Chapter 22 #4
Innes guided his father towards the door. They left without saying goodbye to Cal and so Cal moved away from the minister, saying he needed to use the toilet, and he hurried out and pushed past his father, mumbling apologies.
He took an umbrella from the stand and found Innes on the road, helping his father into the back of Shockie’s Maestro. Innes saw him approaching and his face fell.
Cal held the umbrella above him and smiled in on the elder MacInnes.
He shook the old man’s hand. His vision was gone, and Cal realised that his mind was going too, because after spending an hour at his prosecution, Old MacInnes asked his son who this man was and Innes was forced to explain it was John’s boy, John.
As soon as Innes clicked the seatbelt and closed the door on his father, Cal took a firm hold on his arm and dragged him behind the car, out of the halo of porch light. He spun him round the side of the house until they were between the house and the buried caravan.
“Why did you leave me like that? I stayed on for hours thinking you would come back.”
Innes braced his hand on Cal’s shoulder. He used it to steady the young man, to keep him at arm’s length. “How dare you grab at me in front of my father.”
“Your father doesn’t know if it’s Christmas or Canada.”
Innes walked away from him.
Cal was about to say something more when the men came out of the front door. Shockie called to Innes over the roof of the car. “Perhaps we should stop in on Donnie and Sarah?”
Flash helped the minister into his car. Innes cast a final glance at Cal, then he climbed into the back seat next to his father while Shockie took the driver’s seat.
Cal watched the cars drive away.
Slowly, methodically, he folded up the umbrella and then, in a fit of rage, he hurled it after them as though it were a spear.
When he was calm enough, he went back inside. His grandmother was clearing up the tea things, setting them on a tin tray. Cal gathered some half-eaten biscuits from the saucers. He ate them quickly one after the other.
“Ella, I don’t want you listening at the door like that,” said John.
“Suppose you want teapots and sangwiches to fly through the air like they’re enchanted?”
“Sandwiches. Sand-wiches,” he corrected. He turned to Cal. “And you. You did the very thing you should not have done. You embarrassed the Macdonalds.”
“They embarrassed themselves. What a fucking nonsense that was! What in the world of Thomas Hardy?” He pulled the elastic band from his hair. “Why didn’t you stand up for me sooner?”
“I did. Then I had to sit there and listen to how you fondled the girl.”
“I didn’t fondle her. It was the middle of the day.”
“So you were buying sheep feed, were you? That’ll be a first. Gillies of Leverburgh went out of business years ago.
There was not a man in this room that did not mark you as a bare-faced liar.
And then you want them to believe you didn’t interfere with the girl?
” John sank into his armchair. He turned and thumped the pillow.
“Is there any of that whisky left, Ella?”
“I’m afraid not.”
“There was a whole bottle.” He glowered at Cal. “Where has it gone?”
“Don’t look at me.”
Ella sighed. She wiped her hands on her apron. “I set the bottle on a tray with some tumblers. Doll went up to the toilet and when he came back down, the bottle was gone . . .”
“Ella, you should have told us.”
“Really? How many fights you want in the one night?”
Cal sneered as he unlaced his trainers. “Whisky? What exactly were you celebrating?”
“Oh, grow up,” she said. “The last bairn was Eilidh Macdonald, and she was born, what . . . ten year ago? It’s a wonderful thing, despite what those dour sods think.”
Ella sniffed the milk jug to see if it had spoiled in the heat. She poured it into a glass and thrust it at John. John sipped it and, finding it fine, he swallowed it down.
“There was a better way to have handled this,” he said.
“We’ve to live next to the Macdonalds a good many years yet.
” He looked to Ella. “Don’t be fooled by that show of understanding.
That deferment was the minister’s final gift to his wife’s cousin.
Isla has sealed her fate. She’ll have to be de-membered. ”
That word always sounded too close to dismembered, and it would feel like that to the Macdonalds when Isla’s immortal soul was severed and discarded.
“Donnie said she was too angry to repent.”
“Angry?” said Ella. “What did that fella do to her?”
“You know as much as I do,” said John. “But it is very likely that by the end of the year the Macdonalds will have two children on the outside.”
Cal thought he should go see Isla and try to talk some sense into her. She could repent and not truly mean it. But it was as though his father could read his very thoughts because when he looked up, John was staring right at him.
“Stay away from the Macdonald girl. I don’t want your name associated with hers.
