Kintyre

Copyright © 2013 by Janet Dowler.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

Certain characters in this work are historical figures, and certain events portrayed did take place. However, this is a work of fiction. All of the other characters, names, and events as well as all places, incidents, organizations, and dialogue in this novel are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

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ISBN: 978-1-4759-7622-9 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4759-7623-6 (ebk)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2013902504

iUniverse rev. date: 02/13/2013

CONTENTS

PROLOGUE

FIONA’S STORY

SARA’S STORY

KATHRYN’S STORY

PROLOGUE

H e slid his feet out of the bed carefully, so he wouldn’t disturb her and gasped as his feet hit the floor, Sweet Mother of Jesus! This floor is colder than a whore’s heart!

He tiptoed across the room, drawn by the light streaming through a gap in the heavy curtain, already planning the colors he would need in order to capture just that kind of soft, cold light.

He was using the edge of the curtain to burnish a hole in the thick frost on the glass when he heard a worried, What’s the matter?

There’s a full moon over fresh snow, he replied, as he hurriedly dressed to go outside: two pairs of pants over his nightshirt, then the thick sweater and socks that she had knitted for him.

It’s two o’clock in the morning and cold enough to freeze hell.

The house had only one clock, downstairs in the parlor, and he had never seen her even glance at it. But he knew that if he checked, she would be right.

I’ll just do some quick sketches and be back warming my frozen feet on your warm back before you know it.

She laughed, snuggling deeper beneath the quilts.

Right! And the pigs just flew over the barn. Don’t freeze to death.

He collected his paints.

Definitely water-colors for this light, he decided.

He laced up the heavy boots that she had given him, wrapped himself around with his heaviest coat, a hat, two scarfs and a blanket and stepped outside. The air was completely still but so cold it made him cough. He pushed his water bottles inside his coat before they could freeze.

Not from the lake. The moon’s in the wrong position, he murmured to himself.

He looked around. It was bright enough for him to work without any additional lighting, so he could paint from anywhere. The black tree branches set off the subtle sheen of the stone house, but if he went down to the lane, the moon would then be above the trees, flooding the snow-covered field with its brightness.

He found his perfect viewpoint at the bottom of the front field near the lane, and looked back up at the farmhouse. No matter how many times he painted it, his fascination with the structure never diminished. It had practically grown in place naturally, without having to be built. It’s stone came from the same strata as the stone it sat on. The wood that framed and trimmed it had been cleared from the surrounding fields; even the glass in its windows had been made in the village from local sand.

Concerned with keeping his water-based paints fluid in the cold, he went to work, oblivious to the chill invading his body.

Finally, he felt he had captured the luster of moonlight on the snow, the cool remoteness of the moon, the black lacework of the trees, and the comforting solidity of the house. But something was missing: the always elusive something that made a truly satisfying piece of work.

He paused, frustrated with the painting’s incompleteness, and realized how cold he was. He had started to pack up with frozen fingers, when a new light appeared on a patch of snow.

She had lit the lamp in the parlor window; the only window that faced him. A warm golden light beamed out over the sea of white, black and silver.

He worked feverishly for a few more minutes, then with a sigh of satisfaction, bundled up his work and hurried his half frozen body, up the slope, towards the warm welcoming arms of the house they called Kintyre.

FIONA’S STORY

W e welcomed the twentieth century with a dance at the village hall. The tables were filled with the pride of the village wives and the haggises my mother-in-law had made. There were homemade wines and cider, and a keg of something stronger that the lumberjacks had brought to share with the men.

Men and women with flushed faces laughed and talked too loudly. Young girls fluttered their eyelashes and practiced their wiles on embarrassed young men. Children ran, screaming with excitement, around and through the dancers. Babies slept soundly among the coats in the cloak-room.

George Winters played the piano, Eddie Burnoss and Paul Sinclair had their fiddles, one of the lumberjacks had a squeeze-box while another plucked his banjo, so we danced. We danced the reels and jigs of the old country and the square-dances and modern waltzes of the new land. Because there were so few women, after I had danced with my husband, my husband’s uncles, my husband’s brothers, my children and the unattached men from the village, I danced with the lumberjacks and quarry workers as well. It was a wonderful evening. I had never felt so giddy or so full of life.

When Mathew Tompson, who thinks he owns the village, announced that there was only one minute left in the nineteenth century, the two McDonald boys pumped up their pipes. My husband swung Ian onto his shoulders. Kathryn and I held hands with Jamie and Robbie as we joined in the final countdown, laughter and cheers of greetings to the New Year and new century. The sound of the bagpipes rose over the human voices as we linked hands to sing Auld Lang Syne.

