Chapter 14
ceithir-deug / fourteen
The nights grew longer. Cal spent the dimming afternoons weaving old patterns that would be cut up for sample books. His father could have finished the work himself and in half the time, but each week he left some yardage for Cal to occupy himself with.
He paid Cal’s wages like pocket money. He gave him a few pounds to keep for himself and everything else he sent directly to the bank and the loan company. It never seemed enough to whittle away the principals.
By November, they could already feel the promise of a cold winter.
The only comfort came from the peat fire in the long room.
In the lengthening evenings they gathered there, prayed, played Scrabble, or sat blank-faced before a television programme no one wanted to see because they had all been forced to compromise.
The Calor heater followed the men to the shed whenever there was work on the loom.
The peat felt alive, there was a pulse to it, and the gas felt mean, cruel in comparison.
Cal would move away every time his father thumped the burner, angrily flicking the plasticky switches on the drum of combustible gas.
“Damned thing,” he would spit. “It’s never right. ”
“Maybe if we move it away a bit the heat will feel less angry.”
“Am I over there?”
John should have insulated the weaving shed better, and as soon as the temperatures dropped this poor decision came back to haunt him.
The peat you could work for but the gas was greedy.
It was pure money in a heavy, blue bottle.
It infuriated him as it hissed away the pounds and so his solution was to sit too close so as not to waste a penny of it.
The heat dried out the skin like the crackling on a roast pork and by the time the real cold arrived the men were clawing at themselves for relief.
One night as they gathered round the television, Cal scratched his knuckles with a wince.
John closed his book. “Will you ever stop raking at yourself?”
“My hands hurt.”
John put down the novel. He made Cal sit at the long table and cared for him as he might care for any useful tool.
Cal washed each hand before John dried them on a clean tea towel.
Then John oiled them, rubbing ointment into each knuckle, caressing the webbing between Cal’s forefinger and thumb.
Cal winced occasionally, and John went slower, taking care to rub the lotion into the peeling nail beds.
Cal glanced over his father’s shoulder and studied his grandmother as she watched a game show. The television was reflected in her glasses. Whenever something funny happened, a huff of laughter escaped her without disturbing the blankness on her face.
“Look at you two playing nail salons,” she said. “Can we do bingo hall, next?”
Cal picked some scum from the corner of his mouth.
He hadn’t mentioned the tenancy to Ella.
Yet he knew his mother must have told her that he knew about it.
He wondered if his grandmother was doing all this because she craved some power, a rare chance to centre herself in the household.
As she chuckled at the television, he doubled down on his resolution not to talk about it, to deny her any thrill she might feel at finally having some hold over his father.
“I’m gasping for a cup of tea,” he said.
“You know where the kettle is.”
“And you know where the fank is, yet we never ask you to deworm the sheep.” He looked to his father. “Dad, would you like some tea?” When John nodded, he turned back to Ella and said, “That’ll be two for tea.”
Ella glowered at him but he forced himself to hold her gaze until she rose from the couch and hobbled towards the kitchen.
When she was out of earshot, John leant in and whispered. “You two had a falling out?”
“No,” he said. “I don’t think so.”
John hummed. “Then please don’t speak to your grandmother like that.”
Ella made the tea and delivered it to the table. She went back to the television without taking a cup for herself. The men let it stew in the pot.
When John was finished applying the lotion, Cal thanked him and offered to return the favour. John looked like he might say no, but Cal had seen him chewing at the inflamed skin, using his teeth to scratch an itch that must have run all the way to the bone.
John did as he was told. He washed his hands and when he returned to the table he laid his hands on the towel. Cal patted them gently and even though he took great care not to rub the inflamed skin, the towel spotted with blood.
He was careful with his father. John’s hands were knuckled like celery root.
The skin was swollen, almost gouty in appearance, split in several places and broken down with lanolin and sheep dip.
There were microscopic hairs nestled in the wrinkles, tiny bits of coloured lambswool that were festive looking against the pale skin.
