The Testament of Gideon Mack Read online

  Keldo Woods lie between the new or high road that runs into Monimaskit from the west, off the Dundee to Aberdeen dual carriageway, and the old or low road that ambles into town along the coast. On the other side of the dual carriageway the land rises steeply to form a rocky rampart, where the Keldo Water is forced through the ravine of the Black Jaws, and far in the distance beyond this rampart are the dark outlines of the Grampians. By the time the Keldo comes out of the Black Jaws and under the dual carriageway it has had all the excitement squeezed out of it: its banks widen and it flows calmly and decently beside the high road on its last few miles to the sea. On the edge of town there is an old footbridge across the river. If you cross it you find a path that curls through a scattering of ash trees, then descends into the pine woods of Keldo. It joins the forestry workers’ track that eventually brings you out on a narrow road with only a few houses dotted along it. This is the low road into Monimaskit, and one of the houses is the home of John and Elsie Moffat and their two young daughters, Katie and Claire. Sometimes they’d be out in the garden, and I’d wave and shout hello to them as I ran past on my way back to town.

  I am writing of less than a year past, but it seems decades ago since I stood in those woods, staring at a stone that shouldn’t have been there. The only word that came to me that expressed what I was feeling was fuck. I started saying it between breaths as they slowed down a little. ‘Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.’ The breaths were mine but then they were outside and away into the atmosphere. I was in front of a standing stone that didn’t exist. ‘What the fuck is going on?’ I said loudly. A minister using that word might be thought daring or dangerous, but my voice sounded wee and lonely in the silence, a voice bleating in the wilderness. If God was out there he was either deaf or didn’t care; he didn’t, at any rate, strike me down. I thought of Peter Macmurray, one of my elders: had he chanced to overhear my expletives, he would certainly have expected God to take a pot-shot. But nothing happened.

  The stone, certainly, was not offended. It continued to be there, continued not to disappear. It didn’t give a damn about me, or even a fuck. I started to shiver. Don’t get cold, I told myself, but I wasn’t cold. I backed away. The stone remained. It looked disapproving, as if it knew who I was. I didn’t like it, felt a strange panic rising in me. I returned to the path and started running again.

  All the way back to town I could not get the thought of the stone out of my head. There was something cruel and alien about it. I even glanced over my shoulder a few times to see if it was pursuing me. I remembered one of the few children’s books my parents had had in their house – our house – one from which my mother used to read to me before, learning to read myself, I relieved her of that tiresome task: it was about a little Dutch girl who didn’t want to go to church, and who was chased by the huge church bell until she changed her mind. A fascinating, scary bedtime story: I both loved and hated it. The stone was like that bell in some way. It was fixed, upright, embedded in the ground – yet perhaps it was able to move as well.

  After all, how else had it got there? Maybe my mind was playing tricks on me, and it hadn’t been there at all. If the light had not been almost gone I would have turned around and run back, to see if I’d been mistaken. I found myself saying ‘Stone, stone, stone,’ in time with my out-breaths. My god-daughter Katie, John and Elsie’s four-year-old, had a bear called Bear and an imaginary friend called Friend. The stone acquired a capital S in my mind. The stone became the Stone.

  IV

  It is the start of December as I write this. Autumn has been long and soft, but now come the first barbs of winter. There was a flurry of snow this afternoon, whisking through Monimaskit as if it didn’t think much of the place and was in a hurry to get away again. I had stepped out for some air and I met the snow, or it blew into me, halfway down Baxter Loan. In a few seconds it infested my upturned collar and every opening of my coat, like a swarm of ice-cold midges. It was a curious thing, however, that the sun continued to shine for the entire ten minutes that this little blizzard lasted. Sunshine slanting through snowflakes is a rare delight: you feel as if the seasons are playing tig, or showing off how clever and contrary they can be. I went home through the kirkyard wishing I still had one of Catherine Craigie’s kites to send up amidst the sun and snow. So when two boys leapt from behind a gravestone, shouting, ‘Mad Mack the minister!’ I was more inclined to laugh than be angry, and when they launched two hopeless attempts at snowballs, scraped from the top of the stone, and showered themselves with powder, I did indeed laugh – loud and long enough perhaps to sound slightly unhinged – and the boys fled like rabbits. The wind carrying the snow was sharp, but I limped back to the manse feeling better than I had done for weeks.

