‘What the hell is that?’ Michaél said.
And I laughed. ‘It’s the music of my island,’ I said.
‘Well, I’m glad I don’t come from your island. Sounds bloody weird to me.’
We were standing outside the church when the congregation streamed out into the noonday sun. They cast curious glances our way, two raggedy young men with beards and matted hair standing there in tattered shoes clutching little more than a handful of personal possessions.
When the minister had finished shaking the hands of his flock he walked towards us. A tall, thin man, with dark hair and cautious eyes. He introduced himself in English as the Reverend Iain Macaulay and welcomed us to what he called the Hebridean village of Gould.
‘We’ve come to the right place, then,’ I replied to him in Gaelic. And his eyebrows shot up. ‘My name is Sime Mackenzie and I come from the village of Baile Mhanais on the Langadail Estate on the Isle of Lewis and Harris. And this is my friend, Michaél O’Connor from Ireland.’
All the caution left the minister’s eyes then and he shook our hands warmly. And the congregation, when they heard that I was a fellow Hebridean, began to gather round, each of them welcoming us in turn and shaking our hands.
Mr Macaulay said, ‘You have indeed come to the right place, Mr Mackenzie. Gould was established by sixty Hebridean families cleared off their land in 1838. And they were joined by another forty destitute families from the west coast of Lewis just three years later. It’s as close to home as you can get without actually being there.’ I felt suffused by the warmth of his smile. ‘What’s brought you to us?’
‘We heard that they’re giving away free land,’ I said.
An old man in a dark suit said, ‘Aye, they are that. You’ve timed it well, laddie. The clerk from the British American Land Company arrives in the morning to start allocating parcels.’ He pointed a finger vaguely beyond the church. ‘Just to the south there, in what they call the St Francis tract.’
Michaél said, ‘But why would they be giving away land for nothing?’ He was still deeply suspicious of anyone who claimed to own land, but I was relieved that he was at least moderating his language.
Mr Macaulay said, ‘If there’s one thing there’s plenty of in this country, boys, it’s land. The company is giving it away so that it will be populated by settlers. That way the government will give them contracts to lay in roads and build bridges.’
We set off from Gould early Monday morning along a track that took us maybe half a mile into the forest. The minister was with us, as well as a large crowd of villagers to accompany twenty or more hopeful settlers and the clerk from the British American Land Company.
We arrived at a small clearing after ten or fifteen minutes. The sun was barely over the tops of the trees and it was still icy cold. But the sky was clear and it looked like we were in for another beautiful autumn day.
Mr Macaulay asked those wanting land to gather round. We were going to cast lots, he said.
‘What’s that?’ I asked him.
‘It’s a practice that occurs in the Bible, Mr Mackenzie,’ he said. ‘Most commonly in connection with the division of land under Joshua. I refer you to Joshua, chapters 14 to 21. In this case I will have a bunch of sticks in my hand of varying length. You will each draw one, and he who draws the longest will get the first allocation of land. And so on, right down to the shortest, who will get the last.’
Michaél grunted loudly. ‘What’s the point of that?’
‘The point is, Mr O’Connor, that the first parcel of land will be the closest to the village. The last will be the furthest away, and the most inaccessible. So this is the fairest way to decide who gets what. It shall be God’s will.’
And so we drew lots. To my amazement I pulled out the longest stick. Michaél drew the shortest, and had a face like thunder darkening beneath his beard.
We all proceeded then to the starting point of the first parcel, which was to be mine. The minister handed me a short axe and told me to cut a notch with it in the nearest tree. ‘What for?’ I asked. But he just smiled and told me I’d see soon enough.
So I cut a notch in the closest tree, a tall evergreen pine. ‘What now?’
‘When we start singing,’ he said, ‘begin walking in a straight line. When we stop make a notch in the nearest tree, then turn at right angles to it and start to walk when the singing begins again. Another notch when we stop, another turn, and by the time we’ve sung three times you’ll have marked out your parcel.’
‘It should be approximately ten acres,’ the clerk from the British American Land Company said. ‘I’ll accompany you to register your land on the official map.’
Michaél laughed and said, ‘Well, if you folk would sing a bit slower, and I ran as fast as I could through the trees, then I could have a much bigger piece of land.’
Mr Macaulay smiled indulgently. ‘Aye, you could indeed. And you could also break your back trying to clear it of trees and make it arable. Bigger is not necessarily better, Mr O’Connor.’ He turned then to the assembled crowd and raised a hand and the singing began. To my astonishment, I recognised it immediately as the 23rd Psalm. I was going to pace out my land to the accompaniment of The Lord is My Shepherd!
The voices grew distant as I marched through the trees with the clerk right behind me. But it carried across the still of the morning, a strange haunting sound pursuing us into the forest. Until they reached the end of the final verse and I cut a notch in the nearest tree during the silence that followed, turning then to my right and waiting for it to start again.
After many stops and starts and a break for lunch, it was nearly dark by the time that Michaél paced out his tract of land. We were almost hoarse with the amount of singing we had done. Never, I was sure, had the 23rd Psalm been sung so often in the course of a single day. As we walked back to the village in the falling dusk Michaél said to me, ‘It’s too far to my bit of land. So I’ll just help you do yours first, and we’ll leave mine till later.’
And I was secretly pleased that I wasn’t going to have to face the task on my own.
Last night Michaél and I spent our first night in my new home.
We have been working all the daylight hours of every day for the last two weeks to clear an area of land big enough to build a log cabin. Hard, hand-blistering work with saws and axes loaned to us by folk from the village. Felling the trees was simple enough, once you got the hang of it. But moving them once they were down was another matter, and digging out the roots next to impossible. Someone promised to lend us an ox in the spring to help pull out the worst of them, but the priority has been to get a basic cabin up before winter arrives. Temperatures have been falling, and we’ve been working against nature’s clock. One of the older villagers told me that I might have experienced the odd sprinkling of snow on Lewis and Harris, but nothing would prepare me for the snow that would soon fall here.
The last few days we have been stripping trunks and cutting them to length, and then yesterday the whole village turned up for the raising of the cabin. Certainly, we could never have done it on our own, and would have had no idea how to notch and interlock the logs at the four corners.
The walls are seven feet high — which is as high as men can lift a log. The roof is steeply pitched, laid with hand-split shingles and covered with turf.
I would never have believed it possible, but by the end of the day, the cabin was done. A pretty sorry-looking dwelling, but it was a roof over our heads, with a door to shut against the weather.
Someone brought an old box bed on a wagon and reassembled it for me in my newly finished home. On the same wagon came a kitchen table that someone else was donating, and a couple of rickety chairs that might just about take our weight. A bottle of spirit was opened, and everyone took a slug of it to christen the new house. Then a prayer was said as we all stood around the table. The next priority will be the building of a stone chimney at one gable, which is something I might even be able to do myself. Then we’ll be able to light a fire and heat the place.