Trì nithean brèagha: long fo sheòl, craobh fo bhlàth,
duine naomh air leabaidh a bhàis.
Three beautiful things: a ship under sail, a tree in bloom,
a holy man on his deathbed. -- Gaelic Proverb

THE FLOWERS OF BERMUDA

Bilkie Sutherland took the postcard from behind his rubber bib and slowly read the message one more time: “I’m going here soon. I hope your lobsters are plentiful. My best to Bella. God bless you. Yours, Gordon MacLean.” Bilkie flipped it over: a washed out photograph in black and white. The Holy Isle. Iona. Inner Hebrides. On the land stood stone ruins, no man or woman anywhere, and grim fences of cloud shadowed a dark sea. So this was Iona.

“You want that engine looked at?” Angus Carmichael, in his deepwater boots, was standing on the wharf above Bilkie’s boat.

“Not now. I heard from the minister.”

“MacLean?”

“He’s almost to Iona now.”

Angus laughed, working a toothpick around in his teeth. “Man dear, I’ve been to Iona, was there last Sunday.” Angus meant where his wife was from, a Cape Breton village with a Highland museum open in the summer, and a St. Columba Church.

“It’s a very religious place,” Bilkie said, ignoring him. “Very ancient, in that way.”

“Like you, Bilkie.”

“I’m the same as the rest of you.”

“No, Bilkie. Sometimes you’re not. And neither is your Reverend MacLean.”

Angus’s discarded toothpick fluttered down to the deck. Bilkie picked it up and dropped it over the side. Angus never cared whether his own deck was flecked with gurry and flies. Nor was he keen on Gordon MacLean. Said the man was after putting in a good word for the Catholics. But that wasn’t the minister’s point at all. “We’re all one faith, if we go back to Iona,” is what he’d said. And nothing much more than that.

As Bilkie laid out his gear for the next day’s work, he heard singing. No one sang around here anymore. Radios took care of that. He stood up to listen. Ah! It was Johnny, Angus’s only boy, home from Dalhousie for the summer. He had a good strong voice, that boy, one they could use over at the church. But you didn’t see him there, not since college. No singer himself, Bilkie could appreciate a good tune. His grandfather had worked the schooners in the West Indies trade, and Johnny’s song had the flavor of that, of those rolling vessels . . . “ ‘He could smell the flowers of Bermuda in the gale, when he died on the North Rock Shoal. . . .’ ” Bilkie stared into the wet darkness underneath the wharf where pilings were studded with snails. Algae hung like slicked hair on the rocks. He had saved Gordon MacLean under that wharf, when the man was just a tyke. While hunting for eels, Gordon had slipped and fallen, and Bilkie heard his cries and came down along the rocks on the other side to pull him out, a desperate boy clutching for his hand.

Bilkie’s car, a big salt-eaten Ford, was parked at the end of the wharf, and whenever he saw it he wished again for horses who could shuck salt like rain. At home the well pump had quit this morning and made him grumpy. He’d had to use the woods, squat out there under a fir, the birds barely stirring overhead, him staring at shoots of Indian Pipe wondering what in hell they lived on, leafless, white as wax, hardly a flower at all. Up by the roadside blue lupines were a little past their prime. What flowers, he wondered, grew on Iona?

The car swayed through rain ruts, past clumps of St. John’s Wort (allas Colmcille his grandfather had called them) that gave a wild yellow border to the driveway. His house appeared slowly behind a corridor of tall maples. In their long shade, red cows rested. Sometimes everything seemed fixed, for good. His animals, his life. But God had taken away his only boy, and Bilkie could not fathom that even yet. For a time he had kept sheep, but quit because killing the lambs bothered him.

Bella was waiting at the front door, not the back, her palm pressed to her face. He stopped shy of the porch, hoping it wasn’t a new well-pump they needed.

“What’s wrong?”

“Rev. MacLean’s been stabbed in Oban,” his wife said, her voice thin.

Bilkie repeated the words to himself. There was a swallows nest above the door. The birds swooped and clamored. “Not there?” he said. “Not in Scotland?” A mist of respect, almost of reverence, hovered over the old country. You didn’t get stabbed there.

“Jessie told me on the phone, not a minute ago. Oh, he’ll live all right. He’s living.”

Over supper Bella related what she knew. Gordon MacLean had been walking in Oban, in the evening it was, a woman friend with him. Two young thugs up from Glasgow went for her handbag, right rough about it too. Gordon collared one but the other shoved a knife in his back.

“He’s not a big man either,” Bilkie said, returning a forkful of boiled potato to his plate. He had known Gordon as a child around the wharf, a little boy who asked hard questions. He had pulled him from the water. He’d seen him go off to seminary, thinking he would never come back to Cape Breton, not to this corner of it, but after awhile he did. To think of him lying in blood, on a sidewalk in Oban. “Did they catch the devils?”

“They did. He’ll have to testify?”

“What, go back there?”

“When he’s able. Be a long time until the trial.”

Bilkie felt betrayed. A big stone had slipped somehow out of place. Certain things did not go wrong there, not in the Islands where his people came from. Here, crime was up, too few caring about a day’s work, kids scorning church. Greedier now, more for themselves, people were. But knives, what the hell. There in the Hebrides they’d worked things out, hadn’t they, over a long span of time? It had seemed to him a place of hard wisdom, hard won. Not a definite place, for he had never been there, but something like stone about it: sea-washed, nicely worn, and high cliffs where waves whitened against the rocks. He knew about the Clearances, yes, about the bad laws that drove his grandfather out of Lewis where he’d lived in a turf house. But even then they weren’t knifing people. Gordon MacLean, a minister of God, couldn’t return there and come to no harm? To Mull first he’d been headed, to MacLean country. And then to Iona, across a strait not much wider than this one. But a knife stopped him in Oban, a nice sort of town by the sea.

From his parlor window Bilkie could see a bit of the church in the east, the dull white shingles of its steeple above the dark spruce. We all have Iona inside us, the man had said. Our faith was lighted there. Why then did this happen?

Bilkie had asked such a question before and found no answer. They’d had a son, he and Bella, so he knew about shock, and about grief. Even now, thinking of his son and the schoolhouse could suck the wind right out of him. The boy was born late in their lives anyway, and maybe Bilkie’s hopes had come too much to rest in him. Was that the sin? Torquil they called him, an old name out of the Hebrides, after Bella’s dad. But one October afternoon when the boy was nine, he left the schoolhouse and forgot his coat, a pea coat, new, with a big collar turned up like a sailor’s. So he went back to get it, back to the old white schoolhouse where he was learning about the world. It was just a summer house now, owned by strangers. But that day it was locked tight, and the teacher gone home. A young woman. No blame to her. His boy jimmied open the window with his knife. They were big, double-hung windows, and you could see them open yet on a warm weekend, hear people drunk behind the screens. But Torquil had tried to hoist himself over the sill, and the upper half of the window unjammed then and came down on his neck. Late in the day it was they found him, searching last the grounds of the school. A time of day about now. The sash lay along his small shoulders like a yoke, that cruel piece of wood, blood in his nose like someone had punched him. . . .