"Kaddish": a Wicker Man fanfic
(I wrote this when I was thinking about what the aftermath of the events in the original "Wicker Man" would be. Howie cursed the island, and it occurred to me that the curse could bear fruit in the form of a plague of....hippies. For all that, this isn't a satiric story.)
“You come from SUMMERISLE?” Vanessa’s hazel eyes grew wide with admiration.
Rivka McTavish, whose birth records gave her first name as Bramble, put her hand over her eyes, wishing Brienna hadn’t brought that up. “Yes, I’m from Summerisle.” She waited for the inevitable next set of questions, neo-pagan variety.
She’d started categorizing the questions in her first year after going to the mainland for university. She’d come to Canada for grad school, hoping to get away from it all, but no matter what, the Summerisle came back to haunt her.
Vanessa wore her neo-paganism on the sleeve of her Peruvian sweater. A pair of green military cargo pants, knit boots, and pentagram around her neck completed the ensemble. She’d have different questions from the Armchair Anthropologists or the Outraged Christians. Rivka knew what they were and wondered if she should even try answering.
She and Brienna had been sitting in the Womens’ Union when Vanessa had entered. A discussion of the upcoming winter holidays had led to the subject of religion. Vanessa had mentioned Yule and traditional British customs-and Brienna had to mention Rivka’s hometown.
“That is SO COOL!” Vanessa said. “You should come to my place sometime for circle! We’re totally into the old ways, you could teach us a lot since Summerisle’s the last place that evaded the Christians wiping out the pagans! It must be so great there, I hear you don’t have electricity or cars, you live close to nature-“
“Not any more,” Rivka said glumly. “We still don’t have cars, but we’ve got electricity now, and Internet and everything. What’s more, only old people practice heathen customs now. My mum grew up doing nude dances around a ‘sacred fire’ to bring on parthenogenesis. What rot! Who could believe it?”
Vanessa gaped. “But...it’s so ancient.”
“No it’s not. A Victorian-era Lord Summerisle reconstructed it as a social experiment with his peasants. It worked for a while, in isolation. It’s not ancient at all, and that’s why I’m a Jew now. It did lead to a lovely community I grant you, but that was dying out by the time I was 12.”
“Dying out? What happened?”
“You hippies happened. Excuse me.” She grabbed her parka, threw it on over her sweater and long skirt (both good Highland wool) and walked out onto the concourse around the second floor of the Student Society.
Snow was falling like puffy feathers from a dull grey sky as Rivka stepped out onto the sidewalk. It clung like a pelt to the aged granite walls of McGill University. The swags of artificial pine around the streetlamp poles, still up in January, echoed truly ancient winter tradition.
They didn’t celebrate Yule on Summerisle. They never had, that was a German custom, not British. These days most people enjoyed a nonsectarian Christmas, and that was one of the reasons she’d had to get away. All she did was light her candles for Hanukkah, refusing to give gifts or ape what the quasi-Christian monoculture did.
“Weren’t you kind of hard on Vanessa?” Brienna asked as they walked across the commons.
“She has no idea what poseurs like her did to Summerisle.”
“Does this have to do with that cop who disappeared?”
Rivka stopped and peered at her. “You heard about that?”
“It made papers here in Canada because so many of us have Scottish relatives. It was all so strange; Edinburgh cop disappears while on an investigation and the people who come to follow up on him find a colony of pagans.”
Rivka started walking again. The heel of her right boot was leaking.
“Do they know what happened to him?”
Rivka nodded. “He’d come to the island ranting about Rowan Morrison, saying she’d been kidnapped. Well she hadn’t; she was on the island all the time. Last my Aunt Willow saw, he was reeling on the cliffs by the sea, so I daresay he fell off. He didn’t like our religion much, and probably came out just to cause a fuss over it. Even the cop shop in Edinburgh said he wasn’t known as the sanest officer around.
