Paul regains what he had not lost

Paul’s father greeted him with an excruciating silence. And it wasn’t fair. His father could stare at him, glare at him, or ignore him, as he chose. Paul could not see.

Finally he muttered, “May the wind lift you up, my father.”

Something wooden creaked near the floor, and Paul adjusted the angle of his head, turning his face towards the sound. His father must have been sitting on a chair. But he did not reply. Paul’s sullen mood hardened into anger.

“Cat sent me down to talk to you.”

A brush swished through a dish of water. The pantry odors of fermenting ale and drying meats had masked the scent until that moment, but Paul could smell the paint now: earthen and ashen and wet. In his mind’s eye he swept the table bare of cheeses and stoppered jars, and laid it with his father’s paint pots, water dish, and candles.

His father laid down his brush. “And Flann and your sister made me come to talk to you,” he said. “So I suppose we had better talk.”

“I suppose so.”

“There is a stool beside you, to your left. You may bring it to the table beside me. Do you know where the table is?”

Paul felt for the stool with his toe and hooked his foot around a leg to slide it to the table. His father had never spent any time with him while he was blind, and this awkward solicitude annoyed him.

“I know the room,” he said. “Colin likes to get drunk in here. I’ve had to help Aengus haul him to bed a few times.”

His father’s stool creaked and cracked. Paul imagined him sitting back to look around the room. “Does he drink in here?” he asked, sounding surprised. “Alone?”

Paul sniffed. “Often.”

His father looked a moment more, then the stool creaked a last time, and a pot or plate slid across the table. His father said mildly, “He is an unhappy man.”

Afterwards there fell a silence that felt replete on his father’s side. His father seemed to be painting again. Paul sat. He had almost begun to relax at the introduction of this trivial bit of conversation, but he decided his father was only trying to avoid the real subject.

Nevertheless it was his father who spoke first. “I wondered,” he said, his speech jerky and light like the flicks of his brush, “whether you would come. I should have known Cat would make you.”

“I can hardly refuse her anything at the moment, can I?”

Paul rested his chin on his fist and strained his ears, trying to hear Cat. She was upstairs, on the far side of the manor, with a crowd of excited women besides. He heard only a diffuse hum of female voices. She was not yet at the screaming stage. If anything she had been strangely quiet these last hours.

“I gather you’re angry at me for not coming earlier,” his father said.

“You wouldn’t be here at all if not for the baby.”

“The baby chose the day, that is all.”

“And if there had been no baby,” Paul hurled back at him, “when would you have come?”

The brush zigzagged through the water and clacked onto the tabletop. Paul tensed. It took much to shake his father out of the meditative motions of his painting. Brushes did not zip or clack in his hands.

“I don’t know, Paul,” his father said. “Just how much time did you give me, in fact? Tell me, how long before you judged I’d had ample time to forgive you? Or perhaps I should ask: How long before you’d decided you’d suffered enough?”

Paul set his jaw and slouched on his stool.

“At some point you stopped hoping I would deign to speak to you and started being angry at me for not doing it. So when was it?”

Paul shook his head.

“Where is your sister?”

Paul hesitated, confused by this sudden change of subject. “With Cat and the ladies.”

“Then we may talk. You know she will never trust that arm again, don’t you? Soon now, when you hold your child for the first time, I want you to remember that your sister will never hold her children in her left arm. She’ll never hold her babies on her left shoulder and rest her left cheek on their fuzzy little heads. Think of that when you hold yours.”

Paul had been expecting this. He deserved it, of course, but he found it sadly unoriginal of his father, sadly unworthy. He had thought through all of this already. He’d had months to think it over. He turned his face away to hide a faint sneer of disgust.

“I think of that every time I see her,” he muttered.

“I am not finished. I never told her how close she came to dying. Nor anyone before now. It is the luckiest thing that ever happened to you if Shus was not at home that night. If you had sent Shus, she would have died. Know this. At the end, there was nothing keeping her alive but I breathing for her, and the elf Madra holding her together from afar. Your sister was all but gone. Are you listening to me?”

“I’m listening. But it may surprise you to know I am already aware that others have suffered for my crime. Yes, my father! Even more than I have! I have already thought of all that. Rua, and you, and everyone. Even Malcolm.”

His father was silent for a moment. Paul supposed he had impressed him by mentioning Malcolm.

Then the stool creaked, and Paul heard the whisper of a reed being lifted from wood. When his father spoke, his voice was reflected from some flat surface. He was painting again.

“That is not,” he said, flick by flick, “what I am trying to tell you. I am telling you why I speak to you tonight, and not some weeks ago, or some days from now. Tonight, someone you love will pass close to death, and you will spend the night knowing she suffers, and not knowing whether she will survive.”

He paused to rinse his brush. Paul heard the kiss of his lips as they sucked it to a point.

“Then, in the morning,” he continued, bowed over the table, “you will, I hope, feel the breath of your newborn child on your cheek, which was only the air in the room at one moment, and the life of your son or daughter the next. You will wonder how this came to be, for it was nothing you or Cat did. And from that moment, nothing in the world will matter as much to you as that breath. Protecting it, caring for it, loving it. You may think you know wrath, my fiery son, but you do not know the fury a father feels when someone threatens his little girl. You may think you know love, too, but you are about to learn something new. The love of a father for his child.”

