Chapter 15 #4
He had a flagellant’s need to admit where his work was flawed.
He had enough women in his life telling him where he had gone wrong.
It was redundant work, but he spread the cloth on the kitchen table and spent hours poring over it with an eyeglass, highlighting each fault with a little white knot.
This tweed had been littered with crosses – which was unusual for his yardage – and when he was done, it lay before him like a battlefield, or, more accurately: a diary of every time Cal’s attention had wandered.
He stood before the light box, talking to Catriona, who had been darning his cloth since he was a young weaver. He was showing her where the warp had missed the weft, where a few threads hung loose like broken harp strings. “I should have noticed it sooner.”
“Don’t worry yourself, John. And don’t be doing us out of a job.
” The older woman had her face tilted towards him.
She was beautiful in a peaceful way, large brown eyes, a kind smile, plump lips.
All the women were watching John. He was the only one looking to the flaws.
There was a young darner threading a missing weft through a tartan.
She was somebody’s daughter from a lineage John vaguely recognised.
He was wondering who it was she belonged to, when she called over to a woman who was tweezing debris from a length of cloth, in a whisper just loud enough to be overheard.
“He only does this so he can spend time with her.”
The picker swept her bottom lip with her tongue. “Bet he makes mistakes on purpose.”
John blushed. It was true in a way but not in the way the women imagined.
He loved to see all the components that went into bringing him the yarn, and then, all the steps that happened after he had woven the cloth.
It anchored him, to be a part of this. It made him feel real, and not just a figment of his own imagination, a ghost haunting a tin shed.
“You should let us know when you’re due for a visit,” said the young darner. She was missing one of her front teeth. John was wondering at her temerity, when she added, “Catriona would gladly bake you a cake.”
Catriona pitched a piece of tailor’s chalk at the woman. The darners whooped.
“We’d all bake you a cake,” said the woman with the tweezers. “If you’d only give us a dollop of that good Harris cream.”
Were they mocking him? He couldn’t tell.
He maintained his tight, peaceful expression that told them nothing.
The women were still cackling as he made his way to the spinning shed.
He passed the spinners and the carders and was concerned to see the production lines were unusually quiet.
He knew from the island talk how rich white Americans had turned their backs on tailored clothing and on tweed suiting in particular.
Their collective tastes were turning to branded street wear, athletic clothing, and they seemed desperate to emulate the Black people they otherwise looked down upon.
It was a whole continent of people growing too comfortable to dress properly any more.
They were always wanting cheaper, always wanting faster, and as their bodies turned to fat, they had become obsessed with wrapping their softness in more softness.
As the American orders dried up, the men who worked the mill were no longer guaranteed jobs for life. John wandered from scouring to setting. He thought of Cal in his second-hand clothes and resolved to get him into a new suit.
He passed from the humid finishing department and into the arid air of the blending warehouse like a man leaving one continent for another.
He watched the men take the coloured tops, large technicolour clouds of wool, and prepare the colours for mixing.
The man who was pushing dyed fleece into the blending machine was new.
He was following an exact recipe, using a pitchfork to feed fluffy clouds of geranium and then hyacinth into the mixer.
When he saw John, he paused and leant on the pitchfork, as if inviting conversation.
“What happened to old Fraser?”
The man tilted his hand and made the sign for drinking, “Did him a favour, if you ask me. I heard the leg was coming off. All the toes are away already.”
“Pity,” said John. “I liked Fraser.”
Behind the young man, in the large steel hopper, John could see the fibres being blown, mixed together, and falling from the sky like coloured clouds.
The finished yarn would be an imperial purple, or if they added more navy and a little more fuchsia, it could become the exact colour of blackberries in August. He would have preferred that.
“You seen my boy? About this tall. Walks like he’s made of rubber bands.”
The young man jerked his thumb at the blending shed. “I told him, if he gets the wool-lung, it’s not my fault.”
The door to the blending shed was sealed and had a glass porthole in the centre.
When Cal was younger it had felt like a secret doorway.
Auld Fraser had a magical sense of ceremony, and all the visiting weavers sent their young children to bother Fraser and his magical colour machine.
John had watched as he had beckoned Cal forward with a pantomime worthy of Wonka, and then opened the door like it was a gateway to Narnia.
John peered through the porthole. Cal stood in the centre of the room, arms outstretched, his face turned towards the falling colours.
He had removed his hat and his hair was dancing in the wind.
Even without Fraser, John could tell none of the magic was diminished.
