Ossian

OSSIAN

GORDON M BURNS

©March 2015

Disclaimer : This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

©Cover design by G M Burns March 2015

Published by Gordon Moncrieff Burns at Smashwords

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

Thank you for downloading this ebook. This book remains the copyrighted property of the author, and may not be redistributed to others for commercial or non-commercial purposes. If you enjoyed this book, please encourage your friends to download their own copy from their favorite authorized retailer. Thank you for your support

CONTENTS

Part One ...... The Black Lynn Falls

Part Two ...... The Black Spout

Part Three..... The Falls of Heitt

Part Four ...... The Reeck Lynn

Part Five ...... The Fechtie Falls

OTHERS WORKS BY THE AUTHOR

PART ONE

THE BLACK LYNN FALLS

1

A wild evening witnessed their venture into its heartless soul.

‘And what are we doing here Sarge?’

‘That there, Duncan, is a profound question ye’re asking ... And maybe there is an answer to your enquiry ... But ... It’s naive of ye tae think that any living person has it ... So haud this.’

‘Hold what, Sarge?’

Duncan had voiced the question though its utterance went unnoticed by him for his mind meandered through parlour warmth of past delights and future hopes of thrilling touches and flowering lips to lay kisses on. Anticipation of these pleasures excited his senses to the point that hyacinth scent flooded his in-breath despite the events unfolding. Then, cruelly curled the cutting wind into the face of his bliss: shedding a tear from out his eye, swinging his senses on an edge of fear to show him - that meant for holding he had dropped into a dark void below.

Their bent ears into the dark of a bitter wind that sleet-stung them and whither there was a splash or not was difficult to detect. It seemed an age that white water rushed their eyes before they heard the screams from downstream, bringing them back and shutting their mouths - one soft in relief, the other grinning grimly.

‘Now he screams.’ Noted the grim-grinner. ‘Not on the way doun into the Garriff ... But now ... Credit that can ye? Ah mean, why yammer now when he was as good as away?’ At the question asked him, Duncan shrugged. ‘The pity is, PC Gow, that ye dinna think tae haud him when I asked ye - he might not want tae talk tae us now.’

‘Sorry, Sarge.’

‘Aye, weel, let’s fetch him out and ask him nicely.’

County Police Constable Duncan Gow gripped an iced cable in more than his hands. Its frozen core wide-eyed him into the stinging darkness where all was unmarked stone, plain clay, unpainted canvas, page blank and a disc of unclear cloud. Would anything else record this - a body in frozen water dies and it was his fault? He had let the figure drop and before that had not voiced concern but rather helped to place the boy over the suspension bridge’s railings. Then, shuffling his feet, he meekly watched as Sergeant Munro collared the child and barked his questions at him. Now, swallowing the bile of his incrimination in this act, he wondered why he allowed this to happen. Someone once warned him that uniforms did such things to people and brought about changes most alarming. This blue-cloaked compulsion of his that matched the heavy-serge of the sergeant’s greatcoat had persuaded Duncan it was fine to stand firm and tight-lipped as the sergeant shammed a fall and threatened not to catch the boy the next time. The constable had not questioned the technique’s validity anymore than he would enquire the cause of the broken floods of veins red-ribboning the sergeant’s face in fury. Implicated in their role as police officers was trust in law and the youth had gambled on their understanding of it. They gambled on respect and the loss of it if they were seen working this line of enquiry on the boy. However, it was all as water off an oilskin to Munro. Having been to war and witnessed many things worse condoned, the boy might drown for all the Sarge’s mood could care. As they made their way to the riverbank, Duncan wondered about the nature of humanity’s veneer that two ordinary policemen could flip benevolence of nature into dispassion during a routine enquiry they would eventually solve without murdering a fourteen-year-old in the process.

