Last of the Line

by John MacKay

  ‘You’re only just here,’ protested Cal.

  ‘I can call back.’ She smiled sheepishly at him, swung on her jacket and left.

  The two men watched her go.

  ‘Now then…’ began Finlay, leaning forward intently.

  ‘Hold on,’ interrupted Cal, his annoyance coming to the fore. ‘Why did she have to go?’

  Finlay was taken aback, plainly unused to being challenged.

  ‘Mairi’s a good-looking woman right enough, but I don’t want her hearing what I have to say.’

  Cal could only shrug. ‘You’d better get on with it then.’

  ‘There was always tea in the pot here,’ Finlay reflected, looking round the kitchen. ‘My yes, I was here often. I worked the croft for Mary.’ He glanced at Cal. ‘Oh yes, we had an arrangement. I’d work the croft and she let me keep the sheep on it when I needed.’

  ‘You worked the croft?’

  ‘My, yes. The potatoes and the vegetable patch. Mary helped at times, but she was more for her flowers and the garden. You’re a city man, you wouldn’t notice, but most of the crofts around here? Dead. Nobody does anything with them any more. Not even sheep.’

  Despite Cal’s antagonism to Finlay, he could see the merit in what he was saying.

  The way Finlay was looking at him was making Cal uneasy. He’d be glad when he was gone.

  ‘I’ll pay you a good price.’ Finlay said.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘For the house.’

  Cal sat back. ‘Oh.’

  ‘You wouldn’t understand why, but I want it.’

  ‘I haven’t thought about selling it yet,’ Cal lied. ‘I will, though.’

  ‘What do you have to think about? You won’t be staying here, so you’ll sell it. I’m saying to you, that before you go through all of that, I’ll buy it from you. At a good price mind.’

  ‘Well, like I say, I haven’t thought about it yet.’

  ‘Look, when was the last time you came to see Mary? This means nothing to you, but it means everything to some of us.’

  ‘She’s only just passed away. It’s a bit insensitive for you to be looking to buy her house.’

  ‘I know that,’ Finlay said in a quieter voice and for the first time Cal sensed vulnerability in the man. ‘And normally I would never think of such a thing. But you’ll be away right after the funeral and there would be no chance to speak to you man to man. What’s the point in involving other people when we can sort it out between ourselves?’

  ‘I’m not going to decide here and now what I’m doing. You have to understand that. I don’t even know you.’

  ‘Mary did. She knew me very well.’

  ‘Well that’s as maybe, and I’m not saying no. Just not yet.’

  ‘So what are you going to do? Let one of the agents in town sell it to some Sassenach with money? That’s why places like this are dying. The young folk can’t afford to buy and it’s filling up with people who don’t even stay here most of the year. Or if they do, they’re retired and looking for a peaceful place to die. The place is full of them. And they don’t just come, they try to take over. There’s not a local accent to be heard on the council. Same with anything round here, full of English accents. You think that’s what she would want? Another one of them staying here?’

  ‘My aunt didn’t think like that.’

  ‘And how would you know?’ Finlay was aggressive now.

  ‘Because she didn’t, that’s why.’

  ‘You wouldn’t know what she thought. Oh, it’s easy to talk when you’re away from it. Before you give me a speech, take a walk through the village. Listen to the accents and tell me that’s how it should be. Your family built this croft. Tell me you want it to be taken over by people who don’t care. Another artist maybe?’ Finlay clasped his hand to his forehead. ‘Spare us from another artist.’

  ‘Listen, I don’t like what you’re saying.’

  ‘Maybe not. That doesn’t make it wrong.’

  ‘Yes it does. The only reason some places like this exist at all is because people have come in from outside and revived them.’

  ‘Read it in one of the big papers, I suppose? You should know better than that. Reporters come up to these islands and see what they want to see and write what they always intended to write. They know nothing. And folk read them and think, ‘Oh how quaint.’ We prefer our own kind here. I thought maybe you would understand that. Anyway, I didn’t come to argue. I came to tell you that I want this place and I’ll pay you for it.’

