Go Tell the Bees That I Am Gone

I FELT JAMIE WAKE beside me. He stretched, then made a horrible noise and froze. I yawned and rose up on one elbow.

“I don’t know why it should be the case,” I remarked, “but with injuries of the knee and foot, lying down actually makes them hurt more badly than standing up.”

“It hurts when I stand up, too,” he assured me, but he shrugged off my offer of a helping hand and gingerly swung his bad leg off the edge of the bed with no more than a hiss of pain and a muffled “Mother of God.” He used the chamber pot and sat gathering his strength before he pushed himself up with a hand on the bedside table and stood swaying like a flower in the breeze.

I hopped out of bed, fetched his stick from the corner where he’d thrown it last night, and put it into his hand, wondering just what life had been like for Mary and Martha after their brother, Lazarus, came back from the dead. Then—watching Jamie struggle into his clothes—I wondered what it had been like for Lazarus.

Whatever his state of mind when he died, the poor man would presumably have left his body with the notion that he was finished with the world. Being unceremoniously reinserted into said body was one thing—returning to a life that you never expected to lead again was something else.

Jamie cast a bleak glance at himself in the looking glass, rubbed a hand over his stubble, muttered something in Gaelic, rubbed the same hand through his hair, shook his head, and made his way downstairs for breakfast, his passage marked by the thump of his stick on every other step.

Beginning to dress myself, I thought that in fact such a thing happened to a hell of a lot of people, who perhaps hadn’t come as close to physical death as Jamie had but had still lost the life they were accustomed to. I realized, with a small shock, that I’d had exactly that experience myself—and more than once. When I’d come through the stones the first time, yanked away from Frank and a new life that we’d just begun, after the war—and then again when I’d had to leave Jamie before Culloden.

I hadn’t revisited those memories in a long time. I didn’t want them back now, either—but it was actually a small comfort to remember that they’d happened … and that I’d survived being uprooted, losing everything I’d known and loved—and yet, I’d bloomed anew.

That was a comfort, and I comforted myself further by considering Jenny, who’d lost the greater part of her life when Ian had died, and then courageously turned her back on what was left of it, to come to America with Jamie.

The Provincial prisoners from the battle had been disarmed, rounded up, and marched away; I didn’t know where. But the militias had all disbanded, essentially as soon as the shooting stopped, men making their ways home in small groups, looking for the pieces of their lives that they’d lost along the way.

How long would it be, I wondered, before we might be compelled to do it again? It was 1781. In October, the Battle of Yorktown would be fought—and won. The war would be over—or as over as wars ever are.

There would be more fighting between now and then. Much of it in the South, but not near us. Or so Frank’s book said.

“He’ll be all right, then,” I said to my reflection in the looking glass. Jamie had healed well, physically; his knee would improve with use—and he was back in the house he loved. Most of his militia had survived the battle with mostly minor injuries, though we had lost two men: Tom McHugh’s second-eldest son, Greg, and Balgair Finney, a single man in his fifties from Ullapool who had lived on the Ridge less than a year. If Jamie was inclined to sit in his study and stare pensively into the fire, or to set out for the still and turn back—he hadn’t yet gone all the way there, and I didn’t know whether he couldn’t bear to see it deserted and in disrepair, or couldn’t yet face the job of getting it back into production—I had faith that he would come all the way back.