Chapter 2: Negotiation

September 1916

“Madainn math.”

I woke the next morning with a smile for the two old faces smiling back at me. I had slept soundly helped, no doubt, by the whisky in the Atholl brose and my dreams had not been disturbed by my memories of the time up until my arrival in the United States. The old man helped me to use the bottle and then held my head up while I drank a cupful of water. I could smell coffee brewing and I began to salivate. I hadn’t tasted coffee until I landed in America, and now I’m as addicted as the rest of the population.

“The doctor will be here any minute and we want you looking your best,” the old lady told me as she washed my face and hands with warm soapy water.

I have always kept my face free from whiskers and I put a hand up to my chin expecting to find rasping stubble. Under my fingers there was a beard long enough to let me catch and pull the individual hairs.

“How long have I been here?” I asked in a voice that must have revealed my shock since the old couple turned together to look at me with serious faces.

“It will be three weeks tomorrow since you were brought to us,” she told me. “You had a bad fever and we thought we would lose you more than once. It was while you were delirious that you spoke the Gaelic.”

There was a clink of harness outside, and a tall man strode into the room a moment later carrying a leather satchel advertising his profession as effectively as a sign. He waved a hand at me and then took the old lady aside to question her in a quiet voice.

“I hear you’re on the mend. You’ve had the best nurse in Washington State attending you, but it was touch and go. If you hadn’t been so fit, we’d have lost you.”

While he was talking, he had pulled back the covers and unwound the bandages covering my chest. As he spoke the last words, he pulled off the dressing covering the wound and I yelped with pain making the three witnesses laugh. After a second, I could appreciate that my reaction had been due to surprise more than pain, so I managed a rather pale reflection of their amusement.

“Nice clean wound now,” the doctor told us, probing the area with his strong fingers. “We’ll leave off the dressing and I think he should get up and sit in a chair beside the bed for an hour. What do you think, Callack?”

“He’s young and sound, doctor, and to tell you the honest truth, I’d have him on his feet!”

The old folk left the doctor and I together then. He had put a thermometer under my tongue at some stage and he sat on the bed taking my pulse.

“You’re a cool one, all right. I thought you’d be full of questions, but you just lie there all calm and relaxed as if being shot and nearly dying of fever were nothing special.”

I gestured to the thermometer sticking out between my lips.

“There is that, I suppose,” he chuckled, taking out the instrument and checking it. “Callack’s right you know. Your temperature’s normal and your pulse is healthily low.”

Then he told me all that had happened since the night of the riot. I was one of four people hit by bullets and I was the last to recover. Two were hit by shotgun pellets and one lost part of his ear; my wound was caused by what is often called a rook rife – 22 calibre. My fever was his fault, he insisted, because he missed a scrap of my shirt when he removed the bullet. He went into rather more detail than I absolutely needed on the way my body had enclosed the few threads of material in puss and ejected it from my body. The fever had broken once he lanced the wound.

“I’m only telling you this so you’ll know why I’ve left you with such a big hole from removing a tiny bullet. If it had been a thirty-four or forty-five calibre it would have gone straight through, and you’d have been up and about a week ago.”

“Do you know why the riot happened in the first place?” I asked. “I’ll let the sheriff fill in the details but from what I can learn it was the young bucks egged on by the young does. The girls claimed to be frightened by the tramps and hobos in the jungle, so the boys decided to move them out. It wouldn’t have come to anything if it hadn’t been for a stranger nudging them into action. He looked a bit like you, as a matter of fact, which may explain why you were targeted.”

The old lady – Callack, the doctor had called her – brought in a cup of coffee for the doctor and a chicken casserole for me. For all I could remember, it might have been the first solid food I had eaten in my life, and it was by some margin the tastiest meal I had eaten. When the doctor left, I could only wave to him since I hadn’t the willpower to stop masticating for long enough to say good bye and thanks.

