I never did hear Granda say the word hate, but he was a hating man himself, indeed he was. He hated to be kept waiting when he came home from the Lily Maud, hungry for soup and bannocks. He hated losing his pipe, a daily plague, and sulked at Ma when she remarked that he was the only one who would touch the filthy thing and whoever else but he could say where it might be? He hated the noise of children. And the singing of hymns on Sunday. And anything like singing, for that matter, even the whistling songs of Piper Stewie, which everyone thought pure and true, as sweet as a melodian. And I fancied he had now formed a particular hatred of dogs.

On that autumn evening in 1903, I watched the others leave the house. Forbidden, as always, from putting my accursed self in the way of fishermen off to their boats, I was to clear the plates and wash them in a bucket, but first I would scramble up the stone wall in front of the lean-to and tuck my boots under my skirt. From here I could see all the way to the Lily Maud. Ma pulling off her boots. Unty Jinna wading into the sea. Granda Jeemsie stacking ropes. All of them puffing white breath.

Crusoe usually waited at the foot of the wall, dancing on his stumpy hind legs and whining at me, Come down, come down, but on this day he trotted along to the shore, following a skimming guillemot. And he passed Granda. The old man gave him a kick with his seaboot. Crusoe yelped, he tumbled and rolled, and then he limped to the nearest safe place. By the time I had jumped from the wall to find him, he had hunkered down under a pile of nets in Net Tildie’s lean-to. He wouldn’t come out for me that night, nor next morning, or next. Days, it was, days before I could coax him out, poor bruised little thing.

Jeemsie knew I’d seen him. He probably heard my cry and then the sound of my running boots. But although he didn’t turn back to be tainted by the red-heidit quinie, I’d seen him from Net Tildie’s and I’ll tell you this: a flush was on his face. He was pleased with himself, aye, pleased with his small disgusting victory.

It was wrong to hate, I knew that, lambsie, and very wrong to hate your elders, but that’s what I muttered to myself that night. I hate you, Granda.

God was on my mind, God and Pastor McNab and how my sins would find me out. Well, they do, you know, lambsie, I suppose they always do in the end. But it was not my sin that God chose to punish. Or so it seemed, for a while.

~