It wasn't the death of the ewe that seemed strange that night. Like all Shetland lads, I had slaughtered sheep, swine, fowl, and even whales stranded helpless on the shore. But those killings had been with a purpose, kept at arm's length by the quick stroke of a sharp blade. Fast, direct, deliberate.
I looked first to Gutcher, then Aunt Alice, and finally John, but none would meet me eyes. Gutcher settled in by the fire, fishing line gathered in his lap. Aunt Alice stood staring at the floor for a moment, her long, bluish fingers still covering her mouth. Then she let out a faint gasp, reached for her knitting from the basket in the corner, and sat down.
That was when I saw John snatch the remaining piece of cod from the table and slip out the door to the byre.
When Peter Peterson burst across the threshold, a rush of wind came with him, blowing out the lamps and causing a change in air pressure that sucked another blast of wind down the vent in the roof and across the fire.
"Aye!" he cried, slamming his forehead on one of the rafters as he made his way through the cloud of ash. As the debris settled, his hunched frame towered over Daa's. "Where is she?" he growled, searching the room with his eyes.
Daa scratched his head and shrugged. "If you're meanin' yer lass Ann, who's always moonin' over young Christopher here, we haven't seen her yet today."
Mr. Peterson's face turned a deep purple as he raised his fist in the air. "It's the ewe I'm after, you fool, not me Ann!" he roared, spit flying as he spoke.
Daa told me to, I reasoned, the warmth of the ewe's breath still in me palm. He couldn't do it himself. A rush of bile rose in me throat as I backed slowly into the shadows of the far wall. Snuffed her out, I had. All for him.
Quietly as I could, I kicked open the door to the byre and disappeared inside. It being March, there were at least two feet of straw bound with peat mold and muck on the floor, making headroom scarce, even for a boy me size. By locking the cows inside for the winter, we collected the muck we needed to mix with seaweed and spread on the fields come spring. It was wet and heavy, with a stench so powerful it made me eyes water.
Grabbing the box lantern hanging from the rafters, I made out Catherine and Victoria. They were hovering in the corner, the now orphaned lambs weak in their arms. The harnesses for the ponies we no longer had swayed in the wind from the hook by the door. They banged against the wall near the shadows of the three emaciated cows leaning against the driftwood slats that divided their stalls. Their fodder had run out weeks before, and the bones of their once grand frames pierced sharply through their coats. They had survived near starvation before, but this time I had me doubts. When they could no longer stand, we would hoist them by ropes to keep them up-a gruesome sight I had already witnessed three other winters of me short life.
"I hear Mr. Peterson's voice," Catherine whispered, cradling the wet ram lamb in her arms. "Come to collect his ewe, has he?"
"Aye," I said, spitting on the floor.
"What did Daa do?"
"Hid her-in the ben."
"Lor'-she must be frantic looking for her lambs. Seems strange we're not hearin' her through the wall."
I thought of her limp body lying in me sisters' bed. "Resting, she is," I said. "All worn out, I expect."
"What will we do if Mr. Peterson comes in the byre?" Victoria asked. "There's no place to hide."
I shrugged, looking quickly about me. "Where's John? He'll know."
"Slipped out the back door," Catherine said. "Throwing another linksten over the thatch, I suspect. We'll be lucky if any of the roof survives this storm."
I remember the wind being so strong, and I so thin, that it was all I could do to push the back door open with the lantern in me hand. I pushed wildly through the blinding sheets of sea spray lifted from the waves and dragged ashore, calling for me brother. Pools of water had formed around our croft house, and before I knew it me rivlins, the sealskin shoes we Shetlanders laced below our ankles, were soaked clear through.
Snuff her out! Daa's words turned over and over in me head. I paused by the wall of stones we called a planticrub, built to protect me late Midder's cabbages from the unforgiving summer wind. It was there, as I thought of her kind, warm hands I'd never touch again, that me tears began to mix with the rain dripping down me forehead. Then I retched on the mud. She, the one person who protected us from Daa's rages. Who, with but a light touch of her fingers to our cheeks, let us know we would survive another day.
I thought of her grave, a common mound next to William's behind the Kirk-our family, like most, too poor to pay for a proper gravestone.
"Midder, what have I done?" I cried into the storm.
I was hungry-so hungry. We all were. And now Daa had gotten us into another one of his messes. In this of all years, when we hadn't even the smuggling to rely on.
