High on a Mountain (26 page)

“You’ll be dead if you keep swinging this
pick.” Ailean continued the rhythmic motion. “Use that shovel, look
busy, but don’t push yourself.”

Ruairidh picked up the shovel Ailean had laid
aside and joined Tòmas in removing the dirt Ailean broke loose from
around the stump.

Tòmas stopped to catch his breath. “Look over
there.” He wiped away the sweat pouring down his face. “If you
could get far enough into those woods, they’d never find you. And
if you could make your way to a ship…”

Ailean squinted across the cleared area
toward the woods. The rising heat made the distant trees waver, and
the sun’s brilliance seared his eyes.

“Don’t try it,” Ruairidh said. “You’d be shot
before you were out of sight.”

Tòmas made no reply, but he looked with
longing at the tall trees and thick vine-matted brush beneath them.
He resumed work, digging away the loose soil from the roots of the
stump.

“Even if you weren’t shot, you would be dead
within days,” Ruairidh continued. “James tells me there are animals
in those swamps that can kill a man. Poison snakes. And something
he called gators that can eat a man alive.”

Tòmas stopped again and glared at Ruairidh.
“I could make it through. I know I could.”

“And if you made it through, and if you found
a ship, and if you could make it back to Scotland, you’d be hanged
when you got there.”

Tòmas pulled at a long root he’d dug loose
and glanced at the woods again. “Don’t you want to go back home,
MacLachlainn, back to your family?”

“I have no family to go back to,” Ailean
said. “They’re all dead.”

Tòmas said nothing more.

Someone shouted, and everyone stopped what
they were doing to see what the trouble was. Four men ran from the
edge of the field where they’d been working, looking back over
their shoulders at the woods.

“What? What is it?” Ruairidh called to
them.

“Something…a gator…a snake…I don’t know,” one
of them yelled.

James hurried from the wagon to Ruairidh’s
side and asked him about the commotion. Ruairidh translated what
the men said, and James started for the area where they’d been
working. The four men followed him at a respectful distance. He
stopped, put his hands on his hips and glanced back at them. He
leaned down and picked up something large and dark with both
hands.

“This what you think is a gator or a snake?”
he asked.

They all backed away as he came near, and he
threw back his head and laughed.

“This ain’t nothing but a old gopher turtle.
It make some good eating,” he said as he carried the turtle to the
wagon. “We have us some gopher gumbo. I’ll cook him up and show you
some real good eating. Mmm. Taste good.”

All the Highlanders gathered around the wagon
to look at the turtle. They’d never seen such an animal before and
were intrigued. The guard shouted for them to disperse and get back
to their work.

The next evening, they enjoyed the delicious
soup James made from the gopher turtle.

____________

On the fifth day of work clearing the field,
one of the Highlanders sickened in the heat and became unconscious.
Ailean and another man carried him to the edge of the field and
laid him in the shade. Ruairidh and James bathed him with cool
water and tried to revive him. The other Highlanders gathered
around him as he lay dying.

While attention was focused on the dying man,
Tòmas Camshron eased farther and farther from the wagon where the
armed guard stood. No one but Ailean saw that when he neared the
thicker growth, Tòmas squatted and his head could not be seen above
the brush. But Ailean could see the movement of the bushes and
watched Tòmas’ passage as he eased into the swamp.

It was more than an hour before he was
missed.

____________

The Highlanders did not harvest the rice
crop. After Tòmas’ escape, Mr. Hollingsworth decided they were not
to be trusted and, more particularly, they were not to be trusted
with sharp implements like scythes. The black slaves cut the rice
and the white slaves gathered the harvested rice into sheaves and
loaded them onto the wagons.

“This is woman’s work,” Ruairidh
muttered.

In their Highland homeland, the people always
sang as they worked. Every kind of labor had a song with a rhythm
that fitted the movements of the work at hand and made it flow
easier. As they gathered the rice, one of the men began singing a
song Highland women always sang as they stooked the oats. One by
one, the others joined in, and soon they were working in
rhythm.