“Anyway, that was the beginning of the end. The crops failed for the second time that year, so Lord Summerisle started allowing in tourists. Sure, it brought in enough money to support the island, but...”
“But what?” Brienna asked?
They turned down their street. “The hippies kind of had their own ideas of what the religion on Summerisle should be. First they wanted electricity and indoor plumbing, so we had to bring in that. That’s okay, I like the indoor plumbing. But the feminists weren’t too happy with what they saw.”
“The feminists?”
Rivka opened the front door of their ground-floor apartment. “The religion on Summerisle was very open about sex. The feminists saw it as women being a commodity with their reproductive powers over-emphasized. I must say I kind of agree with them. Biology is not destiny.” She went inside and hung her coat and scarf on the coatrack inside their mauve-painted vestibule. On pulling off her right boot, she found her sock soaked through.
“Anyway, between the electricity, then the telly, then the internet, by the time I was 15 Summerisle was pretty much done being agricultural. They still do the processions with the hobbyhorse and the man/woman and all, but it’s not the same when we don’t need the apples.”
She walked upstairs to her room, stopping to kiss her fingers and touch the mezzuzah before entering. Rivka sat down on the bed to pull off her socks, swatting at her wet sole to dry it before reaching for another pair. Every year this happened. No matter who resoled her boots in late summer, in January they started to leak. The cycle of the year asserted itself in ways unique to every person, all right.
She put on the dry socks and some slippers. The talk about Summerisle had distressed her more than she’d thought it would. She’d been born after the heyday of Summerisle paganism, as the mainlanders were coming in and modern conveniences were taking over. Her aunt Willow and uncle Oak had put in the first refrigerator on the island, deciding that it would be the best thing for the “Green Man”.
During the change, Bramble McTavish had grown up knowing that being able to have babies was power, that it was the same power that made the plants grow and that this showed her connection to the earth and nature. She looked forward to the harvest festivals and she loved the March hares.
She’d heard about what things were like before what people just called the “Sgt Howie accident”. The feminists had stomped down on the Maypole and the outdoor sex, that was for sure. Aunt Willow had apparently been reduced to tears by a number of them who verbally attacked her, telling her she was alternatively a victim and an accomplice in male sexual domination. She’d gone on to marry Oak in the face of a boycott, and while their marriage was happy enough (Oak wasn’t only called that for his height and girth, Willow had giggled to her once), the suggestion of the marriage being compulsory had taken away much of her aunt’s famous lusty glow.
The hippies had done other things too, like insisting on knowing the names of the gods. Lord Summerisle had opposed that strongly, out of faith refusing to bend to such pressure. The gods didn’t need names to him; they were the ocean, the earth, the sun and the moon. He’d died in 1983, some said of a broken heart, and the rituals he once led were dedicated now to Isis, Astarte, Demeter, and other goddesses whose presences had never graced the island.
Bramble had come to the mainland and become Rivka. She’d chosen Judaism because while Catholicism had a rich pantheon, a cluster of protective spirits and a strong belief in sacrifice, its whole hairshirt-and-guilt thing offended her to the core. Judaism had a cycle of the earth’s fertility, even if it was tied to the seasons in Israel, and constant rituals in the home, not necessarily connected to anything dominated by temple or clergy.
She couldn’t fault the hippies for wanting what the Summerislanders had. It had been a beautiful, if short-lived tradition. There had been joyful rituals that involved everyone in the community, old songs in the pub that everyone knew and a feeling of interconnectedness that she’d never seen anywhere else.
It wasn’t as if she was above appropriating someone else’s culture, either. She’d done that quite handily with her Judaism. The difference, though, was that Judaism really did have the deep roots the hippies had thought they’d seen on Summerisle. Furthermore, it wasn’t a small community to be disrupted by others’ envy.
Rivka often wished she could go back to Summerisle the way it had been when she’d been very little, but that world had ended with the life of that policeman. Chains of events could lead to strange conclusions. Still, the circle of life turned, and just as Ostara led to Beltaine which led to Lammas and so on, the leaves would still turn orange in the autumn and her boots would leak to herald the coming of spring.
