The Skye in June

by June Ahern

  Inspired, June rushed down the hallway and came back into the living room with the picture of her angel and a roll of Scotch tape. She asked Uncle Sandy to put it up on the wall. When it was secure, Ian’s wife exclaimed, “Look. Doesn’t it remind you of back home in Skye? Especially around the Dunvegan area?”

  “Aye, could be. Och, with those flowers, could be anywhere in Skye,” Ian answered, returning to his plate of food and glass of whiskey.

  June looked at him curiously, wondering, flowers in the sky? Maybe Uncle Ian is like me. Maybe he can see things other people don’t. She reminded herself to ask Mrs. G if she ever saw flowers in the sky.

  The mood lightened and the singing of Scottish songs became the main activity. Each person had a turn to entertain by singing a favorite tune. Before the party ended and in keeping with another Hogmanay tradition, the adults and children stood in a circle crisscrossing hands, right over left, and sang the famous Scottish song, “Auld Lang Syne.” June was bewildered as the adults’ laughing voices changed to sad tones. Some of the women cried openly as they sang together, “Should auld acquaintance be forgot, and never brought to mind? Should auld acquaintance be forgot, and the days of auld lang syne!

  When June saw Annie’s eyes mist over, she asked, “You going to cry?” Annie shook her head and bit her lower lip and pulled her hands away from the chain. June thought she heard her say, “Granny.”

  After the guests gathered up their coats and children and said good-bye, Jimmy told the girls to go to bed. In the bedroom June asked Annie why people were sad singing the last song. Her sister explained they were sad to be so far away from their families. She said part of the song asked if people were supposed to forget their old friends and the times they shared together.

  “I’ll never, ever forget Granda and Granny B and how good they were to us,” Annie said adamantly.

  Maggie began to talk about the friends they left behind in Scotland. They agreed that Wee Gordie, their cousin, was like Mark––a spoiled brat. Auntie Patsy was their favorite aunt and Uncle Peter always said the funniest things. Helen was remembered with sad sighs and a collective, “We love you.”

  “Will we ever go back to Scotland?” Mary asked, her voice quivering. They knew how much she missed Granda B.

  June piped up that someday she would go back and they could go with her. Excitedly, she added, “Granda B was at our party today. He came in before Uncle Sandy did and kissed Mommy.”

  The sisters rolled their eyes simultaneously and groaned, “Oh, shut up.”

  Mary added, “You’re going to get in trouble for making up big faker stories.”

  June huffed, hurt that her sisters didn’t believe she saw Granda B. Before she could argue, their mother popped her head in the door, telling them to go to sleep if they wanted to go to Playland the next day to celebrate Annie’s tenth birthday. The light was switched off immediately.

  * * * * *

  Chapter 16

  NEWS FROM SCOTLAND

  “I LOVE A SAUSAGE,” June sang out gaily as she scampered down the long staircase to where the mail slot banged moments earlier, announcing the daily delivery. She let out a dramatic gasp when she arrived back at the top of the polished wooden stairs. Her small hands thumbed through the mail searching for a blue airmail letter. Finding one, she ran to her mother and thrust the letter from Scotland into her hands. She was eager to enjoy the ritual of a cup of tea with milk and sugar and freshly baked goods as her mother read the news from home. June settled onto a kitchen chair and licked her lips in anticipation of the morning’s baked oatmeal cookies.

  Her mother started to read the letter out loud. After reading “Dear Cathy, Jimmy and family,”

  her eyes quickly scanned the letter and she cried out, “Oh no!”

  Puzzled, June sat quietly waiting, but her mother didn’t utter another word. Minutes ticked away on the clock before she ventured a query, “Are we going to have tea now?”

  “What?” Cathy said, forgetting that June was there. “No,” she said sternly, “Go downstairs. Ask Mrs. G if you can stay there until somebody comes to get you.”

  Cathy got up from the table and with letter in hand, stoically strode down the hallway to the living room. Frightened by her mother’s odd behavior, June followed, tiptoeing silently behind her.

  “I can’t believe they’d no tell me right away,” Cathy babbled angrily.

