by Neil M. Gunn
‘Is it?’ said his father. ‘It was big enough in my day.’
‘Yes,’ answered Tom, ‘but it’s not big enough now with the jobs I have to do.’
‘What jobs?’
‘You know the jobs,’ said Tom.
‘You did not mention them to me,’ said his father in the same level tones, looking into the distance.
‘I was wanting,’ said Tom, coming to the point before his father’s voice would defeat him, ‘to put up a place at the end of the house.’
‘What sort of place?’
‘A wooden place. I could have my tools and do my jobs there. That would leave the barn free.’
‘Oh, I see,’ said his father, but it was as if he saw some motive or design far beyond the obvious and noted the fact in a dry mockery. His voice, however, held no emphasis.
Tom could not look at him. He had stated his case. He would hold himself there at whatever cost and wait for a definite answer.
He heard the shuffle of his father’s feet, the movement of his body. Tom turned his head. His father was walking away.
Tom went blindly into the barn and for a few moments struggled in the grip of a sheer physical paroxysm of anger. It was too much, too utterly unforgivable. He gripped a plank and sank his nails in the white wood. Anyone could see it was no good. No good giving in to this. It must be one way or the other. And now.
He allowed himself a few minutes to cool down and then walked up past the house to where the pick and shovel were lying. His mother came out at the kitchen door but he did not look at her, nor for that matter did she call him or give any visible sign. He did not know where his father was. He would no doubt find out soon enough!
Thud went the pickaxe and out shot the soil. His mind was working feverishly underneath the thudding sounds. If his father came up and said, ‘What’s this?’ he would look him straight in the face, right into his eyes, and say, ‘I told you.’ And if his father answered that he had not given his assent, then he, Tom, would widen his eyes and say, ‘But you said “I see”. I thought you meant it was all right.’ And they would look at each other, behind surface words, and Tom would wait, would not budge, until his father used definite words, stopping the work. He would force him to use definite words and so be done with the whole accursed business. Then he would throw down his pick. That would be an end of that. What would follow would follow.
He was working on a hole in line with the front wall of the house when he saw his father come round the lower gable-end. He tossed out the shovel and started on the pick, glimpsing his father from under his eyebrows. The old man went over towards the barn and stopped and examined the plough that lay by the wall, its coulter sharpened and ready for work. He bent down over the plough, jerking at something, slowly straightened himself and went into the barn. Tom swung the pick with all his strength. What was his father wanting in the barn? The chest of tools was shut but not locked. If his father lifted the lid he would see the two books, Huxley and Haeckel, as well as the pamphlets on Rationalism which Dougal had enclosed as packing for the clock. Would he dare lift it? Tom knew he would. It was his barn.
Tom worked with fury. If his father appeared in a minute it might be all right. He did not appear. Tom had a wild urge to drop the pick and walk down to the barn.
In a little while his father came out of the barn and, going to the plough, began to hammer at it. Tom swung his pick now in a wild derision. His father went back into the barn and stayed there. Tom felt that all this was being done deliberately, to torture him. He apprehended it, not vaguely, but in a piercing intuition.
His father came out and stood at the barn entrance, then crossed over to the door into the conjoint byre and stable. Perhaps he was going to take out the horse to start ploughing the stubble. By God, it was just the sort of thing he would do at that moment! The final and devastating thing to do!
Now Tom caught the movement of his mother’s shoulder in the kitchen door and knew in a flash that she had been standing there the whole time listening, peeping out unseen. With a tin dish in her hand she appeared and went down towards the byre. Gathering her eggs, by way of it! The henhouse was a black lean-to shed against the lower gable of the barn, but one of the hens laid away in the byre behind the grain barrel where the horse-feed was kept. So naturally she went to the byre, hesitating, however, in a listening moment at the door before going in.
Let them fight it out! thought Tom. Let them get on with it! The point of the pick sprang off a submerged boulder, just missed his shin bone in the narrow hole, and numbed the whole right foot in a glancing blow.