  And I still feel it. I am active again, my mind is buzzing, excited, and a great burden of doom and duty has been lifted from me. This task of ordering my thoughts and writing them down is doing me good. It brings me ever closer to a conclusion.

  I have been called many things over the years – Dirty Mack, Marathon Mack, Mystic Mack – and to be called mad by two young laddies, who at least had the grace not to snigger it behind my back, is no great injury. I can hardly blame them, anyway, since the general view of the town seems to be that the Reverend Gideon Mack has lost his marbles.

  Am I mad? Well, I talk out loud when alone, but then what minister of religion doesn’t? Some talk to God whether or not God is listening, or there at all. Others rehearse their sermons, or practise the kind words they will offer bereaved families or the advice they will give to couples about to marry. I acknowledge the possibility of my insanity – nobody can have pondered this longer and more deeply than I – but at the same time, as I have already said, there is at least a little madness in us all. And since I hear myself speak, am aware of my state of uncertainty, can I really be mad? Does this read like madness? It doesn’t feel mad. But then, what does madness feel like?

  If I could simply be classified as eccentric, then Presbytery – which is even now contemplating putting me on trial for my failings – might find a way to explain me. There is plenty of eccentricity in the Kirk, indeed it is encouraged – up to a point. To be eccentric is to be a ‘character’, and every institution needs characters. If the pulpits are full of characters there is a better chance that people will come to church, for the entertainment if nothing else, than if they are full of nondescript pedants and bores. I know of one minister who spends his days trying to convince people that a youthful Jesus, as in Blake’s hymn, came to Britain with Joseph of Arimathea to learn the secret wisdom of the Druids. Another plays the bagpipes at the weddings he conducts. Another plays saxophone in a jazz combo in a Glasgow club every Friday night. Then there is Lorna Sprott, who brings her Labrador into church, as the shepherds used to bring their collies, and lets the beast sleep on a cushion by the pulpit. Nobody seriously objects to this kind of thing: on the contrary, it adds a little local colour, which may in turn encourage a few more folk through the doors on a Sunday. But there comes a point where eccentricity tips into madness, and there the Kirk draws a line.

  In a way, though, it would suit everyone best if I were mad. The talking to oneself, ultimately, is unimportant. So, at a stretch, is whether or not the Stone in Keldo Woods exists. Likewise, the last funeral service I conducted might have been passed over as eccentricity: there is no sacrament attached to death in our Church, and no requirement for a funeral to follow any set pattern. Even some of the things I said on that occasion could be ascribed to my recent ordeal by water. But what makes life difficult for everybody is my having met with the Devil.

  O tempora! O mores! Oh holy shit! In the seventeenth century a minister who claimed to have seen and spoken with Satan in the flesh would have been not only believed but, assuming he had given a good account of himself, hailed a hero. In the twenty-first century such a minister is simply an embarrassment. I am not the face the Kirk wishes to show to the modern world. The most plausible way of dealing with me, then, is to
find me insane.

  Letters have been flying between Monimaskit, the Presbytery and 121 George Street;* the phone lines have been buzzing with conversations, faxes, e-mails, all with the problem of Gideon Mack as their theme. I imagine a file somewhere in the depths of 121, that palace of paperwork; I imagine the file becoming a drawer in a cabinet, the cabinet being moved to a bigger room deep in the labyrinth, the Kirk’s officials droning like worker bees as they construct a model of my madness from the reports of Presbytery. But can a whole Church find a single man insane in this day and age? Can a man meet the Devil in this day and age? The answer to both questions, be assured, is yes.

  Because the Kirk prides itself on its democracy I would have the right, if found insane by Presbytery, to appeal to the General Assembly, to drag things out by enlisting the expert evidence of doctors, psychologists and theologians. But what would be the point? What good would it do? The happy resolution I have come to is not to engage with the process at all. I will not be there, here, or anywhere. Then they can find me neither bad nor mad but absent, permanently absent – absconded, demitted, disappeared, kidnapped! – and the case will be closed. But not quite, for I will have my say – and hence this pen and this paper.