Ailean tried to sing with them, but his
throat froze and he could make no sound at all. A longing for his
home beset him, and he struggled to push it down, to bury it. He
knew if he didn’t, it would overwhelm him, would bring back his
memories, and he would not be able to endure it. His eyelids
prickled hot with the tears he had not shed, would not shed. He
tried to ignore the painful constriction in his throat, bowed his
head to the task at hand and let the singing sweep over him, past
him.

That night, he dreamed he was in church on a
Sunday morning, leading the congregation in singing. He smiled at
Mùirne as he sang the first line of the psalm and it was echoed by
the congregation. His eyes swept happily over each of his loved
ones as he continued singing each presenting line.

He closed his eyes as he sang, lifting his
face to heaven and his voice and heart to God in praise. But the
congregation’s response grew weaker, until he realized he was
singing by himself. He opened his eyes and looked around to find
the building was empty. He was alone. He panicked and searched in
every direction for the congregation which had disappeared. He had
been abandoned, deserted, not only by his loved ones but also by
God Himself.

A voice came echoing as if from a faraway
place. “Don’t look for us. We’ve gone on. We can’t come to you, but
you can come to us.”

“Wait for me!” he screamed. He ran to the
door but found it had become a solid wall, with no opening. He
clawed at the stones to no avail, then turned to another wall. He
could find no way out. He was sealed in.

He awoke and sat up, sweating and
panting.

____________

All the slaves at The Oaks attended worship
in the family’s chapel. There were two services each Sunday
morning, because the chapel was too small to accommodate the entire
population of the plantation at one time. The preacher was a slave
named Paul, who delivered powerful, stirring sermons. Mr.
Hollingsworth was adamant that all who lived on his land should
receive religious instruction and be given the opportunity to
worship God.

The Highlanders, some Catholic, some
Presbyterian, were grateful to have worship services available,
even if those services were Anglican, and all of them attended.

Except Ailean MacLachlainn.

His anger at God over the loss of his loved
ones, and over the suffering he had endured, deepened and hardened
within him. He did not want to hear any mention of God, and he
refused to worship a Being he’d been taught to turn to in times of
trouble. A Being Who had betrayed him. Who had allowed all he loved
to be destroyed and taken from him.

Each Sunday morning, Ailean stayed locked in
the barracks while the others went to worship.

____________

Every summer when the rice fields were
flooded, members of the Hollingsworth family moved away from the
plantation. They transported their house servants and household
goods on the periagua to Pawley’s Island, as did many planters on
the outlying plantations near George Town.

Fever was an ever-present danger during the
summer months, and most families left their swampy estates for
healthier environs. In November, after the rice was harvested,
threshed, processed and shipped from the plantation, the family
came home.

Upon his return, Mr. Hollingsworth announced
there would be a feast for the slaves, a time of rest, a reward for
their hard work. And each person would be given a new set of
clothing as well as a small gift.

“Master, he do this every year,” James told
Ruairidh, with a broad smile. “It’s fine, mighty fine.”

Mr. Hollingsworth told James the Highlanders
were to be excluded from the festivities. James tried to persuade
Mr. Hollingsworth to allow the men to attend the feast. He
respected the men under his charge and thought they deserved to be
rewarded for their hard work as much as the other slaves. At last,
James prevailed. He and Mr. Hollingsworth compromised: the
Highlanders would be allowed to attend, but under armed guard.

____________

On the day of the party, food in plenty was
laid out on long tables set up behind the slave quarters in the
shade of spreading oak trees with their gray, mossy beards. There
was an abundance of pork which had been cooked over a smoking
hickory fire, but the Highlanders didn’t eat pork. There were other
foods they enjoyed, though, chicken and beef, as well as a variety
of vegetables. Ailean had never seen such a copious amount nor
variety of food.

When they finished eating, James lined them
up.

“Now, make sure you on your best behavior.
Don’t make no trouble,” James admonished. “Master bringing the
family down for the music now, like he always do. You stand here
and look pleasant. Else you be back in the barracks and miss the
fun.”

