excerpt
Just as I believe the experience of myself dreaming dreams. But to him it was real. And it drove him away.”
“You loved him, didn’t you?” Michael’s slow, hesitant voice betrayed the jealous apprehension that was clawing at his mind.
“He was my brother, Michael,” Caitlin replied, aware of his growing anxiety. “My father adopted him. He was living with a doctor and his wife in Scotland when my father found him.”
“Why was he living with them?”
Still tightly clutching the edges of the rug, Caitlin ringed her arms around her raised knees and leaned forward. “That’s quite a story, Michael. We don’t know to this day how much of it is true. But Padraig and I talked about it so often, and he repeated it so often, and he never changed a word. It is carved into his mind like an inscription into a gravestone. It will never leave him.”
“What did he tell you?” Michael asked, then quickly changed his tone. “Do you mind? I know it’s late and you’re probably tired, but …”
“No, I don’t mind,” Caitlin said. “I’ve been turning it over in my mind again. I don’t think I could sleep anyway.” She paused, a captive of her own thoughts.
“So?”
Caitlin looked at Michael with a serious expression, wondering if Padraig would approve of her relating these stories. “One day a ragged, dirty, exhausted, starving little boy, nine years old, arrived in a fishing port on the west coast of Scotland. My father called it Kyle of something. I’ve forgotten. His boots barely had leather left on them. A local doctor was the first person he met. Or at least the first person who talked to him. The doctor brought the boy home, and his wife gave him a bath and a meal and insisted that he stay with them. They had no children of their own. He told her he had been tramping the rough tracks and moors for several days in cold, sleety, October rain, not knowing where he was going. But he refused to tell them where he had come from in case the doctor sent him back.”
“He had run away from home?” Michael said.
Caitlin released her knees, leaned over and tossed another lump of turf on the fire. Sparks flared up into the maw of the chimney, and the room brightened. Caitlin hugged her knees again.
“It wasn’t much of a home,” she replied. “Not if we are to believe Padraig. He had no father. Or rather he never knew who his father was. His unmarried mother was a schoolteacher in a village called Plockton, or Stockton. No Stockton sounds too English, doesn’t it?
Libros Libertad 