The numbness, the pain, took up his attention like an urgent companion, dissipating the weakness of excitement against his father and leaving him more formidable in himself. As he exploded at the pain, he turned down his sock and examined his ankle. It would probably swell, though the skin was not broken. He examined it carefully and for a long time. Let his father come on him now!
But though he lingered, thus engaged, his father did not come. His mother emerged from the byre door. One glance at her swithering body was enough to assure him that she had been overborne, had been turned out. He bent his head in the hole. When he looked up again, she had disappeared.
He went through the motion of spitting out of a dry mouth on his palm and gripped the shaft and swung it. Half an hour afterwards he saw his father coming up the wall of the house, walking slowly and deliberately like a man who has had a dram too many.
Tom bent to examine his ankle, needing the strength of an ally against this maddening mixture of weakness and fear which at once beset him and which he could not control. He pushed down his sock, but hardly saw his ankle, felt no pain.
There was a final white moment when his father looked up at him; then he went in at the kitchen door.
Tom worked on in a dogged, dumb endurance, keeping thought and feeling at bay. He had conquered, but the end was not yet. A certain calmness came over him, a tired fatal feeling of bitterness. He hung on to it, but when at last he stopped digging and went down towards the barn, his body dragged wearily as if it had been mauled.
He looked at the tool chest, lifted the lid. At least nothing had been purposely disordered. Tom tried to think this out but could make little of it. It might be against his father’s dignity to let Tom see that he had been peeping into the tool chest’s private property.
The father had the all-knowing power to gather information and hold it against the day of final judgement. His restraint held a cunning yet terrifying quality. It could break a fellow’s spirit. But it would never break Tom’s. Never! Not on this earth!
His mother darkened the door. ‘I told him,’ she said, ‘you were going to start ploughing tomorrow.’
The whisper in her presence irritated him and he turned away to the bench, his eyes roving over it as though looking for something.
‘Tom, will you start tomorrow?’ she pleaded.
‘If I can get Norman’s horse,’ he answered indifferently.
‘Oh that’s good!’ she muttered, like one given an unexpected present, and off she went.
The ploughing was a great relief, and as he looked down the gleaming furrows of black soil, straight enough for a ploughing match, fine pleasure sharpened his spirit, a loneliness that was a near friendliness of the earth, of the flighting and alighting gulls, a wake of gulls white as blown foam, with the inevitable one or two black rooks amongst them. The work would normally have been heavy drudgery, but now out here in the open field it had somehow a rare freedom. And more than once, on returning to work after a meal and finally as he paused to look over the black furrows that lapped the little grey dikes, he had been caught up by a feeling of great happiness, light and delicate, a stillness and a dancing. Where this came out of, or how or why it came, there was neither knowing nor desire to know. It was there, like that curious stilled laughter which he came to find in bushes or outcrops of grey rock or tumbling green hillocks or wild flowers nodding now and then. It was not in them, of course.
They were inanimate. By an understandable illusion it was communicated by him to them. Naturally. Of course. These ‘explanations’ – how amusing! How easy! Worth a laugh on their own account. What a solemnity of importance man had achieved!
‘I finished the low ley,’ he said after supper. ‘Norman is coming for our horse tomorrow.’
His father did not speak. It was a long-standing arrangement between Norman and himself, and while the dry weather held it was as well to have a shot at getting the heavy ground of both crofts ploughed. They had always suited each other’s convenience and more or less kept evenly abreast of the work.
On the following afternoon, Tom resumed his digging at the end of the house and felt for the first time a confidence in what he was doing. His father could have no real reason for interfering now. But he remained uneasy until supper was over and nothing had been said. The next afternoon he worked with a will, and before Norman was temporarily finished with their horse, the uprights were in position and some planking on the roof. But he had not nearly enough wood. However, he left the work and started ploughing again. One afternoon he saw the minister call and at supper his mother said to him, ‘The minister wants you to take two ton of coal for him from the town.’
