Bruar's Rest Read Online Free PDF Page B

to think it’s a better place to bring up a family further down the country.’
    Helen kept silent. Bruar asked him why he’d taken so long to come home.
    ‘Son, I don’t know. Time just seemed to drift by, working, paying my keep, there never was much left over. It’s taken a long time to get this money here; and losing your mother like that. You do remember, son, how Mammy died?’
    Bruar dropped his head, shuffled uncomfortably from foot to foot. ‘No, I don’t. But Auntie, she told us how you took the eye from Balnakeil and how you ran away. Yes, we know all about you.’
    His father moved closer and said, ‘Aye, and no doubt you’ve heard about me being the wild drunkard? Well yes, I hold my hand up, I might at times have let drink make memories fade. But that was a long time past; I’ve not so much as smelt the stuff for more than two years or so.’ He took his son’s hand and slipped the bag of money into it. ‘I’m clean now, son, and ready to take on the responsibility of caring for you and Jimmy.’
    Helen wanted to ignore the sincerity in her brother’s face, he’d surely forfeited all rights to his children. Why, after all this time, had he come back to haunt them, disrupt their peace? He’d no rights at all. She hated him, at that moment she wished he’d been murdered, destroyed.
    He saw it all, the anger and pain in her face, and without a word fell upon his knees for a second time, sobbing for forgiveness. ‘Sister, please,’ was all he could say, as like a baby he laid his heavy head on her lap.
    Her heart was weeping, the reason why a sweet spring day had changed into a horrible nightmare eluded her. Yet what had years of bad dreams been preparing her for, if not for this day—his return. She ran her hand over his head, and with each stroke her sisterly love was born again. She didn’t hate him or want him dead, she wanted to see him happy, with his children. They weren’t hers, she’d no rights. ‘In God’s path we walk the bends and the straight,’ she told herself, ‘all I’ve done is keep these little boys on the right road.’
    She pushed away his head from off her lap, stood up, gave the smouldering embers in the fire a poke and said in a subdued tone, ‘I’m feeling the effects of age’. Holding back tears welling in her eyes she continued, ‘Boys, you should be with your father...’ Never in all her life did she think she would hand over her charges to him in so meek a fashion. Nights she’d lain in bed cursing him, swearing he’d take them over her dead body, but here she was dismissing the only things in the entire world she loved, as if they were nothing more than her neighbour’s full-grown lambs ready for market. Yet again another phrase from her book of simple teaching came to mind: ‘The meek shall inherit the earth’. Yes, they were ready to be given back. Then her thoughts lifted: what if her brother would stay home—here in Durness?
    Her brother had other plans, though, and they didn’t include taking the boys from her. He threw up his arms, beamed with new vigour, shouting his offer into every corner of the cottage. A small moth fluttering in a corner flew out through an inch of open window, obviously unused to such loudness.
    ‘I want us to go south where we’d all get work, you too, Helen. There’s no need for you not to move with us, be a solid family again?’
    She had the opposite view. Her hope was that instead of living on the road as his wife, the boys’ mother had done, they’d stay at home cutting peat, and in time would all be one big happy Highland family. This, she thought, would be the best solution.
    She rose from her chair, lifted a broom and began brushing up the dried grass which she’d picked off the boys. Then she laid her broom against a window frame, lifted a blue vase of wilting flowers and said, ‘I’ll go and throw these out while you three discuss going on the road and things.’ With these quiet words, she lowered