Chapter 26 #3
It was a simple one-room structure made of kelp-green wood and crowned with a corrugated roof.
At the far end was a metal flue for a wood burning stove.
The gable wall, which overlooked the main house and the sea beyond, was made up of a large patio door that opened out onto a cedar deck that housed a tin table and two folding chairs that faced the sunrise.
There was a path leading up to a red door and the windows on either side had boxes filled with nasturtiums. Cal thought it was fussy looking.
It was unlike all the other sheds dotted around the headland and looked more like a seaside cottage, a place they could rent to tourists.
“I worried he was building a hermitage to banish me to. But look at it!” Sorley was beaming as he ushered the men inside. “What a wedding gift.”
Everything was arranged against the walls and the centre of the room was empty as if waiting for some large piece of furniture.
There were two armchairs near the stove, tatty, comfy things, hideously fringed and fraying at the corners.
Underneath one window was a wide daybed made from shipping pallets and covered in a hand-made mattress.
There was a Pioneer record player and a stack of LPs.
Cal crouched and flicked through the albums, mostly harmless stuff, some soft Christian pop: the Carpenters, the Mamas & the Papas, and at the very front, a Nana Mouskouri album of jazz standards.
There was nothing he wanted to borrow. When he turned back to the room, his father was slumped in one of the armchairs as though he had been taken ill.
Sorley hadn’t noticed and so he kept wittering on. “This will be a wonderful place for Anna-Marie to make her little projects. She wants to try her hand at upholstery.”
When he turned to check on his father again, John was gone.
Cal hurried out the door and flew down the path. He came around the side of the house just as John was blowing through the gate. “Dad. Stop! You’ve been in the sun all day. Drink some water.”
John’s gaze drifted along the road towards home. “I saw a yearling on the way here. She was hobbling and she’ll be lame by morning. I worry there’s rot in the flock.”
“Wait. We have to talk about Innes.”
“Why?” John moved towards the Landy. “Stir yourself. We won’t have the light long.”
They drove a quarter mile up the road and just as the church was coming into view they found the lamb laying on the hillside.
They tended to the lame ewe. Cal held the beast between his knees while John dug a shard of rock from her pad and cleaned some manure from the wound.
They trimmed the hoof so she could stand again.
As they worked, Cal watched his father, but his expression had returned to its usual stolidness and it told him nothing of what he was thinking.
He kept waiting for his father to say something more.
As he filed the keratin, John whispered into the lamb’s ear something Cal could not quite hear but he thought it sounded like, We’re so close . . . which he assumed meant, stop your struggling, but then John added – and Cal was certain of this: so close to heaven.
They held the lamb between them and perhaps it was this closeness, or the fact that he only had to mumble it and could therefore deny it, that made John feel safe enough to say: “What can I do? All the boats have sailed. And I don’t know if he went north or south.”
“And if you knew would you go to him?”
“. . . Yes,” he whispered. Yes.
Cal released the lamb. She bounded away on mended hooves.
John was down on one knee. He wiped his face with back of his hand. The old hoof clippers were so violent looking, so close to his eyes, that Cal took them from his grip.
John let go a sob that startled them both. It sounded like it had torn something inside him and as he fought to master it, it sent him into a fit of gasping. He sipped the air as if this one single cry had knocked the life from him. Then he howled with pain.
Cal couldn’t ever recall his father crying over his mother.
These tears were not how men cried for their friends.
He turned his gaze away to spare his own embarrassment. He didn’t know how to comfort John other than to be near him. He took the time and wiped the clippers on his trousers, leaving a smear of blood and shit on his thigh. Then he tested the spring. They would need oiling.
As he waited, it was as though the knowledge was already buried inside him. In that moment, as his father wept, he pulled on the rope, and the knowledge rose to the surface till he could glimpse it through the water, and then it was clear, and laid before him like a creel filled with ugly truths.
His father loved Innes and Innes had loved his father.
From this all the other troubles in their lives had followed.
He felt the old iron clippers heavy in his hand.