The men went outside and set off the fireworks while the women and children crowded around the windows to watch the brilliant displays. When the final firecracker had exploded, we MacKays bundled the children and ourselves in our blankets and furs and piled into our two big sleighs.

The main street of the village was ablaze with lanterns as groups of people rushed from house to house first-footing, bringing good luck for the coming year with the traditional Hogmanay gifts of coal and salt.

We left the buildings behind, and the peaceful beauty of the stars and moonlight reasserted itself as we swished over the well packed snow. As the horses slowed to turn onto the farm track, I looked across the fields to our new home. It stood sideways to the lane and the lake beyond, facing towards the village. The single window facing us sparkled with the mirrored lights of our sleigh. There was only a half moon but it reflected off the snow giving the stone walls a sheen like burnished pewter. The house almost glowed against the dark of the pine trees and the bare branches of the maples that grew on the slight ridge behind it.

I hugged my family around me and knew I could never be any happier than I was at that moment.

As we walked from the barn towards the house, I saw a man and woman walking towards the kitchen door. They were warmly bundled up, although their clothes looked a little strange. I was delighted to think that some of the villagers had come all the way out to the farm to be our first-footers. I waved and I called out to them.

Come in! You are most welcome.

James, my husband, turned to see whom I was calling to.

We have good luck coming in, I laughed and turned back to my anticipated guests.

They had gone.

It must have been some trick of the shadows, for when James took a lantern out to find them, he couldn’t even find any footprints.

Later, in our warm bed, in our very own room, in our beautiful big house, I spent little time worrying over my disappearing visitors. Instead, I gloated over my good fortune.

Twenty-five years before, I had been a penniless and scared 16-year-old, as I stepped off the train to meet Captain and Mrs Hamilton to whom I was indentured for the next seven years. I was content to be comfortably housed, fed and clothed as payment for my labor—a wonderful improvement over the Scottish Highlands where I had been homeless, jobless and starving!

When my time was served, I stayed with kind Mrs Hamilton for wages. I might have become a lifelong paid housekeeper had James MacKay not come into town with his father to register a second homestead. Finding me sweeping the porch steps, he had asked for a drink of water and within three months, had swept away all my objections and carried me back to his family’s farm as his bride, only the second woman in a household of six men!

Father Mackay, his young wife and his two brothers had left Scotland for Upper Canada years before Confederation. The men had left the pregnant woman in the town of Kingston and gone to work as lumberjacks. Somehow, in the never-ending forests of pine and firs, they found a small lake bordered by meadows of deep rich soil and surrounded by groves of oaks and maples. They staked it and sent down to Kingston to register their claim.

The brothers built a cabin, cleared more land and brought in a crop of barley, rye and alfalfa before bringing the wife and baby up from the town. With good soil, three strong men, a tough Scottish woman raising three young boys, and plenty of winter work available in the forests and quarries around them, the MacKays flourished.

Over time, the nearby lumber camp became a village, and by the time I arrived, there was a main street with a store, a livery stable, a forge, two churches, a village hall and even a schoolhouse.

We all lived in the cabin then. The uncles and brothers slept in the loft while James and I had a bed across the main room from his parents’ bed.

When my babies started arriving, it became more crowded and much noisier. I thought we might move into the small, unfinished frame house they had built, as the law required, on the second homestead, but the uncles wouldn’t hear of it. They said it was time to make a bigger, more permanent main house. Uncle Ian, who was a mason up at the quarries, persuaded the family to build a large strong stone house, instead of a wooden or brick house, which would have been far easier and much quicker to build.

They started on the house before my son Jamie was born but they didn’t finish it until after Baby Ian’s birth. But what a magnificent house it is. It has two storeys with four large rooms upstairs; downstairs, the back half is one big kitchen, complete with a modern iron stove, that had to be brought up from Kingston in four parts and welded together when it got here. There’s even an indoor laundry room with a pump and drain. What a luxury! There is also a parlor, and another smaller room that Mother Kathryn used for her sewing, at the front of the house. Uncle Robert made all the wooden fitments from our own trees and they are magnificent. Father MacKay called the house Kintyre to remind us of where we came from.

We had only moved in two months before the end of the old year, so that we could start the new century in our spacious, handsome new home.

The two uncles had one bedroom, while my two brothers-in-law had another which they happily shared with my two older sons. Father and Mother MacKay had the smallest room, and James and I shared the biggest room with our daughter Kathryn and three-year-old Ian.

There is one very odd and awkward thing about the MacKay family; they keep using the same names over and over. So Father MacKay is James; so is my husband and so is my son! Likewise there are three Roberts and three Ians. The villagers differentiate them by calling them the Old MacKays, the Young MacKays and the MacKay lads.

