John of John

Chapter 22 #5

“Down at the fank. I assumed it was yours. It was freezing so I put it on.”

“At the fank, feeding the sheep with the imaginary silage from the non-existent merchant?” John traced the darning at the collar. “This shirt belongs to Innes.”

“Does it? Then I’ll have to put it back before he notices.”

“Take it off.”

“I’ll go up for my bath in a minute—”

“Where were you last night?”

His father was standing too close and he couldn’t lie at this distance. He tried to step around him and retrieve the sandwich Ella had made. “Let me have my dinner and then—”

John slapped him.

Cal had been looking at his father – not in the eye but on the second button of his shirt – and now his gaze was on the wall.

His vision danced with burning white flecks, northern comets roaring across an indoor sky.

The slap reoriented his view so suddenly, like the clunky revolution of a viewfinder and he found himself looking at the cabbage roses his mother had papered the wall with.

They were beautiful in their plump abundance.

“Look at me.”

Cal was unsure if he could turn his head. The muscle in his neck felt torn with whiplash.

“Look at me!” His father took hold of his face. He pressed his thumbs in the soft flesh underneath each eye. He braced the back of his head with his long weaver’s fingers. “You weren’t at your mother’s. So I’ll ask for the last time. Where were you?”

He circled his father’s wrists but he couldn’t break John’s grip. He couldn’t pull away, so he pushed forwards, pressed closer, shoved his head into John’s chest, and drove him backwards.

John fell into the armchair as Cal fell on top of him.

Somebody kicked the table and the last of the tea things crashed to the floor.

They wrestled in an undignified way, John grasping at Cal, Cal struggling to be set free.

John scratched and clawed at his jumper until it came up over his head.

Then he grabbed the shirt. The placket tore where the fabric had worn thin over the years.

He grabbed Cal and held his head in a shepherd’s lock. Then he closed his fist and punched him in the ribs. Once, twice. A couplet of dull, meaty thuds.

Cal struggled out of his jumper. The shirt was torn to rags.

He stood above his father, panting, clutching his side.

There was outrage on John’s face, as though he was offended Cal had the audacity to free himself, as though Cal had disobeyed him by not taking his beating like a good boy.

Cal looked down upon him with a trembling fury.

“I heard Flash laughing behind your back. He was talking to the men at the bar. They call you, John Knocks, you know. And they laugh, and they laugh, and they laugh.” He tore open what remained of the shirt.

He balled it in his fist and tossed it in John’s face.

When he entered the kitchen, he found Ella standing at the sink, her hands idle in the water. The water was filmy, the bubbles had lost all their effervescence. At the sound of his footsteps, her eyes came into focus. “You didn’t get that for me, did ye?”

“No,” he said. “Not this time.”

There was mutton simmering in a pot, offal and offcuts that she had been boiling for the dog. The air was greasy with the smell of rendered fat.

“I never agreed with anything he said. I’m sorry I never spoke up.” A choked sob escaped him. The effort to swallow it jerked his whole body.

Ella shook the water from her hands and drew the tea towel from her pinny.

She handed it to him and he pressed it to his face and muffled his tears.

As he wept, she went back to the sink and stared out at the black sea.

“Chaidh thu . . . dhan cholaiste,” she said, in broken Gaelic.

“For four years I sat in that room every Wednesday, every Sunday night, listening to the two of you talk on the phone.” She paused.

“Well, you would talk on the phone thinking I didn’t understand.

But I did. And what I didn’t understand I could learn .

. .” She faltered here. The next part seemed outside her command so she reverted to English.

“See, men are awful repetitive. A shockin’ lack of self-expression. ”

They had never known what to do after one of John’s tempers, after he’d kicked, or shoved, or slapped.

Over the years they had tried it many different ways.

There had been interventions and retaliations, long awful avoidances followed by penitent silences.

Ella had gathered the boy up and carried him away but John had always found them and demanded that Ella give his son back.

It was this old house, it always demanded that they return.

At some point, and without discussing it, they had learnt to accept John’s anger as a thing that came and went.

And through this flat acceptance, they found they had no appetite for his atonement, for he didn’t mean it – or he was powerless to change.

The only thing to do was to get up, to try and forget and go on as best as they could.

Ella reached for the flour jar. Cal put his hand on her arm.

“Then I’ll run you a bath,” she said. “I’ll bring the portable upstairs. You like that.”

He wiped his snot on the towel and went to the long table.

He bit into one of the dried-out sandwiches and without finishing it, he opened the next and scraped the ham from the heart of it.

Ella watched as he crammed the ham into his mouth.

He went through the pile of sandwiches and ate only the parts he wanted.

He tossed a slice of tomato to the dog, Tick caught it with a snap, then spat it onto the lino.

“You have to leave,” he said. “You have to go live with Mam—”

“Don’t talk stupit.”

“I can’t move on knowing you’re here.”

“What is it with shepherds thinking women are a thing to be driven from here to there?”

