by C. J. Cooke
One day he called in the morning and again in the evening. As a child I didn’t fully understand why he should be so anxious to get to my mother. She was pregnant again, and I knew that she was afraid of him, and afraid of telling my father that she was afraid of him, and within this curious quandary I was a cog turning a wheel for her escape.
“She’s not in,” I told him for the second time, and I felt my cheeks flame all the way to my collarbone.
He smiled down at me, then rested his hands on his knees and brought his nose close to mine.
“We both know that’s a lie,” he said. “Do you know what happens to little boys who tell lies?”
I shook my head. I had a horrible feeling in my stomach, and suddenly I was aware that it was late, our neighbors all gone indoors for the night. There was just my mother and my brother in the house. With my father gone, I was the man of the house.
“I’ll tell you what happens,” he continued, so close to me now I could only see that hooked nose and the pores in his skin, like strawberry seeds. “They get their bellies cut.” He drew a long finger across my stomach. “So how about I ask you the question again, and you tell me the truth. Is your mother home or not?”
I gulped and nodded. He straightened, looked past me into the house. I knew he knew my father was away for the night, in another town, fixing someone’s roof.
“Knock knock,” he said, rapping his knuckles on the door. He stepped past me, one foot at a time, across the threshold, then called out in a big booming voice that seemed to shake the walls. “Anyone home?”
Finally, my mother emerged, and although she looked surprised to see him, as though he’d just caught her in the middle of something, I knew her well enough to understand that it was all an act, that she was scared.
She gave Duncan a tight smile. “What brings you here so late?”
He closed the door behind him. “Oh, you know. I reckoned I’d check up on you, see what’s been ailing you of late. You’ve not been around. I’ve been dropping off supplies to your boys. We’ve never discussed payment so I thought, now’s as good a time as any.”
Her smile widened, grew more false, and there was fear in her eyes. “Oh, how very thoughtful. I’m fine, thank you. Just fine.”
“Are you sure?” he said, stepping closer.
She pressed a hand to her pregnant belly, protective. “And my husband should be back soon. He’s always tired, and he’ll be expecting supper. So perhaps you could arrange to return in the morning when he’s refreshed, and happy to discuss any payment you desire.”
He lowered his eyes, gave a heavy sigh. “Send the boy to bed.”
She turned her head stiffly toward me. “Patrick. Bed.”
I nodded and scampered, fast as my legs could carry me. In my room I slammed the door, then slid beneath my bed and stuffed my fist in my mouth.
I don’t know what happened that night. I can guess, but I don’t know.
When I woke, it was light again and I was still under the bed. I raced to the kitchen and found my mother preparing breakfast. I studied her carefully. I was relieved to see her there, and I could tell that Duncan was gone. She seemed unharmed, but there was a cloud in the air and something on the wind that only I could read. She was different. Whatever had happened had changed her, in a different way to how my sister’s death had changed her. The look in her eyes was different.
I said nothing, and she said nothing. I held her gaze as I walked across the kitchen floor, then wrapped my arms around her waist and bawled like into her belly. The baby moved against my cheek, and I was so glad that it was still alive because I’d feared Duncan had harmed it, and if the baby died my mother would collapse into sadness again. I felt her hand cup my head, her arm around my shoulders. We held each other like that for a very long time.
She went to see Finwell, Amy’s mother. I played with Amy in the barn while she visited, and when she emerged she seemed better. Finwell had done a fine job of healing her, she said.
About a week thereafter, Duncan fell ill with some kind of pox that no healer could cure. It was the talk of the village. I heard old Mrs. Dunbar telling a neighbor about it, describing boils the size of sparrows’ eggs filled with smelly green pus, and how his body was absolutely covered in them. Not an inch of flesh to be seen. The boils were inside his body, too, and he vomited hot black fluid day and night. His wife and sons kept vigil by his bed, and he whispered to them that he’d been cursed by witches.
My mother hadn’t told a soul what had happened that night. But it turned out that someone had heard or seen, because within a few weeks it was whispered throughout the village.
Amy told me. I went to her house and she was plucking pheasants, ripping the feathers out and laying them in a bowl for her mum to make pillows.
“Are you OK?” she asked me when I sat down.
“I’m well,” I said. She glanced around to check that her brothers and sisters were out of earshot before signaling me to come closer. I didn’t want to. I had always been squeamish, and the bloodless creature on the table turned my stomach. It made me think of my mother, and what Duncan had done to her.
“Look,” Amy said finally. “I’m not sorry for what I did to Duncan. But I’m sorry about what they’re saying about your mum. I’m working on making it stop, OK?”
I screwed up my eyes and tried to process what she’d just said. There seemed to be whole chapters in those three sentences that I’d missed.
“What are you talking about?” I said. “What you did to Duncan?”
I saw her cheeks turn red. This only happened when her mother shouted at her. Amy’s mother was keen on the wooden spoon school of discipline and she was the only person alive who commanded Amy’s full respect.
Amy wiped her hands on her dress before sitting down opposite me.