At the riverside, the help forthcoming the half-drowned lad was short-lived. Reaching for that part nearest to him, the hair on the boy’s head, the sergeant seemed to bite the boy’s ear before plunging the head under the water, holding it there a while before drawing it up only to reinstating an investigation down the child’s ear. Duncan wished he were where his heart was because it was no longer in this job but nearby and far away where she awaited him. The child spluttered anxiously and to the PC he seemed to wish to say something. The sergeant appeared in no mood for discussion as down went the boy’s head again into the icy plunge, up once more and once more down. When his head was held above the water long enough, the youth tried pleading that he had - heard, so let feckin go! Sergeant Munro showed detached concern as under his spread of a middle-aged paunch, he sent the boy for a yet another plunging.

Throughout all this Duncan stood a few yards back not catching any of the words passing between the man and boy. Rushing water and wind saw to all that and he yearned to turn away. All the same, there was an obsession in looking safely from the tethering of his torch beam and flinching on each sharp movement up into the air or down into the water. Pulling the boy up from the last occasion, again words passed from the sergeant’s lips before he turned panting from his exertions to Duncan.

‘Mr Gow, tak ower.’ Munro’s look commanded he should and Duncan edged forward until reaching the floundering boy he skimmed his quandary around the race of wild water unable to look either the man or the boy in the eye.

‘Sarge?’ Duncan pleaded, his eyes daring to bare his soul.

‘Sarge what?’ He grabbed the constable’s arm in the knowledge of its vice like effect. ‘It’s not all - good morning Mrs Donaldson and how’s your husband keeping - now is it? Look at him, go on take a good look at the scrag-end.’ Duncan did. The boy smiled at him - curling, sneering and unafraid. ‘Stick his head under a couple of times and he’ll talk soon. Just mind object is not tae drown him?’

‘Feck you mister,’ the boy swore at Duncan. ‘Come on, I’m freezing, ye ken ye want tae dae it.’

Duncan felt his hand jolt but a voice from up above proclaimed its interest - ‘Aye then, what goes on here?’

‘Save me mister!’ Cried the boy. ‘There’s aine drooned in here already.’

2

The heat of the fire steamed the damp clothes of Badgie Ross. Hands wrapped round a mug of tea, the boy’s incarceration in the cell seemed unnecessary to Duncan for someone wrapped in a blanket going nowhere. Badgie had been none other than misdirected in life but why Munro had subjected him to the river when a fist banged on the table or the threat of dragging him to his mother would have done - the young policeman could not tell. Topping up Badgie’s mug, his eyes turned blindly to the side so not to hold the young boy’s gaze. Despite that caution, mud, sweat and river water mutinied as a moist, musty accusation in his nose. Regardless of the heat inside the station, a cold steeled through him.

One side of the young policemen’s nose curled on everything around but more upon himself still sitting in that room. Despite all the events of the year, his progress out of anxiety and the commitments in life with she who fired his passion, a growing unease fluxed within him to the reason why he sat there. He could still recall the past abject eight years and last glorious twelve-month journey to here as a phenomenon most puzzling considering his origins. However, he felt it slipping without direction from him and unable to place a finger on the spot he lost his way during the day, this worried him as sweet dreams lost on waking up. He wondered why he did not lock the boy up, walk out the door and turn from this life that moment because the decision that he should had her approval.

‘Ah’ll prosecute that bastard.’

‘Oh, you will, will you?’ He asked, accepting that in doing so, he could not leave just then because that much he owed to a man regarded as a father figure, Sergeant Munro. ‘And why’s that?’

‘Christ, you’re as bad.’

Duncan hoped he was not. He was not a bad person. One year ago, on arrival at this place, he could have turned that way but he had not. Back then, the streets all lay still, stark and frost-silvered and the air stung of cold. Looking around the new town, he saw enclosing him, a quarry of thieved mountain rock, mason-chiselled and stacked in monolithic grey conformity to an alien plan. Peaks of slate blue defied the sky to fall and ruin the place. There, he thought, at the time, began his dislocation from the fresh smelling mist-shrouded past to this spa town of painted wrought-iron arcades. Where this tunnel led him smelt less of spring meadows and more of sharp turpentine; breath-clouds trailed as hung remembrances of his passing in the hard light of dawn.

‘What are ye gappin at?’