  Suddenly, Cathy started sobbing with abrupt gasps for breath. With each choking cry that escaped her mother’s mouth, June’s head spun with waves of dark colors. Her own breath shortened as she listened to her mother shouting, with fists waving upward, “It’s too late, Daddy! Do you hear me? Too late!”

  June stopped in her tracks, intuiting the aura of death. The frightened girl spun around and ran to the back stairs, away from her mother’s madness and toward the safety of Mrs. G’s flat.

  Mrs. G was folding clothes when June burst in. She looked up smiling, expecting to see an excited, happy face and hear another colorful tale. Instead she saw June’s frantic face, white as snow, with her blue eyes round like those of a wild cat.

  “Oh, my little friend, you look like a ghost chase you!” Mrs. G exclaimed.

  Paralyzed with confusion, June stood in the doorway, doorknob in hand and mouth agape, unable to answer. Mrs. G went across the kitchen to enfold the trembling girl into her ample bosom. Softly, she crooned a lullaby, but June pulled away from the maternal hug to look intensely at her trusted friend.

  “Mammy’s going away again,” she whimpered. “You come and tell her not to do that.”

  June was always scared on the days when her mother sat for hours staring out the window, crying and talking to herself. She would find company with Mrs. G until her older sisters returned from school.

  “She not well again,” Mrs. G said, sighing.

  June led her old friend upstairs to Cathy. With joints aching, Mrs. G groaned and grunted as she slowly hiked up the steep back stairs.

  The January chill permeated throughout the large flat, with its high ceilings and long, drafty hallway, which made it appear gloomy. The old woman moved slowly down the hallway and then stopped to catch her breath. June waited patiently behind her.

  When Mrs. G placed a hand over her heaving chest, June worried that something bad would happen to her also. A tremendous sense of sadness gripped the little girl’s heart. She started to whimper.

  “Ah, my little friend, I feel something very sad has happened to your family. But, I help,” Mrs. G said as she continued down the hallway too painstakingly slow for June.

  Cathy sat in front of an open window, staring into space, not moving an inch. She nervously rubbed the letter between her forefinger and thumb. Although she wore only a light cardigan over her dress, she seemed oblivious to the frosty winter air surrounding her.

  Mrs. G shuffled into the living room and immediately shut the window. Wearily, she collapsed into the horsehair armchair.

  In a strained voice, Cathy said, “My father died. He has been sick for a while with stomach cancer. Still, I didn’t think he’d go this fast.” She stopped and covered her mouth. Her hand fell to her lap and her voice trembled.

  “He died on Hogmanay. They buried him a fortnight ago. My family didn’t want to let me know earlier. Didn’t want to ruin my holidays, they said.” She turned to Mrs. G and said, without looking directly at her, but past her, “We never had a chance to…” Her eyes roamed the room as though searching for something. She sighed deeply and her shoulders sagged. “To forgive each other.”

  “Ah, the ghost of the past never let go of our hearts,” Mrs. G said so softly that only June heard her.

  Neither woman paid any attention to June’s worried eyes peering from behind the door and into the room where she saw a small glowing aura of light forming behind her mother. It grew into a shape of a young girl. It wasn’t Helen. The image looked almost like her angel, except that she wore a simple green dress. June started to point to the imag
e when Mrs. G’s voice broke the spell and the apparition vanished.

  “You need your family. I go get the girls from school today. But first I phone your husband to come home.”

  “Oh, God, this’ll kill Jimmy,” Cathy said, wringing her hands. Her blue eyes looked like a frightened child’s. “I just want to sleep now. Please,” she said in a tiny voice.

  Mrs. G rose to help Cathy out of the chair and toward the comfort of the bed. When she came back to the living room, she held June’s blue wool tartan coat and a matching cap.

  “We must go,” she said, cupping the girl’s cheeks in her hands. “Don’t share her pain so much, little one.”

  They left, walking hand-in-hand through the cold winter drizzle to retrieve June’s sisters.

  At the school, Mother Superior patted the old woman’s dry veined hand and told her that she “would offer up prayers for the deceased and the family.” Mrs. G silenced further conversation with a small gesture of her hand when the MacDonald girls began trailing into the office.

