Did You Declare the Corpse?

by Patricia Sprinkle

  Brandi and Jim arrived just as Watty was telling us about our itinerary. “First we’ll drive up the western side of the Trotternish Peninsula to Kilmuir Cemetery, where Flora MacDonald is buried, then we’ll come down the eastern side of the peninsula and stop by Flodigarry Hotel, built on the site where Flora MacDonald and her husband used to live.”

  “Those sites were requested by Laura MacDonald,” Joyce added—quite unnecessarily.

  Brandi climbed the steps, turned her back on Sherry, and called, “Come on, Jimmy, there’s plenty of seats in the back.” She more dragged than led him down the aisle. He slid into a seat and immediately opened his laptop. Brandi took a seat on the other side.

  Kenny sat behind Laura, making audible remarks about fiddles and flutes not being real Scottish instruments, merely adopted because they sound good as a backup to bagpipes.

  Jim ignored him, but Watty finally snarled over his shoulder, “Pipe down, man.”

  I chuckled. “Pipe down?” I enjoy a good pun.

  Goaded, Kenny glared like he’d like to hit me upside the head and opened his mouth to say something—probably rude. Laura said in an urgent voice, “Kenny, don’t!” He subsided, then began a tirade about people who let amateurs play with professionals.

  Marcia turned to address him in an icy voice. “Dorothy plays in a symphony orchestra and in a Scottish society band that wins competitions all over Canada.” I turned around to give her an approving smile, but she had laid her head back and closed her eyes, as if exhausted by that effort.

  “And nobody who knows a thing about music would call Jim an amateur,” Dorothy said, her cheeks pink and her eyes snapping.

  I turned, surprised that she’d show so much spirit.

  Jim give her a slight bow with a frosty smile. “Much obliged.”

  Brandi called up to Laura, “Who was this Flora MacDonald, anyway?”

  Kenny jumped in to answer. “She helped Bonnie Prince Charlie get safely to Skye after his defeat at Culloden, so he could catch a ship for France. She dressed him up as her maid and brought him with her through the English blockade. The prince got away safely, but Flora got caught eventually and was sent to the Tower of London for a year. Then she came back to Skye and married her sweetheart—who was also her cousin. They eventually emigrated to North Carolina to farm, and she became a heroine in both countries. Does that about cover it, shug?”

  Laura didn’t reply. She was staring out the window like he’d been talking about the heroine of some Mongolian revolution. Kenny shrugged and began to hum the “Skye Boat Song,” breaking into words at the end: “Carry the lad who’s born to be king, over the sea to Skye.”

  Sherry called down the aisle, “That’s a bunch of crap and you know it. He wasn’t a lad, he was a grown man. And he would have been a terrible king.”

  “You don’t know that,” Kenny objected.

  “He was a terrible military leader. Thousands died unnecessarily because of the jerk, and Flora herself spent a year in jail. And how can you call her a hero in America? The MacDonalds supported the English during the American Revolution, which landed her husband in prison and got him banished to Nova Scotia. She went with him, then they returned to Skye. Heroine?” Sherry gave a rude snort. “The whole story is a bunch of romantic nonsense.”

  I didn’t know much about Flora MacDonald, but Laura could trace her ancestry back to one of Flora’s sons, so I didn’t like to hear the family being trashed. “You have to admit Flora was brave,” I insisted.

  “And loyal to her country,” Kenny added with that kind of pompous nationalism I find most irritating.

  “Loyal to her family,” Sherry corrected him. “Her stepfather didn’t support the prince. He was an English official on the Isle of Uist. It’s likely he persuaded Flora to help get the prince away so no more blood would be shed.”

  “Some say she was in love with the prince,” I mentioned. “He was very handsome.”

  “Some say pigs can fly,” Watty called sourly over one shoulder, “but I never saw one tak to the air. Let’s just leave it that she was a brave lassie, and be done wi’ it.”