Ah, yes. The smuggling. In the eyes of the Crown, Wallace Marwick was a merchant of the highest stature, known for his trade in dried fish, timber, and coal. But he hadn't become the wealthiest man in Shetland by following all the rules. With the high duties charged by Her Majesty on imported items such as gin and tobacco, he found ways to hide them in his trading ships. Then, after officially registering the legitimate goods with the Customs House in Lerwick, he'd cruise to our end of the island to bring ashore the rest. In fact, there wasn't a crofter-man, woman, child-who hadn't hauled at least a cask or two of smuggled Dutch gin in the dead of night from a Marwick packet, and me family was no exception. Even Reverend Sill, the annoyingly pious leader of the Kirk and Daa's greatest enemy, was known to chide his parishioners not for gulping a dram of smuggled gin, but rather for not blessing it before it was swallowed.
Trouble was, last September, while barrels were being unloaded in the middle of the night, one of Marwick's packets was seized by Her Majesty's Revenue Men-the officers whose job it is to see that the Crown's import duties are paid. And when the Revenue Men found the barrels loaded with tobacco, Marwick's captain was arrested and sent to Lerwick Prison.
"There'll be a dry spell ahead," Daa had warned, "while mighty Marwick defends his good name." And how right Daa had been. Already it had been months since any of us had caught sight of a Marwick packet hovering in the distance, the much-welcomed lights flashing twice from her bow at nightfall letting us know a shipment was coming ashore.
I dropped me face in me hands, knowing what was ahead. From May through September, John, Daa, and the other men of the parish were bound to Marwick, fishing cod with horsehair lines and baited hooks in the deep seas west of the island. Day in and day out, recording their catch by slicing barbels from the end of each fish's chin and collecting them in a tin box, knowing all the while that half the catch was Marwick's as rent for our croft, and the rest sold to and cured by Marwick at the price of his choosing. The cod banks having failed three out of the last five years, any hope of paying down even part of our debt had long since disappeared.
"Thief, he is," John muttered each spring when Daa signed for the lines, hooks, and other provisions before heading to sea. "Makes enough to line his own pockets while bleedin' the rest of us dry! Marwick's store, Marwick's prices, even if you can find better in Scalloway."
It had been generations since any crofter on Marwick land had seen cash for his pay, but Wallace Marwick wasn't the only reason for John's hate of the sea. Our brother William was also to blame. Two years before, there had been talk of a growing herring market. "They sell it cheap in the West Indies-feed it to the slaves," John had told me, his freckled face beaming one day after returning from Skeld. "Last year the demand was so high they couldn't keep up, so Lerwick merchants are taking on new men. They say after a year you can earn enough to outfit your share of a sloop!"
But you had to be fourteen to sign on, and John was two months too young. So it was William who found a spot on a half-decker out of Lerwick, and the family rejoiced. Then the early fishing failed, and in September, there was the Great Gale. All hands were lost on more than twenty boats, and none of us speaks of the herring anymore.
From that day on, John's fear of the deep waters was like no other.
It was a crack of thunder that startled me back to the present, and when I looked up, a streak of lightning slashed the sky, showing a strip of thatch on our roof blowing like the flag atop a mast. Then I turned to the scattald and scanned the blackness until another flash caught what I thought could be the outline of John racing in the direction of Culswick Broch.
Culswick Broch-our broch-was a tumbled fortress from ancient times perched on the hill above our croft. There are loads like it in Shetland, built by a mysterious civilization that had long since disappeared. Once as tall as eight men standing one atop the other, it was a massive structure of pinkish-red stone with views for miles in every direction: Straight ahead, the looming rock island that is Foula. To the north, the neighboring parishes of Walls, Aithsting, and Sandness. To the southwest, far across the North Sea waters, the faint outline of Fair Isle.
For thousands of years Culswick Broch had towered atop our hill, its roof finally collapsing when Gutcher was but a lad. What was left was a crumbling, five-foot-high, circular wall I couldn't see over and an enormous triangular lintel stone still in place above its only entrance.
Through sheets of rain and sea spray I sprinted. I scaled the hill dike around the grazing land startling clusters of sheep hovering in the storm, then continued up the rough, drenched path I had traveled so many times I could have done so blind. At the broch's wee entrance I shoved the lantern ahead of me and scrambled on hands and knees through an icy puddle of scree.
There, just inside the wall and illuminated through the driving rain by the weak light of me lantern, stood John, pulling something from a crack between two of the stones.