“I cursed Duncan,” she said. “I put a hex on him to make him sick. As payment for what he did. You know this.”
I shook my head. “No, I didn’t.”
She studied me with her huge, feline eyes. “Yes, you do, Patrick. You know what I can do. No one else does. Not except my parents.” She chewed her lip. I wiped my nose on the back of my hand. It had started to bleed. “Morag started a rumor about your mum. She said she heard some commotion from your house. She said she saw him go in and have his way with your mum.”
I felt like she’d slapped me. “She saw?”
Amy nodded. I leaped to my feet, tears burning my eyes, and screamed in her face. “If she saw, why didn’t she do anything?”
“Sit down,” Amy said, unfazed by my outburst. I collapsed into my seat and buried my face in my hands. Amy let me sit there for a long time, not saying anything until I’d managed to calm down.
“Lots of people are saying that your ma caused Duncan’s illness.” Her voice was soft now, and I knew she was worried.
I looked up. I had no idea what this meant but her voice was lined with worry.
“Why are they saying that?”
She looked away. “I don’t know.” She reached out and took my hand. I didn’t even bother to pull away, despite how sticky it was.
When I went home, Mum was sewing by the lantern. She only had to look up for me to know something had happened.
“Where’s Dad?” I asked.
“Gone,” she said, keeping her eyes on her sewing.
“Gone-gone?” I asked.
She nodded.
“Should I dig up his treasure box?” I asked. My father had told me that he had buried his inheritance in the hill near the large oak, and that if anything were to happen to him we were to dig it up. Now that he was gone, I couldn’t see how we would survive.
Mother shook her head. I walked over to her and, very slowly, wrapped my arms around her. I buried my face in her shoulder and cried, and she let me. Then I let go and went to bed without saying a word.<
br />
It didn’t happen the next day, or the day after. Dad had taken his ax, so he definitely was gone-gone. I came back from the fields to find church elders at the door, and Mum being taken away. Her wrists were bound and her head bowed. I ran up to her but one of the men pushed me back.
“Mum!” I shouted as they threw her in the carriage. “Mum! Stop! Where are you taking her?”
Some of the neighbors had come out, and I thought they were there to help. But they just stood and watched.
“Witch,” one of them said in a low voice. Then someone else said it, then another. In a moment it was a deafening chant, and it didn’t relent, not even when I cried out for them to stop, when I shouted that she was innocent, that he’d hurt her.
Not even then.
III
It’s late morning. Saffy’s at school, though once again the teacher is forcing them all to have class outdoors in the freezing cold and rain. Saffy has no idea why the woman insists on this, beyond punishment for the sake of it. It’s almost October, and it’s raining again. It always bloody rains here. Saffy has never seen rain like it, nor so many varieties. Rain that’s like a mist, making her blonde hair all frizzy and fat. Rain that bounces up from the ground, rain that blisters the windows and drums the roof of the bothy. Rain that seeps inside your bones and chills you from the inside out. It was blue skies and sunshine when they left England. She didn’t even bring a coat, and now she’s had to borrow some old wax coat that smells of dead fish.
Today, the small group of teenage pupils are in the valley on the other side of the island writing poems about nature. Their teacher, Mrs. McGrath, is clearly a poetry freak as that’s all they seem to do. Saffy can’t help but wind her up. “Poetry makes me want to gouge my eyes out,” she says repeatedly, and finally Mrs. McGrath snaps.
“Sapphire, I’m going tae have tae ask you tae keep your opinions tae yoursel,” she says, pushing her glasses farther up her nose with a wiry finger. “There’ll be plenty of time tae dae other subjects, but this morning, we’re doing poetry.” She throws a hard stare across the class, who are sat on tree stumps. “Anyone else got a problem with that?”
They all shake their heads, resignedly. Saffy pouts, annoyed that nobody else has taken the cue to rib their teacher. Cowards.
An older boy leans into her. Brodie. “Impressive,” he says. “I’ve been waiting for ages for someone to stand up to that mean old bitch.”
Her chest fills with a warm glow, the kind that follows approval. She smiles broadly at him, and he winks. He’s handsome. She noticed him the first day she started school, but up close his beauty is striking. He’s Rowan’s boyfriend, and so she hasn’t paid him any mind. But Rowan’s sitting with another girl on the other side of the group. Maybe they’ve broken up.
She doesn’t hear what Mrs. McGrath says next, and she doesn’t quite see the page so clearly, either—suddenly Brodie’s proximity to her has made the world swampy, underwater somehow.
“I’m writing about butterflies,” she hears Rowan announce. “About how the caterpillar changing into a butterfly is a metaphor for me becoming who I want to be.”
“Very good, Rowan,” Mrs. McGrath says. “Though please do write in silence? You use up your creative energy by explaining your project.”
My project, Saffy thinks. Creative energy. She scribbles on the page, keeping Brodie firmly in her field of vision. He looks up at her every now and then. He’s seventeen, she remembers. He has stubble on his jaw and curly brown hair.