By the time I had used a hunk of bread to soak up the last of the gravy, you could have put the casserole dish back in the cupboard without further cleaning. The old man helped me into a chair beside the bed and I was sipping a cup of coffee when the jingle of harness heralded another visitor.

Like the doctor, he strode into the room but there the resemblance ended. My new visitor is about my age but several inches shorter than me. He is stockily built, and he has a roll of fat round his waist. His face is tanned and clearly displays the high opinion he has of himself – he looks arrogant.

“I’m Erich Fassbinder,” he began. “I dare say you’ve heard of me. The doctor says you’re going to be all right.”

He paused and paced up and down the room before he gave a loud sigh and turned to stand right in front of me. Since he was standing and I was seated in a chair, the effect could have been intimidating and I couldn’t make up my mind if that was his intention.

“I suppose I owe you an apology. I shot you. It was only a point-two-two rabbit gun. It was an accident, of course.”

I’ve had apologies before but none quite as insincere as this one. It wasn’t just his take it or leave it attitude, but I couldn’t put my finger on the other thing that had raised a question at the back of my mind. I hadn’t heard of Erich, but the name Fassbinder was familiar to me – an old farmer of that name was the leader of the faction opposing unionisation. Perhaps his father had insisted that Erich own up to his misdeeds – the old man certainly had a reputation for square dealing.

I didn’t reply to his apology, and he stood looking a bit bewildered: I expect he had rehearsed all the answers he would make when I started complaining. If he was true to type, he would already have in mind the amount of cash he would give me to shut me up. I sat in my chair and looked at him, still saying nothing and he eventually broke away and strode out the door.

As he exited, he broke step and turned back.

“Is there anything we can do for you? My sister told me to ask.”

“I would be very grateful if she can provide paper and a pen – and a couple of postage stamps. Please thank her for her consideration.”

It was peaceful after Erich rode off in a jingle of harness and I sat quietly thinking over the events of the morning. I had been brought here to be nursed by the old lady but where exactly was ‘here’.

“An bodach doesn’t care for Erich so he’s gone off to look at the tups,” Callack said as she bustled in with a plate of sandwiches.

I found that I was almost as hungry as before the chicken casserole, so I concentrated on the joys of eating cold roast lamb with plenty mustard. I think it was the food that made my mind so slow to react, but the plate carried only a handful of crumbs before I realised what had been said.

The old lady is what her husband calls her, and she calls him the old man. In Gaelic he is an bodach and she is na cailleach – and the locals pronounce it Callack and think it’s her given name!

She brought in another cup of coffee when she collected the empty plate.

“What are your real names – your Christian names – and how did you get here? And where are we anyway?”

She laughed and then she sat on the bed and took my hand.

“I’ve been na cailleach for so long I’ve almost forgotten. I was named Morag and an bodach is Calum.”

“What brought you here?”

“Caora!” Calum said, entering and putting a loving hand on Morag’s shoulder where she sat on the bed.

I still didn’t know where we were, and I had no idea what sheep – caora in Gaelic – had to do with anything

CALUM & MORAG’S STORY

In the years following the rebellion in favour of Bonnie Prince Charlie the Highland chiefs tried to make good their losses by clearing their clansmen off the crofts and running sheep instead. Sheep were more profitable than men and women but, by the first years of Victoria’s reign an even more profitable crop was discovered – red deer.

Calum’s father had been retained on the clan lands as shepherd and the lad was eighteen when the laird announced his decision to get rid of the sheep. There were so many flocks coming on the market that the price dropped, and the laird decided to invest in passage for his best breeding stock to a parcel of land in the American North West.

He won the land in a card game and was more than a little surprised to discover not only that the land existed but that it bordered on some of the poorer gold fields. He spent money on a survey that ruled out the slightest possibility of gold, but he shrugged that off and talked Calum into packing his bags and driving a hundred breeding ewes and four rams from the West Coast of Scotland to the North West of the United States.

