Chapter 17
seachd-deug / seventeen
John leant on the fank and kicked one foot over the other. He cast around and, taking stock of his blessings, he felt the usual heaviness lift a little. The sheep were fat. The wind was quiet. His son was home. His friend was by his side.
The men watched Cal from under their brims as he clambered up the hill and prepared to bring the sheep down to the fank. Innes unscrewed his Thermos and offered the first sip to John. “Sorley and my father have more trips planned.”
“I thought you seemed cheerier.”
“It’s to be his farewell tour. A chance to see his sisters and my cousins, before . . . well.”
The men were talking without facing each other. Their eyes were in shadow and their lips were barely moving. If anyone saw them from the road, they would have thought they passed the afternoon in stony silence.
“I hoped we could make the most of their absence. Thought we could go away for a day or two. Aidh—wouldn’t need to be far. The mainland. Somewhere folk don’t know us. Aberdeen. Edinburgh if you could handle the travel. You’re always complaining you’ve never been.”
“I’m a bit old for castles.” John nodded towards his son. “Imagine if I told that one I was off to Edinburgh.”
“Then don’t tell him.” Innes took a sip of tea. He hung his bottom lip on the flask, on the place where John had drunk. “We could say we were looking at Transit vans. I need a new van. And people would think it was canny that I asked you along for an opinion.”
“I would just . . . come with you?”
“Aidh—it’d be unwise to travel alone. What with all that cash.”
Cal had reached the top of the hill. They watched as he called the dogs to his side.
John had been grateful when Cal said he would help with the gathering-in, the hill was steep and his knee was louping in the damp.
Cal said he would be glad of the distraction, but when John had chuckled and asked what he needed to be distracted from, Cal had only shrugged.
He watched as Cal whistled for Bess to come by and the old sheepdog sank low to the ground.
She slithered up the hillside until she was above the bellwether ewe.
Then she started to gather them in. She moved like a careful hand sweeping rice from a tabletop.
She worked quickly, despite the ulcer in her leg. What a godsend she was.
The younger dog was more skittish and excitable.
Tick was all black without the messy white paint of his mother.
He had amber eyes that seemed to glow with mischief.
He was pacing on the spine of the hill, forcing the sheep around to the face and away from the windward side.
The sheep should come on easily, but it would only take one to wander away, to break rank, and then the others would follow till they all poured away like a leak.
“Hep-hep! Mind that lamb now!” John shouted across the distance.
Cal spotted the stray lamb.
“Promise me you’ll think about it,” said Innes.
“I’d get two separate rooms in a big hotel if that is what you are afraid of.
A big hotel in a big city, somewhere folk don’t know us.
” Innes misread the look John gave him, which was not confusion, but bewilderment at his sudden boldness.
“We’d only use one room. But we’d be beyond reproach with two. ”
Innes took strange notions whenever his father and Sorley were away.
He would borrow books from the library and, after sailing to Inverness for ingredients, he would ask John to come round and cook with him: Indian food, Italian food, Greek.
He would send away for VHS tapes and ask John to spend a sunny afternoon curled up with him, the curtains drawn tight against the world as they watched Tenko, The Thorn Birds, Moonstruck.
He had magazines about the gay community and he would read articles about the need to abolish Section 28, about the director who tended a garden next to a nuclear reactor.
He would declare that what they were was ‘gay’.
And John would bear it silently. And he would hate it.
“Dè?” asked Innes. “Well?”
“It’s to be a sojourn of sin, then.” He thought it sounded funnier, more pathetic in English.
Innes shook his head. “You’re such an arsehole. No. Not only sin. But also, yes, hopefully, if the good deacon will allow it. But it’s also to be a trip of walking and wandering and just being near you for a while.”
“You’re near me now.”
Innes raised the tea to his lips, then he paused. “You make me feel so lonely.”
“I’m right here.”
Innes’s smile faded. He changed to English because John was being unkind and because English was the language of business and he wanted John to heed everything he said.
“I’d like to get away from the same thing, day in, day out.
To go to an art gallery and stand before a painting with you and have you teach me about colours.
