A KEPT PROMISE
Rob took his boys into the forest and the hills and searched out the plants and herbs he wanted, and the three of them gathered the medicinals and brought them back, drying some and powdering others. He sat with his sons and taught them carefully, showing them each leaf and each flower. He told them about the herbs—which was used to cure the headache and which for cramp, which for fever and which for catarrh, which for bleeding nose and which for chilblains, which for quinsy and which for aching bones.
Craig Cullen was a spoonmaker and turned his craft toward the fashioning of covered wooden boxes in which the pharmacy herbs could be kept safe and dry. The boxes, like Craig’s spoons, were decorated with carved nymphs and sprites and wild creatures of every sort. Seeing them, Rob was inspired to draw some of the pieces that made up the Shah’s Game.
“Could you make something like these?”
Craig looked at him quizzically. “Why not?”
Rob drew likenesses of each piece and the checkered board. With very little guidance Craig carved everything, so that presently Rob and Mary once again spent some of their hours at a pastime taught him by a dead king.
Rob was determined to learn Gaelic. Mary owned no books but set out to teach him, beginning with the eighteen-letter alphabet. By now he knew what must be done to learn a strange language and all through the summer and autumn he labored, so that by early winter he was writing short sentences in the Erse and trying to speak it, to the amusement of the shepherds and his sons.
As he had supposed, winter there proved hard. The bitterest cold came just before Candlemas. After that was the time of the huntsmen, for snowy ground helped them track venison and fowl and hunt down catamounts and wolves that harried the flocks. In the evenings there were always people gathered in the hall in front of a great fire. Craig might be there whittling, others would sit and repair harness or accomplish whatever homely tasks could be done in warmth and company. Sometimes Ostric played his pipes. They made a famous woollen cloth at Kilmarnock, dying their best fleeces the colors of heather by steeping them with lichens picked from the rocks. They wove in privacy but congregated in the hall for waulking, the shrinking of the fabric. The wet cloth, which had been soaked in soapy water, was passed around the table while each woman pounded and rubbed it. All the while they sang waulking songs, and Rob thought that their voices and Ostric’s pipes made a singular sound.
The nearest chapel was a three-hour ride and Rob had believed it wouldn’t be difficult to avoid priests, but one day in his second spring in Kilmarnock there appeared a small, plump man with a tired smile.
“Father Domhnall! It is Father Domhnall!” Mary cried, and hastened to bid him welcome.
They clustered about him and greeted him warmly. He spent a moment with each, asking a question with a smile, patting an arm, dropping a word of encouragement—like a good earl walking among his churls, Rob thought sourly.
He came to Rob and looked him over. “So. You are Mary Cullen’s man.”
“Yes.”
“Are you a fisher?”
The question disconcerted him. “I fish for trouts.”
“I’d have wagered so. I would take you after salmon tomorrow in the morning,” he said, and Rob said he would go.
Next day they walked in gray light to a small, rushing river. Domhnall had brought two massive poles that were surely too heavy, and stout line and long-shanked feathered lures with barbs hidden treacherously in their handsome centers. “Like men I know,” Rob observed to the priest, and Domhnall nodded, regarding him curiously.
Domhnall showed him how to fling the lure and bring it back through the water in little surges that resembled the darting of a small fish. They did it again and again with no result, but Rob didn’t care, for he was lost in the rush of the water. Now the sun was up. High overhead he watched an eagle floating on nothing, and somewhere nearby he heard the cry of a grouse.
The big fish took his lure at the surface with a slash that sent a spout of water into the air.
It began to run upstream at once.
“You must go toward him or he’ll break the line or tear out the hook!” Domhnall shouted.
Rob was already splashing into the river, clattering after the salmon. Expending its first surge of strength the fish almost did him in, for he fell several times in the frigid water, following over the stony bottom and floundering in and out of deep pools.
The fish ran again and again, taking him up and down the river. Domhnall had been shouting instructions, but once Rob looked up at the sound of a splash and saw that Domhnall now had troubles of his own. He had hooked a fish and was in the river too.
Rob fought to keep the fish in the middle of the stream. Eventually the salmon seemed under his control, though it felt dangerously heavy at the end of his line.
Soon he was able to skid the feebly struggling fish—so big!—into shingled shallows. As he grasped the shank of the lure, the salmon gave one last convulsive leap and the hook tore free, bringing with it a strip of bloody tissue from within the fish’s throat. For a moment the salmon lay motionless on its side and then, as Rob saw a thick haze of blood rise darkly from its gills, it flipped into deep water and was gone.