He laid down his brush, but his last words hung in the air. They both listened, breathing more softly than the hissing candles.

The servants were bringing tables and chairs into the great hall, with many thunks and much clatter. Alred and Aengus were twitting Domnall, and the Old Man was riled up over these strange happenings and doing some thumping and squealing of his own. Colin rumbled his ill humor from the creaking wooden chair nearest the door.

Farther off, the voices of the women were indistinct. There was laughter, but Paul could not have heard Lasrua’s dignified tittering beneath Edris’s giggles and the Gaelic girls’ hearty peals. If anything Lasrua had been especially quiet these last days.

“Then you will know,” his father said, jerking Paul’s attention back into the room, “how I feel about your sister. And then you will know why what you did is, to me, the most unforgivable of crimes. I do not speak of… the accident. Out of passion, perhaps…”

Paul heard his father’s hand rasp over his beard and smooth back his hair. His mellow voice was growing thin.

“Nor do I speak of trying to kill Malcolm. You thought—stupidly, but I don’t doubt it—that you were protecting Rua. Instead…”

His father’s stool creaked under his shifting weight, and suddenly his words were coming from just beyond Paul’s shoulder. He could almost feel his father’s breath on his bare skin, and he shrugged into it, even as he hung his head over the table and hid his face behind his hair.

“Instead, I speak, Paul, of your lie to me. You lied to me, so you could smuggle your knife and your hatred into that room where your sister was, and put her in terrible danger.”

The back of Paul’s wrist bumped against a bowl, and he curved his arm around it and slid it beneath his face. He inhaled the scent of paint: damp and velvety and thick. In his mind’s eye he was a boy again, in his father’s workroom, and his father was giving him one of those quietly soul-​harrowing scolds that made him wish for his mother’s shrieks and spankings.

But in his heart he could not forget that he was no longer a boy. His mother was six years dead, and this was only Aengus’s pantry, and not his father’s old workroom. Most of all he knew his father would not end this conversation by pulling him onto his lap and laying his cheek on Paul’s flaxen head. Those days were gone.

“It was not even enough for you to lie to me,” his father said. “You looked me in the eyes and told me to trust you. Trust you with the happiness, and the future, and the life of my daughter. And I looked you in the eyes, and I trusted you. It was the last time you will ever see me look at you with love and respect. I only wonder that you did not go blind at that moment.”

He clapped his hand softly on the wooden tabletop and sat back on his stool.

Love and respect. Paul managed to gulp back a sob, but a couple of hot tears raced down his cheeks to plop into the bowl of paint.

He wished he had gone blind at that moment. If only he had! It would have prevented everything—it would have served a purpose. As it was, he had bought nothing with his sight: no relief, not even forgiveness. And worse than losing his sight was losing his father’s love and respect.

“Ah, now,” his father said coldly. “If you are crying, you are beginning to feel as you ought.”

“What must I do?” Paul whimpered.

“About what, Paul?”

“To win back your love and respect.”

“Ah!” His father made an annoyed sound and slapped the tabletop again. “If I could think of anything useful for you to do, I would tell you. But my house is quite snug, I just had a load of firewood split, and if I told you you had to finish building the back pasture wall to make me love and respect you again, I doubt you’d believe it. There’s nothing for you to do. But who said you’d lost my love and respect?”

“You did,” Paul mumbled, deriving a certain miserable satisfaction from the fact. Another fat tear welled up at the corner of his eye, and he let it fall into the paint. “You said you would never look on me with love or respect again.”

His father’s fingertips brushed over Paul’s shoulder, sweeping his hair back from his face. Paul choked and stooped more deeply over the paint bowl, trying to hide behind his arm. But his skin shivered with a newborn’s sensitivity, yearning for that touch to come again.

“I told you that it was the last time you would ever see me look at you with love and respect,” his father corrected gently. “You will never see me again at all, unless the Lord wills it otherwise.”

His father’s stool creaked a last time, and its legs scraped over the flagstone floor. Then his father’s hands slid over Paul’s shoulders, cool and gentle and strong as they had ever been. Paul’s ache was so raw after all these weeks of exile that his body tensed and hunched and prickled, but he blubbered over the paint bowl out of overflowing relief. His father rubbed his shoulders until the spasm had passed.

“Upon my honor,” his father said dryly, “you are not the most respectable fellow of my acquaintance. But how could you believe I would ever stop loving you?”

Paul sniffled and wiped his tears back over his cheeks with both hands. “Because of what I did. Because I lied to you.”

“It wasn’t the first time.”

“No, but…”

It was different this time. Paul couldn’t quite say why. He was only seeing it now. It wasn’t only because he had put his sister’s life in danger. He had lied, and his father had trusted him this time. Was that why? Was that not the entire point of a lie?

Meanwhile his father brushed back Paul’s hair and slid the paint bowl out of range of the tears that were welling in Paul’s beard.

“If you believe that,” his father said, “then it is well that I speak to you tonight.”

He cupped Paul’s chin in his hand and tipped his head back against his chest. Paul felt his father’s breath on his face—warm on his forehead, cool on his wet cheeks. He could not see the look on his father’s face. But it no longer seemed so unfair.

“Do not forget,” his father said, “that everything I feel for your sister I feel for you, too. It is more than I can say in words. You are my firstborn child. You are about to learn how much I love you.”