He snapped his head around at the light and slipped a hand quickly behind him.
"Chris!" he said, his eyes darting left and then right. He was still breathing heavily from his sprint up the hill. "Are you alone?"
I laughed when I saw him, his head just inches from the mysterious carving of the tree on one of the stones of the wall, remembering a time not long before when I had surprised him in that very spot, his lips pressed flat against Maggie Moncrieff's.
"Don't be daft. Do you think anyone else would be out in a gale such as this?"
Rain pelted down me forehead as I glanced from his face to the arm that he held behind his back.
John stared for a moment and then shrugged. "Well, you might as well know." The dim light from the lantern caught a glint in his eyes as he brought his hand forward. "I finally found it."
I gasped, having seen the wee caramel-colored pouch only two other times in me life.
"Took me five years of waiting and watching to finally figure out where the Ol' Cod stashed it."
John shifted his weight from left to right as he ran his fingers through his dripping yellow hair.
It was the pouch that held something no other crofter had, as far as I knew-coins. I had no idea how many, only that the family was forbidden to ever speak of it, so fearful was Daa that it would be confiscated to cover his debts. I had seen it two years before when he, with a scowl, pulled it from his pocket to pay Andrew Johnson, the smithy in Skeld, for repairing the tuskhar we used to cut the peat. Then again, four months back, on the night Midder and our wee brother Michael died, when he silently paid the midwife who had failed to save them.
Daa never trusted a soul with where it was hidden, so it was only fitting John had taken it to the broch, the one place Daa's stiff leg kept him from venturing. John and I knew every stone of that place, every curve of every rock. And when William was still with us-dear, lovely William, who would laugh at the drop of a hat, and smile so deeply at the littlest of things that his elfin cheeks raised clear to his eyes-the three of us had pretended it was our fort and we were the last mighty warriors of Shetland. The wonderfully strange picture of a tree carved on a smooth stone next to where John stood we fancied the symbol of our kingdom. Or, perhaps, a secret crest of valor. Imagine-a tree on the treeless island of Shetland! No other broch could claim such a thing as that. Some of the branches on the bottom right had been mysteriously left off, as if, we secretly guessed, its maker had been captured before completing his work.
What I didn't know that night was how close to the truth we were.
Lifting the lantern as John fondled the pouch, I caught a glint in his lively hazel eyes. The eyes that locked onto yours, no matter who you were, and held you fast.
"Last Tuesday I saw the crafty miser creep down from the ladder by the harnesses in the byre when he thought no one was looking. Next chance I got I stood on that same ladder and prodded among the turf above those rafters. Hah!" he shouted through the wind, his smile growing dark. "I'll not risk me life another year at sea, belly aching with hunger, and him hiding a pouch of coins!"
He turned to the scattald below.
"All that talk about us Robertsons being better than the others. Boasting of his ties to the English just because he thinks that proves his ties to royalty. Chris-have you ever wondered why you and our sisters have no friends?"
I thought of how Jeremy Williamson had come by to see me. And Nicol Magnuson. "Not our kind," Daa had warned. "I'll not have the likes of those families on our croft."
The carving of the tree above his shoulder, John clenched his fists as he spoke, his words roaring above the moan of the gale.
I had never seen him in such a state.
"Look at us!" he said, rounding on me. "Clothes in tatters, no flesh to speak of on our bones, and him with this!" He shook the pouch in me face, then started to pace. "The man's not right in his mind. You must know that! How many a Shetlander risked his neck hauling casks of gin in the dead of night for him to skim off a cut of their share? Him and his years of side deals with Marwick-we know he never gave the others what they deserved. Here, in me hand, is proof that Daa, through years of cheating, lying, and scheming, has enough to get us out! He had it all along! Do you know, Chris, how much is in here?"
I shrugged. Not only had I never touched a coin, I hadn't any idea what a pound or even a shilling could buy.
"Enough to outfit our share of a sloop for an entire season!" John closed his fist tightly around the leather, steam coming from his mouth into the chill of the storm. "We could begin to escape the clutches of Marwick! But no-Daa thinks like all the dim-witted Shetlanders: Better the known evil of the merchants than the unknown of breaking free. They've been waiting for generations, but no one ever dares! Lor', Chris," he bellowed, "don't you ever dream of being free?"
I shuddered, watching his wild eyes and swallowing hard. Did I want to be free? Did I yearn for a life beyond the struggles of the croft? "Me belly aches, John," I said quietly. "I think, perhaps, I'm too hungry to think of freedom."
