Does Your Mother Know?

by Maureen Jennings

  “That’s right. You see, my Pappy hadn’t wanted me in the first place. He was almost forty when I was born, and he was hard as nails and colder than the cod. He could just about tolerate the boys but, for whatever reason, he couldn’t stand having a daughter. He thought all women were original Eves, ready to lead the pure man astray.”

  “He’s right about that.”

  She grinned and we shared a bit of misanthropy together. “As far as Pappy was concerned, I was going to end up populating an entire island with bastard children.”

  “So you told him you had run off with a Red Indian?”

  “I was dating a fellow who was part Cree, and he lived in Timmins — let’s just say I elaborated.” She cast another anxious glance at me to see if I was judging her. I kept my face neutral, although the question had popped into my mind. I let it ride for now. Joan took my hand in hers.

  “You’re cold. Do you want my gloves? I’m warm as toast.”

  “Thanks. I wouldn’t mind.”

  She handed over her sheepskin gloves and they were indeed welcome. Even in this sheltered cove, I was beginning to get really cold. I needed my winter jacket and fur-lined boots. To heck with it being May.

  “Back to Tormod. We seem to be avoiding the subject.”

  “It hurts,” she said, but after a moment she continued. “Oh, Chris, he was so handsome and he could charm the pants off a parson, as we’d say. But most of all he was so kind to me. I must have been one of the most miserable kids you’d ever meet. By the time I was fourteen, I didn’t know if I was going to survive. In spite of all the lads who were hanging around, I thought the loneliness would kill me, like the tuberculosis, which carried off so many young ones. Then that summer, Tormod’s wife had to go and take care of her mother down in Benecula. They asked me if I would help mind his children for a few weeks. I’d done that before — you saw the snap of us together — so I went over. I hadn’t seen him all winter, and I’d developed. I wasn’t a skinny kid any more. He’d always been good to me, but this was different. He talked to me like an equal, made me laugh, made me think I was an attractive girl. I fell crazy in love with him. I was like somebody who’d been on a starvation diet and, all of a sudden, there’s this banquet in front of me. He wasn’t happy either. He’d never loved Margaret, and he certainly enjoyed female charms. How could he resist?”

  No matter what she said, in my opinion, it was statutory rape, and my disapproval must have shown on my face.

  “Chris, you have to understand, kids grew up faster on the island. He did fend me off a couple of times, but I was too determined. He was a human being. So we did the deed. Only three times, but that was enough. I got pregnant. And the rest I’ve just told you.” She looked into my eyes. “Do you think I was such a bad girl?”

  I smoothed away a strand of hair from her cheek. “Oh, Joan, I don’t think that at all.”

  And I didn’t. I was seeing something I’d never seen before. We both got a bit awkward with this dramatic shift in our relationship, and I got to my feet.

  “Do you feel like walking a bit?” I asked her. “I’m getting stiff.”

  “Sure. As a matter of fact, I was going to suggest we go along to the village. That’s where I was born and lived for a while, till we moved into Carloway. You want ancestors, I’ll show you ancestors.”

  I helped her up and Nic came over, eager to go on a walk. Patches of blue sky were showing through the grey and an uncertain sun came out briefly. As we climbed back to the top of the cliff, a strong wind grabbed at us, and I was reminded of Coral-Lyn. I didn’t know when I was going to tell Joan about Tormod’s murder, but I had to trust there would be an appropriate time.

  The path was narrow and we had to walk single file. Joan went on ahead of me which meant she was talking over her shoulder.

  “I thought I owed it to Sarah to tell her the truth, but I’m not so sure now it was the right thing to do. When I told her Tormod was her natural father, she was livid. He had to put the kibosh on her relationship with his son because he suspected the truth, but she’d always thought it was because he didn’t consider her good enough. Isn’t it ironic that she’d fall for a MacAulay like I did. So they had a big barney. She was more than a little pie-eyed by this time. The rest of it you know.” Joan faced me so she could talk more easily. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you this before, Chris.” She turned away and pointed. “There used to be a ruined house just over this hill. It’ll be sheltered and private. Let’s go there.” She left the path and crossed the cropped grass. “Good, it’s still here.”