” John held the empty glass aloft like some arrogant laird, until Ella hobbled over to claim it.
“It’s too bad, really. If she hadn’t been ruined and you had taken up with her, then you could have this croft and all that Macdonald land. ”
“And what about Doll?”
“What about him? You could smell the fumes coming off him.” They sat in the sad truth of it a moment, before John went on, “I have to confess, a small part of me hoped the child might be yours. Isla would’ve been a good, obedient wife, for you would have been her salvation.
The Macdonalds would have given you anything you’d asked.
Think of the inheritance. That’s a brand-new house, central heating. ”
“Sorry to spoil your dreams with dreams of my own.”
Ella snickered and Cal glared at her.
“And who are you laughing at, Judas? You’re as bad as my dad. I told you I had no interest right from the start but you’ve always got to be in there, stirring the fucking pot.”
Ella didn’t answer him. She resumed piling the tea things on the tray.
She should have told Cal the truth about his grandfather.
She should have done it years ago when he was young enough to be bullied into keeping a confidence.
It kept her awake some nights, imagining what might have happened to her in Glasgow had Calum Morrison not offered to marry her and raise some other man’s baby, some man who might have been called Jimmy, or Johnny, or Bobby – the music had been so loud.
“Always meddling,” said John in Gaelic. “Desperate to be the centre of attention.”
“What did he say?”
John leant forwards in his chair. “I said. You. The ghost of all my failures. Why are you still haunting my door?”
“Dad!”
“What did he say?”
John’s face was alarmingly calm. His tone measured and even.
The only thing that betrayed his cruelty was the clarity with which he pronounced every word.
“Your mindless chatter is the last thing I hear at night and the first thing I hear in the morning. When I sit my arse on the toilet and it is still warm from the memory of you, I want to scream. I want to take a knife and peel my skin from the bone.”
Cal tried in Gaelic. “Athair!”
“And him! You are the reason he is so far from the scripture. With all your slanted talk. How I wish your daughter had dragged you away with her. How I wish you both to hell.”
Ella looked to Cal. Cal could not meet her eye.
“I see,” she said. “That was the football results, was it?”
She gathered up the teaspoons. She checked the dirty ones and put the clean ones in her pocket. “When Grace’s father brought me to the islands, I didn’t know a lick of the old tongue. They all laughed at me and said I could barely speak English.”
“Please,” John rubbed his temples. “Just go to your cupboard.”
She itched her top lip with her bottom teeth.
“Do ye know for all those years, if any of those women wanted to leave me out, they just spoke Gaelic. Sometimes it wisnae even to leave me out. It was just cos they were in a mood. Mibbe they were bleedin’.
Mibbe they were bored. But for forty-odd year, I was meant to stand there and smile.
Then I’d come home and raise your son and you would give me the same.
” She was staring into the centre of the room, staring at something the men could not see.
“Carson nach urra . . . urrainn . . . dhut a bhith toilichte?”
Cal rounded on his father. “Say you’re sorry. Say it!”
“Ach, she’s playing the game she’s always played! Anything to turn you against me.”
“You do all your own turnin’, John. You need no help from me.” She lifted the tray and moved towards the door. “But, see if you ever speak to me like that again, I’ll put so much bleach in your bath it’ll melt your face off. Let the world see the devil that lives inside God’s favourite singer.”
The men watched her leave.
Cal felt powerless to help.
Ella couldn’t close the door, so he crossed the room and closed it at her back. He pressed his face against the painted wood and listened for the latch to fall into the socket.
“God help us.” His father rose from his armchair and began pacing. “Did you teach her the Gàidhlig?”
Cal had memories of rainy afternoons, of Ella parroting some random fragments and him correcting her pronunciation.
He had taught her the eighteen letters of the alphabet but it was all done so casually that none of it added up to this fluency.
He remembered that on the bookshelves in her bedroom sat a dogeared dictionary and the poor-looking textbooks from his time at school.
He had assumed she was gathering old things close to her in order to keep them safe.
“Why do you never take my side?” John gripped the collar of his shirt. He paused. He rubbed the fabric as if struck by its softness. “Whose shirt is that?”
Cal looked down. He was wearing Innes’s shirt. It was a plain, ordinary check. Every man he knew had ordered a version of it from the catalogue. “I found it.”
“You found a shirt?”