The Parting Glass (Caitlin Ross Book 4) (29 page)

He paused, coming to something difficult, I supposed. I waited.

“I thought of how we’d been together, you and I, and I didna think, I didna even ask, and what if there were a child from it? Gods, I could hae drowned myself in the stream for an ass not fit tae live. Mitch would hae had my hide if he’d known I’d been so heedless.”

“You didn’t tell him?” I asked, acerbic. Of course he hadn’t. He hadn’t considered it himself.

“I told him of us. I told him I loved you and meant tae return tae you. But I’m not seventeen anymore. He’s no right tae the details.” He fidgeted with his mug some more. “Is there? A child?”

“Is that the only reason you came back?” I countered.

“Of course not!” he barked, half rising from his chair. I’d really made him angry. “Caitlin, tell me. Are ye pregnant?”

“No,” I whispered, and steeled myself to bear his relief.

He sat back down with a sigh, and leaned across the table to take my hands in his, surprising me. “It wouldna have been a bad thing, love.” The endearment slipped out so spontaneously I knew it came from his heart. “I’d be happy tae make a child with you. Just…not quite yet.”

His words soothed something hurt in my soul, and I closed my eyes so he couldn’t see them fill with tears. No getting around it. Risk or not, this was The One.

“Aye well,” Timber continued more quietly, releasing my hands. “I worked myself up into a righteous fury, and when I couldna stand it anymore, I hiked out to the nearest road and hitched back to town. I went straight to Mitch’s place and stormed in the kitchen door, ready to beat him to a pulp. He was sitting at the table. He said, ‘Took you long enough,’ as if he’d been expecting me for days. Then he sat me down and gave me this.”

Now he showed me his hand. It bore a new tattoo, an eight-pointed star done in red and black with white accents. I’d never seen anything like it before.

“He gave you that at his kitchen table?” I whistled in appreciation. “Nice work.”

“Aye. Mitch is an artist.” Timber took a moment to admire his acquisition. “It was all part of the test, ken. Leaving me up there, I mean. I had to accept and act on my own authority and take the responsibility for the consequences, not sit about waiting for someone to give me permission and tell me what to do.”

The mention of responsibility and consequences gave me a shrewd idea that Mitch had known quite well the details of what had passed between Timber and me. It might have been coincidence. But Mitch had known Timber for a long time.

“What if you’d never come to that point?” I asked.

“I expect I’d have run out of food before long. I’m not much of a hunter. Fishing, aye, but I didna see any large ones in the stream. Perhaps I’d have come down when I got hungry enough. Or perhaps I’d have died of starvation. It’s not unknown.” He shrugged as if he didn’t much care, one way or another. “I dinna ken; it didna happen.”

“So that was when?” I prompted when he didn’t continue the story right away.

“A little more than a week ago. By then, I’d forgotten such things as telephones existed.” His lips twisted in a wry smile. “All I could think was how to get to you.”

“Did you hitch?”

“No. That’s what took so long. I decided I did have some things I valued, tools and such, and I wanted to bring them. So I bought a truck.”

The offhand way he mentioned it, as if going out and buying a truck were an everyday occurrence, took me rather aback.

“You bought a truck,” I repeated.

“Aye. A ’78 Chevy pickup.” The gleam in his eye frightened me a bit. It didn’t betoken a car nut, not exactly. But he did like them. I supposed I could cope.

“I’ll need a truck here if I’m to get into the trades,” he said. “But it cost me a bit of time to build up the funds. Carpentry would have paid well, but taken too long. I had to play for it.” He mimed sliding a pool cue across the table. “And no one at any of my regular places will bet me anything more than the odd beer. I had to go pretty far afield.”

“Hustler,” I remarked without rancor.

“It does come in handy,” he agreed. “Well, I got the truck, and I pitched my tools in back. I didna have much else worth keeping. Some clothes and such. My lease was up at the end of the month, so that was convenient. Then I remembered I hadna visited my parents in over a year, and I planned to move halfway across the country, and if I left without a word me mam would hunt me down and shoot me.”

He cleared his throat. I suspected that despite his light tone, he took the threat of his mother’s wrath very seriously indeed.

“So I drove down to Klamath Falls. Da retired there when Spruce left home,” he explained in an aside. “They kept me a day and a half, and me itching all the while to be on the road. I didna get away until yesterday morning.”