  On the walk home, Mrs. G lagged behind while the girls huddled together in front, whispering to each other and trying to guess what could have happened at home. Maggie guessed that their mother had lost another baby. Mary wanted to know how babies get lost. Annie changed the subject and said, confidently, “Maybe Granda and Granny came for a surprise visit from Scotland and nothing bad thing happened.”

  June bit her tongue, wanting to keep her promise to Mrs. G, who told her the news should wait until their father got home.

  When the group came to the gas station on the corner of Market Street, the girls rifled through their pockets in hopes of coming up with fifteen cents for a soda pop. Their mother would often let them stop at the station to buy cold drinks from the machine. But Mrs. G kept them moving, not hesitating at their unhappy protests. As they approached their building they saw Uncle Sandy’s car parked in front.

  The girls rushed up the stairs and found their father sitting in the living room with tears pouring down his face. Only once before had they seen him cry, and that was at Helen’s funeral, when he had shed silent tears.

  Seeing his girls, he quickly held up a large white handkerchief to his mouth to muffle his sobs. Uncle Sandy came down the hallway from the kitchen, holding two tall glasses of whiskey and said, “Girls, go to your room and be quiet.”

  The four sisters sat in their room without making a sound, eyeing each other to see who would be the first to speculate what the problem could be.

  Maggie said, shivering, “I got the willies. Someone walked over my grave,” which started Mary wailing. She rushed to the bedroom door, threw it open and ran down the hall screaming, “Mommy! Mommy!” Uncle Sandy caught her around the waist and carried her back to her bedroom. “Wheesht now hen, your mother’s sleeping.”

  The hysterical girl couldn’t be calmed and demanded to see her mother.

  “Is our mother okay?” Annie asked.

  “Aye. Everything’s just fine. Don’t worry.” Sandy’s soothing manner seemed to reassure the frightened children.

  The girls stayed silent after Sandy closed their bedroom door. Annie handed Mary a hankie to wipe her eyes.

  “I think Mommy’s really sick. Maybe it’s something horrible,” Maggie said shuddering dramatically.

  Unable to keep her word any longer, June sputtered out that Granda B was now with Helen and Baby Kit.

  “No!” Mary protested, her lip quivering.

  “It’s true. I heard Mommy tell Mrs. G,” June said as she sat down in front of the altar.

  Annie knelt next to her and beckoned the other sisters to join them. “Let’s say a prayer to Our Lady,” she said.

  June held out both her hands, palms up. “Let’s hold hands so we can talk to Granda B. Mrs. G and her daughter do it like that when they talk to their dead people.”

  Annie looked apprehensively at her little sister’s eager face. “I don’t know if that’s okay for Catholics to do. Besides, I think it’d be too scary talking to dead people.”

  “No, it’s not. It’s fun,” said June.

  “Let’s say prayers instead, okay?” Annie suggested.

  “If it’s for Granda, we should have a picture of him, like we have for our dead sisters,” Maggie said.

  “There’s a picture of him in the living room on the mantle,” Mary said, before breaking into more tears.

  Maggie hugged her sister tightly. Annie sniffled back tears. June came up with the idea of grabbing the photo from the living room.

  The girls agreed they needed to do something special for Granda, although they also agreed that they didn’t want to disobey for fear of getting a smacking.

  A plan was hatched. Maggie was to lure their father and Uncle Sandy into the kitchen on the other end of the flat. Her pretext was that she and her sisters were hungry, which was true. When the three walked past the bedroom and were in the kitchen, June would sneak down to the living room and grab the photo. Mary offered to go along since June couldn’t reach the photo on the fireplace mantle. Annie’s job was to keep watch and if necessary, detain the men if they returned too early to the front of the flat.

  The deep rumble of the men’s voices could be plainly heard down the hallway and through the small opening of the girls’ bedroom door.

  “Willie Buchanan was like a father to me,” Jimmy said solemnly.

  “Och, aye, Jimmy. There’s no many like him,” Sandy answered.