‘All right,’ said Tom quietly. ‘When does he want it?’
‘As soon as you can go. He said he did not want to interfere with the ploughing if he could help it.’
Tom was silent for a moment. At this season how could the minister help interfering with the ploughing? ‘I better go tomorrow then – in fairness to Norman.’
His mother looked at the father, but the father said nothing.
Two loads a day were all he could manage. But he so arranged his loads that on the last one he carried the planking he needed. On bringing home the horse and cart in the evening, he stopped by the gable-end and quietly unloaded his wood behind the new erection, taking care that the boards did not slap together.
That evening he waited for Janet in the hollow, but she did not come. After an hour, he slipped along the hillside and stood gazing towards the back of her house. All was dark and dead down there. Growing chilled, he returned to the hollow. But though he waited about the bleak hillside for a long time, there came no sign from her.
In the morning he went round to see Norman, who was a jobbing stone mason, over sixty years of age. As a young man he had become an apprentice mason to a firm of builders in the town. On the day he drew his first pay as a journeyman, his elder brother, Iain, got into trouble over a fight which the fond but cantankerous mother of the lad whom Iain had laid out insisted, against all local custom, should be investigated by the police. Iain disappeared and when next they heard of him he had joined the soldiers. Two years after that, the father had died, and Norman had come back to run the croft and look after his mother and two younger sisters.
Norman was a pleasant decent man, with a twinkling greeting in his eyes and the easy-going ways that made young fellows treat him as a companion. His face was thickset with a dark whisker.
‘Man,’ he now answered Tom, ‘I must get some stone from the quarry for a little job they want done at Taruv. I have the stones ready and I’d need to cart them today and tomorrow. It’s a pity, but I sort of promised.’
‘In that case I’ll yoke Prince and come along with you.’
‘No, no, that would be too much –’
‘It’ll shorten the time you need your own horse and that’s a good enough excuse for me!’
Tom went home and in the kitchen explained casually that he was going to give a day to Norman. It would mean he would have both horses for the ploughing all the sooner. His mother would clearly have liked to have told him it was a neighbourly thing to do, but she waited for her husband who said nothing.
Tom started off with the air of being on holiday and in the quarry Norman and himself worked away quietly, loading the carts. Norman asked him how the new building was getting on and Tom answered, ‘Slowly but steadily!’ Norman glanced at him and paused to take a snuff. ‘You’re doing fine,’ he said, nodding pleasantly. ‘Once a craftsman always a craftsman, and you need some building of the kind. How I could have got on myself without the extra bit that came in from the mason-work I sometimes wonder. But it’s made life very comfortable for us. This work is a change, too, it takes you out of yourself.’
Tom agreed and presently he found himself saying, ‘In fact I thought of turning it into a bit of a shop with the ironmongery and odds and ends you don’t get readily here.’ He smiled, as though amused. ‘I mean, with the sort of stuff I could handle and mend and all that. I could get my material then at wholesale price. I’m not like you – with the stuff of your trade lying to your hand!’
‘That’s very true,’ answered Norman, ‘very true indeed.’ He looked thoughtfully at Tom. ‘Have you mentioned it to your father?’
‘This is the first time I have mentioned it to anyone,’ answered Tom, looking at the stone he was about to lift.
Norman bent down and gripped the stone with him and together they put it on the cart.
When they had the carts loaded, Norman hitched Prince to the tail of his own cart, and then Tom and himself walked along together, leaving the horses to their own pace.
‘Your father is a fine man,’ said Norman, ‘a fine conscientious man. I’ve known him all my life. In our young days there wasn’t much schooling in it, but your father was one of a little group who was always keen on the learning. There was no Board of Education Act and High School in it then. Your father was always neat-handed, and he could make the finest goose quills for writing that ever you saw. I sometimes think he would have liked to have been a teacher. I don’t know. I was never a great one at the writing myself, though I must say that when I had to sign my name in the town I was proud to be able to do it.’
