A Twelvemonth and a Day by Christopher Rush

Author:Christopher Rush [Christopher Rush]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: IGP-002 CBL
ISBN: 9781847675699
Publisher: Canongate Books
Published: 1985-03-13T16:00:00+00:00

One summer a much bigger sea specimen came into the harbour.

I saw it from the back yard first thing in the morning, swimming between the May Island and the shore—a black boomerang that ripped open the firth, shot up higher than the lighthouse, crossing the white orbits of the gannets, and crashed back into the sea with mountains of snow cascading to the clouds.

I ran up the stairs to George’s house.

He was standing at his open window, already fully dressed, and the pages of his bible fluttering in the blue breeze from the sea. His spyglass was at his eye.

‘What is it, Gramps? Can I see?’

He handed me the glass, and I looked, and saw for the first time, close, the savage cut and thrust of that living scimitar slashing and thrashing the waves, the battling bull head, the powerful fin, and the tigerish tail that mauled the water, churning it like a propellor.

‘What is it?’ I shouted. ‘Is it a whale?’

‘Aye, they call it a whale,’ George said, ‘but it’s liker a wolf.’

‘Is it like the ones you used to hunt for?’ I asked.

‘No,’ he said quietly, ‘that’s a killer out there. And compared to the beasts I went after, that one is a butcher, let me tell you, a bad black butcher.’

He told me how he had seen a pack of killers tear out the tongue of one of the great blue whales.

‘It was nearly ninety feet long,’ he said, ‘and its tongue in its jaws must have weighed a ton. They just ripped it out and fed on it while it was bleeding to death from the mouth.’

‘Didn’t you catch killer whales, Gramps?’

He turned, and I saw his back making for the door.

‘Come with me,’ he said.

I followed him down to the lumber room of the old house. It was like the interior of a shipwreck—everywhere there were broken bits of everything that had to do with the fishing. He clambered stiffly over the piles of torn nets, long since mouse-eaten, dog-torn and condemned, throwing aside shredded baskets and boxes and punctured dahns in his struggle to reach what he was after. I frisked after him on all fours, sniffing at this and that. He was in the corner, tugging heavily at a stiff tarpaulin draped on a long pole.

‘Pull it off,’ he breathed, ‘you that has so much life in you.’

I had the eye to see but not the understanding to know that my great grandfather was no more the man who had taken the Jehovah’s Witness by the throat.

He tilted the pole and I pulled at the faded green sheeting which came away—and my mouth opened wide.

It was his old harpoon.

Nine feet of lacquered larch and a further foot of solid iron, tipped with the most brutal barb that made even a gartlin hook seem like a bent pin. The everyday working weapon of my great grandfather’s youth, unveiled after half a century—now standing upright and shining in the bright windowed corner of a local museum.

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