"The Arrival"

[rfmcdonald]

Back home in the old land, all the men had fished from the black sea off of the village’s stony beach just down from the church. Almost all of the men who were able set out, one day out of the week or more often when they needed the food or the money, in the hide-wrapped coracles that made their careful way, in a flock, between the rocks that barred either end of the harbour. When the weather looked good and the work wasn’t too hard, it was still monotonous, muscle-straining work. When the squalls came up, they paddled frantically back towards the village’s shore ahead of the winds and the waves.

On occasion, some of the men had died, crushed against the rocks, or swamped and left to sink and screaming for help that couldn’t come. They left womenfolk and children to parade up and down the rocky shore, disconsolately searching for the body of their man so they could bury it. Even if the sea selfishly kept the body for itself, the survivors couldn’t reject the sea; they couldn’t afford to do that. They had to keep going back to it, collecting the kelp -- perhaps the same that tied the bodies of their menfolk to the seafloor? -- to make the thin rocky soil of their farms a bit more hospitable to growing things and to bank it up against their homes to keep the heat in during the long cold winters in the homeland.

The people knew full well that the sea could be cruel. They had the advantage of knowing how it would be cruel, though, and that made all of the difference. Up until the point that their landlord told them that their rents simply weren’t enough, and that he was invoking his right to convert their entire village to cattle pasture, now. He would give them better lands, he told them, but they would be across the ocean.

It seemed quite impossible for anyone to actually believe that they would be driven away just as casually as they themselves would drive away a mad dog. After a bout of drinking far too much, the old widow’s only son had declared that he was going to kill the landlord, and he did get within a few hundred yards before the policeman from the town had shot him dead. After that, the army came to the village, and the widow had to watch as the landlord’s hired men tore down the thick stone walls of the home where she had given birth to her only child. She’d died of grief and shame a week later, and was buried by the priest in the graveyard the day before the armed men came on the ship and told them to get on it with whatever they had, since they were going to start their new lives in a new land, and there was nothing they could do to change their former landlord’s mind.

Given that the law and the police were so visibly on the side of property and good breeding, there was nothing to do but weep as belongings were gathered and children and the old were carried onto the boat. Some couldn’t bear to watch, but others stood on the deck of the ship and watched as the homes that they or their grandfathers had built were knocked down by explosives or torn down by the harnessed horses. Then they had been told to go below by the captain, and that they’d get a chance to come up once every week for an hour or so to get fresh air, and food, and that they’d like the new land.

The people were a small community to begin with, and the voyage made them smaller. The air of the communal cabins didn’t circulate at all, and they were terribly dark, lit only by the greasy tallow of candles in daytime. The old and the infirm began to die off, of bad food, of homesickness, and of coughing fits brought on by the dirt and dust that floated in the air whenever someone put a foot down, fits that never stopped until their victims lay lifeless on the blankets. Some of the more sickly children followed in turn, for all of the faithful, desperate prayers addressed by their mothers and fathers in their best language to the Almighty.

All found the burials at sea to be incredible strains. Whenever someone died back home, there would be a long and drawn-out wake, then would be a funeral service delivered by the Minister, and then there would be the careful internment of the dead in a pine box buried in a funeral churchyard sanctified by three centuries’ use, around even before they became Protestants. Here, the sailors weren’t in the mood for making the people feel at all better with the extended ceremonies and rituals that they would have liked. After the captain read out something in English from a sheet of paper between gulps of whiskey, a couple of sailors would take the body, covered in a burlap sheet, and dump it overboard, back into the sea and far from any kind of sanctified ground, and after a blessed hour of fresh air they would be trooped back into the antechambers. At the first such funeral, the people almost rioted; by the tenth, there was only stunned and sullen resignation on their faces and in their heads.

Every last person who could count kept track of the numbers of days that passed. They had heard from the captain that the voyage across the deep and cold waters to what was supposed to be their new home would take seven weeks. It was only six and a half weeks before they saw land again, but what land. Back home, the land was sere and bore the marks of centuries of humanity and others -- half of the houses in the old village had been built from fallen-down stone walls in the middle of barren moors, and the giants had built themselves a palace up by the old church hill. Here, there was nothing to be seen on either side of the ship but utter wilderness such as they’d never seen before. It was mostly made up of dense forests, seemingly of pine and oak, blanketing the slopes of the low hills. Those fortunate few who saw those the hills that had been left bare couldn’t help but be reminded of the lost hills of home, so dear and now so far away.

When they came to it, land was a blessing. The captain wanted them to debark in prim and orderly fashion, and so he made them walk down the gangplank in single file. When the foot of the first person to come off the ship hit the blessedly solid dock -- true, not real land, but a close enough substitute -- he fell to his knees and blessed God for his delivery from the purgatory in which he had been placed, to test his faith just as the Holy Book told of Job’s testing by the Almighty. His wife, and the two sons that made it, joined him, and the burly longshoremen had to threaten to haul them off before they got out of the way of the hundreds of others. They all clustered around the dock, relishing the miraculous sensation of firm ground under their feet. Unnoticed, the longshoremen came on board and took the people’s possessions off the boat -- spinning wheels, sturdy chests filled with clothes, some few farm tools, the animals that had survived, and that was the end of the voyage.

It was only after the ship left that the people realized where they had been sent. From the wharf, the town had looked substantial enough. Once they began to drift away from the docks, they found that the town was not a town, that in fact it was just a village carved out of the virgin forest without a church, without a school, without anyone who spoke their language, but with a saloon and muddy roads that went nowhere but deep into points selected at random on the dark forest floor. When the landlord’s agents had shown them the lands that were to be theirs now, they saw with unbelieving eyes that given the amount of growth on those lands they could very well be immensely fertile, if only the trees were felled and the stumps extracted. It was only after the ship that had dropped them in this desolate and unpeopled corner of empire that the people finally came to realize that they had been had all along.

They survived, of course, though in the first winter they survived more on their anger than anything else. As the years progressed, they cleared space for their new farms -- and the soil really was richer -- and built their neat wooden homesteads. They began to learn the spoken language of the country, as they had to lest they wanted to remain backwards in the midst of the incoming seas of humanity.

Slowly, they began to piece together a new emotional language to service their use of the foreign language, one without so much rage, and despair, and grief. After all, with the abundant crops reminding the first generation to think of this land as their native land, what good would there to be in following their parents -- good people though they certainly were -- in their anger? No, the country’s young decided without so much as a word, it would be best to embrace the languages of Progress, and Empire, and principled nostalgia of a past there never was. Besides, what was their prosperous life here compared to their parents’ miserable life on those far northern shores? If anything, the principle of Property should be thanked for thgeir exile, the more so since they could enjoy it.

And so, without so much as a struggle, they did.