But so much in a fury was me brother that night that he went on as if I hadn't spoken.
"Now, if it was Knut Blackbeard's coins, or Gutcher's, or some other gullible soul's," he muttered, "well then, of course, he'd find plenty of ways to spend it. But Hell itself will freeze before he parts with his own shillings to feed his own family's bellies and save us from the talons of Marwick. The way I see it, with the smuggling dropped off and Daa starting all this trouble with that Peterson ewe, I either leave with the pouch or starve by May."
"Leave?" His words hit like a stone to me gut. "We're past due on the rent! And the fishing starts next month! You know I'm not strong enough to pull in those cod lines meself!"
As he started to turn away, I surprised us both by dropping the lantern and grabbing his shoulders. "Wallace Marwick owns us, John! We've so much debt we'll be fishing the deep waters our entire lives before we pay him back. He has no other use for us. We'll be tossed from the croft by summer-added to the list of paupers-left to the charity of the Kirk!"
I knew-we all knew-about our neighbor Jeemie Black, his five younger sisters, and seven cousins. Father and uncles lost at sea, the family split apart. The Kirk shuffling them from croft to croft to work for a place to sleep and a portion of what little food the families in our parish could spare.
A crack of thunder shook the hill as our eyes locked, wind pulling across the rain-drenched stones that surrounded us. Then John ripped me arms from his shoulders and shoved me aside, saying words I never wanted to hear: "You're just like the rest of 'em!"
And for the first time in me life I feared him. Until he did what he always did when anyone challenged him-he started to laugh. Long and hard, throwing back his freckled face and closing his eyes as if I had just told him the most wonderful tale he had heard in months.
"Chris," he said, eyes ablaze, "let's not forget what you've done tonight."
"I-what have I-"
"Ya just murdered Pete Peterson's prize ewe, me peerie brother!"
Then he grabbed firmly to me shoulder, brows furrowed, and leaned in.
"Stolen property, that was! Why, should Sheriff Nicolson find out, you'll be starting a very long stay in Lerwick Prison. I've seen the place-deep inside the mighty stone walls of Fort Charlotte, perched high above Lerwick Harbor. They say that those that get locked up are never seen again. No, instead of worrying about me, you best make a plan for yourself before Peterson finds that dead ewe in our sisters' bed."
It wasn't until that moment that the horror of what I had done began to sink in. I thought of the caaing whales we spotted on occasion in the voes near our croft. Sleek, powerful creatures, some more than twenty feet long, all foolishly wedded to only one leader; something clever islanders had long ago discovered. By setting out silently, ten or twelve boats at a time, crofters find the leader and then suddenly go at him, hooting and hollering, waving pitchforks and brooms-until, in utter panic, he charges for the shore, the rest of his school blindly following by the hundreds. And there the marvelously sleek creatures lie, helplessly stranded on the beach, only to be slaughtered-flinched and boiled-the head blubber especially prized for lamp oil, the carcasses left to rot.
I, too, had followed blindly. Followed me Daa. And I had followed him straight to the Devil himself.
I opened me right hand wide, still feeling deep in me flesh what, just a short while ago, I had done. "But Daa-he needed me to. You were there." And somehow, I thought to meself, I had needed to be needed. Needed by him.
Rain dripped into me eyes as I shifted weight from one foot to the other. In me head Daa's voice screamed, "Snuff-her-out!"
"Try and tell that to the Sheriff Court in Lerwick," John said, laughing. "Christopher Robertson, when will you learn? Daa has never cared for anyone above himself. Never."
"He loved our Midder." The words tumbled out before I could stop them. I thought of the way Daa had looked at her from across the room. How he had so often walked past her as she stood at the fire, letting his hand touch her cheek ever so lightly.
"Hah! Did you even see him shed a tear the night she and wee Michael took their last breath? Ever see him visit her grave?"
I thought of that endless night. Of him sitting before her, his eyes vacant as her chest lay still. How he had slowly risen to his feet and walked out the door, gone for days without so much as a word.
"The man wasn't about to commit a crime so dark himself!" John continued. "Not a tenth-generation 'Robertson,' all convinced the entire island owes him their firstborn. The same man who talked his best friend, Knut Blackbeard, into spendin' six months in prison for the crime he committed! Certainly not when he could get some other luckless soul-his youngest son no less-to do the deed."