‘Watch it sonny.’ He warned the boy then felt he sounded too much like the Sarge. ‘Do you want to be up on a suicide charge?’

‘Me? Ah’m no jumper.’

‘No, but you’re a badgerer, Badgie, and it’s that that led to this.’ Both slipped tea down on that thought. ‘You look cold, would you like me to get you one - a jumper?’

‘Aye, sod it, go on then.’ Both sniffed the humour of that sharply out their noses. Duncan fetched a police jumper and a pair of uniform trousers, looking away as the boy let the blanket fall to put them on. ‘Think Ah’ll mak the polis?’ Duncan looked back at the dressed boy and shared the joke as the lad rolled up the excess material on arms and legs. When he was finished, Badgie asked darkly - ‘Aye, and dae ye think you’ll mak the polis, mister?’

At the edge of the present reality, Duncan slipped into the past briefly and recalled who last asked him that same question - the cailleach, a year ago before her doorstep. That morning, the old woman, Kate Stratton, had said, glowering with defensive-age at him- ‘Sae, laddie, yer the new yin. Dae ye think ye’ll mak the polis?’ One look at her and he had known she would ask him that. She stood with oats to feed her hens, reminding him on what he set his back upon: musty dark houses of boulder stones that moldered into the earth. Mind you, truth be told, he left all that when five years old. Even so, those turf-capped black-houses held down by ropes were a part of who he was, and he did not mind the manner of the old woman’s question to him. He knew it to be rhetorical, set to befool him in gossip later. Not that her yammering time was often because she was one that age separated from others and an old woman who now refused to answer the knock of help or enquiry. She had reminded him of his mother. Soon to be imprisoned in a bed, boxed before her coffin-time then discovered when her hens deserted and began to search for oats elsewhere. Alternatively, those from the present reality at her garden wall, might object when sniffing then recognise more than dilapidation from her dwelling. He recalled that as he raised a wave to the old woman and went on his way; she gave no hint of reflex in return. There was a time she would have paddled in the burn beside the salmon pool of youth and crossed the Sands of Dee into her mother’s arms. She would have been a gleam of pleasure in her father’s eyes. In his good, strong hands, she would have first found how to work the fulfilment of seedtime, green corn and harvest. As a youth in love, she in her turn would have dabbled with the spin of time until it came to this web - a mutter to herself.

‘Christ, Ah could run oot the door and ye’d nae no have noticed.’

"Ach, I’d feel the cold blast and run and catch you.’

‘Huh, ye think? Onystheways, the sod had no right tae dae that.’ Badgie Ross muttered. Other than a hand-flutter at the comment, PC Duncan kept mute. ‘Man, did you see him when Bobby Lochlane shouted - what the feck are you doing?’ Along with Badgie, Duncan laughed ruefully. ‘Ah swear Munro wet himself, no doubt you as well, eh?’

‘That shows you why you’ll not make the force, Badgie, the exact words spoken were - aye then, what goes on here? And that’s why you’ll not raise a complaint about either of us because Mr Lochlane will swear blind he saw you slip off the bridge all by your own volition.’

‘But you let me go.’

‘Is that how you saw it? Why would I do that, Badgie? No, that man has it in his mind that drunk as he was, you fell off by your own stupidity.’ He could see the injustice in the boy’s face was no stranger. ‘When a farmer reports that he’s been held up, smacked around and robbed in his own house, Munro knows you never did the bad stuff but he wants to know who did.’

‘Humph, like Ah’ll tell. He’ll kill me, so he would.’

‘Who?’

By now, just a little after five, Bobby Lochlane would be propping up the bar at Gannachen’s knocking back the dram that Alistair Wright, the joiner and undertaker, would have given him for informing him about the body in the Garriff. By now the Sarge and the joiner may have fetched the corpse from out under the icy, log blockage of an overhanging riverbank. They may even have identified the body for Badgie had not in the horror of it snatching him from the spate.

‘You can thank it you’re not drowned. Hamesucken, that’s what Munro will charge you with. It’ll no hang ye but it will jail you.’

‘Hamesucken? What’s that?’

