Chapter 26
fichead ’s a sia / twenty-six
Cal hung up the phone. When he came into the long room, his father was setting bowls of soup on the table. “Who was that?”
He hesitated because he could not recall Cheeks’s real name and he would rather not upset his father with the story of how the man blistered his arse.
“Oh, Doll’s friend from Lewis. His cousin is the foreman at the new fish farm.
He’s got me a job.” He saw a flash of disapproval; the old crofter’s pride which said it was noble to be poor if you were your own man under God.
He carried the plate of buttered bread to the table.
John had arranged it on their finest ashet, as if this might improve their plain lunch. The men sat facing one another.
“I’ve put a little money aside. Not much. I was thinking to pay Donnie a visit. See if he would sell me Doll’s old banger. I could give him a deposit and if I get the job, I could give him money each week until the car was paid off.”
“You’re up to your eyes in debt.”
“And without a real job I’ll never get out of it. Flash can’t afford to keep me at the inn.”
“That car will never run.”
“I have it on good advice that it will.”
“Ah, a miracle.”
“An end to devilment, maybe.” He folded a slice and dunked it in the broth.
He hadn’t seen the tin before his father opened it and tasting the murky liquid he couldn’t tell if it was mushroom or oxtail or something other.
“I might ask Innes to check it over. He’s good with cars.
” He looked up at the exact moment his father looked down.
“Don’t be bothering Innes.”
Cal tasted the soup again. “Dad, what is this?”
“It’s a tin of Scotch broth and a tin of mulligatawny. We didn’t have two of the same.”
It would never occur to his father that they could each have a different soup.
John was wearing his good suit. He had been out visiting the parishioners, ministering to Licky McAllister, who had come down with a spiritual melancholy. Several of the older faithful, upon hearing of the sale of the church, had taken to their beds in heartbroken defeat.
“I saw Donnie out on the boat this morning.” John shook some salt onto his soup. “Sarah tried to drown herself again.”
It had been almost seven weeks since Doll’s funeral and his mother had now tried to drown herself on two separate occasions.
In the dead of night, she had gone into the Minch and swallowed as much seawater as a person could.
In the morning, Donnie found her sitting on the rocks, waiting placidly near the van.
She gulped and retched, but the dry drowning wouldn’t take her and as the day wore on, she became furious to be alive.
Donnie had been forced to lock the doors whenever he left the house.
His daughters drew up a rota in colouring pencil, taking turns to mind their mother whenever he was out on the boat.
“Some free advice? You might be encouraged to persuade Isla to return to university, or to get out there and do something with her life. But please, resist it. It is a sin that we should think we know what is best for others.”
Cal thought with some bitterness that the soundest advice people gave was the advice they should heed for themselves.
“What happens inside that family is none of our business. It is not our place to interfere. Isla is needed at home – perhaps she won’t always be – but she is needed at this very moment.”
“And what of her own needs?”
“She has no needs. She has only wants.”
“She’s so bright.”
John hummed as though he might argue this point. “Then let her shine here. Let her be a light for her family.” He dug around in his soup, hunting for a shred of meat. “Donnie says this baby of hers is Sarah’s only consolation. Don’t be the man to break a grandmother’s heart.”
He wondered if his father knew about the church money but there was no way to ask him without incriminating his grandmother.
If his father was right, and Isla felt the duty to remain, then the money was all but wasted now.
He should have used it to go back to the mainland himself.
He wondered if he could ask for it back.
When he looked up again, his father was studying him.
“I’m proud of you,” he said. “You didn’t hesitate.
We needed you and you came.” John tore a hunk of bread and fed it to the dog.
“The Communions were hardest. The others with their families at their side. And me, always on my own.” He turned his gaze to the window.
The daylight illuminated him without shadow.
There was a starkness to him: the black suit against the white shirt, the rails of the bench against the plain plaster wall.
“If the quiet starts to bother you, then make yourself busy. I find that helps.”