Before James finished speaking, a fiddle
struck up the first lively notes of a song. A memory flashed into
Ailean’s mind. A fiddle. Niall. Playing at his wedding. A lively
tune for dancing, like this one. He gritted his teeth and tried to
shove the remembrance, and the hurt that came with it, away.

Mr. Hollingsworth walked by, nodding and
smiling at everyone, on his way to the small dais where the
musicians were performing.

At that moment, Ailean heard a high-pitched
childish voice call, “Daddy, Daddy! Wait for me!”

A sharp pain stabbed through Ailean’s chest
when he saw a little blond-haired boy run past, followed by a young
woman.

“Oh, sir, I’m so sorry,” said the woman when
she reached Mr. Hollingsworth. “He dashed away before I could stop
him.”

“That’s all right, Miss Webster,” Mr.
Hollingsworth said with a smile as he swung the boy up into his
arms. “He can go with me. He’s getting to be a big boy now.”

“As you wish, sir,” Miss Webster said, dipped
in a perfunctory curtsy to her employer and turned to go.

But Ailean didn’t notice her departure. His
gaze was fixed on the blond head of the small boy Mr. Hollingsworth
had taken into his arms and lifted onto his shoulder. Ailean could
hardly breathe as he watched the smiling father and son, aching and
smothered by the memories that flooded into his mind from the place
deep within himself where he had locked them away. And his fingers
went unbidden to caress the tattered piece of his tunic he kept
tucked behind the waist of his
triubhas
.

THIRTY-TWO

Latharn’s head fell, senseless, onto the
table and knocked over the bottle. The little whisky left in it
dribbled onto the table top and meandered across it to trickle over
the edge and drip onto the stone floor. Catriona grumbled when she
saw the additional work his drunkenness had created for her.

“And me with so far to walk when I leave
here, and he adds more steps for these old bones,” she muttered as
she went to get a rag. “All he does is tipple nowadays.”

Latharn’s drinking interfered with his daily
life. He spent more and more time in a drunken stupor, and his
affairs suffered. His crofters, unsupervised, spent more time on
their own concerns than they did fulfilling their obligations to
him on his portion of the farm he leased from the Duke of
Argyll.

During harvest time, his fields of oats and
barley went unmown for weeks, and they went unthreshed when he
remained sober long enough to have the crofters reap them. But
Latharn didn’t spare a moment’s concern for his crops or his other
duties.

His sober periods brought memories of Mùirne,
and he couldn’t bear the flood of guilt that surged through him at
the thought of her. And always, when Latharn remembered Mùirne’s
death, he sought to relieve himself of self-blame by placing
responsibility at the feet of Ailean MacLachlainn.

If it hadn’t been for MacLachlainn, Mùirne
would have been safely married to Latharn, here at his side, happy,
smiling, instead of being buried in the cold ground. And if
MacLachlainn hadn’t exercised some sort of unnatural hold over her,
she wouldn’t have placed herself in the way of the piece of lead
that killed her.

Latharn’s thoughts brought fresh waves of
remorse, and he gritted his teeth and pressed the heels of his
hands into his eye sockets in an attempt to block the pain. His
sporadic attempts at sobriety ended when, each time, he reached for
another bottle of whisky to drink himself into blessed
oblivion.

____________

The time between harvest and planting was
free time for the slaves who worked in the fields at The Oaks. They
were allowed to tend their own private vegetable gardens, to work
on their own projects and given permission to work on other
plantations to earn money for themselves. They performed their
tasks efficiently to harvest the rice as soon as possible so they
would have more free time to enjoy.

But Mr. Hollingsworth did not believe it
would be wise to extend those privileges to the Highland men.
Idleness was not good for anyone, and particularly not for men like
these. And Mr. Hollingsworth did not trust them to employ their
time in productive enterprises unsupervised, as the other slaves
did. So they continued the work of clearing the additional
acreage.