“Yesterday morning!” I’d been up on Flagstaff Mountain, debating what to do about our non-existent offspring. Someday I’d tell Timber about it. Not just now. “You drove from Oregon to here in a day? Does your truck fly, by any chance?”

“Och, no. But I was in a hurry, ken, and I drove straight through. I only stopped to pull over and have a piss now and again. And to call you, when I passed a phone.” He added the last with a bashful look up at me through his recalcitrant lock of hair. “I used up an entire roll of quarters.”

Ah. The messages.

“So you’d remembered the existence of phones, then?” I couldn’t help but poke that sore spot. I wasn’t going to let him forget it in a hurry.

Once again, he cleared his throat.

“Me mam reminded me,” he muttered.

He sounded so mortified, I had to laugh. “Do tell.”

“I suppose you’ve the right to hear my shame,” Timber allowed, unamused. He’d hoped to get out of telling me. “Well, I told Mam and Da what I had in mind, and of course they had to know why. So I told them about you. They were pleased for me.” He looked distinctly uncomfortable, and I had a feeling he’d understated his parents’ reaction quite a lot. “Mam thought I’d never be… Never be serious about a woman, and all. Truth to tell, I think she has us marrit already.”

My heart skipped a beat. Timber frowned a little, as if it had just recently occurred to him that he might be drawn into making such a commitment.

“At any rate,” he went on, flicking his hair back with a toss of his head. “As I was getting ready to leave, Mam asked if I couldna stay yet another day or two, and when you were expecting me. And it…came out that you couldna know tae expect me, as I hadna spoken with you since I left Boulder.” He grimaced at the recollection.

“She didn’t find that acceptable?” I guessed.

“She went after me with a potholder. Called me every name in the book, and then some.” His eyes grew thoughtful. “Not ‘cumsucker,’ though. She’d not think tae accuse me of that.”

“So that’s the whole story?”

“Aye. Except…” He quaffed the remainder of his tea and set the mug down with a thud. Gearing up to something.

“Except what?” I asked, nervous. What more could there conceivably be?

“Except, it’s my birthday. I’m thirty years old today. And I wondered if ye might… If ye might perhaps have a present for me?” He gave me a guarded look through that damned unruly lock of hair, which had fallen into his face again. “Nothing out of the way, mind. But I do recall that I left something with ye, and I’d thought to claim it.”

Oh yes. His farewell kiss.

“I don’t know. You see, I mislaid it when I didn’t hear from you in so long. I’m not sure I can put my hands on it again.”

For just a moment, I savored his crushed expression. Then I couldn’t stand it anymore, couldn’t keep up the pretense.

“I think I could find another one, though,” I offered. “Would that be all right?”

He smiled like the sun rising.

“Aye. That would be fine.”

I thought about Lughnasadh, and the harvest, and how sometimes you’re lucky enough to gather in things you didn’t plant and had no right to expect.

Timber opened his arms, and I went into them.

The End

Author’s Note

From what I gather, I am not the usual kind of writer. I do not do well with the usual kind of writer’s rules, like “write every day whether you feel like it or not,” and “don’t use too many adverbs.” Some of this is just due to the kind of person I am. But a larger part is due to the fact that I don’t actually invent the stories I write. Characters come to me and tell me about their lives. I simply transcribe them. Sometimes these characters hang around for months at a time. Sometimes they disappear for years. Then, one day, there they are again, full of their travels, like tourists after an extended vacation, with shoeboxes full of pictures they need to show me right away. They hang around my house, interrupting each other. They wake me up in the middle of the night. I have a hard time getting it all down.

I first encountered Caitlin Ross in the fall of 2001 (with her permission, I have moved the timeline of her stories closer to the present day. This just makes it easier for me). She started by telling me the events of
She Moved Through the Fair
, one day while I was walking up to the corner store to buy cigarettes. Yes, I smoke. So sue me. My band had recently played at a similar music festival, and we had a lot in common.

She got to the point where she found Vic Houston’s body and stopped. When I asked her why, she said, “Well, really, to understand all this you have to know what happened before.” Then she left for a while, to mull it over, I guess.

Sometime during this initial conversation, she mentioned Rain and Sky Montoya. I found this amusing, and made a remark about people whose Hippie parents had saddled them with strange names. She raised an eyebrow at me. “Don’t laugh,” she said. “My husband’s name is Timber.”

That was the first I heard of
him
.