  In the lea of the hill were the remains of an old stone house. The roof was broken but the walls were intact. She pushed open the door and we went inside. The floor was carpeted with sheep droppings mostly, but there was a bench built into the wall along one side and there was a tartan shawl lying there.

  “I thought so,” Joan cried. “That’s the shawl that Tormod gave me. He was working on it when we arrived, and I said I was cold. Nerves probably, but he gave it to me to keep warm. He hadn’t finished it yet.” I could see that the strands were unfinished at the ends. “After you did that sleeping thing with me, I started to have more bits of memories. I could remember walking away from the accident towards the cliffs. God knows how I did it really, but I must have ended up in here for a few hours.” She put the shawl against her cheek. “There were some sheep in here as well, and they all kept me warm. It was a vile night, pissing rain and black as the peat.” She shuddered. “I feel so bad about what happened, Chris. I was so dead set on telling the truth. Well you know, I’m wondering if sometimes it isn’t better to leave things be. It was my truth after all that I was sticking their noses in. Maybe Sarah wouldn’t have died the way she did if I hadn’t got all that shit stirred up. And poor Tormod. He was so upset. It probably brought on the hemorrhage.”

  She looked so abysmally miserable that I decided it was time to tell her what had likely happened. I told it as gently as I could, but there is no way to blunt the brutality of a murder that involves people you know. She burst into tears, crying over and over, “Poor Tormod, poor Tormod.” She was sitting on the bench at this point, and I held out my arms and she slid over to me and cried so desperately I thought she might not be able to stop. After a long time, we let go. She blew her nose into a tissue I’d found in my pocket, but she didn’t move away from me.

  “There’s one more thing, Chris.” She glanced over at me timidly. “It’s about Duncan. He’s a good man. I like him even more than I did when we were kids.” Another blow into the tissue, so that her voice was muffled. “We did have what you’d call a fling when I was on the mainland, just before I left for Canada with the Cohens.”

  I stared at her in horror. “Oh God, Joan, don’t tell me he’s my natural father?”

  She wiped her nose. “Well actually, Chris, he is.”

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

  It was my turn to walk off and she had to trot after me. After all these years of longing to know who my biological father was, I was thrown off balance. Duncan MacKenzie! True, I hadn’t known him very long, but he wasn’t a man I had warmed to. Probably it would have been a shock whomever she’d named, but I wasn’t in a rational frame of mind and all I could think of was “Why him?”

  We walked for about twenty minutes, in which time I said exactly three words. “Does he know?” to which Joan replied, “No, he doesn’t.” Somewhere along the walk, Nic had gone back home.

  “Do you still want to see the village?” Joan asked.

  “Why not? As you say, I’ve always wanted ancestors. It’s raining cats and dogs with ancestors now.”

  She smiled uneasily at this, but we went on.

  We trudged across a rocky beach, up the path to a double gate. Ahead of us the slope was dotted with several low, grey stone houses, all of them with neatly thatched roofs. We pushed open the gate and followed a paved road through the centre of the village. Joan stopped in front of one of the houses. A hanging sign proclai
med it was the public toilet. A young fellow carrying a backpack almost as long as himself walked past us and ducked through the low door.

  “Duncan warned me the village had been reconstructed,” said Joan. “Our toilet was out in the back grass in summer and was a bucket in the byre in winter. Add some chickens, two or three dogs lying around, a cow tethered in the back, and the women coming and going to the shore with their heavy wash in a tub on their hips. It was never as quiet as this.”

  We walked on down the road, and she stopped again in front of one of the houses, which advertised itself as a self-catering unit. She was chattering at me over my own silence.