  It is nonsense, of course, to think myself unique, as if doubts and fears and loss of faith were never visited on a Scottish clergyman before. What is the history of Christianity in this dark wee country but a history of doubts and fears, graspings at metaphysics from hard stone and wet bog? True, some came up bloody and triumphant with their fists full of certainties, but it is a delusion to look into our past and see only grim ranks of Covenanters and John Knoxes scowling back. Even then there were plenty of holy wobblers and switherers making up the numbers. Had I lived in those fierce times, would I have been one of them or one of the zealots? I do not know. I only know that in this life I have lived behind a mask, adapting my disguise as circumstances required. For nearly forty years I have let the world assume that I believed in God when I did not.

  I sit in my study with the curtains open and the night crowding at the window to watch me at work. Somewhere out there the foxes have holes, and the birds their nests, but the son of the manse hath nowhere to lay his head. A joke. Of course I do. There is a double-bed up the stairs, more beds in the three spare rooms that might have been children’s bedrooms, and here in the study the armchair is high-backed and comfortable, very good for writing and dozing, dozing and writing. This is where I spend nearly all my time now. The fire, which I lit after my walk, is settled and cosy. But I am restless. There is someone out there with the foxes and birds, and I am waiting for him. I am anxious to see him but I know he will not come till I have finished writing this. And so I write. It is the prelude to our final, silent journey into knowledge. I long for that: utter silence.

  I felt a twinge in my left arm just now. Barely even that. A tiny submerged ripple running down it like an echo, an old memory. That arm has been quiet for weeks, hasn’t bothered me since my fall. But the twinge reminded me – as if I need reminding – of a hand reaching to me, pulling me from freezing water. Oh, that hand! But it was as if the arm, not I, remembered. I waited for more ripples, but they did not come. The arm is like some sleeping animal, separate and distinct from the rest of me. My right leg too: it doesn’t quite belong to me any more. I do not altogether trust either of these limbs, but I have picked up my pen with the hand of my left arm, and it is writing again.

  For several evenings in a row I sat at the blinking screen of the manse computer, trying to find a place to start. But the computer was unfriendly, and I realised that since I’d be leaving this place I would have to leave it as well. A floppy disc is too frail a thing on which to store everything I have to say: I prefer the pen. There is something elemental about the glide and flow of nib and ink on paper. Also, there can be no dispute, later, that this testament, written in my hand, is mine. So here I am now, finally, with a board across the arms of the chair, my good fountain pen, a sheaf of blank paper, and at my side a bottle of Dalwhinnie and a small glass. Here I am, in other words, for the duration. As long as it takes to tell my story.

  There was only one place to start, and that was with the Stone. But my head has been full of my father and my mother, my childhood and student days, my eleven-year marriage and my nearly fifteen years as minister here. So now I must go back: back to that other manse at Ochtermill, where I first became conscious of the world, and of that empty vessel in which my spirit, like the genie in the lamp, was condemned to dwell, and which went by the name of Gideon Mack.

  V

  I was born on 17th March, St Patrick’s Day, 1958, so when I first came upon the Stone I was forty-four, approaching forty-five. My father, the Reverend James Mack, was that age, forty-five, when I was born. My mother, Agnes Campbell, was six years younger – an age when many mothers are seeing their offspring leaving home for good – when she produced me, her only child. I was therefore brought up by parents who were old enough to be my grandparents.

  Of my actual grandparents, by the time I was born three were dead: my father’s father killed in the First World War; my mother’s felled by the influenza that swept the world in its aftermath; my father’s mother a victim of pneumonia in the harsh winter of 1947. The fourth, my maternal grandmother, died when I was three, leaving me with only the vaguest memory of a small, silent figure dressed in black from head to toe. I don’t recall that she was ever unkind to me, but somehow that figure infiltrated my early dreams, taking on an aspect of menace, and for a period I would wake screaming as she approached from the shadows of my mind. My mother, wearing a fawn dressing-gown, would enter the room and calm me. She was not a natural comforter: she was herself too nervous and timid a character to banish bad dreams for ever, but she did her best. One of my earliest memories: my mother holding me to her bony breast, the thin heat of her through the fawn wool. ‘Try to sleep now, Gideon,’ she would say. ‘We must not wake your father, must we?’ She was from Argyll originally and spoke impeccable English in a soft West Highland accent. We’d stay there for long minutes in the dark, clutched together in a kind of conspiracy against him, until sleep overtook me again.