His father put all his faith in the Presbyterian penicillin. For whatever ailed you there was only one cure: work and prayer.
Cal cleared the lunch things while John went upstairs and changed out of his visiting clothes. He put the bowls down for the dog and Tick did such a thorough job of licking them clean that Cal put them back in the cupboard without washing them.
The mill had sent a new pattern and so he followed his father to the shed where they tied in the warp.
They took the ends and threaded them through the heddles.
It was close, finicky work, like threading seven hundred tiny needles where any twisting or confusing of order would mean starting over again.
They sat shoulder to shoulder and worked in silence, concentrating on their counting.
When they reached a stopping point, John sat up and stretched his back.
“Am fear dhan dàn a’ chroich, cha tèid gu bràth a bhàthadh,” he said. “I believe it. Don’t you?”
“No. I can’t accept that we are so helpless.”
“A man that is meant to drown, will drown. And there is nothing you could have done.”
As Cal untangled his threads, he thought how he hated that belief, that docile sufferance of God’s plan.
And he hated his grandmother’s folksy wisdom more.
It filled him with rage when she would sigh and say, “Aye, whut’s fur ye, won’t go by ye.
” He wondered why the Scots never said, “If it goes by you, get up and fucking chase it.” Or “If you don’t want this fate, then get to work and make another.
” This passive acceptance for whatever came your way was surely a sentiment sent north by English rule.
It had to be. He found no hope in any of it.
And yet here he was, stuck, unable to move forwards, accepting it.
“I was a bad friend.”
He stared at the knots in his hand. There was so much he could never tell his father.
“You’ve had so much loss, so much disappointment, recently.”
“Yes,” he said, with a small gasp.
When he thought of Doll or Grace, of Innes or Ella, it was hard not to feel rejected, impossible not to feel left behind. He felt surrounded by a sense of failure. Everywhere he looked, everyone he thought of, made him feel some sort of regret.
It was only when his father laid his hand upon his own that he realised how he had been trembling. He watched in a passive remove as his father plucked the warp from his grip. He set the threads aside to be untangled later.
His father was right: fresh air helped. It felt better to be out of the house, up in the valley working the peats. There was a respite from overthinking because as soon as a thought formed, the wind picked up and knocked it out of his head.
It had taken two days to skin the sward, to clear the moss and heather and get at the burnable beneath.
His father stood over him and sang into the wind as he drove the tairsgear into the earth.
With the heel of his boot, John pushed the blade into the exposed peat, sliced it like it were heavy cake and then he stood back, resting his clasped hands on the handle, his chin on his hands, his eye on God’s land.
Cal excavated the bricks and set them aside to dry.
The earth was heavy, slippery as potter’s clay.
A few times he worked in a counterclockwise direction and his father chided him, reminded him to turn with the sun for it would bring better luck.
“I’ll take a turn at the lifting,” said his father after a time.
But Cal refused him. He wanted the harder job. It was the lifting that set the pace. He couldn’t bear the cutting and the waiting, the staring and the thinking.
They didn’t talk much the rest of the afternoon. The stitches had been removed and his wound had mostly healed, but on the nurse’s instruction he still wore a single Marigold glove whenever he worked with shit and muck.
As Cal lifted the bricks, John checked his list of neighbours who were too old or frail to cut their own peats. They would make sure that their banks were taken care of, that no one would be found wanting in the middle of winter.
By late afternoon, Cal was filthy and his back was begging to be laid against a hard floor. But the work had done what his father had promised. He didn’t have the energy to feel sorry for himself.
“Hungry?” asked John.
“A bit. I’d be glad of a bath.”
John considered the clouds. “Well, we can continue tomorrow. The sky’s in a mood, but she’ll sulk a while longer.
” He covered their tools with a waxed cloth.
Then he doused some cold tea on a washcloth and used it to clean the mud from his hands.
“Let’s stop in on the MacInnes brothers,” he said.
“Innes will be annoyed we started without him.”
“And risk Sorley joining us?”