Calum and Morag were hand-fast – promised to each other – but she was only fourteen and her father, the local minister, would not consider marriage until she was eighteen at the earliest. The two young people talked things over and agreed that Calum should go and that they should not be parted. With the devastating logic of youth, they decided that the only possible solution was to defy her father and go off together.

They thought it likely that they wouldn’t find a minister to marry them in Scotland, so they decided to postpone the nuptials until they started a family. They shared a superstitious dread of bringing bastards into the world although they accepted the local custom of conceiving the first child before the nuptials. They had been living together now for sixty-eight years but they never had children, so they had never bothered with formal vows of marriage.

Calum and his two dogs drove the sheep to Dunoon where they were loaded onto a steam sailing ship and sailed across the Atlantic to be landed just west of Montreal on the St Lawrence River. The young people shared a cabin and a bed with uninhibited pleasure and had continued to do so ever since. It was a blow not to have children of their own, but Morag had served as midwife in the district around their home for sixty-five years.

She had been to school and was fluent in English, but Calum always struggled with the language. In the last five years since he passed his eightieth birthday he has more or less forgotten the little he knew. It was she that arranged the passage of the sheep by train to Chicago where the laird met them. The sheep were housed in a smallholding for almost a year at that time. The rams were hired out to improve the local stock and their fees paid for the onward expenses of the rail journey to Spokane.

It was 1852 before Calum and Morag set foot on the little plateau that has been their home ever since. The Yakima Valley was cattle country in those days so the sheep had to be driven up into the foothills above a thousand feet where the grass would not support cows. The land the laird had won at cards was mostly rough grazing but there was one almost level meadow at the eastern side of the mountains extending to fifty or so acres.

The land narrowed towards cliffs at the north down which cascaded a stream of pure water and ended in a precipice to the south while to the east it dropped in steep escarpments to the cattle ranches in the valley. The laird had entrusted twenty pounds to Morag, and she spent all of it on seeds, tools and a large tent. They built a kitchen garden where they grew root vegetables and oatmeal. They cut hay from the rest of the level area and brought the sheep down from the hills to winter on the stubble.

It took them five years to fell and dress the timber that became the cabin where Morag was now recounting their adventures, still holding my hand in hers. She began delivering babies and Calum was sought after for his knowledge of animal care. His first love was always sheep, but he doctored cows until the herds gave way to wheat. He is still in demand as a horse doctor and Morag is still the unofficial district nurse.

Their flock increased and they deposited the money they earned in the laird’s account at the State Bank in Spokane until ten years ago when the son of the laird that won the land died, and his heirs decided to sell out. Since the only access to the property is over the heights of the Cascade Mountain Range or from the Yakima Valley, there was little interest in it. Calum and Morag crossed Fassbinder land to get to town and the old man, Willi, bought the property for a song.

Helga had been delivered by Morag and she and Erich had treated the log cabin as a second home. The girl insisted that her father formally settle the meadow on Calum and Morag for their lifetime – Calum thought she did it in case Erich got control and evicted the old couple.

Calum is eighty-six and Morag eighty-two and they are still living together without ever promising marriage. They have no family living that they know of, but Helga seems to take the place of the child they never had.

“It’s my fault that we lost our given names,” Morag told me with a smile. “When folk came asking for help with sick animals, I would tell them to see an bodach so they thought that was his Christian name.”

I thought that I was intrepid because I came to America on my own and have managed to survive but their story involves courage and skill beyond my utmost capability.

“Would you do me the honour of letting me call you seanar agus seanmhar?”

Morag pulled my hand up to her dry old lips and kissed it while Calum leaned across and squeezed my shoulder with his gnarled old hand. They treated my request to call them grandfather and grandmother as if it was an honour bestowed by me on them and not the other way round.

We were interrupted by the arrival of a wagon carrying a davenport – a sort of miniature writing desk. It was brought in by two farm hands and placed under the window in my bedroom. Miss Helga had insisted that they get me to check the contents in case there was something she had missed. There was paper and envelopes, pen and ink, together with a supply of pencils, erasers and paper clips rather larger than the stock in my office in Minneapolis.

