He Bought My Father's Name to Make Me Kneel, but I Was the One Who Cut His Chains novel · Chapter 24 of 24
Chapter 24: The Shop on the Ness
My father stood at the shop door at first light with a stool under him and a paper in his hand.
Every crofter from the Wick to the south end stood in the road below him in the thin morning rain.
I came down from the Hall in the trap with Erlend beside me, and neither of us said a word.
We stopped at the dyke.
Magnus Isbister had shaved.
He wore a clean collar and his dead wife's brooch pinned to his waistcoat, which I had not seen since I was nine.
His cap lay in his lap.
He looked at me across the road, and I nodded.
He cleared his throat and read from the paper, in a voice that cracked on the first word and then steadied.
"The Wick fisherman. Six pounds four shillings, for meal and nets and a winter of tea."
He swallowed.
"I wrote it in the book in the year eighteen eighty-one, and he could not pay it, and I let it stand. I took a profit on it. It was wrong."
He stopped.
A thin man in the front row, with his hat in his hands, looked at him for a long moment.
"Aye," the man said. "It was."
"I'm sorry," my father said.
"I'll hear the next," the man said.
My father read the next.
I sat in the trap and watched him read it.
Erlend's hand lay on the seat between us, bare, with the palm turned up.
I put mine in it.
He closed his fingers.
We sat there in the rain and listened to an old man read out the worst of himself, one name at a time.
The shop opened in August.
It was not my father's any more.
By Erlend's pen it had been no one's, and by the crofters' meeting in the kirk it became a company.
It had two hundred and fourteen shares of a pound each and a committee of nine.
They elected me keeper of the book, and I had not asked.
The cooper proposed me and the old man from the south end seconded.
There was a long silence in the kirk while the Ness looked at me, and then a great stamping of feet.
They painted the sign on a Saturday.
It took a Lerwick signwriter a morning on a ladder, and the whole Ness stood in the road to watch.
THE NESS CO-OPERATIVE STORE, it said, in black on white.
Under it, smaller: Keeper of the Book, D. Isbister.
And under that, at the bottom, because Erlend had stood on the road and said so in front of everyone, and would not be moved: Garriock & Isbister.
The rest of this chapter is part of the paid portion of the series. Chapters 1–6 of He Bought My Father's Name to Make Me Kneel, but I Was the One Who Cut His Chains are free to read — start from the beginning, then unlock the rest with coins in the app.
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