Cal tweezed some wool that was embedded in the skin. “We need to sign on, Dad. We’ve hardly a pot to piss in.”
“What? The dole?”
Cal glanced at his grandmother and in that moment he didn’t want her to be part of this family, he felt she didn’t deserve to be in this with his father and him. He switched back to Gaelic. “Yes. Take unemployment. Doll does it. I’d bet Donnie does too.”
Ella shifted. She flicked her eyes at him then quickly looked away again.
“It’s dishonest. We have work.”
“Yes, but not enough.” He pulled some black wool out of a crease on John’s hand, wool that he had mistaken for knuckle hair. The fibre was nearly two centimetres long. He laid it on the towel. “We wouldn’t be breaking the law. Not really.”
“Whose? Man’s or God’s?”
“We could do with a little fat on the bone.”
“Are you expecting bad news?”
“Of course,” he said. “We’re Protestants.”
He had removed all the stray wool and so he dabbed some Dettol on a rag and started to clean the wounds. John reared back and gripped the table edge with his free hand. The table shifted several inches. It knocked into Cal’s belly and winded him.
He thought about the tenancy as he tended the wounds. He wondered if he was a bad son for keeping the news to himself. He wondered if his father was aware that he knew and now thought less of him for not bringing it up.
Then he wondered if the tenancy was the real reason his father had called him home, and if that was true, then he didn’t want to admit to himself that he had a father who would use him as a pawn; a father who would ask him to set aside his own dreams as if they were nothing at all.
He could only see two outcomes from being honest. The first was that his father somehow did not know about Ella’s plan and he would hurt him in the telling.
The second was that his father knew, and would be embarrassed by Cal bringing it up, for how could he be the man of the house if he didn’t have a house to be man of?
Either way, he would demand Cal’s loyalty and ask that he take his side against his mother and grandmother.
In the end he said nothing. The silence suited them.
Cal cleaned the cuts on the other hand. John reared back and the table shifted again.
Perhaps it would be a mercy to lose the croft.
“If you could live anywhere else in the world, where would you live?”
“Don’t ask foolish questions.”
“I’m only trying to take your mind off the sting.
” His father’s fingers were so swollen that the nails were swallowed by the flesh.
There was a long split in his thumbnail and Cal took a sewing needle and cleaned some of the dirt that had gathered there.
He turned the hands palm-side up and, unbuttoning his father’s shirt cuff, he folded it up to his elbow.
There was a rash blooming on the inside of John’s wrist. “If you could do anything else – anything other than the sheep – what would you do?”
“I would set up a council that prosecuted people for wasting time with stupid questions.”
Cal rubbed some ointment into his skin. The webbing between his fingers cracked open, the skin flared a hot ember pink. “Have you ever seen a doctor?”
“Why?”
“I think you might be allergic to wool.”
“And if I am,” he said. “What would you expect me to do about that?”
Cal sat back and looked at him in disbelief.
John knocked his upturned hands on the tabletop. “Are we done here?”
Cal cut a glance at his grandmother. Ella was staring at the television but he could tell from her stillness that she was trying to decipher what they were talking about.
He got up with a sigh and went through to the kitchen.
He rooted around under the sink and returned with a packet of Marigold gloves.
“The girls at college did this. You’ll fight me. But just do it. Please.” He gouged a dollop of Vaseline from the tub. He smeared some on his father’s hand and then taking another lump, he shoved that into the glove. “Here. Now. Put this on.”
He forced the glove onto his father’s hand.
John’s fingers were swollen and the fit was snug.
The yellow Marigold, which reached almost to Ella’s elbow, looked oddly wrist-length on his father.
Cal flinched a little at a sexual image that was brought on by the sight of such powerful, masculine hands shoved into tight rubber.
The clouds snagged on the hillside and pressed down upon the island.
Trapped by their own weight, they sank lower and lower until the sky finally ripped and the rain returned.
Cal found himself trapped in the house again.
The light kept its distance and never stayed long enough. The days snuck in, then they snuck out.