Chapter 19 #3
Tick rose from his place in the corner and started an anxious circling.
It was a terrible thing to lose a sheep, but death was part of crofting and most of the time they dug a pit and moved on.
But to lose three in one afternoon was a bitter blow.
It was foolish. It was not the money alone, it was the effort, the time they had wasted only to be visited by death, an avoidable, domino-like death at that.
But he didn’t know why this should be his fault. Surely Innes and his father had been in Falabay – they should have seen the ewe in distress. He thought to ask his father why they hadn’t, but he considered the dying dog and decided not to press him further.
He got up. He would leave his father to grieve. He thought he might weave for a few hours and then go to bed, and in the morning, he would sing with the bright gleam of God in his eye, all of it to try and get back into his father’s good books.
He took Tick by the collar and led him to the door. The house flies were waking up from the long winter and one drummed against the window, desperate, unlearning, focused on its escape.
He looked around the weaving shed at the accumulation of a life. He entertained a cruel notion. He would let his grandmother do as she pleased: let her sign the croft and the house over to his mother and let his father be changed or be freed or be damned. He no longer cared.
The shuttle crossed the loom a dozen times, a hundred times, a thousand times. It split the warp like a red deer running through a forest of bare trees. It shot below his eyeline for hours with its clatter-whoosh-clatter-whoosh, and he could remember none of it.
One dead dog. One dead ewe. Five dead lambs. It was a terrible start to the spring. Of the lambs, there were the two that had died and killed their own mother. Another made it to the end of its first week, full of good colostrum, and then died anyway.
Innes had a fourth lamb that got stuck like the Macleod two.
He couldn’t push it in and he couldn’t pull it out, so he was forced to cut its head off while it hung from its mother’s passage.
And then there was the fifth who fell from its mother, still and quiet.
Innes tickled its throat with a spear of straw.
He blew into its mouth, swung it hard by its hind legs, but the lamb would not come to life. Five dead lambs.
There had been a number that came on in breech, all backwards hooves and hind legs, but Cal handled every birth calmly.
He only wished his father had seen so that he could be restored in his eyes.
He told Ella the details of every difficult birth in the hopes she would tell John.
But if she did, he received no thanks for it.
Partial redemption came when there was another lamb born and John and Cal were both there at the same time.
The newborn was lying in its own mucus, its mother, inattentive to its needs, had simply walked away.
The seagulls were never far during the lambing but that morning a white-tailed eagle was circling.
Cal was too far from the abandoned lamb as the sea eagle sliced through the sky, spreading its talons wide.
It pierced the flesh with its locking claws and ascended triumphant, dripping blood and amniotic fluid.
Cal was too late to save the newborn. He fell on empty ground.
Then, just as he was summoning the courage to stand and face his father’s wrath, there came a faint bleating from the grass.
As he crawled closer the shunned lamb stared up at him in fear.
The eagle had missed. It had stolen the placenta and left the lamb shivering in the wind.
Cal picked it up, put its birth-slick body inside his jacket, and held it to his chest.
John scowled at the mother, who was chewing on a scrabble of pearlwort.
“God damn that unfeeling bitch!” he spat.
“God damn her!” He picked up a rock and flung it at the ewe.
It caught her in the mid-section but she was well-protected by her winter coat.
She bleated like she was annoyed, staggered slightly and then went on with her mindless chewing.
In the days that followed, Cal sterilised some whisky bottles then he made teats from a pair of rubber gloves and affixed them to the necks.
He watched over the lambs and nursed any that were rejected.
Then the long wait for the lambing was quickly replaced with the busy work of tagging and drenching, docking and castration.
His father delegated all this work and so he spent a miserable few days working through the flock.
He gathered all the lambs in the fank and, like a minister at the pulpit, he leant over them and addressed his terrified congregation.
“I’m so sorry for what I’m about to do,” he said. “But please . . . you’ll thank me later. I promise you, a little nip now is better, yes, better – you’ll have to agree – than being eaten from the arsehole out by the black flies of summer.”
It was best to get to the newborns when they were a few days old, this way they felt less pain as their tails withered and fell off.
He picked them up and nuzzled them – which he was told time after time not to do.
Then he used the docking gun to shoot a rubber ring around the base of their soft tails, whispering, “I know, I know,” as he did so.
He docked the females and then he docked the tups. And while he had the boys upside down, he tugged on their velvety scrotums and tied an additional ring around their balls so that they would neuter and lose the desire to mount their sisters.
“Welcome to bachelor’s paradise,” he said as he patted them on their rumps, and they staggered away, blue balls turning purple, crying out for their mothers.
At the end of the lambing season, he was gripped by a desperate need to get away. He left the house and, thinking to use the phone box, he set out on the long walk in the dark.
The phone box sat next to Beady’s house, which meant most of what was said could be eavesdropped if Beady left her bathroom window cracked open, which she usually did.
Cal waited on the edge of the light while Licky McAllister, with her persistent chapped lips, talked with her sister.
She had a black shawl slung around her shoulders and she was facing away from Cal, sitting on a hardbacked chair.
Every Tuesday night she received incoming calls from her sister in New Zealand; a sister who had married a Merino farmer and had seen the fabric of her life, the sheen and comfort of it, steadily improve.
Cal listened from the shadows as Licky gossiped in a quick flowing Gaelic.
She puffed on a Rattray pipe that seemed glued to her mouth, only removing it to let out a low huh, huh, huh, which he supposed was laughter.
He waited ten minutes, twenty, pacing back and forth in the dark.
He wondered if he should step out of the darkness and say he needed to use the phone, but just as he was working up the courage to interrupt them, their talk turned to Doll, and Licky recounted the events of Communion Sunday for her sister.
The condemnation in her voice was in strange contrast to the thin smile upon her lips and several times she slandered the Macdonalds and then giggled as she answered, “Oh shìor, but sure they were always this way.”
The sisters eventually said their goodbyes. Licky picked up her kitchen chair and put it in the boot of her battered estate. She drove off without noticing Cal waiting in the dark.
When her taillights had receded, he stepped forwards.
He rescued the door from the grass, propped it over the opening, and sealed himself inside the phone box.
The common understanding was that the wind had ripped the door off its hinges, except when Cal studied the hinges he noticed that the screws were missing and the hinges were perfectly intact.
He picked up the receiver and dialled the number.
A familiar voice answered.
“Innes?” he said. “Yes, it’s me. It’s Cal.”
The salt air had corroded the wires and so he needed to jiggle the cable till the crackling subsided and the connection cleared.
“Listen, I’m sorry to call so late. But I overheard you talking to my dad about new vans the other week. And I just wanted to say that if you needed to go look at some, then I’d be happy to go with you.”