I finally walked inside. And I came up to every man and woman in there, and reached out and spoke to them. Not that they heard any words, because I had no mouth any more to speak with. But they felt my touch, and they felt the sins I carried. The sins of their fathers and grandfathers and great-grandfathers to the third and fourth generation. Oh, they felt them all right. They felt them all. And some started sobbing, and some started screaming, and some just sat there, faces are hard as the rock they lived on, and gritted their teeth and tried to bear more of the sin they had known forever.
And at last I came to the box and to the crow, and I reached out to him, and all the sins that he had done, and he saw then. He saw that his life was as hollow as the box my own body lay in, and all the doubt he had held inside since the seminary flowed out over him and he lost everything in that moment as he at last understood all of the sins that he had never known before.
And I lay down in that coffin, and so my soul came to rest.
Aye, I pawned my soul alright, many many times. But what they all tried hard to forget is that a pawn is but a loan, and all debts must be paid in time. All debts must be paid.
July 2018, Isle of Lewis, Hebrides, Scotland.