The Covenant of Water

1919, Glasgow

On Saturdays, Digby’s mother takes him to the Gaiety, Glasgow’s best. Years later, when he remembers those afternoons his nose will itch, as though he’s inhaling the Jeyes Fluid wafting off the seats. But that pungent cleaner never managed to dampen the smell of stale tobacco exuding from the floors and walls.

Johnny the ticket seller’s eyes are on different floors from his prizefighting days. He no longer remarks that a boy of ten shouldn’t be at a variety show. The dancing girls open the matinee and his mother’s hand stays clamped over Digby’s eyes until the second-spot magician appears. The floaters in Digby’s vision don’t clear till the next act, which is either the sword swallower or the juggler.

The audience is louder and less forgiving after intermission, tanked up on pints of heavy. The roll-your-own haze is thicker than morning fog on the Clyde. The comics come out like gladiators, but brandishing cigarettes instead of maces. Eight minutes is what it takes for the dout to burn their fingers, and that’s how long they have on stage. Most are booed off in under five.

His mother is stone-faced the whole time, her thoughts far away in a manner that always worries Digby. Is she recalling being on stage here herself? She gave up a theatrical career, and fame, perhaps, because she was carrying him. Or is she thinking of the man she met here who ruined it all? Digby studies the performers. He never met his father, but Archie Kilgour was of this tribe, traveling from town to town, haunting the same pubs in each city (in Glasgow it was the Sarry Heid), the publican’s face more familiar to them than their own bairns, and bedding down in the same theatrical digs like Mrs. MacIntyre’s. Digby’s mother once said Archie Kilgour had nailed a kipper to the underside of the dining table when Mrs. MacIntyre denied him credit. Digby asked why under the table. “Gie it a thought, Digs. Yon’s the last place onybuddy wid look fur something rotten. That’s him all over. So low he could slide under a snake’s belly wearing a lum hat.”

Some say Archie sailed for Canada, others that he never left. Archie Kilgour’s real talent was in disappearing. All Digby really knows is that he’s the sort who leaves a fish pinned under the dining table, and he left Digby pinned in his mother’s womb. Digby imagines half-siblings he surely has in the other towns on the circuit: Edinburgh, Stirling, Dundee, Dumfries, Aberdeen . . .

The rousing finale is always “There’s a Girl for Every Soldier,” and it rings in Digby’s ears as they emerge. He feels buoyant, lighter than air, only wishing his maw could feel the same way.

Digby can’t imagine a more exciting time to be alive. The Wright brothers made the first heavier-than-air flight in 1903, but, as every Scottish schoolboy knows, the Barnwell brothers did the same at Causewayhead soon after. He dreams of steering a biplane, of becoming lighter than air! He’ll fly his maw over Glasgow and away. He’ll make her smile. He’ll make her proud.

On Wednesdays, the two of them have a midweek treat: tea at Gallowgate. Digby waits for her and thousands of “Singers” to pour out of the factory at the end of the shift. The Proddies will emerge first. Catholics like his mother come after; they are the lowest paid and do the roughest jobs. Her supervisor is a Proddy and a Rangers supporter, of course. Glasgow, like most Scottish cities, is violently split by religion. His grandparents were in the Irish wave that came after the Famine, turning the East End into a Catholic bastion (and the home of the Celtic football team).

Digby loves to stare up at the square clock tower that stands six stories high. The factory buildings extend on either side of it like trains a mile long. Each face of the tower, which is Glasgow’s most famous landmark, has a massive clock weighing two tons, with SINGER in giant letters above each dial, visible from anywhere in the city. Digby could spell SINGER before he could write his name. Standing this close and looking up, Digby feels he’s in the presence of God, whose name is SINGER. God has his own trains and railway station to run parts from the foundry to Helensburgh, Dumbarton, or Glasgow. God churns out a million sewing machines a year and employs fifteen thousand people. God lets his mother splurge on drawing paper and watercolors for Digby. God allowed his mother and him to move out from Nana’s and live on their own, and be silly and loud and have jam with their tea every day if it pleases them, and it does.

The rumble of hundreds of hobnail boots sound as they descend the factory steps. Soon he spots his mother, red-haired and beautiful. Men look at her in a way that makes him angrily protective. “Away! I’m done with men, Digs,” she said after cutting down a suitor. “A mooth ta eat and ta tell lies, that’s all.”

She’s not smiling when she comes to him. “They’ve gone an’ cut the assemblers tae only a dozen and the rest o’ us are meant to pick up the slack. Ah was burstin’—hardly time to take a pee. An it’s aw fur the sake of ‘industrial efficiency’!” There’ll be no tea today. Instead, her coworkers gather around his mother’s dining table, planning a strike. Digby hears them say that God—Mr. Isaac Singer—is really the Devil. God is a polygamist with two dozen children by various wives and mistresses. God sounds a lot like Archie Kilgour. For the next week, his mother is off to meetings every night, rallying support, returning late, bright-eyed but pale with fatigue.

He’s slicing bread for their tea when he hears her steps on the stairs much too early. He has a terrible foreboding. “They give me ma book, Digs. Kicked yer maw out. They found cause.” If she expects her friends to strike in her support, she’s disappointed. Since she’s no longer employed, the strike fund won’t pay her.

There’s nothing to do but move back in with Nana, a flatulent hypochondriac who crosses herself when she hears church bells and refers to Digby as “the bastard.” Digby and his mother sleep in the front room—no more jam, and sometimes no bread. His mother has the covers over her head when he leaves for school, and she’s that way when he returns. Her dull eyes remind him of the haddock lined up on ice at the Briggait Fish Market. “Thar’s nae good that e’er came out o’ the Gaiety,” Nana says to her daughter with satisfaction.

