Wait for Me. Caroline Leech

from home. They’d only been talking, but she’d been rude to him yet again. He didn’t deserve that, but how could she make it right now?

      “Good night,” she said, trying to make her voice sound more friendly.

      Just before she clicked the door into place, he replied.

       “Gute Nacht, Fräulein. Schlafen Sie gut!”

       Seven

      Lorna stood at the scullery sink on Wednesday morning, washing the breakfast dishes and stacking them to drain in the wooden rack. As she worked, she gazed out the window. One of the cats sat on the wall, haughtily overseeing the activity of some sparrows pecking around nearby. Lorna was not on the lookout for the truck arriving, now that Paul was sleeping in the barn, but she was looking out all the same. Only to check that Paul was all right, of course, and that he didn’t need any more blankets.

      She was almost finished with her dishes when the side door of the barn opened. Paul came out looking tired and rumpled, yawning and stretching out his arms and his back, as if he had only just woken up. Perhaps he had. He’d been up most of every other night this week with the ewes, so he’d probably had very little sleep.

      Lorna watched as he walked to the water pump over the horse trough and stripped his shirt over his head without unbuttoning it. He hung it on a lantern bracket on the wall, then lifted off his undershirt and hung that up too. Bending over, he pumped the handle up and down, muscles straining.

      As the water flowed from the wide spout, Paul thrust his head and shoulders under the stream. Lorna knew for certain that the water must be icy, for the temperature outside was barely above freezing. Sure enough, as Paul stood upright again, his skin glistening in the soft morning light, a shiver ran through him.

      Physically Paul had changed so much since he’d arrived a month ago, so skinny and gray-faced. Now his face had lost its skeletal look, the sharp edge of his jawline had softened, and his cheeks, even under the tight scarring, had become plump and full. His chest and shoulder muscles had filled out and were now rounded and smooth. His stomach was flat and strong, no longer concave with hunger.

      Lorna had only seen a man with muscles as well defined as that once before, on a school trip to the National Gallery in Edinburgh, but it had been on the carved body of a marble statue, a Greek god with curly hair, playing a lute and wearing nothing but a large and serendipitously placed leaf. She and Iris had giggled for hours about his bare bottom and strapping thighs.

      They had been much younger then, and Lorna was certainly not giggling now. She was barely even breathing.

      Even his skin looked healthy and pink, almost rosy in reaction to the icy water. What might he look like once the summer sun had tanned his skin?

      Summer.

      Would this Greek god still be here by summer, washing at the pump in the warm sun? Or would the war be over by then and her brothers home?

      Paul shook his head back and forth, sending water drops flying. His hair was growing out and was now sticking up in wet spikes.

      He looked like Caddy when she’d been swimming in the Peffer Burn.

      Almost as if Lorna had called her name, Caddy appeared at a run around the corner of the barn, her claws skidding on the wet cobbles. She bounded up to Paul and jumped to put her front paws onto the side of the water trough, attempting to get closer to him. Paul pulled on the handle again and a stream of water belched from the pump onto the dog’s head. Caddy jumped back and then shook herself, just as Paul had done, sending water all over Paul. He laughed, and Caddy yelped in excitement, jumping up at him, and he rubbed vigorously at the wet patches in her fur.

      Paul picked up a stick from under the trough. As he threw it, Lorna noticed there was another scar, this one under his left arm and around the side of his rib cage. Like the scars on his face, it was an angry pink against the white of his skin, but it didn’t look like a burn. This one was a sharp gash, perhaps two inches wide, a deep groove, as if the flat of a knife had been dragged across a pat of butter.

      Lorna was awoken from her daydream of Paul as a Greek god by the reality of his desperate scars. What pain must this boy have endured?

      Just then, Nellie clumped down the stairs and into the kitchen. Lorna grabbed an already-clean plate from the draining rack and plunged it into the warm soapy water again.

      “What you doing that for?” Nellie asked, sitting down at the kitchen table. “Isn’t that Mrs. Mack’s job?”

      Nellie pulled heavy socks over her petite feet and up to her knees, first one pair and then another on top. She tied them with a cord over the hem of her breeches and folded them down again into a cuff.

      “Just helping out,” Lorna choked, glad that her back was to Nellie. “Heading off to school right now.”

      Lorna lifted her coat from the hook just as Mrs. Mack came bustling into the house. Before she closed the door, she glanced back out into the yard again.

      “That young lad needs to put some more clothes on,” Mrs. Mack said as she removed the first of the many layers of scarves, coats, and cardigans in which she had wrapped herself for the walk from the village. “I just told him he’ll catch pneumonia bathing in that icy water. I feel like I’m catching a chill just looking at him!”

      She looked up at Lorna. “Won’t you be late, dear?”

      “Going now,” said Lorna, trying not to blush as she grabbed her bag and gave Mrs. Mack a quick hug. Her father banged his boots against the wall outside to loosen the mud and came through the door as Lorna made to leave.

      “If it’s not one thing, it’s another,” he said, unbuckling the leather strap of his old watch and laying it across his palm.

      He studied the watch for a moment, shook it, and held it to his ear.

      “What’s wrong with Grandpa’s watch?” Lorna asked. Even though her father had worn the watch ever since his father had died, she still thought of it as her grandpa’s.

      “After forty-odd years or more of keeping this farm on time, the damn thing has finally given up.”

      Dad carefully hung the gold buckle on a cup hook hammered into the wood of the kitchen dresser, leaving it dangling.

      “I’ll have to send it up to Christie’s in Edinburgh to see if they can get it going again. In the meantime, I’ll make do with my farmer’s instinct, and my grumbling belly, to know when it’s dinnertime.”

      He winked at Lorna.

      “You mean the same farmer’s instinct that can hear the sound of the pub opening at two o’clock every Saturday afternoon?” teased Lorna. “You and John Jo can hear the Gowff doors being unlocked all the way up here, can’t you, Dad?”

      Lorna’s father laughed too, but then looked at the circlet of white skin contrasting with the deep tan of his wrist as if his watch was still there.

      “And it’s the father’s instinct that knows that someone is going to be late for school again if she doesn’t get a move on.”

      “I’m going, I’m going!”

      After kissing her dad on the cheek, Lorna left the house, clicking the door shut behind her.

      Across the yard, Paul was fully dressed now, but was still rubbing his hair with the towel as he walked back toward the barn. Suddenly, he changed course and walked over toward the drystane dyke that ran up to the gate, where he picked up two or three small items from the scrubby grass. He squinted at them and then, instead of tossing them down again, he put them into the pocket of his pants and headed into the barn.

      Lorna was puzzled. What could he have found over there? Not nuts or berries at this time of year, and too small for sticks. Small stones, perhaps?