“You come from SUMMERISLE?” Vanessa’s hazel eyes grew wide with admiration.
Rivka McTavish, whose birth records gave her first name as Bramble, put her hand over her eyes, wishing Brienna hadn’t brought that up. “Yes, I’m from Summerisle.” She waited for the inevitable next set of questions, neo-pagan variety.
She’d started categorizing the questions in her first year after going to the mainland for university. She’d come to Canada for grad school, hoping to get away from it all, but no matter what, the Summerisle came back to haunt her.
Vanessa wore her neo-paganism on the sleeve of her Peruvian sweater. A pair of green military cargo pants, knit boots, and pentagram around her neck completed the ensemble. She’d have different questions from the Armchair Anthropologists or the Outraged Christians. Rivka knew what they were and wondered if she should even try answering.
She and Brienna had been sitting in the Womens’ Union when Vanessa had entered. A discussion of the upcoming winter holidays had led to the subject of religion. Vanessa had mentioned Yule and traditional British customs-and Brienna had to mention Rivka’s hometown.
“That is SO COOL!” Vanessa said. “You should come to my place sometime for circle! We’re totally into the old ways, you could teach us a lot since Summerisle’s the last place that evaded the Christians wiping out the pagans! It must be so great there, I hear you don’t have electricity or cars, you live close to nature-“
“Not any more,” Rivka said glumly. “We still don’t have cars, but we’ve got electricity now, and Internet and everything. What’s more, only old people practice heathen customs now. My mum grew up doing nude dances around a ‘sacred fire’ to bring on parthenogenesis. What rot! Who could believe it?”
Vanessa gaped. “But...it’s so ancient.”
“No it’s not. A Victorian-era Lord Summerisle reconstructed it as a social experiment with his peasants. It worked for a while, in isolation. It’s not ancient at all, and that’s why I’m a Jew now. It did lead to a lovely community I grant you, but that was dying out by the time I was 12.”
“Dying out? What happened?”
“You hippies happened. Excuse me.” She grabbed her parka, threw it on over her sweater and long skirt (both good Highland wool) and walked out onto the concourse around the second floor of the Student Society.
Snow was falling like puffy feathers from a dull grey sky as Rivka stepped out onto the sidewalk. It clung like a pelt to the aged granite walls of McGill University. The swags of artificial pine around the streetlamp poles, still up in January, echoed truly ancient winter tradition.
They didn’t celebrate Yule on Summerisle. They never had, that was a German custom, not British. These days most people enjoyed a nonsectarian Christmas, and that was one of the reasons she’d had to get away. All she did was light her candles for Hanukkah, refusing to give gifts or ape what the quasi-Christian monoculture did.
“Weren’t you kind of hard on Vanessa?” Brienna asked as they walked across the commons.
“She has no idea what poseurs like her did to Summerisle.”
“Does this have to do with that cop who disappeared?”
Rivka stopped and peered at her. “You heard about that?”
“It made papers here in Canada because so many of us have Scottish relatives. It was all so strange; Edinburgh cop disappears while on an investigation and the people who come to follow up on him find a colony of pagans.”
Rivka started walking again. The heel of her right boot was leaking.
“Do they know what happened to him?”
Rivka nodded. “He’d come to the island ranting about Rowan Morrison, saying she’d been kidnapped. Well she hadn’t; she was on the island all the time. Last my Aunt Willow saw, he was reeling on the cliffs by the sea, so I daresay he fell off. He didn’t like our religion much, and probably came out just to cause a fuss over it. Even the cop shop in Edinburgh said he wasn’t known as the sanest officer around.
“Anyway, that was the beginning of the end. The crops failed for the second time that year, so Lord Summerisle started allowing in tourists. Sure, it brought in enough money to support the island, but...”
“But what?” Brienna asked?