My mother-in-law is Kathryn; I am Fiona, but my daughter had to be called Kathryn too. When I asked my husband, James, why we couldn’t call our daughter Margaret as I had wanted, he simply said it wasn’t a family name, and his mother would be greatly distressed if we did not call our daughter after her. I had no desire to upset Mother Kathryn in any way. I can barely remember my own family and I love this family I have married into, but I do find this naming tradition very strange. I wonder what would have happened if I had had more children!

The early years of the new century rolled gently by. As the forest was cut down, the lumber camps moved further away and a few more farmers moved into the area. The village grew and we acquired a doctor. We had a good market for our milk, butter and vegetables. The men added a dairy to the barn and I started to make cheese as well, and there was always a buyer for some of Mother Kathryn’s baked goods.

The old man, who had run the general store since the days of the lumber camp, died and a young family moved in. The man, David Talbot, had some modern ideas and greatly increased the quantity and variety of his merchandise. One of his innovations that favorably affected us was the milk delivery. Instead of one of us taking around a milk wagon, or having the villagers come to us for their milk, we made a single delivery to Mr Talbot’s store and all the villagers went to him. Mr Talbot then paid us with coin or with credit at the store. It was easy for the children to take the wagon full of churns down to the store before school and collect them on their way home. The villagers were obviously prepared to pay a little more for their milk if it saved them the walk out to our farm, and I appreciated not having the bother of people arriving at the dairy at any hour of the day.

There is a natural rhythm to life on a farm, and as my children grew stronger and more capable of doing the chores, the Old MacKays grew weaker and less capable. Uncle Robert died only three years into the new century, and Uncle Ian died as a result of an accident at the quarry, just two years later. Mother Kathryn was devastated when Father passed away in 1910, and only survived him by a year.

We were saddened by and deeply mourned each passing, but it was just part of the natural cycle of birth, growth and death. I missed them all, but the loss of Mother Kathryn grieved me the most.

I had soon realized that my mother-in-law’s stern, serious expression hid a warm, humorous person with a wonderful sense of the ridiculous. I often felt overwhelmed by the demands and responsibilities of the farm work, and my growing family but Mother Kathryn could always lift my spirits and make me laugh with tales of her early days on the ever-expanding farm. We formed a strong female bond in our houseful of men. Without Mother Kathryn, I turned to my daughter Kathy, but with her there was nothing but grief.

As the only girl in the family, and a very pretty one too, Kathy had been badly spoiled. She could twist her uncles and father round her little finger with her dimpled smile, big blue eyes and coy manner. Even her brothers were not entirely immune but I saw a different side of my too-charming-by-half daughter.

In a home where everyone worked hard, she was shamelessly lazy. When I became the sole woman in the house with all the jobs that that entailed, I desperately needed her help; however, after being called three times to do some chore that she knew she should already have performed, she would start it so slowly and so poorly and with such sulkiness, that I found it easier and less annoying to do it myself. I asked James to speak to her and to him she was all contrition and promises then as soon as he was out of sight, she returned to her idle ways.

Within a week of her grandmother’s death, without asking anyone, Kathy moved into the now vacant bedroom, declaring that as a young woman (she was just 15 at the time) it was not right that she had to share a room with her parents. She then bewitched her father and uncles into helping her decorate the room to her taste; a taste which included a large mirror.

I often found her there (talking to her image, trying out different angles to display her profile and expressions, smiling to show her dimples to best effect and fluttering her thick lashes over her lovely blue eyes) of course those were the times when I most needed her help with the work of feeding the men and animals, tending the garden and keeping the yard, barn, and house clean and tidy.

Kathy had loved school and according to her brothers and teacher had been an excellent student, which led me, one night at supper, to suggest, in front of everyone, that she might like to think of becoming a school teacher. I was stunned by her reaction, and for the first time even my brothers-in-law realized what I had to contend with.

Ugly-faced with fury, she screamed that she was NEVER going to live such a boring life as we did. She was going to the city where she would become rich and famous. She would NEVER spend HER life cleaning up after people or animals. She was going to have servants to take proper care of her. She would NEVER be content in such a backwater, working so hard for such a meager living. She was going to go everywhere, see everything and live an interesting life far away from this life of slavery and ugliness.

As she rushed from the table to hide in her room, the men looked at each other in utter amazement and the meal was completed in awkward silence. The incident was never discussed.

I was appalled by the extent of my daughter’s rudeness and unhappiness but did not know how to deal with it. I did try to tell her about my life in Kingston when I was her age but she was so scornful of my role as a servant, that I gave up. I wanted James to speak to her, but he was convinced that it was just the restlessness of youth and that she would soon find a young man, fall in love and