Chapter 7 #4
John had fallen on Jesus’s mercy the year after Cal’s mother had left.
Cal was about nine or ten at the time, and all John could remember of the Communion ritual was the fencing off of the Saved.
He heard the minister tell the confirmed to leave behind those who were dear to them, that there was now a light around them while the unconfirmed remained in the dark.
“You!” he bellowed. “You who are predestined to be saved must leave behind your wife or husband, your sons, and your daughters.” To hear it said out loud, to see his son on the far side of the line and separate from him, had terrified him, and sensing the same fear in Cal he mouthed, Don’t worry .
. . Later that night, after he read to him, John lay beside Cal and held him.
He promised him that he would never in this life leave him, never, and that before salvation came, he would be sure that Cal could follow.
“It didn’t feel right to confess,” Cal said. “I don’t feel the same way about God that you do. I try. But I don’t.”
“Now there’s Doll sitting beside his father, and you? You’re sat at the back, halfway to the exit, halfway down the hill to damnation.”
“Don’t be fooled. Doll’s no closer to God for it.”
Cal took his father’s cap from the dashboard.
He was fiddling with it to stop his hands from trembling.
He picked some strands of John’s hair from the gripper and wound them around his finger like a spool of yarn, turning it in the light so that it was first a deep chestnut, then silver as a birch in winter.
“Dad . . . It’s only hair. Nobody was that bothered.”
“. . . A more selfish creature has never existed.”
He thought about all the mornings his fingers had been too cold to pull the warp through the heddles, or the nights when the lambs wouldn’t come easy and he’d sat in the howling wind and pulled the newborns from their mothers.
He hadn’t wanted to do any of it, but he had done it, without complaint or praise.
Then when Cal was fourteen, Beady-Màiri had asked him if he wanted to be like his father, and Cal had guffawed.
Right there, right before John’s very eyes, he had told Beady, no, that crofting was a stupid, old-fashioned thing to do.
He thought about all the nights after Cal’s mother had gone when he would have liked to run off and see a bit of the world for himself, but he didn’t, he stayed, because he had a son sleeping upstairs who couldn’t sleep without the landing light being left on.
A son who would grow up to abandon him, and who would dim every light in the house and leave, when the time came.
All the afternoons he would have liked to have wept on the settee, to close his eyes and cry for everything that would never happen for him, but he couldn’t because the old woman who had been left behind by his wife haunted every inch of the house.
The only peace he could find was up a hillside where her sore feet could no longer carry her, but he couldn’t cry on the hillside for the fear that a neighbour saw him and he’d become for ever known as Crying John.
He thought about how Cal wouldn’t call him from Edinburgh.
How he said he would and then he couldn’t be bothered, or it would be too wet to go to the phone box, or there would be some party to go to, or an exam to study for, and John would wait by the phone, unable to concentrate on anything else while his mother-in-law coloured in with those annoying, vinegary markers that squeaked on the page.
He had to force Cal to listen to Bible readings, because it was too much to ask his son to call him a couple of times a week, or to sit with him by the fire for a few hours and give him all his news. Too much to ask Cal just to be near him.
He thought about the avalanche of bills.
The statements and credit cards that kept him awake at night.
The condescending tone of the banker in Stornoway who, when John had asked for a small loan to help pay things off, had looked at his life and what it was worth and had offered him an amount that was less, far less, than all the debt his son had already accrued.
He thought about the life that he had tied himself to so that Cal had something to tie himself to, and now that Cal didn’t want it, he realised that he hadn’t wanted it either.
“You’ll give yourself a heart attack, Dad,” said Cal in English. It was a cheap ploy to bring his grandmother on side.
“Is that what you think this is about . . . hair?” said John quietly. “You must think I’m a very small man.”
John felt Ella scoot forwards on the back seat. There was a peripheral sense of her tights, a murky colour like over-steeped tea. She reached for Cal like she would clamp her hand over his mouth, but she was too short, too fat, and she was too late.
“Everybody needs to relax,” he said. “You’ve probably never heard of Kurt Cobai—”
John punched him in the face.
Everything stopped.
John twisted in the driver seat. He braced his left hand on Cal’s lapel and with his right he punched his son three more times, each blow stronger in its fury and determination. Cal raised his arms to shield himself, but John only paused to judge his next strike and punch around his son’s defences.
His vision became a flick book of small images.
He saw how his son’s mouth knotted. How his front teeth cracked together, angry bubbles of spit pushing through the chipped enamel.
He saw the black hair on his pale knuckles come away, first a scalded blood-filled red, and then edged in actual blood.
Then he heard the slipping scratching sound, the desperate grasp for purchase as Ella threw herself between them and fell across the gear stick.
She clutched the dashboard like she had been flung from some terrible wreck.
The contents of her handbag came tumbling out, her loose change falling through the floor and tinkling against the chassis.
Cal slumped in the seat, his arms crossed in front of him, his elbows locked in defence.
He searched the door, feeling for the pump lever that opened it.
He scrabbled for it, a thing he had opened a million times before, a thing he knew the feel of, but could not now explain what it looked like, or where it was.
Everything had gone a brilliant white and he started to panic, to sob, as the handle evaded his grasp.
John caught a glimpse of his own reflection in the wing mirror and he had to turn away. Now that the anger had gone, he didn’t know what had possessed him. When he looked in the mirror he saw a devil, and the devil wore his face.
Without looking at his son, he reached over his mother-in-law and opened the door for Cal. He gave him a shove and Cal tumbled out and into the day.