The fans spun as the air filled with puffs of colour.
The colours fell all around him like technicolour snowflakes and sat in drifts that reached his waist.
John rapped on the door and Cal started. He saw his father and he deflated as though John’s arrival was an end to all fun, as sure as a buzzer, as sure as the pennies running out on the supermarket pony. John saw it.
Cal waded to the door but before he could exit, John opened it and stepped inside.
John was laughing, and then coughing, and then scratching at himself as they climbed back into the Landy.
His face was slightly swollen, which would give him a sleepless night later, but for the moment it had been worth it, because it brought Cal into fits of laughter every time he looked at him.
When they had left the cluster of outbuildings behind, he turned to Cal.
“Seems I owe you five pounds. You’re improving.
The menders never saw a difference in our beating. ”
Cal picked the last of the mad colours from his hair. “We could be the same man.”
As they drove south towards Harris, his contentment ebbed and gave way to creeping worry again.
And as they drew nearer to home he fell back into the old tongue for some reason.
“But what about next winter? Last year, when the mill got the spring orders there was barely enough to keep me busy. Now with two of us . . .”
“Dad. We can manage.”
But his peace was already gone.
The road turned away from the sea and they came into a small village.
There was a primary school at the edge of the settlement and women were gathered outside, talking and waiting for their youngest children to finish their half-days.
John was unaware he had done it, but he leant forwards and craned to search the faces of the strangers.
Cal watched him do it. “Do you always look for her?”
“I fear that I’ll run into her. And then what?”
“And then you ask her how she’s keeping. If she’s read any good books.” Cal rolled some loose fibres between his fingers.
“Some days I have to force myself to go out into the world.”
“I know, Dad,” he said. He held the wool to the window. It struggled in the breeze before he let it go. “But the world’s not so bad.”
When he was eight years old, Cal broke his own speed record.
He ran the fastest he had ever run in his life.
He knew how he should ration his energy, use it to jog up each hill and then coast down the far side.
But in his panic he couldn’t pace himself and several times he was forced to stop and lurch to the roadside, panting, his back as bent as a startled cat.
His father was in the shed, staring out the window. He saw his son coming a mile off and he could tell something was wrong.
It was a long time before Cal could pull enough air into his lungs to form a complete sentence.
John took him by the shoulders, tried to steady him, wanted to throttle him.
He knelt to be at Cal’s eyeline and there was a moment where Cal’s panic seemed like it might be replaced with grief, that his panting would give way to inconsolable tears.
Ella appeared beside them, the door to the croft swinging in the wind. Later that night, when she dressed Cal in clean pyjamas, she would see the thumb prints that John had left on his collarbone; two perfect circles, little purple grapes.
“It’s Mamaidh.” Cal sobbed. “It’s Mam!”
Grace Macleod had been leaving things in the back seat of the Sunbeam for the past four months.
It was always one thing at a time: a padded coat, a box of sanitary towels, her favourite book.
It was just enough to appear forgetful. When Cal had mentioned the mess, she had told him it was a game.
She wrote him a list and sent him round the house each day to take something – just one single thing – to see if he could hide it in the car without his father or grandmother noticing.
In this way he gathered: a blue cardigan, a pair of flat shoes (first the left, and then the right), a jar of loose copper coins, a set of bedsheets (starting with the pillowcase and working on from there).
On that Thursday when he had climbed into the car with his mother, he thought they were only going to Beady’s because the car couldn’t go any farther. When his mother had driven all the way to the top of the road, he had scolded her, sounding a little like his father.
Grace wasn’t listening. She parked in a passing place, pulled a roll of bin bags out of the glove compartment and started furiously stuffing them with the debris that was strewn around the floor.
Cal knew then that something was different, but he was filled with an excitement that his mother stoked with a conspirator’s whisper.
He helped her scavenge parts of herself with an enthusiasm he would later regret.
They dragged the bags to the mouth of the spinal road. As they waited at the bus shelter, his mother paced back and forth. “I’ve forgotten my book, what will I read on the bus?”
Cal was in the middle of the road. He had his arms outstretched and he was leaning into the wind and testing its resolve to catch him. “We could tell each other stories.”
Grace began buckling and unbuckling the hasp on her bag. Click, click, click. “How fast do you think you could run home?”
He was at the edge of his world. She glanced at her wrist and checked the time.
It was only later that Cal realised his mother never wore a watch.
“Please,” she said. “Run home and get Mamaidh’s book. I’ll wait right here. I promise.”