“Miss Helga says I’ve to come up every day to collect any letters and take them to the post for you.”

After they had gone, I was left alone to write. The first letter was a brief one to my mother in Aberdeenshire. My Father had died the year after I left home but he made me promise to write to my mother at least four times a year. I don’t know if she read them, but her brief replies certainly made no mention of the things I told her about my life in the New World. She wrote about their poverty and the un-neighbourliness of the people around them. My brother Alan sometimes added a note mostly asking about farming conditions in the United States. Since the War began, I have sensed that their fortunes have taken a turn for the better – or perhaps they have become reconciled to hardship!

I find it tiring to hit the right tone for those letters to the family so when I had addressed the envelope, I postponed the difficult letter I would have to compose to my boss. Instead, I wrote to Ellen, the secretary in my office. Girls going into offices to work, was a recent innovation but it had become the thing to do. My first secretaries had been young ladies of good family being thoroughly modern.

The grim reality of arriving in the office on time and having to remain polite when the subject of personal remarks, however flattering in intention, proved too much for the first three appointees. Ellen was made of sterner stuff. Her father makes a living growing vegetables that are shipped to many of the cities in the mid-west. He needed extra help to harvest seasonal crops, so he had experience of itinerant labour. Ellen and her brothers were expected to go into the fields to work alongside the men when they were needed.

I only wanted to ask her to go into my private room and pack up some of my clothes and books, but I found myself describing the cabin and my hosts in warm detail. I knew that Ellen would understand what I was saying. I filled four pages with news of what had happened to me before I came to an abrupt halt. I wanted to end the letter with a sort of ‘how are you?’ inquiry but I felt that it should be a little personal. The problem was that Ellen is – well, just Ellen.

She is fairly tall and pretty and her clothes look all right although they are not so ultra-fashionable as the things worn by her predecessors. She is always thoughtful, reminding me not to miss lunch again and things like that. She is also very polite, and it took days before she would call me Ewan, even when we were alone. After a prolonged period of thought I finished the letter by asking how things were going on her father’s farm.

I could sense another long delay coming on about how to sign the letter, so I quickly wrote: ‘Your friend, Ewan’ and sealed it in an envelope.

I was sweating slightly when I finished the letter to Ellen but I had been out of bed for more than two hours, so I was probably just getting tired. My last letter was to Walter Nef the leader of the AWO and I made it in the form of a report with numbered sections. I knew that Swede Larsen would have reported already so most of what I wrote would be nothing more than confirmation, but I didn’t think he would say much, if anything, about the presence of Lewis. The AWO is an offshoot of a much larger union, the International Workers of the World (IWW also known as Wobblies) and he is one of their regional organisers.

I had been thinking very hard about Lewis going along the train looking for someone. Just before I was shot, the idea popped into my head that he might have been expecting the arrival of the two men I had encouraged to alight early. I have no evidence that convinces even me, but I wanted to alert Nef that there could be a problem.

Lewis has the same air about him as the enforcers for the labour gangs, the job he was doing when I first met him. He is a well-respected Wobbly, and I can only assume that his background has been thoroughly checked although I privately doubted that they would have bothered. I’ve worked with a man for months, sharing everything, but then one night when he got very drunk, he took out of his wallet a poster naming him as wanted for the murder of a bank clerk during a robbery. It isn’t too difficult even now in the United States to reinvent yourself, especially in the far north-west.

In the end all I told Nef was that Lewis had been there on the night of the fight but that he had made no attempt to contact Swede or me. I expected Nef to take the hint because he trusted my judgement, but it turned out that he trusted Lewis even more!

The following morning, I got out of bed without help and managed to put on my pants although I decided not to attempt socks.

“Madainn math, ogha,” Calum said, helping me to carry a chair on to the porch. I flushed with pride to be recognised as his grandson.