  ‘Well now you’ve told me and I’ve told you I’ll think about it.’

  Finlay got to his feet and made for the door. He turned to Cal as if in an afterthought.

  ‘This is the house closest to Mairi. You don’t think she would want someone she knows here, rather than a stranger?’

  He clicked his fingers as he walked out of the door, the dogs rising together and turning to follow him. Cal went through to the living room and watched him stride down the path. Finlay was a man made for this landscape. He was, almost literally, in his element. Cal could tell that this was a man who knew instinctively how to make the most of whatever challenges nature set. And as landfall for the gathered winds of the open ocean, the island’s challenges were many.

  Take him out of this setting and Finlay would not dominate so, but then he would have no interest to go. This was the only place he wanted to be.

  During the holidays of his youth Cal had remained isolated from those of his own age, despite Mary’s encouragement that he should play with local children. On his visits to older people in the district with Mary or his parents, he was received with nothing but warmth and kindness. It was a different story with his peers. They were suspicious of the city boy and the air of superiority that they projected onto him. For his part, Cal felt out of place and inadequate. On the moor he was uncomfortable near the cattle, he didn’t enjoy working with the sheep and the dogs scared him. Soon there was no interaction and he remained almost exclusively in adult company when on the island. Finlay may well have been one of these other children. They were about the same age.

  Finlay’s dogs followed behind him, utterly obedient to their master. What power did he have that the dogs, Mairi, even Cal himself, had been intimidated by him? Away from this place, that authority would be stripped away, but here he acted lord of all he surveyed.

  Cal’s thoughts wandered as he looked through the window. He saw the breeze playing with the long grass beyond the fence, sweeping it this way and that. A sparrow flitted onto the white cap of a grey rock and twitched busily before flying off with the wind. Beyond, white horses rode the blue Atlantic Ocean.

  Every day there would be something different to see outside this window, from the detail of the animals and birds to the mass of the landscape, all of it dictated by the light and mood of the heavens so open above. It was a place for the soul. He remained there in a timeless spell, until a spiral of smoke from Mairi’s chimney stirred him from his daydream. Mairi, the unknowable woman who was already such a support and distraction since his arrival.

  He remembered what she had said about the letters lying upstairs. ‘Maybe look at them later,’ she’d advised. ‘When it’s all over.’

  Cal went through to the hall and climbed the stairs. He would leave it for now, but the question wouldn’t go away and he knew he would return to it when emotions were not so raw.

  The blue letters had slid off each other and lay spread on the floor. He had left in a hurry, Mairi had been the reason for that. He shuffled them together, but the elastic band that had held them was perished and useless.

  He looked into the shoe box that had contained them and tried to rearrange the other contents in such a way that the airmail letters would be held together. As he did so, he felt something thicker at the bottom. It was another envelope, small in dimensions, but its contents bulged in the middle. The flap was already open and inside Cal could see a lock of auburn hair, tied by white cotton thr
ead.

  Cal studied the hair, rolling it gently between his fingertips. It was so soft. Whose was it? In all probability it was his own. He was her only nephew, after all. It would be perfectly natural for a proud aunt to have a lock of her nephew’s baby hair.

  He replaced the hair in the envelope and placed it back in the box. The movement caused a strip of plastic to slip out from beneath the letters. Cal picked it up. It was a name tag that had been cut. When placed together, the two ends of the cut loop formed a tiny circle. A blue cardboard strip had been inserted inside the plastic sheath of the tag. Written on it were two simple words: ‘Baby MacCarl’.

  11

  CAL ENDURED AN internal struggle as he thought through everything he had found and journeyed towards an inevitable conclusion. He had never seen a baby tag in his own home. It was the sort of memento a mother might keep, likewise the lock of hair, but his own mother had nothing of the kind. Mary did.

  He left the letters on the bed and went back downstairs to the box in the dresser which contained the return-to-sender letter. He didn’t need to open it, the date stamp was enough. It had been sent the month before he was born.