  “The three MacLeod sisters lived here. They never married, even though they were all as lovely as daisies when they were young. Anna was a weaver and she designed her own patterns. She even won a prize for one of her rugs. It was a glass bowl and it sat in pride of place on her dresser. She’d let me take it down and look at it. I handled it as carefully as if it were as fragile as a new babe.” Joan’s face was wistful. “Nowadays, Anna would be considered an artist and she’d have a studio instead of a byre where the cow lived in winter. All three of them were middle-aged when I knew them, but I’d come here whenever I could and always be welcome. They made a pet of me at a time when I so needed to be fussed over. Christina would always make me a cuppa, even when I was young. She’d boil the water and the tea leaves together in a pot over the fire. It tasted of the peat smoke and was so strong almost nobody else could drink it.”

  I remembered how much Joan had liked her cup of tea in the mornings. When I hit my snobbish, critical adolescence, this was one more thing I held against her. All the other parents I knew drank coffee.

  “Am I related to them?”

  She managed to laugh. “Not directly. We have a lot of catching up to do, Chris. Like I said, I wanted to sever my roots completely when I left. Which was stupid and impossible anyway, but what can you do?”

  What indeed.

  We walked on and went into one of the black houses, which had been restored to a period in the 1950s and was crammed with furniture. The stone walls were lined by wood siding, painted a shiny beige, the linoleum on the floor was beige and brown. Nothing matched

  “I think they’ve gathered together whatever they could find from lots of different people. That was Mrs. Duncan MacLeod’s radio for sure. Her son brought it back from the mainland when we got electricity, and she was so proud of it. Oh my... ” She halted in front of the dresser. “There are Auntie Peggie’s best teacups. She’d bought them in London when she was with the herring boats. I don’t know if she ever used them to drink out of.”

  There was a curtained bed tucked into the corner of the room, which was also the living room/kitchen. I could see that the only other room adjoining had two bunk-style beds, also with curtains.

  “Most people had big families, and it was customary for unmarried sisters or brothers to stay living with the family. They were a healthy lot and most of the women lived into their nineties. Our house was about this size, but there was a little room off the kitchen, which I had. No bigger than a cupboard really.” She shuddered. “I can’t stand to think about it.”

  We walked out into a room that adjoined the entrance. It was unfurnished, more like a stable than a room.

  Joan paused. “This is where the cow would be for the winter, and the chickens. I was good at milking.” She pointed at an iron tub by the door. “Look at that! They’ve found a pee-tub. They weren’t as common when I was a wee one as they were earlier, but every household had one.”

  The tub looked too big to serve as a chamber pot. “What were they exactly?”

  She was happy to go on sharing her stories. “The weaving industry was crucial to the islands for a long time, and tweed became very popular, especially with the British. However, the sheared wool was oily, and before it could be woven into tweed it had to be cleaned. This was before you could get ammonia easily mind you, so they used urine to wash out the oil. The pee-tub was in every cottage.” She held her nose. “It could get pretty strong back here when the tub filled up. We’d have a giggle about the fact that, on a humid day, the English la-di-das were likely to walk around in their tweeds exclaiming, ‘Hm, dahling, smell that glorious heather!’ What they were actually smelling was human pee.”

  That broke my sulk, and we were laughing together when a young man ducked through the entrance. He was impressively clean cut, with short hair and a neat, unobtrusive, dark wind-breaker and jeans. I would have pegged him as secret service immediately, even without the radio communicator in his ear with the strange growth-like curly cord down the back of his head.

  “Good afternoon, I’m Simon Wilson. I’m with British security and I wonder if I could ask you a big favour, which is to leave off your tour for the moment and wait outside.”

  His accent was what I’d call posh British, and he was so polite, he was butter coated.

  “What’s wrong?” Joan asked.

  “Nothing wrong at all, Ma’am. We just need to clear the area for security reasons.”

  “My god, a bomb?”

  He smiled again. “No, Ma’am. Nothing like that.”

  “I believe the old homestead is about to be visited by Wills himself.” I said to her.

  She stared at me. “The prince?”

  I nodded at the officer. “That’s it isn’t it?”

  “We do have a royal party arriving.”

  Mr. Wilson’s expression was friendly, but his eyes were ice. He’d had too much experience of the worst excesses of star-struck bystanders. He looked as if he were hoping we were too old for hysteria, and wouldn’t suddenly lift our sweaters to display our breasts.

