The Monster's Wife(23)
If people passed by the croft that day and heard the hammer thud into the naked wood of the new fence post and saw Hamish Yule - nearly naked himself in his shirtsleeves - they might well have wondered.
Hamish never fixed other people’s doors and fence posts and was only seen hatless in kirk. It was often the subject of talk in Quoy - the Minister’s near-daily visits to Granny’s and hers to him, even when Mrs Yule was bedridden with her last illness. There was nobody who really believed that Bible study had made them constant companions these forty years or more.
Halfway between the burn and the byre, a brimful pail of ice water gripped in her raw-knuckled hands, Oona watched as he rested the hammer in the pouch of mud around the base of the post. Some men looked wrong in shirtsleeves, as plucked birds looked wrong, as a fish, in fact, might look sitting in a tree.
Hamish took out a clean white kerchief and blew his nose, his red, spider-veined cheeks puffing out. He blew twice for good measure and scrubbed the linen square back and forth against the bulbous tip of his long nose. Without folding the kerchief, he wiped the sweat from his head. She wrinkled her nose at the thought that Granny might have kissed that forehead, or other places. It didn’t bear thinking about really.
Oona was used to seeing him stand upright as a bannister in the gloom of the kirk, telling her what was good, what was right, how she should be Christlike. She was used to the crackle of his voice, the murmur of prayer, to trying her hand at the virtue he spoke of, pulling it about her, a new vestment of piety, a prickly shirt only the bravest could wear. Even in the yard of the croft, with the smell of soup wafting from Granny’s pot, Hamish brought the kirk with him. Toby, the reprimanded sinner, sat arrow straight by the apple tree - as far from the scene of the crime as he could manage - clearly imagining he was invisible. The thud of the hammer on wood along the fence and in the broken byre was the toll of a kirk bell too early of a morning.
The bodies of the hens, neatly ranged side by side, were the melancholy orderliness of the kirkyard, the solemn litany of graves. She looked at the henhouse, its hinges now mended, clean straw covering the bloody earth beneath. It was true what Granny had said. There was no way Toby could have gone in there and latched the door after. Whatever or whoever had killed the chickens had shut him in, as if they wanted the dog to take the blame. Perhaps the doctor had followed her back last night, that dark look still on his face.
How about the hand hidden in the roof? In her panic, she hadn’t even thought to check if it was still there. The Minister might find it. She shivered at that thought as if someone had passed over her grave.
Her hands were reaching for the last little corpse when she heard a cough behind her. She turned to face Hamish, her neck twisting at an awkward angle so that something pinched in it and a tiny fire pulsed there. The light was behind him and his face looked even darker and redder than usual, pocked and weighty, graven from sandstone.
He wiped his hands on the handkerchief, brown with farm dirt now. “Your Granny tells me you’re a housemaid now at the big house, cooking and cleaning for Doctor Frankenstein.”
She nodded, her skin prickly and hot with the guilt of lying to the Minister. “May said there was more work than two hands could do, with so many rooms and fireplaces and things there running to wrack, rusting and half broken, grand as it is.”
“And do you clean all of the rooms, the pair of you?” On the face of it, it was a silly question, the kind of domestic detail she had always thought Hamish Yule was blind to, his mind forever following a higher path. It was the tone he said it in, the pause before pair of of you, that told her there was something more in it.
“I take care of the cooking and the laundry.” The lies pressed through her teeth brazenly. She didn’t know where they came from or why they tumbled out so easily. “I might clean the hanging lamps in the big dining hall today. He eats there even though it’s only him alone.”
“And you’ve seen nobody else?” He stared at her, eyebrows beetling.
He usually asked for Granny when he came and then they went off on one of their walks, or sat by the fire with a copy of Pilgrim’s Progress and a bottle of sherry, whispering. Oona wasn’t accustomed to him taking such particular interest in the details of her life and her mind couldn’t help running back his words of before, don’t listen to gossip. The Minister wasn’t practising what he preached.
Oona had no gossip for him anyway. Not until she found something real and definite. The girl. Afraid that this last thought might be read from her face that everyone said was as plain as an open book, she looked down at the cockerel in her hands. The warmth had gone out of him now and he was a cockerel no more. He was nothing now, but a heap of draggled black feathers. His head lay, bright as a poppy, in the mud nearby.
“Well I’ve mended your fence posts, Oona, and done what I can with the byre. I’m afraid I must hurry back to the manse now. Can you tell your Granny thank you for the offer of soup and sorry I couldn’t stay longer.” He put on his hat and turned towards the newly mended fence with its naked bird of a new-wood post.
“Goodbye, Reverend Yule.” She tried her hardest to smile.
Still bent over Orpheus, still shivering as if with fever, she watched the Minister stride off towards the road. Soon he appeared the shape and size of a walking cane and had nearly reached the kirk, his face whittled birch in the sunlight.
She stumbled up and hurried to the coop, prised out the wooden hatch and reached inside, groping in the darkness for the feel of her kerchief. Her fingers ran frantically over the wooden struts and felt the softness of feathers, the prickle of straw. But nowhere was the heavy bundle she’d stuffed in the roof. She shoved her arm in further until her shoulder burned. Nothing. Whoever had killed the chickens had taken the girl’s hand too.