  Cal slumped back in the armchair, closed his eyes and tried to come to terms with the enormity of this emotional upheaval.

  ‘Was Mary my mother?’ he whispered aloud, the utterance of the words an attempt to bring order to the tumult in his head. Flashbacks and segments of conversations rushed through his mind, overwhelming any rational consideration.

  There was Mary, gentle, kind Mary through the years and finally at her end. She had wanted to see him and maybe he now knew why. He thought of his mother, still young in his mind’s eye, comforting him, loving him as a mother should. Contrasting the image of her and the sacrifices she had made for him with the thought that she might never have been his mother made him cry. And he heard his father’s repeated admonishment, ‘No son of mine…’

  If it were true, perhaps he could understand now his father’s resentment: he was being required to raise a child that was not his own. It would explain too, his apparently irrational friction against the softness of Mary. With understanding would come forgiveness for his father – or the man he knew as his father.

  Cal was starting to feel that his whole life been based on a lie. The possibility seemed to crush him physically. He felt his chest tight and breath short. His face burned. He forced himself to stand and make for the door, grabbing his jacket on the way. The breeze outside was a balm, swathing him in coolness, and the peat smoke in the air was curiously comforting.

  Cal strode through the wild grass of the garden and climbed the fence into the croft. The barbed wire was sagging and by swinging one leg over as he pressed down on the top strand, he could actually stand astride the fence on his tip-toes before adjusting his weight and bringing his other leg over.

  He set off across the reseeding towards the moor with no destination in mind, just the need to feel the fresh, new air fill his lungs and movement in his trembling limbs. With the physical activity, his heart stopped pumping so wildly and his breath became even. His mind, though, continued thrashing between the wild scatter of imagination and the steady pull of sense.

  If Mary was his mother, then who was his father? The Canadian boyfriend? ‘I’m glad it is one of our own who is making you happy,’ his grandmother had written. Was he still alive? Was his true father still alive? Did he even know if Cal existed? Or was Mary’s pregnancy what had forced them apart? Cal decided he would travel to Canada to meet him. Perhaps he had a whole family across the ocean.

  And yet questions kept tugging him back all the time. Everything was circumstantial. The only facts were that Mary had lived in Canada and had returned home, apparently unexpectedly, and that she had mementoes of his birth in her possession, which didn’t disprove that she was the aunt he had always known her as. Perhaps she had left Canada with the excitement of knowing that her brother’s wife was expecting a child and wanting to share the family experience. Maybe she had taken the hair and the tag into her safe-keeping when his mother died. ‘Fits just as easy,’ Cal chided himself.

  An old cart trail meandered across the edge of the moor, sections obscured by grass and heather. He had a flashback to his boyhood. A tractor bouncing violently along the track pulling a trailer loaded with peat. Cal sitting on top, nervously excited, being jolted from side to side. His father, in the peats in the bed of the trailer, his powerful arms draped outside, smoking a roll-up, laughing amiably up at Cal’s discomfiture. This was the life his father had wanted, physical and of the land. His mother, sitting rather more primly next to him, her strong features furrowed anxiously lest Cal should fall, her dark curly hair blowing in the wind. Moving to the city had removed her from this hard life and she was thankful for it. Across from her, Mary, smiling encouragement at Cal. ‘You will not fall. I will catch you.’ She is young and pretty. He sees that now. Two women looking out for him. And though he tries, Cal can’t tell which one sees him as their child.

  His eyes were damp when he returned to the present. He followed the track beyond the peat banks, round the edge of the brown waters of the loch, across the flat gneiss rocks, through the shallow glen and leapt the burbling moorland burn then climbed up up the ridged rise of greener grass.

  His father had understood this landscape and what had made it. On their trips to fish the moorland lochs, he would try to pass on his knowledge. And because he was sharing rather than telling, Cal would listen, sometimes unsure how much to believe, but he enjoyed the fact that his father might be telling tall tales. He recalled being told that the island, this bare, wind-whipped landscape had once been covered in trees.

