The Black Halo by Iain Crichton Smith

Author:Iain Crichton Smith [Smith, Iain Crichton]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780857907141
Publisher: Birlinn

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By their Fruits

My Canadian uncle told me, ‘Today we are going to see John Smith. I’ll tell you a story about him. When he was nineteen years old, and coming to Canada, the minister met him and he said to him (you see, John had been working at the Glasgow shipyards before that) the minister said to him, “And I hear you’ve been working on a Sunday,” and John said to him, “I hear you work on a Sunday yourself.” So when John was leaving to come to Canada the minister wouldn’t speak to him. Imagine that. He was nineteen years old, the minister didn’t know whether he would ever see him again. Now the fact is that John has never been to church since he came to Canada.’

My uncle was eighty-six years old. He had been allowed to drive, I think, during the duration of our holiday with him, and he took full advantage of the concession.

‘They said to me,’ he told us, ‘you keep out of Vancouver, you can drive around your home area, old timer. Drive around White Rock.’

Every morning he took the white Plymouth from the garage, put on his glasses carefully and set off with us for a drive of hundreds of miles, perhaps to Hell’s Gate or Fraser River. His wife was dead: in the garden he had planted a velvety red rose in remembrance of her, and he watered it devoutly every day.

Once in Vancouver we came to a red light which we drove through, while a woman who was permitted to cross in her car stared at him, her mouth opening and shutting like that of a fish.

‘These women drivers,’ he said contemptuously, as he drove negligently onwards.

Every summer he took the plane home to Lewis. ‘What I do,’ he said, ‘I leave this lamp on so that people think I am here.’ One summer Donalda and I searched Loch Lomondside for the house in which his wife had been born but we couldn’t find it.

‘She was an orphan, you know, and the way we met was like this. She went to London on service and decided she would emigrate to Australia, but then changed her mind when she saw an advertisement showing British Columbia and its fruit. I was going to Australia myself with another fellow, but he dropped out so I emigrated to Canada instead. One night at a Scottish Evening in Vancouver I saw her coming in the door wearing a yellow dress. I knew at that moment that that was the girl for me, so I asked her for a dance, and that was how it happened.’

He fixed his eye on the road. ‘Listen,’ he said, ‘you can drive a few miles over the limit. You’re allowed to do that.’ His big craggy face was tanned like a Red Indian’s. It was like an image you would see on a totem pole.

John Smith lived in a house which was not as luxurious as my uncle’s. He had a limp, and immediately my uncle came in he began to banter with him.

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