Entry Island (23 page)

If she was disappointed there was no hint of it in her voice. Just surprise. ‘Well, yes, of course. Why?’

‘Do you still have them?’

‘Somewhere, yes. I’ve still got everything here that we took from Mum and Dad’s. And from Granny’s. I keep meaning to sort through it all some day, but we put everything in the attic above the garage. And, you know, out of sight …’

‘I’d like to read them again, sis.’ He could tell that she was containing her curiosity with difficulty.

‘Of course. Any time you like.’

‘I’ll come down as soon as we’re finished here on the Madeleines.’

‘That would be great, Sime. It’ll be lovely to see you.’ And then she couldn’t help herself. ‘What’s the sudden interest in the diaries?’

‘It’s complicated,’ he said. ‘I’ll explain when I get there.’ Then, ‘Annie … you know the signet ring I inherited from Dad?’

‘Yes. Some kind of red, semi-precious stone, wasn’t it? Engraved with a family crest. Not ours, though. It was an arm and sword or something.’

‘That’s right. Do you know anything about its history?’

She laughed. ‘Am I really going to have to wait till you get here to find out what this is all about?’

‘Sorry, sis, there just isn’t time for me to go into it right now.’

‘Well, it got passed down through the male line,’ she said. ‘Came originally from our great-great-great-grandfather, I think. The one who wrote the diaries. The one you were named after. In fact, I’m sure there’s something about the ring in the diaries themselves. Can’t remember what, though.’

‘Do you remember how or where he got it?’

‘I think it was given to him by his wife.’

Sime was deflated. If that was true he couldn’t imagine what possible connection it could have with Kirsty Cowell. ‘He met his wife here in Canada, didn’t he?’

‘That’s right. She was a serving girl or something in Quebec City.’

A dead end.

When he didn’t speak for a long time, Annie said, ‘Sime? Are you still there?’

‘Yes, I’m still here.’

He heard her hesitation. ‘It was the tenth anniversary last week, Sime.’

He was momentarily confused. ‘Of what?’

‘Mum and Dad’s accident.’

His guilt returned. He had barely even thought about his parents in all the years since the accident. Of course, he remembered, it had been at this time of year. An autumn deluge which had swollen the River Salmon, washing away the bridge and the cars that were on it at the time. Ironically, it was only their parents who had lost their lives in the accident.

Annie said, ‘Someone put flowers on their grave. I visit them often. And I thought it was lovely that someone else had remembered. No idea who, though.’

Sime said, ‘Annie, I have to go. I’ll call you when I get home, okay?’

He hung up and closed his eyes. There was so much in his life he had simply learned to shut out. Like the death of his parents. He’d always thought there would be time to tell them that he loved them, even if he’d never been quite sure that he did. And then death had stepped in and left him feeling all alone in the world for the very first time.

His ancestor’s pain at the loss of his father came flooding back in a surge of childhood memories. It had been a cold
winter’s night, sometime just after New Year, that their granny had read the account of it to them. Right after dinner, and he and Annie had sat by her feet at the fire while she read. The story had given him nightmares later that night. And he couldn’t imagine then what it would feel like to lose a parent. Never mind both of them.

Even although there was still plenty of light in the sky, it was as dark as a winter’s night in the blackhouse. And there was conspiracy in all the faces huddled around the flicker of the peat fire.

I sat among the men listening, but saying nothing.

I still have a clear recollection of the potato crop first failing the previous year. Green, healthy leaves on the lazy beds that turned black and slimy almost overnight. And I remember being sent to the potato store in our barn, pulling aside the tarpaulin to be greeted by a smell like death that rose from the rotting tubers we had so carefully nurtured and harvested twelve months before.

Disaster!

Without the potato there was no way to survive. It was the ever-present at every meal. Our meagre harvest of oats and barley served only to supplement a diet that was totally dependent upon the humble spud. And yet some invisible malady had robbed us of the gift of life that it gave us. A
disease visited on us by God. For our sins, as the minister would have it.

