After the Dance

up when it suited him and when he was in a bad temper. His wife was the daughter of Big Angus who had been a famous fisherman in his youth but who had settled down to become a crofter and who was famed for his great strength though at this time he was getting old. In fact I suppose he must have been about seventy years old. His daughter’s name was Anna and during the course of most days she seemed to be baking a lot without much result. You would also find her quite often with a dripping plate and a soggy dishcloth in her hand. She had seven children all at various stages of random development and with running noses throughout both summer and winter.

It must be said that, when sober, Red Roderick was a very kind man, fond of his children and picking them up on his shoulders and showing them off to people and saying how much they weighed and how clever and strong they were, though in fact none of them was any of these things, for they were in fact skinny and underweight and tending to have blotches and spots on their faces and necks. In those moments he would say that he was content with his life and that no one had better children or better land than he had. When he was sunny-tempered he was the life and soul of the village and up to all sorts of mischief, singing songs happily in a very loud and melodious voice which revealed great depth of feeling. That was why it seemed so strange when he got drunk. His whole character would change and he would grow violent and morose and snarl at anyone near him, especially the weakest and most inoffensive people.

One thing that we noticed was that he seemed very jealous of his father-in-law who had, as I have said, a reputation in the village for feats of strength. It was said that he had once pulled a cart loaded with peat out of a deep muddy rut many years before when he was in his prime, but now that he was ageing and wifeless he lived on more failingly from day to day, since after all what else is there to do but that?

Red Roderick in his drunken bouts would say that it was time the ‘old devil’ died so that he might inherit something through his wife, since there were no other relations alive. Red Roderick would brood about his inheritance and sometimes when he was drunk he would go past his father-in-law’s house and shout insults at him. He brooded and grew angry, the more so since his father-in-law’s land was richer than his own and better looked after, and also there were a number of sheep and cows which he coveted. I sometimes think that this must have been how things were in the days of the Old Testament, though it doesn’t mention that people in those days drank heavily unless perhaps in Sodom and Gomorrah.

His whole mind was set on his inheritance mainly because he regretted marrying the old man’s daughter who, in his opinion, had brought him nothing but a brood of children whom in his drunken moments he despised and punished for offences that they had never even committed. Yet, as I said, in his sunny moments there was no one as gay and popular as he was, full of fine interesting stories and inventions.

However, I am coming to my story. One day he went to town in the morning (which was unusual for him) and came home in the afternoon on the bus, very drunk indeed. This was in fact the first time he had been drunk during the day, as it were, in the village, and we all thought that this was rather ominous, especially as he began by prowling around his own house like a tiger, sending one of his children spinning with a blow to the face in full sight of the village. The trouble was that all the villagers were frightened of him since none of them was as strong as he was in those moments of madness.

After he had paced about outside his house for a while shouting and throwing things, he seemed to make up his mind and went down to the byre from which he emerged with a scythe. At first I thought – since I was his neighbour – that he was going to scythe the corn but this was not at all what was in his mind. No, he set off with the scythe in his hand towards his father-in-law’s house. I remember as he walked along that the scythe glittered in his hand as if it was made of glass. When he got to the house he shouted out to the old man that it was time he came out and fought like a man, if he was as great as people said he had been in the past. There was, apart from his voice, a great silence all over the village which drowsed in the sun as he made his challenge. The day in fact was so calm that there was an atmosphere as if one was in church, and it seemed that he was disturbing it in exactly the same way as a shouting lunatic might do who entered a church during a service.

One or two people said that someone should go for a policeman but no one in fact did. In any case looking back on it now I think that in a strange shameful way we were looking forward to the result of the challenge as if it would be a break in an endless routine. Nevertheless there was something really frightening and irresponsible about Red Roderick that day as if all the poison that seethed about his system had emerged to the surface as cloudy dregs will float upwards to the surface of bad liquor. Strangely enough – in