It was then, as I stared into me beloved brother's darting hazel eyes-the eyes I had grown to trust above all others since the passing of William-that I remembered something me Midder had said when I was just a wee boy of six or seven, but had never forgotten.
"Christopher," she had said, in a hushed tone, while we were planting cabbages, "take care with your brother John."
She had looked down as she spoke, working the earth with red, chapped hands, never meeting me eyes with hers. "For I fear," she continued, and then hesitated, "there are times when his honor is not as it should be."
Midder wit we called it. Words of truth passed down by those women much wiser than we. I remembered looking at the soft skin of her cheeks and the wisps of reddish-blond hair blowing across her eyes, puzzled by what had prompted her to say such a thing about the older brother I idolized. Not long afterward some of our butter and oat stores had gone missing, and I wondered if perhaps John had been responsible. But when, a few days later, I found a time when me Midder and I were alone and asked what she had meant, she quickly shook her head.
She looked first left and then right, her cheeks turning ashen. "Never would I have said such a thing about me own sweet bairn!"
From that day on she took great pains never to be alone with me, as if fearful I'd ask again. As if fearful of betraying the son she adored. And in the last moments before her heart stopped beating the night she failed in giving birth to wee Michael, it was John's hand she clutched, not mine, pressing it close to her heaving chest while I stood stiffly at her side. As I hovered silently, frozen in place, blackness and despair seeping into me heart when we knew all hope of saving her was gone, I listened in agony as John told her he loved her and tenderly stroked her fevered brow.
The rain on John's face shimmered as another wretched branch of lightning ripped through the sky. I glanced suddenly at the pouch. "And what's to keep you from Lerwick Prison?" I asked.
He laughed, playfully pressing the wee sack of coins to his cheek. "Oh, dunna worry about me. I haven't stolen anything. Only borrowing for a spell. The Ol' Cod doesn't even know it's missing."
"He'll find out, soon enough."
"Aye. But by then I'll be long gone. From what I hear, an English schooner was blown off course last night near Skeld Voe. On its way back from Bergen. Loaded with timber. Angus told me of it this morning."
I wasn't sure who I feared more: John's friend Angus Moncrieff or Daa. Angus was bigger than any lad in Culswick, and mostly because he had so effective a right jab, even his Daa couldn't keep him from stealing the food from his own plate. He was a tall, sullen brute of a boy, distinguishable from quite a distance by cheeks pocked with red pimples and a line of thick black eyebrows, which extended, uninterrupted, across his forehead. And though the rest of our family had no friends that met with Daa's approval, Angus and John had been nearly inseparable since the Moncrieffs settled in Culswick from Bressay Isle five years before.
I knew there was little doubt the report of a wreck was true. With its treacherous winds and jagged shoreline, the west coast of Shetland had always been a graveyard for ships. Most of us considered a wreck of good-quality cargo a gift, and though no one admitted to praying for a wreck, the island being treeless and of few resources led many to pray that, should such a wreck happen, the good Lord would direct it to a nearby shore.
John stepped back, continuing to toss the pouch from one hand to the other. "This gale will finish the schooner off for sure, even in a voe as protected as Skeld. They'll be desperate to unload the timber. I'll use the coins to buy what I can, and then resell to Marwick for a tidy profit. Then it's off to America I'll go. With enough in me pockets to start anew."
"America?" I gasped, the thought so preposterous-so utterly foreign to everything we knew-that I was sure he was joking.
"Aye! Where a crofter such as me can have a say in his future. And be free of the likes of Marwick and his kind forever!"
I was speechless, me mind drifting to William, sinking deeper and deeper with no line to grasp. Then, suddenly, I shouted through the wind what was clawing at me insides. "And when you've made your profit-before you leave-you'll return the coins? You'll come back for us?"
"Count on it," John mumbled, not meeting me eyes as he spoke.
Then he grabbed the lantern as casually as he had snatched the last piece of cod from the table earlier that evening and playfully slapped me on the back.
"For now, you and Daa have a ewe's body to get rid of and no time to waste. I'll sneak by the croft to see if Peterson's gone before I'm off. Keep a lookout-two flashes from below means it's safe to come down."
I nodded, rain dripping from me face. Then I suddenly grabbed his arm, me nails digging through his heavy, wet gansey. I tried not to sound desperate. "Please, John. You're our only hope."
"Aye, Brother," he said with a wink, breaking free of me grip and scrambling up and over the crumbled broch wall. "And there's nothing going to stand in me way tonight."