  The men were standing right in front of the door. As their voices grew louder, the girls pulled back a bit and held their breaths.

  “It’s a sair fecht,” Jimmy sighed.

  “It is that. A bloody sore thought, Sandy said. “If it wasn’t for Willie, I’d never have come to America. He said being a Catholic, it’d be a better life here.”

  “Wish I could go home to Scotland,” Jimmy said.

  “Me, too,” Annie said gloomily as she leaned against the bedroom door. June wanted to say that she couldn’t go to Scotland because the family needed her here.

  The men’s voices faded away into the kitchen. The last voice heard was Sandy’s. “Nancy’s on her way to help with the girls.”

  Maggie, who was following behind the men, gave the door a quick rap, signaling the coast was clear.

  When Maggie closed the kitchen door, Mary and June slipped out and crept toward the front of the flat, trying hard to suppress their nervous giggles.

  Although the early winter darkness had crept into the living room, they decided not to brighten it up by switching on a lamp, which would draw attention. Luckily, the streetlights suddenly snapped on, shining some light for them. The streetcar clanged past and a horn blared. June walked to the bay windows and leaned her head against the frame to look down onto Market Street, which was now busy with people arriving home from work. Large raindrops rolled, one after another, down the windowpanes and onto the scurrying crowd below. Hypnotized by the scene, June became lost, thinking about the ant colony in the yard.

  “Neato, skeeto, I got it!” Mary hopped off the arm of the big chair with a frame in her hand. She handed June the old grainy black-and-white photo of Granda and Granny B on their wedding day. Granda B, a handsome, tall, lean man with a full head of dark curly hair, reminded June of Maggie, with his slanted eyes and toothy grin. Granny B, holding a bouquet of roses, was dressed in an ankle-length wedding gown with her hair tucked up under a long, laced veil. With her eyes wide and full lips closed, she seemed to be shyly looking out at the girls.

  “Looks like mommy, huh?” Mary said.

  “Take the other one, too.” June pointed to the black-and-white photo of Cathy in her mid-teens, linked arm-in-arm with Granda B in a summer garden. Both were smiling broadly.

  A yellow cab stopping in front of the flat caught June’s attention. She pressed her face against the cold glass to get a better view. A tall, heavy woman in a dark coat exited the cab.

  “She’s here!” June called out warningly.

  “Let�
�s scram!” Mary bolted down the hallway with June at her heels.

  A moment later the doorbell’s loud buzz was heard. Annie opened the bedroom door a slit and June knelt beneath her to peek out just as Sandy trotted past toward the front door. They heard him greet his wife cheerfully, and watched as she passed by with a full paper bag. Uncle Sandy, holding two more bags, stopped at the girls’ door and tapped on it lightly. “Come say hello to Auntie Nancy.”

  The girls disliked her as much as they disliked Mark. They wished they didn’t have to call her auntie, as their parents had instructed them to do.

  “Did she bring the brat?” Maggie asked in a low voice.

  The pungent aroma of simmering garlic, spices, and tomatoes filled the flat, creating an illusion of a warm home. Sandy breathed in the fragrances with hungry pleasure. He often boasted to Jimmy about his wife’s delicious Italian cooking.

  “I thank God every day that she married me,” he said.

  The girls were sprawled across the carpet watching “The Lone Ranger.” Uncle Sandy had invited them out of their room to watch television while Aunt Nancy made dinner.

  “Dinner!” Nancy’s voice boomed down the hallway.

  Sandy picked up Jimmy’s empty glass and trying to sound upbeat, said, “Let’s get some food.”

  “Oh, man, I can’t eat.” Jimmy’s voice slurred as his head lolled onto the overstuffed chair.

  His daughters eyed him cautiously. They knew his mood could quickly change when he was drunk. June sensed her father’s mood growing darker and turned down the television just as Tonto galloped away from the bad guys.

  “The girls, Jimmy. They need to eat and get to bed. For their sakes please,” Sandy said kindly, trying to get Jimmy to come to the dinner table.

  “You go. I’ll see if Cathy wants anything.” Jimmy stumbled off to their bedroom.