Someone called John’s name. John turned away from the voice while Cal, half stunned, turned towards it.
Sorley was sauntering along the road waving a small ticket as though he had won the lottery.
“I just mentioned to my father that you paid a visit. And he told me about this. Lucky he remembered, really . . .” He tapped the mint-coloured QSL.
“It was sitting on the mantle with instructions to give it to you. But, of course, nobody bothered to tell me that.”
Cal heeded the instinct to step between them and protect his father from this man.
Behind him, he could hear John’s knees click as he got to his feet.
He could hear him snuffling in an attempt to gather himself.
Cal took the card from Sorley. It was marked with the code for the Isle of Skye and on the back, in Innes’s neat hand, it read: Portree, Thursday 16 July, 8 p.m.
The date was today. The time less than two hours away.
John took the card from him, all the while keeping his face turned away as though he were a lowly scut.
He studied the card and while he did so, Cal watched Sorley studying his father.
Sorley saw it all: the tear-streaked face, the knotted jaw, and he was delighted.
His eyes were bright with knowledge, as though the very thing Cal had realised about the lovers was just now being confirmed for him.
“Will that be all, Sorley?”
He could tell that Sorley wanted to hang about, wanted to see what had brought their great deacon to tears, but Cal maintained his cool gaze and withdrew his smile until Sorley was forced to retreat towards the house.
He was an age going up the road, stopping now and then to pick some useless treasure from the ditch.
When he was certain they were alone again, Cal went to his father and found John a gathered man. He was staring at the sea. “So, he sailed to Uig, after all.”
“Would seem so.”
“There’s no boats till the morning.”
“No. But he let you know where he is. And I think he wants to see you.”
John folded the card in on itself. Cal could see he was already steeling himself, facing his loss, hardening to the world.
The madness of a few moments ago had already passed and now that John had gained control of himself again, he would cling to this control until the day he died.
Cal knew that his father could not move forwards into truth and there was no way to call him on his lies, to have him deconstruct himself now.
He had spent his whole life concealing this truth and the conversations they needed to have would take a lifetime to eke out, years of sly, indirect allusions, only to find that after all those years – decades, perhaps – his father would still not have shifted in his thinking.
Whatever lay ahead, he knew they would keep lying to each other.
“You could ask Donnie to ferry you.” Cal reached into his jeans pocket. He fished out the little money he had. “This should cover the diesel.”
John tutted. “What . . . just knock on his door and ask him to make a – what? – six-hour round journey? And for what? Why should I chase Innes?”
“I’m only trying to help.”
“And what do you expect me to tell Donnie?”
His father snatched the clippers from his hand.
He set out after a cluster of ewes that were further up the hill and Cal had no choice but to pick up the sack and trail after him.
“It’s a wicked world out there. All manner of sin.
” He had no idea what he would say next.
“Poor Innes. He’s not in his right mind.
It’s a crisis of faith. That’s what it is!
First there’s the closing of the church.
Then his own brother cheats him out of his inheritance!
” He drew level with his father. “Sorley’s a manipulator, Dad.
He’s taken advantage. He’s kicked Innes out of his own house! ”
John was side-eyeing Cal in the same sceptical – slightly horrified, slightly impressed – way you watched a fibber making it up as they went along. And Cal was weaving lies for his father, watching him like a child who was afraid to be found out. “It’s a fucking disgrace!”
“Yes,” said John faintly. “It is.”
“Come on. It’s so out of character to just up and leave like that.
He would never turn his back on Falabay.
We’ll be lost without him.” He saw now what he was fumbling for.
As they trudged onwards he put his hand on his father’s shoulder, realising that here it was, the Christian excuse, a chance for his father to follow his lover and preserve his good name.
“Someone has to go check on him, or what kind of community are we? It’s only proper that you are worried.
That is all you have to say. Donnie will understand.
For goodness’ sake. Think of all that poor Sarah has gone through. ”
Cal saw the flicker of inspiration as the Word of Matthew came to John’s mind. “‘If a man has a hundred sheep and one of them wanders away, what will he do?’”