  “Do you mind, Ma’am?” He indicated we should leave the house, and, rather excited, I must admit, I followed after him. Joan was behind me, also rather twittery. The royal lad had that effect. Outside, a couple of uniformed officers from the Northern Constabulary had appeared. Some tourists had been moved from the gift shop and were “standing back.”

  Then I saw two men walking up from the direction of the beach. Each was carrying an ordinary fisherman’s pail with a closed lid. One was Colin MacLeod, the other man was tall and thin, with a mane of dark hair almost to his shoulders, Black John in the flesh. At the same time as that registered on my brain, I saw two dark-blue sedans pull into the parking lot at the upper end of the village. Both had the royal-standard pennants flying from the front of the car.

  Oh God. Colin was up to mischief. Both men were moving with far too much deliberation, and they were carrying the pails out rather carefully from their sides.

  I grabbed Joan’s arm. “Quick. Look at those men coming towards us. What do you think they’re carrying?”

  Responding to the urgency in my voice, but not understanding, she squinted at Colin and his pal.

  “If I didn’t know better, I’d say they were piss buckets, but I haven’t seen them in years... ”

  The passengers were getting out of the sedans. First two bodyguards, then a tall young man with reddish-blond hair. He was casually dressed in jeans and a blue blazer. By any standard he was a handsome lad, but transferred excitement made the air around him shine. He gave a helping hand to his companion, a young woman who was also tall, with short, fair hair. I had an impression of easy grace from the young man and self-consciousness from the girl.

  That was all I had time for. I stepped quickly over to Wilson, who had taken up his position in front of the cottage entrance.

  “I’m a police officer from Canada. I’ll show you ID later. Those two men at the gate are planning to do something. One of them is a known agitator. His name is Black John.”

  He didn’t wait for a further explanation. He was an experienced officer and he observed the same thing I did. He started to walk forward to intercept Colin and his pals and spoke into his lapel. I went with him.

  “They’re planning to embarrass the prince. I think they’ve got urine in those buckets and they
intend to throw it on him.”

  “Shit!” said Wilson, appropriately.

  Colin had put down his bucket so he could unfasten the gate. The other man waited behind him. We were there now, and Wilson grabbed hold of the top bar.

  “Excuse me, Sir, I can’t let you through at the moment.”

  Over my shoulder, I could see the royal party was almost at the door of the black house. A little smattering of applause from the watching attendants and backpackers. William smiled and waved to them. Black John suddenly pushed on the gate, taking Wilson by surprise.

  Colin seized his chance, grabbed his bucket, and was almost through the gap. I was hovering on the right of the secret service, and I shoved Colin back with my shoulder. He lost his balance and sat down, the bucket fell over and the lid came off, spilling stinking yellow urine all over his own pants. Black John tried to get past, but Wilson was too fast for him and pulled his hand through the bars so that he was jammed against the gate. Two of the uniformed officers saw what was happening and came running over.

  “MacLeod, what the hell are you doing?”

  Colin was too busy trying to wipe off his pants on the grass to answer, but Black John shouted out.

  “Give us back our land. We won’t tolerate cock-boys any longer.”

  Wilson spoke into his coat again. Immediately, one of the prince’s bodyguards came out of the black house and ran over to us. The spectators watched curiously. An adventure indeed on a grey, ordinary day.

  “What’s happening?” asked the bodyguard. He was thirtyish and formidable.

  “These two toerags were about to douse the prince with piss.” Wilson had temporarily lost his cool.

  He was still holding Black John jammed against the gate and had twisted his arm up painfully through the bar. He’d break the wrist if necessary.

  “We’ll ask you to come with us.” The bodyguard never lost his polite, quiet voice, but I’d hardly ever heard a tone so chilling and powerful. In the meantime, I picked up the second bucket, which was now on our side of the gate, and carried it to the grass. To be safe, I emptied out the contents. Colin finally acknowledged me, but he didn’t look embarrassed or ashamed. Just arrogant.