Sitting in the sun with my back against the rough logs of the wall was very pleasant and I was content to doze away the morning. One of the farmhands from the day before rode up to collect my mail. He became very uneasy when I offered him the price of the postage stamps.

“Miss Helga’d skin me if’n A took yer money.”

“She must be a tough lady. I’ve met Erich and he’s got his opinions on things.”

“Miss Helga’s worser than him!”

Morag came out after he had ridden off with a cup of coffee.

“Don’t you go thinking anything bad about Helga. She’s been a good friend to an bodach and me since she was little more than a baby. She’s a sweet child whatever they may say about her in the town!”

Two days later I had a chance to make my own assessment of the young lady. I was strolling slowly along a track through the woods at the edge of the plateau when a white horse appeared on the path travelling fast. At walking pace we might have eased past each other but with him galloping I had to hop backwards between the trees. I avoided contact with the horse, but I landed on my backside – don’t let anyone tell you that pine needles are soft!

It was all over in seconds, and I didn’t even get a proper look at the rider. I turned and made my way back to the cabin where Morag was sitting outside shelling peas. There was no sign of the horse or rider. She looked up but her smile faded when she saw blood on my shirt over the wound, so she made me take it off.

I was considerably embarrassed by this because I knew where the blood came from, and it had nothing to do with dodging a runaway horse. The truth is that I had been picking at the scab. My mother had told me often enough to leave wounds alone, but it had been itching all morning and I had fallen into temptation.

Morag sat me in her chair, but I hadn’t time to confess when one of the Valkyrie strode round the end of the cabin brandishing a riding crop. Before I could decide that she was there to offer an apology for forcing me off the track she went on the attack.

“What the hell do you think you’re playing at scaring a horse like that? If I wasn’t such a superb rider, it could have ended in disaster!”

“Oh, I thought it must have run away with you,” I was so foolish as to venture in reply.

“I’ve never lost control of a horse in my life, you cretin, and I’ll tell you something else,” she added, touching the tip of her riding crop to the trickle of blood running down my chest, “I don’t miss what I aim at!”

“So, it was you that fired the rabbit gun! I thought Erich’s story sounded a bit odd at the time!”

At that, she completely lost control and swung her arm back preparing to bring the crop down across my face. I like to think of myself as an easy-going, forgiving, sort of a guy but she crossed the boundary of my tolerance.

I reached up and grasped the wrist holding the riding whip and pulled. She had been intending to hit me as hard as she could and so she was off balance. She fell across my knee face down and she let go the crop to try to save herself. In an instant I had her across my knee with a whippy riding crop in my hand. She was wearing jeans, and I raised a storm of dust from them four times before she managed to squirm free.

I still wasn’t back to my full strength after the fever, of course, but I promise you that she knew she had been punished. She didn’t wait to recover her crop – or her dignity – but made off round the cabin reappearing a second later spurring the bewildered horse into a gallop.

Calum was standing near the corner with a huge grin exposing all the stumps of his teeth while Morag was standing beside me with her mouth hanging open. I didn’t know how I felt. Part of me wanted to laugh with seanar but the other half was as shocked as seanmhar.

“I’ll get you another cup of coffee ogha. I’m afraid the last one got spilled.”

At least I was still her grandson so the damage can’t have been too great.

Nothing more was said and the next morning I set off on my customary walk. It was pure perversity, I’m sure, that made me choose the path where I had encountered Helga on her high horse. There were several other tracks up to the plateau including one that was suitable for wagons, but I was not going to have my freedom limited by that young woman. I will admit that I kept an eye open for gaps in the bordering trees that I could retreat into if she galloped at me again.

She was not the first woman I had met that wore jeans. The cook at the bunkhouse of the railroad camp always did but she chain-smoked cheap cheroots and could out-swear and probably outfight any of the men. I don’t remember taking any particular notice of the cook’s behind, but I remembered every aspect of Helga’s. It is round for a start, and it must be soft for there was a sort of ripple across the flesh from the place where the riding crop landed.