  Later, when I was seven or eight, I went through a phase of sleepwalking. I would wake and find myself on the stairs, or in the kitchen, my bare feet cold on the linoleum. I did not panic on these occasions. Perhaps I only half woke up, although I remember the sensation even now. I simply turned around and went back to bed. But whenever it happened, my mother would be near by, standing like a ghost, watching me. This did not frighten me either: it was as if I expected to see her. That, at least, is my memory, but was she always there, or did this happen only once? I will never know now whether some instinct made her wake and follow me, to make sure I came to no harm, or whether she also wandered the house at night, and our meetings were chance occurrences. Whichever it was, in this too we were conspirators against the sleeping minister.

  James Mack, my father, was the son of a baker from Lanarkshire. He was five when his father was killed at Passchendaele. His mother removed to Glasgow, where she met and married another baker, an elderly man who died almost immediately, leaving her twice-widowed but reasonably comfortably off. There was enough money for my father, a good scholar, to go to the University. He’d always been serious, sombre and religious: it was natural, and highly satisfactory to his mother, that he should study for the Kirk. First as a probationer, then as a minister, he worked in some of the poorest parts of the city in the 1930s, a time of terrible hardship for many. This, he once told me, prepared him for what came next. When war broke out in 1939, he demitted his charge and became an army chaplain. He said he owed it to his father, even if he wasn’t going to fight, at least to get an idea of what being a soldier was like. He took part in the landings in Normandy in 1944 and advanced with the Allied forces all the way to Germany. One might have expected this experience to have generated a dislike of Germans, but it didn’t. He was suspicious of them, but he w
as suspicious of everybody. ‘We,’ he said (meaning, I think, the Scots of the Lowlands in particular and the people of Britain in general) ‘are all Germans under the skin.’ The people he really disliked, because of their brashness, which he saw as arrogance, and their drawling carelessness, which he saw as ignorance, were the Americans. I think he found the sheer might of the US armed forces repulsive. He knew that they were necessary to defeat Hitler, but something about them deeply offended him.

  He didn’t talk much about the war, but it must have affected him. How could it not have? He had, I presume, held the heads and hands of scores of wounded and dying men, said prayers over hundreds of bloody, dismembered and barbecued corpses, seen thousands of destroyed homes, starved bodies, ruined faces. I imagine him striding eastward through the shattered countryside and villages, gazing in awe at endless miles of man-made destruction and wondering what it all meant. What purpose was served by such bloody chaos, what plan or grand design could require such devastation? Nothing kills people’s belief in God more surely than war. But my father raised his eyes above the carnage, and God was there, stronger than ever.

  I have always envied him this single-minded devotion. How clear the view must be from that vantage point! For him, without God there was nothing but carnage. It wasn’t that God had absented himself, or was responsible for the mess human beings had made: for my father, God was the only redemption from the mess.

  In 1946 he returned to Glasgow, and in 1947, the year his mother died, he was called to the charge of the Stirlingshire parish of Ochtermill. It was there that he met Agnes Campbell.

  Agnes’s grandparents had spoken nothing but Gaelic, and she still had that otherness of the Gael that has always tried the patience of Lowlanders, even those attracted by it. She was the only child of a widow in his congregation – the woman in black of my infant dreams. It seems that Mrs Campbell brought her daughter out with the tea service whenever James Mack called at the house, and presented her at the door of the kirk every Sunday, and on every other possible church or social occasion, with something like pleading in her eyes. In 1957, having known Agnes for ten years and never spoken alone with her for more than three minutes, my father proposed to her. Far from succumbing to Mrs Campbell’s constant pressure I believe he probably wasn’t even aware of it, although something must have kept making him visit. He asked Agnes one evening at the garden gate, and, according to my mother, seemed more surprised than she was that he’d finally got around to it; almost as if he’d remembered that marriage was something he was supposed to do, he was getting on in life, and it might as well be Agnes as anyone else who replaced the housekeeper. Mrs Campbell was delighted, and showed it by breaking out of her habitual black to don something garish and flowery for the wedding. Apart from her outfit it was a very quiet occasion, conducted by an aged minister from a neighbouring parish, attended by twelve guests and followed by high tea at the Ochtermill Hotel and a weekend honeymoon at Crieff. The following year I was born, to the further delight of Mrs Campbell: her grandson, a son of the manse! Having achieved all she could have hoped for, she went into a three-year decline, at the end of which she expired.