There must have been a dozen men or more sitting around the embers of the peat, almost lost in the fug of smoke that hung heavy in the air of the fire room. But I could see the hunger in their sunken cheeks. I had watched strong men grow weak, as I had, and stout men grow thin. I had seen my mother and my sisters wasting away, reduced to scouring the shore for shellfish. Limpets and clams. Food for old women without teeth. They collected nettles for soup, and silver leaf from among the grasses. The roots, when dried and ground, made a kind of flour. But it was a poor substitute for proper grain and we could barely gather enough to sustain us.

The fishermen no longer dried their white fish on the rocks in case we stole them, and we had no boats of our own to take fish from the sea for ourselves.

As always my father led the discussion, old blind Calum squatting at his side, listening intently from within his world of darkness, his head so shrunken now that his Glengarry seemed almost to drown him.

I heard the fettered fury in my father’s voice. ‘Guthrie hands out grain rations from the Poor Board then charges it against our rents. Earns a name for himself as a man of generosity, while creating the excuse for throwing us off our land. Rents beyond our means, debts we can never repay. And while we’re starving, he and his cronies hunt deer and take salmon from the river and eat like kings.’

Discontent rose up from around the fire like smoke. I heard men of God using the language of the Devil. ‘Food all around us, and not a damned thing we can eat,’ one of the men said.

My father’s voice trembled with anger. ‘But we could eat. We’re just not allowed to. The law that serves the rich forbids it.’ It was a favourite theme, and I had heard him vent his anger often on the subject. ‘Well, enough’s enough. Time to take the law into our own hands and harvest what the Lord provided for all, not just the few.’

Which brought a hush around the fire. For there wasn’t a man there who didn’t know what that meant.

My father’s voice rose in frustration at their lack of gumption. ‘It’s our job to feed our families. And I for one am not going to stand by and watch my kinfolk waste away before my eyes.’

‘What do you propose, Angus?’ It was our neighbour, Donald Dubh, who spoke up.

My father leaned in towards the fire, his voice low and earnest. ‘The land on the far side of the Sgagarstaigh hill is teeming with red deer. In what the toffs laughingly call a deer forest.’ There was no mirth in his own laughter. ‘And not a bloody tree in sight!’ His face was set, his eyes black, reflecting only the burning of the peats. ‘If we set off after midnight tomorrow, there should be enough light for us to hunt by, but not a soul around. We’ll kill as many deer as we can carry and bring them back here.’

Old Jock Maciver spoke then. ‘We’ll get the jail if we’re caught, Angus. Or worse.’

‘Not if there’s enough of us, Jock. A big hunting party. If they catch us it’ll make the newspapers. And just think how that’ll read. Starving men arrested for trying to feed their families. Guthrie’ll do nothing if we’re caught. Because he knows the courts would never dare to convict. There would be bloody revolution!’

There wasn’t a man around the fire who wouldn’t have given his right arm for a haunch of venison. But not one of them who wasn’t afraid of the consequences.

*

When they were gone my mother and sisters came back into the house. They had been out with the other women of the village sitting around a long table between the blackhouses waulking the newly woven tweed to soften it. Usually they sang as they beat the cloth, and the meeting of men around the fire would have been accompanied by the voices of their womenfolk raised in Gaelic song outside. But with the hunger the women had fallen silent. The very first thing that starvation steals is your spirit.

My father took his old crossbow out from the bottom drawer of the dresser and with a cloth started to work oil into the first signs of rust in the iron. It was heavy and lethal. A weapon of war made by a blacksmith, traded to my father years ago by a tinker in return for a hank of tweed. My father was proud of it, and of the bolts he had made himself, short but well balanced with feather flights and flint heads.

When he had finished he laid it aside and started to sharpen the hunting knife he had taken with him on those occasions when the estate had employed him as a gillie. He was skilled with it at the gralloch, the gutting of the deer. The times he had taken me with him I had watched him do it with something like awe. And disgust. It is quite a thing to see the insides of an animal taken out of it almost intact, steam rising from blood that is still hot.

‘What knife shall I take?’ I asked him, and he turned serious eyes in my direction.

‘You’re not coming, son.’

I felt anger and disappointment spiking through me in equal measure. ‘Why not?’