Ella went to the freezer and cracked some ice from the tray. She filled the tea towel and gave it back to him. He winced as he pressed the ice to his cheek.

“Please,” he said. “Sign the croft over to my mamaidh. It’s not his and it’s not mine. If he wants to stay and manage the place, then he can humble himself for once. If he can’t do that – then he can live under an upturned boat. He can’t be more miserable than he is now.”

She poured him a glass of milk. He waited for her to say something in response but when she was done pouring the milk she simply turned and left the room.

As he waited, he drank the milk and stared up at the clothes pulley hanging from the ceiling.

There were his father’s shirts drying on the rack and several pairs of old Y-fronts limp as windless flags.

Hanging amongst the laundry were two flanks of salted lamb, flayed, greying flesh marbled with cream fat.

He could hear Ella fight with the sticky drawers on her dresser. When she came back into the kitchen she was holding the envelope from an old electricity bill.

“Now,” she said, “I’m going to give you something. I don’t want to argue and I’ll be offended if you refuse me. If you have to say anything then just say, ‘thank you.’ Don’t make a big show of it. You hear me?”

The envelope was stuffed with loose notes. He could see the different colours, mostly green, but here and there were some blues, browns, purples. He was never great with maths, but if he were to guess, he would say it was several thousand pounds.

“I’ve been putting a bit aside. I was going to give it to you when you went to college, but you were so immature I worried you’d buy somethin’ daft.”

“Like an education?”

“No, like a cowboy hat or some shite.”

He laughed. “I would never have bought a cowboy hat.”

“There was a couple of birthdays where all you wanted was a white Stetson. Then there was another where you begged for a purple shellsuit.”

“I was twelve.”

“How they let you into art school, I’ll never know.”

The combination of a Stetson and shellsuit was so ugly that it would have made the perfect art school outfit. The try-hards at the GSA would have loved it.

The envelope was bursting at the folds. She handed it to him. “I don’t know what to say.”

“I told you what to say.”

“Then . . . Thank you, Granny.”

She nodded stiffly. She took the envelope and, lifting the front of his jumper, she stuffed it into his waistband before she lowered the jumper again. She stood back and checked his jumper for lumps. “Put that somewhere safe. Somewhere he won’t see it.”

“OK.”

“Will you go back to the city?”

“Yes,” he paused. “Where did you get this?”

He watched as Ella crossed the room and closed the door to the kitchen which they almost never closed.

“I never liked that old Reverend McAllister. The soul always shows on the face. He gave this sermon about a wife’s duty that put my hackles up.

He was talking about obedience and he was hinting at your mother, how in her leaving she had left not only your father, but all the Godly men, like she was some village heifer that had wandered away.

And there you were, ten years old, sitting next to me, shiny as a penny, staring up at him in awe.

” She ran her tongue across her lip. “When your father gives me his offering on a Friday night, I take some money from the envelope. I never stole it,” she said, reading his expression. “I withheld it. There’s a difference.”

“I know,” he said, not entirely convinced.

They both knew that the church cèisean were numbered to identify each family and on the first Tuesday of the month, the deacons met to count the offerings. He patted the envelope, which now felt hot against his skin. The old gummy seal was sticking to the hairs on his belly.

“That minister was a rantallion little weasel. He did more harm than he knew. He gave this sermon about the young men on the mainland, you know the types, the pretty ones wi’ the leper spots.

He said they deserved it and that their mothers deserved it, that it was the burns you get when you dance in the Devil’s light.

I never heard that in the church growing up. That hardness. I couldnae get over it.”

Ella flicked her eyes at the wall and then looked right at him.

They stared at each other a moment.

“. . .What?” he asked.

“I’m tired, son. I’m an old woman wi’ a bad heart. Don’t you come to ma funeral and say you loved me if you let there be secrets between us.”

“What secrets?” He pressed his tender ribs. “I’m not a homosexual, if that’s what you’re asking.”

“Are you sure?”

If she had asked him last week – if she had asked him a few hours ago – then perhaps he could have been honest with her. But he was aware of his own tiredness all of sudden. He wanted to lie down on the floor and rot into the linoleum. “I think I would know, don’t you?”

She made a long face as she swept his discarded crusts into her palm and dropped them into the dog bowl. “I find what men know and what men admit to knowing to be very different things.”

He watched her as she wet a cloth and wiped the counter. It was as though this was another ordinary evening and the most monumental things that had ever happened between them had somehow never happened.

“Now don’t you tell your father about that money.”

She went around the room and switched off all the lamps.

“Make yourself happy, son. Christ above, let one of us be happy.”

She tidied up the newspaper and dropped it into the box for burning.

“But see if you buy a cowboy hat, then you better buy a fast horse.”

She put the guard over the fire.

He laughed. “Oidhche mhath, a sheanmhair.”

“Aye,” she said. “Oidhche mhath, a ghràidh.”