Shadow in Hawthorn Bay

The author wishes to acknowledge:
The Canada Council and the Ontario Arts Council for financial assistance; Mollie Hunter and Michael McIlwraith, Invernesshire, for their generous hospitality and advice; Dorothy Davies, Trenton Ontario
Memorial Library, for her helpful assistance; Edith Fowke, for kindly opening her music library; Jessica Latshaw, Joyce Barkhouse, and my family for having faith in this story over a long period of time; Edward Lukeman for Davie Cameron’s map; Louise Dennys, my editor, for her clear good sense, endless patience, and encouragement
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Glossary of Gaelic terms

Sources:
The New English-Gaelic Dictionary
compiled by Derick Thomson (Gairm Publications, Glasgow, 1981);
Gaelic Dictionary
compiled by Malcolm Mackinnon (ACAIR and Aberdeen University Press, first pub. 1925, reprinted 1984)
.

Come, Mairi!

“C
ome, Mairi! Come you here!”

“Duncan, I cannot! Here is the lamb making sore trouble getting itself into the world. Come you to me!”

Mary went back to her work. Swiftly she turned and tugged the struggling lamb, crooning softly all the while, until, with a cry of triumph, she held it firmly in her two hands.

“There now, Sally, there is your wee
uan,”
she murmured. She laid the lamb beside its mother. It began at once to suckle. Gently stroking the ewe’s still heaving sides, Mary sat back on her heels, tossed her thick black hair from her sweaty face, and watched with satisfaction as the ewe began to clean her baby. Only then did she realize that Duncan had not called from the other side of the hill. He was three thousand miles away in Upper Canada. Yet he had called! Sudden tears prickled her
eyes. In four years it was the first time she had heard his voice. He had sworn so often they could never be parted in life or death but he had gone away. And barely a word since.

“While you are gone,” she had said, “we will still be together, Duncan. Our thoughts will travel the miles. And you will be soon home.” Mary had never doubted that. She and Duncan had always been like one person, two halves of a whole. Cousins, they might as well have been twins, they had been so inseparable—until Uncle Davie and Aunt Jean had decided to leave the Highlands. Over the plaintive cry of the lapwings, the chirping of the thrushes, and the ewe and her baby bleating softly at one another, she heard Duncan’s voice again, “Come, Mairi!” In it there was a note of such pain, such urgency, she could feel the sharpness of it in her own breast.

“How can I?” she cried aloud. “How can I?”

“Was you wanting help with the ewe, Mairi?” Annie Morrison called from across the field.

“I was not.”

“Come away then, it is dinner time.”

“In a minute.” Mary rested on her heels, pulling her plaid around her against the chill April wind and fine rain. She looked down the green slope over the valley and the hills beyond, remembering the day Duncan had left the glen. Everyone in the township had gone down to the
wide path by Loch Ness to see them off. The sun was shining on their six dark heads—Uncle Davie, Aunt Jean, Callum, the baby, Iain, and Duncan. Standing beside the cart that held the few Cameron possessions they would take with them, tears large in his black eyes, Duncan had promised, “I will come home, Mairi. Next year I will be twelve, I will be soon grown, and I will earn the money to come home.”

But it had been four years and the only word he had ever sent was a brief letter in English, not in the Gaelic they all spoke, a letter enclosed in one of Uncle Davie’s a year after they had gone away.

Mary hated it. And she had every word memorized. There was nothing in it of the Duncan she knew, of what he was feeling—beyond those mournful words “dark with forest”—and there was nothing in it of plans to
come home. There had been letters from Uncle Davie and Aunt Jean to Mary’s mother and father, letters to say that life was hard but good in Upper Canada, letters urging them to emigrate. But although she had written and written to him, there had never been another letter from Duncan, nor any sign at all.