He stood trembling and disgusted, for the blood cloud told him he had killed the fish, and now it had been wasted.
Moving more by instinct than out of hope, he walked downstream, but before he had taken half a dozen steps he saw a silvery patch in the water ahead and splashed toward it. He lost the pale reflection twice as the fish swam or was moved by the river. Then he saw he was right on top of it. The salmon was dying but not quite dead, pressed against the upstream side of a boulder by the strong current.
He had to immerse himself in the numbing water to take it in both arms and carry it to the bank, where he ended its pain with a rock. It weighed at least two stone.
Domhnall was just landing his fish, which wasn’t nearly as large.
“Yours is enough flesh for us all, eh?” he said. When Rob nodded, Domhnall returned his salmon to the river. He held it carefully to let the water do its work. The fins moved and waved as languorously as if the fish were not struggling to maintain its existence, and the gills began to pump. Rob saw the quiver of life run through the fish, and as he watched it move away from them and disappear into the current, he knew that this priest would be his friend.
* * *
They took off their sodden garments and spread them to dry, then lay near them on a huge sun-warmed rock.
Domhnall sighed. “Not like catching trouts,” he said.
“The difference between picking a flower and felling a tree.” Rob had half a dozen bleeding cuts on his legs from falling in the river, and innumerable bruises.
They grinned at one another.
Domhnall scratched his round little belly, white as any fish’s, and lapsed into silence. Rob had expected questions, but he perceived it was this priest’s style to listen intently and wait, a valuable patience that would make him a deadly opponent if Rob should teach him the Shah’s Game.
“Mary and I are not married in the Church. Do you know that?”
“I had heard something.”
“Well. We have been truly wed, these years. But it was a hand-held union.”
Domhnall grunted.
He told the cleric their story. He didn’t omit or make light of his troubles in London. “I would like you to marry us, but I must warn that perhaps I’ve been excommunicated.”
They dried lazily in the sun, considering the problem.
“If this auxiliary bishop of Worcester could have done, he would gloss it over,” Domhnall said. “Such an ambitious man would rather have a missing and forgotten brother than close kin scandalously driven from the Church.”
Rob nodded. “Suppose he could not cover it over?”
The priest frowned. “You have no sure proof of excommunication?”
Rob shook his head. “But it is possible.”
“Possible? I cannot run my ministry according to your fears. Man, man, what do your fears have to do with Christ? I was born in Prestwick. Since ordination I have never left this mountain parish and I expect I will be pastor here when I die. Other than yourself, never in all my life have I encountered anyone from London or from Worcester. I have never received a message from an archbishop or from His Holiness, but only from Jesus. Can you believe it is the will of the Lord that I not make a Christian family of the four of you?”
Rob smiled at him and shook his head.
All their lives the two sons would remember the wedding of their parents, and describe it to their own grandchildren. The Nuptial Mass in the Cullen hall was small and quiet. Mary had a dress of light gray stuff and wore a silver brooch and a roeskin belt studded with silver. She was a composed bride, but her eyes shone as Father Domhnall declared that ever more and in sanctified protection she and her children were irreversibly joined to Robert Jeremy Cole.
Thereafter Mary sent invitations for all her kinfolk to meet her husband. On the appointed day the MacPhees came west through the low hills and the Tedders crossed the big river and came through the clough to Kilmarnock. They came bearing wedding gifts and fruit cakes and game pies and casks of strong drink and the great meat-and-oats puddings they loved. At the holding, an ox and a bull were slowly turning on spits over open fires, and eight sheep and a dozen lambs, and numerous fowl. There was the music of harp, pipe, viol, and trump, and Mary joined in when the women sang.
All afternoon, during the athletic contests, Rob met Cullens and Tedders and MacPhees. Some he admired at once and others he did not. He tried not to study the male cousins, who were legion. Everywhere, men began to become drunk, and some tried to force the groom to join them. But he toasted his bride and his sons and their clan, and for the rest he put them off with an easy word and a smile.
That evening, while the roistering was still in high progress, he walked from the buildings, past the pens and away. It was a good night, starry but still not warm. He could smell the spice of the gorse, and as the sounds of the celebration faded behind him he heard the sheep and the nickering of a horse and the wind in the hills and the rushing of streams, and he fancied he could feel taproots emerging from the soles of his feet and pushing deep into the thin, flinty soil.