‘Because if for some reason I don’t come back tomorrow night, someone’s going to have to look after your mother and sisters.’

I could feel my heart pushing up into my throat. ‘What do you mean, if you don’t come back!’

But he just laughed at me and put a hand on my shoulder. ‘I have no intention of being caught, boy, but if I am then they’ll probably take me and anyone else they catch to the jail in Stornoway. At least until there is some kind of a court hearing – or they let us go. But either way, it’ll be your job to take my place till I get back.’

*

I watched them leave shortly after midnight. It was still light, and would never get fully dark. It was a clear night,
with a good moon that would flood the land when dusk finally came. There was no wind, which was unusual, and meant that they would be eaten alive by the midges. Before he left my father smeared bog myrtle over his hands and face to keep them at bay.

There must have been fifteen men or more in the hunting party, all armed with knives and clubs. And a couple of them had crossbows like my father. I climbed the hill above Baile Mhanais to watch them disappear from view, disappointed not to be with them. At almost eighteen, I was more man than boy now.

I found a sheltered spot to watch for them coming back and settled down to feel the midges in my hair and on my face. I pulled my jacket over my head, and my knees up under my chin, and thought about Ciorstaidh. There was not a day had passed that I didn’t think about her with an ache like the hunger of the famine. I had often wondered what would have become of us if I had run away with her as she asked. But it was pointless thinking about might-have-beens. And it was already more than a year since I had last seen her.

It was about two hours later that I heard the far-off sound of men’s voices carried in the still of the night. I stood up and could see them huddled together as they came back over the Sgagarstaigh hill at a trot. They were carrying something heavy in their midst. My first thought was that they were back early, and only had the one deer to show for it.

I ran down to the path and struck out across the dry
summer heather, feeling the ground give beneath my feet and sap the strength from my legs. As I got nearer I could hear them breathing, like horses gasping at the end of a race, but not a single voice was raised in greeting when they saw me running towards them.

I scanned the faces for my father, and when I couldn’t see him was confused. Had he stayed on to hunt some more on his own? Or had he been caught? I could hardly think of anything worse until I realised that it was not a deer that they carried in their midst, but a man. They came to a stop as I reached them, and I saw that the man was my father. His face deathly pale, his shirt and jacket soaked black by blood.

For a moment we stood in the semi-darkness and no one knew what to say. I was shocked to my core, and couldn’t have spoken even had I found the words. I stared at my father, hanging by his arms and legs, sweat glistening on the faces of his bearers.

‘They were waiting for us,’ Donald Dubh said. ‘As if they knew we were coming. The gamekeeper and water bailiff and half a dozen men from the estate. They had guns, boy!’

‘Is he …?’ I couldn’t bring myself to give voice to the thought.

‘He’s alive,’ someone else said. ‘But God knows for how much longer. They fired warning shots over our heads. But your father refused to run. As if he wanted them to catch us. Like he wanted to be paraded in front of the public and the press. Like a bloody martyr.’ He paused. ‘Off he went,
walking towards them, shouting like a man demented. And some bastard shot him. Full in the chest.’

‘Aye, and then the cowards turned and bloody ran,’ Donald Dubh said. ‘It’s murder, pure and simple. But you can bet your life there’s not one of them that’ll be held to account for it.’

*

My mother was hysterical when we carried him into the house and laid him out on the stone floor next to the peat fire. Screaming and tearing at her clothes. Some of the men tried to calm her down. I saw my sisters peering out from the gloom of the back room, faces the colour of ash.

I knelt over my father and cut away his shirt. There was a gaping hole where the bullet had torn through his chest just below the ribcage, shattering bone and flesh. The bullet had not come out the other side, so I could only think it had lodged in his spine. I could tell from the feeble beating of his heart, and the fact that the wound had stopped bleeding, that he had lost too much blood to recover. He was in shock and fading fast.

He opened eyes clouded as if by cataracts, and I am not sure that he even saw me. His hand clutched my forearm. A grip like steel, before slowly relaxing. And a long, hollow sigh slipped from between his lips as the last breath of his life escaped his body.