They turned down their street. “The hippies kind of had their own ideas of what the religion on Summerisle should be. First they wanted electricity and indoor plumbing, so we had to bring in that. That’s okay, I like the indoor plumbing. But the feminists weren’t too happy with what they saw.”
“The feminists?”
Rivka opened the front door of their ground-floor apartment. “The religion on Summerisle was very open about sex. The feminists saw it as women being a commodity with their reproductive powers over-emphasized. I must say I kind of agree with them. Biology is not destiny.” She went inside and hung her coat and scarf on the coatrack inside their mauve-painted vestibule. On pulling off her right boot, she found her sock soaked through.
“Anyway, between the electricity, then the telly, then the internet, by the time I was 15 Summerisle was pretty much done being agricultural. They still do the processions with the hobbyhorse and the man/woman and all, but it’s not the same when we don’t need the apples.”
She walked upstairs to her room, stopping to kiss her fingers and touch the mezzuzah before entering. Rivka sat down on the bed to pull off her socks, swatting at her wet sole to dry it before reaching for another pair. Every year this happened. No matter who resoled her boots in late summer, in January they started to leak. The cycle of the year asserted itself in ways unique to every person, all right.
She put on the dry socks and some slippers. The talk about Summerisle had distressed her more than she’d thought it would. She’d been born after the heyday of Summerisle paganism, as the mainlanders were coming in and modern conveniences were taking over. Her aunt Willow and uncle Oak had put in the first refrigerator on the island, deciding that it would be the best thing for the “Green Man”.
During the change, Bramble McTavish had grown up knowing that being able to have babies was power, that it was the same power that made the plants grow and that this showed her connection to the earth and nature. She looked forward to the harvest festivals and she loved the March hares.
She’d heard about what things were like before what people just called the “Sgt Howie accident”. The feminists had stomped down on the Maypole and the outdoor sex, that was for sure. Aunt Willow had apparently been reduced to tears by a number of them who verbally attacked her, telling her she was alternatively a victim and an accomplice in male sexual domination. She’d gone on to marry Oak in the face of a boycott, and while their marriage was happy enough (Oak wasn’t only called that for his height and girth, Willow had giggled to her once), the suggestion of the marriage being compulsory had taken away much of her aunt’s famous lusty glow.
The hippies had done other things too, like insisting on knowing the names of the gods. Lord Summerisle had opposed that strongly, out of faith refusing to bend to such pressure. The gods didn’t need names to him; they were the ocean, the earth, the sun and the moon. He’d died in 1983, some said of a broken heart, and the rituals he once led were dedicated now to Isis, Astarte, Demeter, and other goddesses whose presences had never graced the island.
Bramble had come to the mainland and become Rivka. She’d chosen Judaism because while Catholicism had a rich pantheon, a cluster of protective spirits and a strong belief in sacrifice, its whole hairshirt-and-guilt thing offended her to the core. Judaism had a cycle of the earth’s fertility, even if it was tied to the seasons in Israel, and constant rituals in the home, not necessarily connected to anything dominated by temple or clergy.
She couldn’t fault the hippies for wanting what the Summerislanders had. It had been a beautiful, if short-lived tradition. There had been joyful rituals that involved everyone in the community, old songs in the pub that everyone knew and a feeling of interconnectedness that she’d never seen anywhere else.
It wasn’t as if she was above appropriating someone else’s culture, either. She’d done that quite handily with her Judaism. The difference, though, was that Judaism really did have the deep roots the hippies had thought they’d seen on Summerisle. Furthermore, it wasn’t a small community to be disrupted by others’ envy.
Rivka often wished she could go back to Summerisle the way it had been when she’d been very little, but that world had ended with the life of that policeman. Chains of events could lead to strange conclusions. Still, the circle of life turned, and just as Ostara led to Beltaine which led to Lammas and so on, the leaves would still turn orange in the autumn and her boots would leak to herald the coming of spring.