  That punched a hole in everybody’s bucket. We rode in silence until we reached Kilmuir Cemetery, which is dominated by the tall Flora MacDonald memorial. I’ll admit I was impressed. None of the rest of us had ancestors worth huge granite monoliths, unless you believed Kenny’s and Sherry’s claims to noble blood.

  Laura, however, barely looked at Flora’s memorial at all. She mooched around reading gravestones apparently at random, then wandered off to one edge of the cemetery and stood gazing into the distance as if she were waiting for the rest of us to finish. Annoyed, I followed. “Granted, you’ve seen this before,” I told her with the bluntness of one who used to babysit her when her folks were out of town, “but why bother to tell Joyce you’d like to see it again if you don’t care?”

  She looked down at me as if coming back from far away. “Sorry, what did you say?”

  “I said the rest of us are getting a grand tour of your family burial ground, but if you aren’t interested, I’m sure everybody would be willing to leave early and head to the mainland. What’s the matter? You’ve been on another planet all morning. Too much to drink last night?”

  She grimaced. “A bit. But that’s not what’s bothering me. I am really worried about Kenny. He says Sherry—” She stopped, and I suspected that she’d been about to blurt out something she was told in confidence. For several seconds she watched a plane fly high in the sky, then asked so abruptly that I knew we were changing the subject, “How did you know you wanted to marry Joe Riddley, Mac? Was there one minute when you said, ‘I’ve got to do this, or I’ll die’?”

  I would have made a joke, but her expression changed my mind. “Our case wasn’t typical. You know that. We met when we were four and six, and were enchanted with each other from the start. We grew up together, until he gradually seemed like the other half of me. There was one little period in college when I wavered a tad, but it didn’t last long. He’s the only man I ever really wanted.”

  “Daddy was all Mama ever wanted, too. She loved Daddy more than life.” She peered off at the misty horizon, and we stood silently for a moment in honor of Gwen Ellen and Skye. Then she went on, desperation in her voice. “But other married people—I mean, look at Brandi and Jim, or Sherry and Kenny. They don’t even seem to like each other.”

  “You can’t make fine china out of common clay,” I said bluntly. “No matter who you marry, you won’t turn out like Sherry or Brandi. You’re finer than that. You’ll work and build a good marriage.” It was time to stop pussyfooting around. “Is this about Ben?” I sure hoped so.

  She turned slightly away and got real interested in rubbing a piece of lichen off a tombstone with one toe. “Yeah.” She took a deep breath, flung back her head, and looked me straight in the eye. Then she announced, like she was Flora MacDonald accepting the job of disguising the prince, “I’ve been thinking it over, and I don’t think Ben’s the man for me.” I got the feeling she was practicing on me what she planned to say to him when she got home. “One reason I came on this trip—the main one, in fact—was to see if I could live without him. Well, I can. I’m having a fine time without him, and apparently he’s having a fine time without me. He hasn’t called once since we got here.”

  “Have you called him since the first day?”

  “Sure, every day, but we mostly talk about the business. I tell him a little about what I’ve been doing and he tells me what he’s been doing, but he doesn’t sound like he really misses me. Certainly not like he needs me. And I don’t think I need him, either.” She picked up a stone and hurled it over the distant wall. “I look at Marcia, consumed by grief, and I know I wouldn’t be like that if Ben died. I’d be very sad, but I’d get up and go back to the office, keep on living. I wouldn’t curl up and die.” I knew she was still thinking of her mother when she said that.

  I wished she were still small enough for me t
o put my arms around her shoulders and draw her close, like I used to when she was a tall, sweet little girl. All I could do now was take a deep breath and try to sound halfway coherent. “That’s because you knew you were a whole person before you met Ben, honey. It took me forty years to learn that about myself. Remember when Joe Riddley got shot and we all thought he was going to die?”2 She nodded. Her family had been real supportive of me in that time. “The second night in the hospital, around five in the morning, I was praying and crying and thinking, ‘If he dies, God, just take me, too. I can’t live without him.’ Clear as anything, a voice in my head said, ‘Nonsense. You don’t want to live without him, but you will if you have to.’ While I sat there watching the sun come up, something shifted inside me. I realized I am whole, with or without him. Since that day, I’ve known that I’m not married to Joe Riddley because I have to be, I’m married to him because I want to be—most days. The other days I stay married to him because I’m too busy to get a divorce right then.”