  ‘In ancient times,’ his father had told him, ‘there were trees everywhere. And they’re still there, beneath the peat. My, yes, I was with my own father when he dug up the root of a pine tree.’

  Cal did not know whether it was true or not, but he saw a relevant moral to that story. Mysteries, no matter how long they were buried, would always come to the surface.

  Finally, breathless and beat, he reached the top of the hill. The wind swept euphorically around him, billowing his jacket. Four hundred feet below, the rollers of the Atlantic pounded the flaxen sand, the white tops tumbling over each other in the final hurl to land.

  It was a scene he remembered from childhood, and doubtless his father before him and his father before him, to time immemorial.

  Beyond the sea-smoothed sand, on a grass plateau, stood the grey and black marker stones of the dead. This was where the islanders laid their loved ones to rest, on the edge of the land against the symphony of the sea.

  It is where they would bring Mary. He promised himself that by the time he stood over her open grave, he would know the truth.

  12

  ‘FINLAY’S NOT SO bad, it’s just his way.’ Mairi sat across from Cal at her kitchen table, her hands clasped round a mug of tea.

  Cal had come off the moor straight to her house with the full intention of presenting what he had uncovered and challenging her to question the implications. Why he should discuss such intimate matters with a woman he had met just two days previously, crossed his mind only fleetingly. It seemed the natural thing to do. But he faltered as he approached her door, uncertain how she would react. She had already admonished him for raking over the past. When she welcomed him in, he had blurted out criticism of Finlay simply for something to say.

  ‘He’s just very straight and direct,’ Mairi countered.

  ‘That’s another way of saying he’s rude. Who does he think he is?’

  ‘Maybe it is rude, but you always know where you stand with Finlay. He has no side to him.’

  ‘So why were you so uncomfortable with him?’

  Mairi’s eyes fell to her cup.

  ‘You looked scared of him,’ Cal pressed.

  ‘That’s not right. That’s not how it is at all,’ she protested.

  ‘That’s how it seemed.’

  ‘No.
It’s just that sometimes Finlay can impose himself.’

  ‘You’re not wrong. It was like he owned the place.’

  ‘That house does mean a lot to him. He was there so often and Mary was very good to him. She understood him.’

  ‘What’s to understand? The man’s a bully.’

  ‘No he’s not, he’s just had to look out for himself. His mother died when he was a baby and his father was older. It was just the two of them.’

  ‘It wasn’t so different for me.’

  ‘I know, but I’m not sure he ever knew his mother at all. I picked up bits and pieces about him from Mary. I suppose she was like a surrogate mother to Finlay, one of many I’m sure. I’m not local of course,’ she smiled, ‘I’ve only been here about fifteen years. Anyway, he was up there often. And in fairness, he did a lot for her on the croft. She seemed to know how to handle him and he relied on her.’

  Cal pondered what she’d said.

  ‘Finlay’s straight off the croft,’ Mairi continued. ‘I’m sure he’s just shy and it comes across the wrong way.’

  ‘There was nothing shy about the way he spoke to me. It was like I was dirt on his shoe.’

  ‘Well…’ Mairi shrugged.

  ‘Sounds like Mary took in every waif and stray she came across. A friend to everyone, even that big lump.’

  ‘She was just a good Christian woman. She looked out for those who were maybe not so fortunate. Children especially. She loved children.’

  ‘And what about you? “Impose” you said. Is that what he does to you?’

  ‘No, not really.’

  ‘You know he asked me if I wanted a stranger living next to you? He did, like he thought he was some guardian looking over you.’

  ‘Really?’ There was the fleeting anxiety again.

  ‘You can’t hide it,’ Cal persisted. ‘You’re scared of him.’

  ‘No, I’m not scared,’ said Mairi. ‘Finlay would like us to be closer, that’s all.’

  ‘Closer? What, like married?’