I think it was a few months later that Caitlin reappeared, Timber in tow, and began to tell me the story of
The Unquiet Grave
. This was difficult subject matter for her, dealing with a time when she had chosen to cut herself off from all things magical, and it took her literally years to get the story out. There was quite a lot of going back and saying, “Well, no; that’s not really how it happened. It was more like
this
.” For the most part, Timber left her to it; it was Caitlin’s story, after all.

Finally the whole thing came out to Caitlin’s satisfaction, and although we all agreed that it was rather a flawed and complicated story, we decided just to leave it alone, probably forever. From there, she and Timber proceeded to tell me the entirety of
She Moved Through the Fair
, and segued directly into
A Maid in Bedlam.
They spoke so fast that I transcribed both those tales in a little under twelve weeks.

Along the way, they told me bits and pieces of
The Parting Glass
. Not the whole tale, only as much as I needed to know to be getting on with. I wrote down what I could, and the story intrigued me, seeing as I had been living in Boulder at about the same time. But they never saw fit to fill me in on the details.

After we’d finished with
A Maid in Bedlam
, I heard the beginning of the next major event in Timber and Caitlin’s lives (a story that will, I hope, be told to me in its complete form rather sooner than later). About this time, however, things between my visitors began to get, to put it mildly, steamy. I’m afraid I began to be able to write of nothing—in fact, think of nothing—but Caitlin and Timber having sex; a peculiar and disturbing experience. At some point, after I had spent a whole day and some twenty manuscript pages describing a particular love scene. Timber looked over my shoulder and frowned.

“Aye,” he said. “That did happen. But not quite like that.”

And then the both of them disappeared. They were gone for over two years, and I was left with no idea what happened in the story I was attempting to tell, or anywhere else. I thought about it quite a lot, and went back to it regularly. But without the input of the relevant characters, there was absolutely nothing I could do about it.

Late in the summer of 2012, I began to have the sense of someone sniffing around me again. I hoped it was Caitlin and Timber, but I really didn’t know until, one morning, I walked into the living room and there they both were, in the best chairs. I have no idea whether they spent their entire absence in bed—I think that would be a little much, even for them. But the overwhelming sense of mutual passion was much diminished, and it was clear they were ready to continue.

“So?” I asked. “What really happened?”

Caitlin opened her mouth. A little to my surprise, Timber interrupted her.

“Perhaps let’s back up a bit,” he said.

So it was that I heard the tale of Caitlin and Timber’s initial meeting, and how the matter of John Stonefeather brought them together, as is related in
The Parting Glass
.

Now, I never speak to Timber much directly. Seeing him through Caitlin’s eyes is about all I can manage. He talks to my husband, though; they have a good deal in common, both being drummers and woodworkers and so on. So when I really need to know what’s going on in Timber’s head, or what he’s been doing when Caitlin hasn’t been around, I ask Michael, who is generally glad to tell me. I’ve toyed around with the idea of trying to write something from Timber’s point of view, but it’s never come to much.

Well, one morning during the transcription of
The Parting Glass
—I was at the beginning of Chapter Twelve, with Caitlin and Timber on their way to break into Stonefeather’s house—I woke very early to the distinct sensation of someone poking me in the eye.

“Get up,” said a Scots voice. “I have something to tell you.”

“Good gods, it’s five in the morning,” I mumbled. “Can’t it wait?”

“No.”

I got out of bed. “Can I at least have my coffee?”

“Aye, I expect that will do,” he allowed with some reluctance.

So I heaved myself up, staggered into the kitchen, and started the coffee going. When it was done, I poured myself a cup and staggered back to the living room, where I threw myself on the couch and stared into space for a good while.

“Are you done yet?”

“No! Leave me alone!”

“Look, you.” When Timber deigns to talk to me, he rarely uses my name. I don’t know what that’s about. “I’ve never spoken of this to anyone. I mean to do it now. Hurry up before I change my mind.”

So I trundled into my office and fired up the word processor. And Timber told me all about the morning after that memorable Summer Solstice he first spent with Caitlin Ross.

There seems to be trend with authors lately, of putting in extra scenes, retold from the point of view of someone other than their main protagonist. Personally, I think this is kind of lame. So I never intended Timber’s revelations to see print. I did, however, share them with my husband. He told me, “This is brilliant. It needs to be seen.”

Timber’s uneasy about it, but, oddly enough, he has expressed no particular objection. So here it is.