“I’m going to divide you all into small groups,” Mrs. McGrath says. “I’ll assign you a part of the forest to explore so you don’t waste time chatting.” Saffy finds herself in a group with Brodie and the weird twins, Fia and Fen, who don’t talk to anyone but each other. They’re assigned to a vague part of the forest that looks spray-painted with neon-green moss. She remembers that sphagnum moss is an antiseptic, that the Celts used it to pack their wounds after battle. Soldiers in World War One did the same. She likes to cling on to bits of information like that, the type that links the ancient past to the near-present. It makes the strangeness of the present less strange.
Mrs. McGrath tells them to do pencil rubbings of five different kinds of leaves and name the tree from which they came, then write a poem from the perspective of each tree that identifies how it grows, its fruit or leaves, and what happens to it during each season. To the others, this appears an easy task, but Saffy has no clue. Birds, she knows about, but trees? She can just about name five—oak, birch, fir, cherry, pine—but identify them? Not a chance.
“You OK?”
She looks up to find Brodie standing over her. The twins have slunk off, leaving her and Brodie alone in a clutch of towering conifers. Immediately, blood rushes to her face, her heart catapulting in her chest. For a moment, Jack’s face sweeps across her mind, and she feels a pang of guilt.
“Yeah,” she murmurs weakly. “Just . . . trying to remember the name of this one.”
“That’s a maple,” he says.
She rises to her full height. Saffy’s tall, five foot eight, but Brodie looks down at her, making her feel tiny.
“You lived in the city, didn’t you?” Brodie says.
She nods.
“I was born in Glasgow. West End.”
“West End,” she repeats.
He grins. “I couldn’t tell an elm from a monkey puzzle when I came here.”
“Monkey puzzle?”
He raises his dark eyes to the trees around them, his face lit in pearlescent afternoon light that leaks through the canopy. It’s a scene that reminds her of one of those Dutch paintings, as though the gods in Mount Olympus have spotted one of their own.
“No monkey puzzles in this wood. That there’s an elm, though.” He bends to retrieve a leaf. “See? Looks like nettle leaves. It’s a hermaphrodite, that tree.”
She swallows. Is he mocking her or being serious? “Shut up.”
He looks at her, wounded, and she wants to collapse to the ground and beg forgiveness.
“I mean, a hermaphrodite?” she says, backpedaling. “I didn’t know trees had genitals.”
He laughs, and she laughs, too, but it’s a desperate, kill-me-now laugh. “It means that the flowers of the tree have both female and male reproductive parts. No genitals.”
“That’s a relief. Can you imagine how awkward that would be? A forest full of penises and vaginas?”
Shut up, Saffy, she tells herself, wanting to die. Shut. Up.
“Imagine,” he says, and he holds her gaze a moment too long. He is dissolving her into a kind of vapor, one cell at a time. Never in her whole life has she seen such lips.
She looks away, embarrassed. “I, uh, read that this place has some kind of history. Involving witches?”
“Yeah. That’s what they say.”
She takes a breath, willing herself to stop overthinking her every movement. “I read that they burned about four thousand witches here in Scotland. Or, you know, women.”
“I think some of them were men.”
“Yeah, like two.”
“Well, yeah. Not all of them were burned on Lòn Haven.”
“Obviously,” she says, then flushes red.
“You’re staying at the Longing, aren’t you?” Brodie says, and she nods. “Do you know what the Longing’s built on?”
She’s puzzled. “Rock?”
He laughs, and her cheeks burn. His stare peels layers off her, one at a time. She understands now the saying “weak at the knees,” because he has removed all of her bones just by existing. She feels wobbly and melty and stupid.
“It’s built on an old broch from the Iron Age,” he says.
“Oh yeah, I heard about that.”
“Yeah. It’s like a kind of round tower made of stone, though a lot shorter than the Longing. A Scottish chieftain would have
lived there.”
She remembers this from the Neolithic museum but can tell Brodie’s enjoying sharing it. “Yeah?”
“A lot of people say it’s cursed. They built a lighthouse on top of it and everyone who worked there died young.”
“You don’t believe that, do you?” she says. “The curse thing.”
He shrugs. “Do you believe in witches?”
She’s not sure how to answer. “Well, yeah. Rowan’s a witch, isn’t she?”
He looks away. She’s pleased to see what looks like irritation on his face at the mention of her. “So she says. She meditates and collects crystals. That’s about it.”
“So, the broch is cursed?” she says, circling him back to the topic.
“Oh yeah. They chucked witches into the hole. Tortured them for a few months, then set them on fire. People say the witches cursed the island for it.”
“The witches cursed Lòn Haven?” Saffy says, intrigued. “Like—how?”
“Legend has it that they made a pact with the fae, to give them human form so they could take revenge on humankind,” Brodie says.
“The fae?”
“Fairies.”
She’s never heard this term but commits it to memory. Fae. “Why did they want revenge?”
“For taking over their lands. Destroying the forests, killing the animals. You follow?” he asks.
She nods.