Norman went on talking in this discursive way, recalling old days, as if he had quite forgotten Tom’s father. On the way back to the quarry which was no great distance from Taruv (it lay at the base of the shoulder of the hill to their left as they entered the Glen just after leaving the village) Norman said, ‘Man, I remember the curious effect that Iain’s joining the soldiers had on my father and mother. They looked on it as a great disgrace, of course. My mother was very upset. You would think she was never going to get over it. She would greet to herself. She went clean throughither for a while. But my father went quiet. To tell the truth there was a while I didn’t care for going home over the Sabbath. But when they heard from Iain, it was wonderful how my mother came round. But my father seemed to have lost all interest in him. There was something about it, about the whole thing, the fight and the soldiers, that somehow got the better of him, whatever it was. I can remember well the awful feeling of disgrace. You would almost imagine that the blood spilt in the fighting was red murder itself. A queer feeling of guilt. I never quite got to the bottom of it. And I won’t go the length of saying it hastened my father’s end. But he undoubtedly grew careless about himself, about getting wettings and that, and it was no good saying anything to him. He just paid no attention, as if he hadn’t heard you, and talked about something else. Congestion of the lungs took him in the end, and he went away as quietly as he had lived over the last while.’
Presently Norman said, ‘It’s queer when a thing gets the better of you. That’s one thing a fellow has to watch. When you’re in health you can break yourself of it, but, man, when you’re ill it’s not so easy then. Your father is a sick man, Tom, boy, and you should take him carefully.’
‘It’s not always easy,’ said Tom, flushing slightly, for they were both finding the subject difficult and embarrassing, ‘when he won’t say a thing one way or the other.’
‘You can do little about that,’ answered Norman. ‘You go ahead quietly, keeping your eye open. And look here, my boy, if you need money, just ask me. But I would like that always to be between ourselves. I haven’t a great deal, but I have plenty, and you’ll be starting in a simple way.’
> Tom was deeply touched by these words. But more than the offer of money was the sense of comfort and companionship that came from their thus working together away from home. The day seemed large and long, and at the end of it he felt refreshed and pleasantly tired as if he had indeed been on a holiday.
He would have liked now to have stayed with his parents until they ‘took the books’, but it was long agreed between Janet and himself that if she could not come on a set night, she would do her best to appear the following night. At first she had let it be understood that her difficulty was due to chance visitors or other social cause, but now he knew of her secret trouble with her mother and this not only made thought of her more tender but gave him a strengthening assurance of her dependence on him.
As he got up, his mother said, ‘Surely you are not going out tonight?’ It was a hidden appeal not to endanger things that now were shaping well.
‘I have got to go,’ was all he could say.
‘I would have thought you had a heavy enough day as it was.’ She spoke as if thinking only of him, but he heard the dismay in her voice.
He hesitated, not knowing what to answer, wondering indeed for a moment if he would stay.
‘We want no-one here,’ came his father’s voice, ‘who does not believe in worshipping God. If he believes, let him stay. If not, he can go.’
The cold penetrating voice was a rod that pierced the room. Before these words, all other words fled from the air about Tom’s mouth and he turned slowly for the door in a heavy awkwardness. Mindless he pushed on into the new darkness and was still numb as he came by the barn.
It had gone beyond anger now, beyond rage. His body was quiet, his hands a little unreal. He listened to all things, but heard nothing. He went into the barn, over to the bench, and stood there. Presently he was sitting in the darkness.
His father’s logic penetrated, like a rod of grey metal. It was accurate and remorseless.
Believe in God. Had he ever believed in God? Tom saw that he had never had any interest in God, that he had always dodged Him, as a boy dodged his schoolmaster. Dodged all thought of Him, so that life be freed from that fear or terror. And in Glasgow, with Dougal – they had dodged the fear out of existence, so that ordinary life could be carried on and opened up and enjoyed.