He Bought My Father's Name to Make Me Kneel, but I Was the One Who Cut His Chains novel · Chapter 4 of 24

Chapter 4: The Croft Above the Wick

He took me to the croft on the Sunday afternoon, after the kirk, in a thin wind and a light that never quite became day.

We went by the pony as far as the burn and on foot after that.

Torvald had not come.

He had said, at breakfast, that he had accounts to go over, and that the dead had little use for company.

The path ran up from the Wick beach between two stone dykes, over a moor of grey heather.

Erlend walked ahead of me, a few yards, and did not turn.

He had not spoken since the pony.

At the top of the rise the croft showed against the sky.

It was four walls, mostly down.

A gable stood to the height of a man, and a lintel stone lay across the old door as if it had been set there that morning.

Nothing grew inside the walls but nettles.

Erlend stopped at the dyke.

He did not go in.

I went past him, over the threshold, and put my hand on the lintel.

A child's hand had been cut into the stone.

It was small and rough, five fingers with the thumb crooked.

It had been cut with a nail or a knife and worn soft by twenty winters of rain.

"My sister," Erlend said behind me.

I did not turn.

"She was seven. She did it the day my father set that stone. He cut his own mark beside it, and she wanted hers."

I looked for the mark.

It was there, a plain cross, lower down.

"He could not write," Erlend said. "He made a cross for everything. He said a man's name was what he did with his hands."

My throat was tight.

"My mother died when I was nine," I said. I do not know why I said it. "She was ill all one winter. My father wrote her doctor's bill into the book as a debt."

"Yes."

"I found it at fourteen, when I was learning the sums."

I breathed in.

"I took a pound out of the house money and paid it, and wrote it off, and put a mark where it had been so nobody would see."

I turned and looked at him.

"That was the first thing in my own book," I said. "I have written two hundred and fourteen more."

He stood in the wind with his gloves on and his face quite still.

"Why are you telling me?" he asked.

"Because you came to my father's shop and called me an Isbister as if it were a sentence."

"It is a sentence," he said.

"It's a name," I said. "And I've done more with it than he has."

He did not answer.

He came in over the threshold, slowly, like a man crossing into a church, and stood on the nettles looking at the walls.

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