At that point I realised that I was indulging in very improper thoughts but when I tried to put the image of Helga’s posterior out of my head it was replaced by an image of Ellen with her back to me bending down to put on her overshoes for her walk home through the slush this spring. I didn’t think I was paying attention at the time but now I could recall that it is just as round and soft looking as Helga’s. That brought my train of thought round full circle and I might have been stuck in the pleasant loop if I hadn’t been interrupted by Spade Docherty towing a reluctant mule along the path.

“Deep thoughts, Ewan. I swear I could’ve walked past without you noticing!”

I once borrowed a book from the library in Cumberland about a girl, Alice, who met some strange people after she followed a white rabbit into its burrow. Meeting Spade here was a bit like Alice running into the Mad Hatter. I was still trying to clear my mind of images of feminine bottoms when he laughed and explained.

“I heard you were laid up, so I came to ask if you’d a fancy for a stroll through the Cascades.”

As we walked on up to the house, he gave me what news he had. Swede had been accused of instigating the riot in Yakima and the State Attorney had issued a warrant for his arrest. The Union bosses had advised him to get out for a time, so he was now logging in Saskatchewan so far as Spade knew.

“He’s not much of a one for writing so you’ll probably have to go and fetch him back after you’ve cleared his name.”

At the cabin Morag greeted him as William, an old and valued friend. Calum had gone off just before dawn into the hills to check on the dozen or so sheep he had kept after the flocks were sold. She thoroughly approved of my going for a long hike in the mountains and she packed my carpet bag while she waited for lunch to cook.

“It’ll be best for him to be away from here until Helga cools down,” she suggested to Spade.

He wanted to know what had happened and he needed an explanation when Morag said that I had taken a riding crop to her ton. When I told him it was the Gaelic for her sit-upon he laughed until he choked.

“D’you tell me that you put Helga Fassbinder over your knee and thrashed her arse – pardon me, Morag, I should have said her ton!”

When he had recovered somewhat, he added:

“I’ll bet it was Helga’s ton you were thinking about this morning when you nearly walked into me!”

My blush gave me away so I thought I might as well tell them the worst.

“It was, and I got to thinking of Ellen’s ton as well!”

Spade found a spot on the laden mule for my bag, and he started off up the trail into the foothills leaving me to say goodbye to my seanmhar.

“You need to get your strength back, mo gradhach. There is greatness in you, but you will have to face many trials. There are two women in your future, but you have to select the one that will fulfil your destiny.”

It brought a shiver to my spine to hear this wise, old Highland woman prophecy my future. I am of a race that believes that our path through life is ordained and that our free will allows us no more than to select the best route to our destiny. I was a bit thoughtful as I strode away to catch up with Spade and the mule. We met Calum on his way home with a late lamb round his neck like a scarf.

It was early October and autumn was well advanced even this low in the mountains. We were heading up into country where winter would clamp down in another four or five weeks. This is Spade’s country, so I went along with his proposal to wander around Mount Adams. Mount Rainier is the big one in this part of the Cascades Range, making a triangle with Adams and Mount St Helens.

“Why is there cloud over St Helens’ every time we see it?”

“It’s smoke not cloud,” Spade told me. “St Helens is a volcano but she’s pretty tame, although you can feel the heat through your boots when you walk on her. Just like any other dame, she doesn’t like you to forget that’s she’s got fire in her belly.”

We walked uphill for day after day going through forests that changed in nature as we went higher. The weather was fine and warm although there were sometimes threatening clouds to the west of Rainier; the nights were cold and there would be a covering of hoar frost on our bedding when we woke in the morning.

Often, we walked from breakfast to lunch in companionable silence. When we did talk, we avoided anything serious.

“Is there a Gaelic word for, you know?” Spade made an eloquent gesture cupping his hands below his chest.