‘Smacking a man about in his own house and robbing him, which in your case was for twenty pounds and where’s your part of that, Badgie?’

‘He said I get mine’s later.’

‘Ach he’ll be halfway tae Oban by now and if they don’t hang you for a suicide attempt, your mother will for battering Mr MacGregor of Balnabeggan. Do yourself a favour, Badgie; you know Munro and what’ll happen. Your mum will talk with him, he’ll have a word with Balnabeggan and that farmer will swear on his best bull’s eyes that ...’

‘That what?’

‘That, in looking for the suspect, we came across you trying to rescue a drowning person in an icy river all by yourself’

‘And why would I dae a daft thing like that?’

‘Because, Badgie,’ Duncan sighed, ‘deep down there’s none of us want to be bad lads. It’s just that circumstances run away with us but when we stop, we need to take a good look at ourselves. So who was it?’

‘Feck you if you believe that.’ The boy smirked. He took a breath in and cast out a name. ‘Nod O’Discoll: satisfied?’

Nod O’Discoll: no longer name a fear for him but the day as clear as yesterday when first it trod on Duncan’s life.

3

And that day should have been a summer’s day of wonder because on that day his father’s poetic soul, his mother’s smile condoning, reached to the wide blue heaven above the fields lowering over Little Dunkeld and told him - flee the clods, my son, run frae the yowes and never mind the beasts - aff ye gang; run tae the sun. Whereby, young Duncan made to do but by the gate, his father stopped him.

‘When you’re oot there, find a way to build a castle for your mither ... Eh? A place to take her and care for her when she gets old. Will ye do that for me son?’

He must have at least questioned that request with childish curiosity but cheerfully his father propelled him out the gate to run on that knightly errand. In doing so, he brushed the woods where Turner painted idylls, skimmed the bridge above the brown and foaming pool where Mendelssohn heard music. Then he followed in the footsteps by the leaping waters of the Braan that brought verses to the pen of Wordsworth until, by Ossian’s Cave, bright day turned into darkest fear because in there - Nod O’Discoll kneeled before a violator. Duncan had not known Nod O’Discoll’s name then but he knew his sort. He saw the older youth’s attempt to wreck Nod who, determined to not bow down to the abuse, struggled with harsh words and actions. Seeing them and the ripping violence, Duncan instantly knew the pair as types in any situation to give wide berth to, albeit that their life-crossed path of no avoidance now sucked him into that vile impasse.

In the police station, Badgie fidgeted impatiently at the daydreaming constable. He sought a reaction to his seemingly rash confession and there was a change in the lad’s composure for rather than cowed, or afraid of his future prospects at the hand of Nod, he appeared proud.

‘Weel, say something then.’

‘Nod O’Discoll, you say, Patrick O’Discoll?’

‘Aye, the same.’

‘Och, Alistair,’ with voice and eyes did Duncan sigh, ‘now what were you doing getting into tow with the likes of that?’

As soon as asked, both knew it to be the wrong approach and that in showing pity for the boy, the policeman showed the softness of an easy mark. If Munro had been there, the young lad’s cuffed head might have open a vein of further bleeding-truth but not this handout of sorrow. Cauterising with sympathy only spread the disorder, such was his sergeant’s teaching to which, as now, Duncan kept silent his opinion.

‘It’s what happens.’ The boy said,

And full well Duncan knew it because as it happened that day of summer as a child, it happened that the older youth had looked through the doorway and ordered him to come in and hold the young Nod down within the folly, upon the cold-damp wet and bone cramping rock. Seeing Nod’s fury - a polecat for a throat but that day held scruffed - the child Duncan ran with all his might up and on to where he knew the Rumbling Bridge leapt across the torrent to win him back to his parent’s walls. No poem came to his mind that day, no song sung from his heart but like some indelible mark his mind recalled few other days that ended with the sadness on his mother’s face - dinna gie up, son, run, for ever are the stars tae reach.’

‘Sometimes, Badgie, you need to think about the company you keep.’

‘Aye, yon’s a bugger, ken?’