I’d like to get lost with you, John. Wander through the city, start at the centre and walk all the way out to the edges .
. . peer in people’s houses and imagine living there.
I’d like you to pat me on the arse now and then, gently, like, just to hurry me along.
I’d like to sit in a pub as the rain comes down and talk to you without worrying someone might know us. ”
“I don’t have anything to say.”
“I’ve managed this far.”
“And what will they say when we return without a new van?”
“They’ll say Innes MacInnes is lucky to have a friend in John Macleod. A good friend who wouldn’t let the mainlanders gouge him.”
A wayward lamb, a plump young hogget, stood on the edge of a shelf of anorthosite.
The face had sheared away and the drop would kill it.
John watched as Cal clicked for Tick. He brought the young dog under the shelf and tried to push the yearling back and away from the edge.
But Bess was still focused on her original job and sweeping downhill.
As she came closer the lamb separated from the flock.
It called out as its leg slipped off the shelf.
There was an awful moment where it scrambled before it fell.
Cal had been coming uphill and he darted forwards.
He caught the hogget, not completely, but enough to spare it from the worst of the rocks.
The lamb’s face connected with the stone and for a stunned moment John thought it had shattered its jaw.
Cal ran his hand along the jaw, held his breath, and felt for the split.
Dazed, but not broken, the lamb screamed to be released.
The dogs drove the remaining sheep towards the fank and Cal reunited the lamb with the flock.
John nodded at the young ram. “Good wee hogget that one. He’ll make a busy tupper when his time comes.
” He was pleased with his flock. The lamb-man from Leverburgh had come with his sonogram and scanned the ewes to see which were expecting.
Of John’s thirty-six ewes, only five were empty and there would be many who would give out twins.
Innes tugged the fleece of the fallen hogget.
“Aidh—I need to tell those crofters out in Uig that I won’t help with the shearing this year.
” It was a version of the same thing he complained about most years.
The sheep of Uig on the wild Atlantic coast with their sandblasted, bone-dry fleeces defied the use of mechanical clippers. “I’m not going to do it this year.”
John caught Cal’s eye. Neither man contradicted him.
They knew Innes would do it, not for the money – he would lose money when you counted the cost of diesel – but he would do it because people relied on him and he would not let them down.
John took Cal’s hand. “Feel that,” he said, presenting the hand to Innes.
Innes ran his hand over the calluses. “Aidh—it’s getting there.”
Cal wondered how the men could feel anything through their own weathered skin.
“Soil and salt and sheep and shite. You’ve not smelt like that in too long.” John shoved Cal back to work. “It’s good, that.”
The men went around the flock, trimming hooves, lifting tails and checking beneath the fleece for maggots.
The morning passed in peace and John allowed himself a daydream.
He imagined going away with Innes and seeing Edinburgh.
Every so often, when he was sure that Cal was distracted, he would stop and watch Innes and consider his good luck.
At ten, they unwrapped their sandwiches and ate their lunch. John sat to the side and watched Cal and Innes as they chatted. He tried to decide if Innes was still handsome or not – it was a face he was so familiar with that he often took it for granted.
It was a face of the islands. Innes could have been a man from before the Clearances, with such an honest face, untouched by the fashions of the broader world.
His ears stuck out, which made him seem trustworthy and kind – which he was.
As John drank his milk, he thought of Innes’s body.
It was roped with lean muscles, his chest furred with pale hair, his buttocks square with a hillwalker’s endurance.
He felt his cock jump and pulled his thighs together to conceal it.
It throbbed pleasantly. He moved his thighs and squeezed it, enjoying the pressure.
“John!” Innes called for his attention. “Would you look at this!”
John was forced to turn around and pretend to be packing his lunch things away while he tucked his erection into the waistband of his trousers.
Innes was leaning over the fank and holding a small lamb that Cal had applied the Macleod keel mark to.
It was a vibrant coppery colour, and Cal had sprayed the lambs on the back of their necks instead of their flanks.
They looked like they were wearing ginger wigs that had slipped in the wind. Cal was delighted.
John made to kick his son, but Cal danced out of the way.
“Aidh—come on now. It’s funny.” Innes lowered the lamb back into the fank.