This is how a boy’s world crumbles. On his walks back from school, the four-eyed monster in the tower tracks his every movement. No show tunes play in his head. He and his mother are intruders in a house that holds the coffin gases of a “pernickety old pharisee of a wummin,” as his mother is wont to say.

The doctor who came to the mean little flat called his mother “catatonic.” When she rallied, Digby walked her from factory to counting house to drugstore. Work, any work, would be healing. But she might as well have been wearing a sign that said GINGER FENIAN AGITATOR. That was what a butcher called her. She cleans houses when she can; an invalid herself, she’s hired to care for invalids.

Winters are so cold Digby keeps his hat on indoors, but he must remove one glove to do his essays. Nana hounds her daughter. “Get yirsel’ oot. We’ve nae coal, and gey little food. If ye’te beg, if ye’te spread yer legs, do it. That’s how you got yirsel’ into this mess.”

Seven years after she was let go, they are still at Nana’s. After school, by habit, he keeps watch over his mother, sitting beside her, sketching on water-stained ledgers a neighbor gave him. He spins out a rich and sensual world in pen and ink. Beautiful women wearing heels that turn their calves into erotic pillars, women with slim shoulders and full hips in fancy hats and fur shrugs. Here and there a breast pops out from a blouse. Newspaper advertisements are good for perfecting form. The eyes he sketches are getting better; the tiny square of reflected light over the iris brings his creations to life, allows them to behold their creator. When he discovers an anatomy text in the Clydebank Library on Dumbarton Road, the women in Digby’s sketches begin to have transparent skin that reveals their bones and their articulations. He’s reassured to think that no matter how disappointing humans can be, the bones, the muscles, and the viscera are constant, an unchanging interior architecture . . . except for the “external genitalia.” A woman’s privates are rather less than he expected to see: a furry mound, a lipped portal that further conceals and leaves him with more questions.

His mother was once the most glamorous woman he knew. But now, so many years after losing her job, she makes little effort, speaks not at all, and still spends hours in bed. Even so, in the line of her arm draped over her cheek, in the angle between forearm and wrist, and again between palm and fingers, she has innate grace. Her red hair no longer looks on fire, and her forelock of gray suggests she’s brushed up against wet paint. At times she stares at her son, punishing him with a look that makes him feel responsible for all her troubles. She’s aged, but he can’t imagine she’ll ever look like Nana, with those inflamed fissures at the corners of her lips, bookends for a foul mouth.

The only time his mother ever turns on him is when Digby proposes to leave school, to get work. “Do that and ah’m deid,” she says, furious. “It’s only you bein’ top o’ the class that gets me through this hell. I dream o’ yer success. Dinnae disappoint me.”

In the end, she disappoints him. By then he’s almost a man, with a Carnegie College scholarship, secured against all odds. He plans to study medicine, drawn as he is to the body and its workings.

He comes home on a Sunday after an all-day tutoring session. Nana is out. Above his desk, his mother sticks her tongue out at him obscenely, a tongue three times its normal size, and blue. Her frog eyes mock him. The smell in the room tells him that she’s soiled herself. She dangles from a rafter, her toes barely off the ground. His school tie bites into the blue flesh of her neck.

Digby falls back against the door, dropping his books. This is why he kept vigil. This is what he feared, though he never dared put words to it. He’s too terrified to approach the body and take it down.

He lets the old woman make her own discovery. Nana screams, and then her sobs spill out of the room. The polis take the body down. The neighbors gawp at the sheeted form. His mother’s soul has been dead for years and her body has now followed.

Digby steps outside. It’s the twenty-second of May, a quarter of the way into the century, a decade after a war wrought terrible slaughter. One more death hardly matters, but it does for him. His feet carry him away. He wants to find people, lights, laughter. Soon he’s in a pub, thick with revelers. He has to shout at the barmaid for his two pints. “For the granda and his mate,” he says, nodding to the back room. The taste is vile. He thinks of Archie Kilgour. Are you drinking tonight, you jakey? Yer a widower, did you know? As for his mother, he has no tears, only angry words. Did you think of me, Ma? Do you think you’re off to a better place?

He gets thrown out of the pub; he’s not sure why. Next, he’s in a small, dark, beery room where the drinking is serious and silent. He shoves in next to a group of lads who give him the evil eye. “Two pints for the granda,” he says again, but doesn’t bother to move to a table, drains his first glass at the bar. He notices the blue-and-white bunting on the wall facing him, then sees those colors echoed on the scarves of morose men. Fuck me, I’m in a Rangers’ pub! He’s trying not to laugh, but he can’t help it. “Fucking Rangers!” He shakes his head. Did he say that out loud?

A man tells Digby to come outside. Digby has a better idea: he’ll drink the second pint right where he is.

A fist hits him on his ear. A bottle is smashed, and something sharp flicks at the corner of his mouth. The publican comes around the beer-puddled counter and heaves him out on the pavement. “Bugger off before they finish yer smile, and you with it!” Digby stumbles round the corner, sobered by the recognition that these silent men might find killing him more diverting than drinking.

At the newsstand on the corner, a hundred identical handsome faces jeer at him, triumphant. LINDBERGH’S CROWNING HOUR, the banner headline reads. THE HERO OF AMERICA. The wetness trickling into his mouth tastes faintly sweet, faintly metallic. His sleeve is red. His eyes don’t want to focus. Could a man really have flown across the Atlantic? Yes! Says so in big letters. In a plane called the Spirit of St. Louis. Lindbergh landed, his mother aloft. He feels no pain at all.