  She didn’t crack a smile.

  I sighed. Looked like I couldn’t say a blessed thing that would help, so I finished up with, “Well, I haven’t bought your wedding present yet, but you and Ben sure are mighty good together. You bring out the best in each other.”

  “I guess.” Her face was so gloomy, you’d have thought we were discussing which fatal disease was likely to get her first.

  “Honey,” I urged, “if Ben ever gets up his courage to pop the question—”

  Her mouth twisted. “He’s already popped it. Several times. But I’ve never been sure that what I feel for him will last forever.”

  That burst my blister. Here I’d been thinking terrible things about poor Ben, and all the time it was Laura—

  “Folks in your generation worry far too much about feelings,” I told her hotly. “Sure, feelings are important, but they come and go. The question is whether you care enough about somebody to stand up before God-and-thesewitnesses and make promises you intend to do your dad-burned best to keep. Marriage is like the rest of life. It’s not primarily about feelings, it’s mostly about choices. Don’t you forget it.”

  In a perfect world she’d have grabbed me in that rib-crushing hug she used to give me, and she’d have whispered, “Me-Mac, I love you. Will you dance at our wedding?”

  In a fallen world, she shrugged. “I can’t see tying myself for life to somebody I don’t need and who doesn’t need me.” She turned and strode off toward the Flora MacDonald memorial, where Kenny was still investigating the MacDonald family history.

  Poor Ben. Looked like he was history, too. But what raised my blood pressure was worrying that Laura would do something dumb with Kenny. She wouldn’t be the first smart, strong person to take on a needy one because she confused ministry with marriage.

  I stood there trying to decide whether to follow and nag some more—nagging being, by definition, telling somebody again to do what they didn’t do when you told them the first time—or whether to pamper my chilly feet by returning to the bus.

  What decided me was a scream.

  It came from the parking lot, and ours was the only vehicle there, so I headed that way in the fastest trot a woman past sixty can muster. Sherry sat on the gravel beside the front tire, her hair disheveled and her cheek marked with four long red lines.

  Brandi stood over her with one fist clenched. “You leave him alone, do you hear me? You had your moment of glory, but it’s over.” She brushed her hands like she had just finished chopping wood.

  Sherry gave a hoarse, sarcastic laugh. “You think you’ll keep him long? Ask him what happened to his first wife once he took over her daddy’s business.” She started to climb to her feet, but Brandi shoved her back down.

  “He gave that old woman enough alimony to choke a horse. Now you leave him alone!” Her hands curved like talons.

  Laura pushed past me and said in a voice of authority, “Hold up, there.” Not for nothing had she been refereeing middle-school soccer games these past two years. As she stepped between them and held up her hands, I could almost hear a whistle blow.

  Brandi stepped back. While Brandi was distracted, Sherry climbed to her feet and flew past Laura’s arm. When Laura reached out to deflect her, Sherry grabbed a fistful of Laura’s hair and jerked it hard. “You keep out of this. And keep your hands off my husband!” She jerked Laura’s hair again.

  While Laura tried to disentangle her hair, Brandi circled Laura and grabbed Sherry from behind. Sherry turned and raked Brandi’s cheeks with her nails. Brandi tried to hold her off, and the two of them grappled and swayed like bar-room brawlers. I grabbed Sherry and Laura managed to grab Brandi, but they squirmed like eels. We weren’t having noticeable success in separating them until Watty waded in, admonishing, “Now, ladies. Now, ladies. We don’t want to create a distur-r-r-bance.”

  That’s when poor Joyce arrived. “What happened?”

