Inside I was as icy as I was cold on the outside. But not so numb that I couldn’t sense the fear that still hung in a pall over the lumber camp. I didn’t go far before I pulled the horse off the track and into the woods to tie her up to a tree.
I had thought long and hard about Michaél’s final words to me. You owe me, Scotsman. I owed him money, yes. The cash he had loaned me on Grosse Île to pay the keep of Catrìona Macdonald’s children. I had been going to pay it back out of my wages. But I knew that’s not what he meant. I knew, too, what I had to do. And I knew it was wrong. But Michaél was right. I owed him.
I suppose it must have been about midnight when I sneaked back into the camp. There was no light anywhere. Not a soul stirring. These men worked hard, played hard, and slept the sleep of the dead. There was a new moon in the sky, a sliver of light to guide me as I drifted like a ghost between the long sheds until I found the one where I knew the French slept. The doors were never locked, and the only fear I had was that this one would creak in the silence of the night and waken men from their slumbers. I needn’t have worried. It swung open soundlessly, and I slipped inside.
It was profoundly dark here, and I had to wait until my eyes accustomed themselves to what little moonlight fell through the windows before I moved along between the rows of bunk beds looking for the big, bearded face of The Bear.
His bed was second from the end, the lower bunk. The man above him was breathing gently, purring like a cat, one arm hanging over the edge of his bed. The Bear himself was lying on his back, snoring like the wild boar we hunted in the woods. He slept deep, without a conscience, without a second thought for the life he had taken so gratuitously that day. Of the seconds, minutes, hours, days, months, years of accumulated experience that had made the man who was Michaél O’Connor. Flawed, yes. But a man of generous spirit and good humour, whose very existence he had erased from the face of this earth in the flash of a blade.
I felt anger and grief bubbling up inside me and knelt down beside his bald head. If I were caught, they would kill me for sure. But in that moment I didn’t care. I had one thought, one single purpose.
I drew out my hunting knife and clamped my left hand over the big man’s mouth as I drew the blade of it across his throat with all my strength. His eyes opened wide in an instant. Shock, pain, fear. But I had severed both the carotid artery and the jugular, as well as his windpipe, and the life fairly pumped out of him as his heart fought desperately to feed blood to his brain.
I clamped both hands over his face as I felt his hands grab my wrists, and summoning every ounce of strength in my body held him fast. His legs kicked feebly, and his eyes turned towards mine. I wanted him to see me. I wanted him to know who had killed him and why. I wanted to spit in his face, just as he had spat on Michaél as he lay bleeding on the ground.
But all I did was fix him in my gaze, and I saw in his eyes that he knew he was lost. The fight went out of him in a matter of seconds, and it was as if I were back on the Langadail estate, watching the life ebb away from the stag whose throat I had cut. His eyes clouded and he was gone. His whole body limp, his grip on my wrists slackening and falling away.
There was a huge amount of blood soaking into the blanket across his chest and staining my hands red. I wiped them off on his pillow and put away my knife, then stood to look down on his ugly, lifeless face before turning away to lose myself in the darkness.
Debt paid.
I have walked the horse through the night to put as much distance between the camp and myself as possible before they find the bastard. But I have stopped here, somewhere deep in the forest, now that first light has come. Not just to rest the horse, but to light a fire and warm my bones. I have never felt this cold, ever, and it is hard to hold my pen without my fingers trembling.
But I think the cold comes from inside, from the Arctic wastes that are my soul. I would never have believed it possible that I could take the life of another human being in cold blood. But cold it was, and calculated, and the only thing I regret is that Michaél is no longer with me.
I arrived home this morning. Rode through the village just before dawn, with Michaél over the back of my horse. He was frozen solid.
The cabin was bleak and cold when I got there, but pretty much as we had left it. I don’t think anyone has been in it during the four months we have been away. There’s nothing to steal anyway. The notice advertising jobs with the East Canada Lumber Company was lying on the table where Michael had left it, and I looked at it with a kind of rage inside me. That fate should have dealt us such a tragic hand. I could remember him returning with it from the Gould village store. Had he not chanced upon it that day and suggested it as a way of earning some cash during the winter months, he would still have been alive. We sow the seeds of our own destruction without even realising it.
I lit a fire and made some tea, to thaw out and steel myself for the job ahead. The Frenchman’s blood was still on my hands. Turned almost black now. I washed it off in ice-cold water, changed my clothes and lifted the pickaxe we had used to dig up roots, then led my horse off through the trees as the sun rose and angled its first warm light between the branches overhead.
It took nearly half an hour to reach Michaél’s plot of land, the notches he had made still there on the trees at the four corners of it. Somewhere near its centre I found a clear area big enough for my purposes and tested the ground. It was rock-hard, still frozen. And I knew it was going to be a long hard job.
After the first eighteen inches the ground began to soften as I broke through the permafrost. But it had taken me over two hours to get there, and it was maybe another three hours before the grave was dug. I had to dig it in an arc to accomodate the curve of Michaél’s frozen body, for there was no way to straighten him out. I lowered him carefully into the hole, still wrapped in canvas, and began shovelling the earth over him. When I had finished I laid one stone at his head, and another at his feet, comforted by the thought that at least he would spend eternity on land that was his. It had never been cleared, and probably never would be. But in some office in some city somewhere, this rectangle of land is registered as belonging to Michaél O’Connor. And in it he lies. Master of it for ever.
I stood then, among the trees, with the sun warming my skin, steam rising off me in the cold air, and I uttered my final farewell to him. ‘Cuiridh mi clach air do charn.’ I’ll put a stone on your cairn. Then I recited aloud from John, chapter 11, the verse that I knew so well by now. ‘I am the resurrection and the life, saith the Lord: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live; and whosoever liveth and believeth in me, shall never die.’
As I sit here now, writing this, I want so much to believe it, just as I did when old blind Calum recited it over my father’s coffin. But I’m not sure that I do any longer, and all I know is that Ciorstaidh is lost, my family is dead, and Michaél is gone.
NOTE
It should be noted that although Baile Mhanais, Ard Mor Castle and the Langadail Estate are all fictitious, the events depicted in relation to the clearance of settlements there are based on real events that occurred during the nineteenth century on the Isle of Barra, the Isles of North and South Uist, the Isle of Harris, and to a lesser extent the Isle of Lewis, during what has become known as the Highland Clearances.