Menacing, dark and fearful was that day of childhood, it was an evening when round the hearth, beneath the moon-silvered, blue-slate roof, the child Duncan was led towards that which lay ahead by his parent’s revelations.

4

Just before six the Sergeant returned, he smelt mountain-wild fresh, wild in its untamed spoor. He smiled through a drawn expression so obscure meaning and it was hard for the constable work out what his true feeling was underneath. That the Sarge refilled his cup for him made him feel uneasy.

‘So how was it, anything to report?’

‘Er, on what?’

‘Yer rounds, Mr Gow, your rounds before this rouge buggered up oor afterneen.’

‘Nothing, Sarge.’ He felt his shoulder twitch to accord a protection from the stern man. ‘Wednesday, half day closing, shops securely locked and with the weather, nobody about until, well you know the rest.’

‘Aye, some rest, eh!’ Badgie sparked up as if really keen to get in on the report. ‘Auld Munro here’s puff oot a wind at my back then Ah run smack intae ye and Ah’m thinking - big polis, sod me that’s me ...’

Whatever the young boy had thought he had become back then, when Duncan not so much as grabbed him but stopped the lad from falling, was lost as the back of the sergeant’s fist smashed itself into the boy’s mouth. The boy did not cry. His look of hurt, surprise and resentment stemming any flow of tears other than that of body-reaction to the blow. The back of one small grimy hand saw to its removal.

‘I thought you told me never to leave a mark, Sarge?’ Duncan could see the boy’s lip swelling up already. Over it ran a trickle of blood that Badgie’s tongue relished.

‘What mark?’ The sergeant asked examining the face anxiously at a distance as if he had no time to put on glasses. ‘Och, that one, how did ye get that yin, Badgie?’

‘Must hae happened when Ah slipped and hit that rock, mister.’ He answered the sergeant although he grinned schemingly at Duncan, dragging him down with him. ‘Ken? Doun at the river? You saw, eh, just when ye came to help me, like.’

‘There’s yer answer, Mr Gow.’

Duncan felt like crying for someone in the room and that could have easily been for his sergeant, for that side of the man that leapt in backlash to go beyond all understanding. His sergeant, Donald Munro, was a simple man and deep down caring; over the past year he had sheltered Duncan under his wing. Much of the happiness and love that he had found would not have been achievable if Munro had not been supportive and indulgent of a country boy new from out of his mother’s skirts, in a town with many brightly swishing skirts and other youthful diversions. Munro had been like a new father to him and though Duncan’s father never did, Duncan knew that there were fathers that had the impulsive gleam that sprang the stick to beat the child. A problem, a provocation and a slight slip over a line and he was the truncheon man to sort it out. Legs would crack, bodies topple to the ground and if the Sergeant’s tongue stuck out far enough from the corner of his mouth, then heads might feel themselves splitting. Blue serge and helmet of the county police was the badge that both he and Duncan wore, the constable, until recently, sheltering in it like a child behind the bed when the man of the house came home drunk. Duncan’s father when alive had never done that. Badgie had no dad to his knowledge, but home drunk came many men to his mother’s door.

‘Mr Gow, Duncan laddie, perhaps ye’ll need tae steady yersel’ for what I’m aboot tae say.’ A blockage came to Duncan’s throat. He forced it down to the loose seething below his stomach. A wicked leer formed on the boy’s face, as if he too smelt that musty musk suddenly coating Duncan’s body. A cloud of dismay hung over Munro and the slow ticking of the clock gave warning of time’s progression. ‘The body we fished out - a lass - a young lassie. It was a Haldane.’ At this, the bluntness of the statement heart-struck Duncan and blocked the utterance in his gullet. ‘Sibylla Haldane, aye weel, winter will hae its deaths.’

Duncan’s face showed disbelief, anguish and a self-reproach that fluctuated from a deep remorse into the passion-set resolve that shot him to his feet. ‘Steady lad, steady, just sit ye doun, I ken how close she was tae ye.’ Sucker-punched, the young man collapsed back into his seat, winded and speechless by the blow. ‘Poor lassie, she’ll only be your age Badgie -