  Sherry and Brandi started a chorus of “She—” “She—”

  “They had a little disagreement,” Laura explained, panting and red in the face.

  “Dear Lord.” The way Joyce said it, it might have been a prayer. “Where are Jim and Kenny?”

  “Jim decided to walk toward the Museum of Island Life,” Watty told her. “I said we’d pick him up on the road.”

  “Here comes Kenny now,” Laura announced. “Let’s skip Flodigarry Hotel. I’ve been there before. Let’s pick up the others and get on our way.”

  Sherry got on first. As Brandi climbed on ahead of me, she warned Sherry, “This isn’t over. You can be sure of that.” Her voice was soft, but menacing.

  I couldn’t see Sherry’s face, but the stream of words that came from her mouth made Watty warn, “None of that kind of talk, now, or I’ll be putting the both of ye off the bus.”

  12

  We spent the next three days in the far north of Scotland, mostly pleasing Brandi. She had requested gardens, so we visited the Inverewe Gardens in Poolewe, where the Gulf Stream comes so close to the Scottish coast that palms and other tropical plants can grow, and I got an amazing photograph of a palm tree growing near a snow-topped mountain. We also visited the Lechmelm Gardens and the gardens of Dunrobin Castle just north of Dornoch Firth. The others complained a bit about “all this horticulture,” but as a nursery owner, I was delighted to add gardens to my trip.

  I was also pleased to discover that Brandi wasn’t just a bubbleheaded bimbo with jealous tendencies. She was very knowledgeable about plants, and as we strolled together through the Dunrobin Castle gardens, she confided, “I’m looking for plants that might grow in North Georgia. Jimmy said that after this trip, I can design the garden the way I want to. We have thirty mountain acres, and I am itching to get to work on them.”

  “Will you hire somebody to help with design and planting?” It wasn’t an idle question. Getting that commission could make up for Yarbrough’s recent losses from the superstore.

  “Oh, no, I’m a landscape designer myself. I’ll hire somebody to do the planting, but I want to do the plan.” She gave me her supermodel’s smile. “That’s how I met Jimmy, landscaping Scotsman Distilleries.”

  I tried to picture her driving a backhoe or digging with a shovel, but designer clothes kept spoiling the picture. More likely she’d stood decoratively on one side, giving orders and making sure her flaming hair could be seen from the boss’s office window.

  “If you need plants and help putting them in, let us give you a bid.” I fished in my pocketbook for a Yarbrough Feed, Seed and Nursery card.

  She raised one eyebrow. “Do you all work way up in the mountains?”

  “Of course,” I assured her. We certainly would if we got the job.

  Between gardens, we rode through areas that Kenny informed us had been the most affected by the Highland Clearances. The rest of us rode in relative silence, trying to absorb a cataclysm that could empty land so completely that you’d never guess people used to inhabit most of it. The population was now clust
ered in small villages near the coast. I knew those villages must be the result of the clearances, but after two hundred years, they looked like they’d sat by the sea forever.

  Brandi and I took photographs of view after view we’d never be able to identify later. Marcia stared out the window through the eyes of a haunted soul. Dorothy plied pencil to sketchbook, talking to nobody. Jim mostly worked, and treated Brandi coolly, like a distant acquaintance. Sherry discussed music with Jim when he’d let her and the rest of the time looked out the window or described places we ought to be seeing instead of where we were. Kenny attached himself to Laura like a thistle. She treated him with a gentleness that worried me.

  Saturday night we stayed in another Gilroy Hotel, and Jim and Sherry brought down their violins and played by the fire.You might think that a musical evening would have relaxed us all, but it didn’t. For one thing, Kenny sat on a couch with Laura and talked the whole time, showing her his sgian dubh and boasting about the bargain he’d gotten on it on eBay. “Look at that cairngorm!” he bragged, holding it up so I could see it, too. It truly was impressive, encased in an intricate design of metal that formed the hilt. But I wished he would hush.