“ oh, corpse, rest in peace”
What were these kings fighting for? One side of the island against the other? Red shirts against blue, give me your goddamn sheep?
In Kirkwall on Christmas Day, the men chase a football from the highest point in town down to the quays, tripping each other, bucking on the shale and sandstone pavement. They round the cathedral, which tips leeward and crumbles into seashells. My boots sink in shells and pebbles, dodging the flight of headless men, fishing nets, footballs. Pitched, myself, against the town, I hurl through the cathedral doors and land panting under the memorial plaques.
More dead in the walls. Images carved in deep grooved lines. A rank-haired woman crouched fierce in prayer. Her hair flows and lifts like kelp. In runic script her supplication: oh, corpse, rest in peace. The children have washed off the shore. The seals have taken them, the selkies. The men are gone to the Artic, to the white ocean gone.
This death-mask, marbled, mustachioed, belongs to a scientist. Three times he returned from the Pole. First his baby toes fell off. Next his index finger, from pointing to the stars without his gloves, and finally an ear had to be cut. Called to London to deliver an address, sent to Princeton, overshadowed by the American, Perry: the fourth time he ventured to that perfect North he didn’ t come back at all. The death-mask is a fabrication. Oh, corpse, rest in peace. The woman on the tombstone is
52 not his wife. He never married. None of the women are wives. They are grave-mourners,
“ oh, corpse, rest in peace”
land-locked, seaweed in their hair, and there is a stretch of sea between them and their men.
I head back to Kirkwall Lane, watching the clouds ink the house-fronts and pass like avoiding spirits. Reflections of clouds speckle to the sheep down in their flat green pastures. Reflections of sheep speckle the clouds.
Behind the black iron gate in the cathedral yard, the bride and groom are stiff for the wedding picture. Their families, bright in flapping taffeta, swarm behind the man with the tripod. Girls are chattering and holding down their straw hats in the wind. The men are roaring a song and not agreeing on the lyrics, but the picture will show only the bride and groom in a cup of silence, dark hair, blue eyes shining like wedding china.
The harbor-master stands on the beach. His house sits squinty-eyed on the end of the sea wall. He has not been to the mainland for twenty years, one hour south by ferry. This is what he remembers: the HMS Belfast steaming out of the harbor for the Normandy beaches. These are public memories. Even before that, the defeated German flotilla scuttled in Scapa Bay, the gaunt blackened noses of ships pointing toward heaven, all else submerged below.