Please Don't! "Fire at" Will'm Keane a character sketch

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I never believed cousin Haimish about the standing stones on Conc A’Bhodaich, although everyone else did.  I suppose it was easier than believing Da ran out on us.     Bodach and Cailleach, the Old Man and the Hag, are up on Cnoc A’Bhodaich near Achmore House a million miles from everywhere.  What the MacDonalds always wanted with the island, I don’t know.  Couple of farms, some scraggly woods, that’s all the Ilse of Geay was in my childhood and probably still is.  I haven’t been back there since to know.  Most interesting thing on that island was the standing stones and the old ruined church.  Kilchattan.     I think that’s about all the Gallic I remember anymore.  Gr. Mere was always adament that we speak King’s English at home.  She had big plans for us boys.  She told us all there stories about the MacDonalds raping and burning, and she wanted us to have friends from off the island if they ever came back.      Matthias, my oldest brother from Mother’s first marriage, was Gr. Mere’s answer to that.  She beat the accent out of him and got him married to some pretty young thing from the mainland.      But me, Mother’s younger son from her second marriage, I was Gr. Mere’s special project.  She wanted me to be a man of letters.     Calvinism was Gr. Mere’s thing.  She’d converted when old Knox went through, and was bound and determined that I was going to be her contribution to the church.  Da and her had some mighty rows over that one.     I sometimes think that one of the reasons Mother and Da got on so well was because they were both still papist, because Da was adament that I should be a weaver like him and his Da had been.     Well, they both got their way, sort of.  Mornings Gr. Mere taught me my letters and even bought me a Bible of my own.  Afternoons, Da did what work he could get on the island, and I’d prentice with him.  Then whatever time I could get, Haimish and I went out to Kilchattan or the standing stones.     Those were the times Haimish told me the stories about Bodcah and Cailleach.  He got such a beating from Gr. Mere when I woke up with night terrors from those stories.  We must have been eight then.  Haimish was sore with me for a few days after that, but he got forgotten by his brothers the same as I did, and we were back out at Kilchattan faster than you could say Cailleach.     Haimish and I were almost 16 the summer Mother got pregnant again.  It was a bad summer, and not just because it was supposed to have been the last summer I spent at home before leaving for the seminary.  Milk curdled as soon as the cows had been milked, the crops spoiled in the field, and Reverend MacDougal railed against the sacrifices that had been showing up around the standing stones.      Haimish and I slept out at the ruins of Kilchattan the night Da left, trying not to talk about our pretty cousins.      Mother cried something terrible when we got back home the next morning, for she’d thought Haimish and I had been killed in the night like Da.     The bad crops and the bad milk stopped when Da was “killed,” though there wasn’t ever a body found.  Haimish said it was because Bodach and Cailleach had eaten him and thrown his bones into the sea, but I think he just picked up and left.  That’s what Gr. Mere said, and for once, I think she was right.  She said that all Da had left Mother was his loom and me, because after he disappeared, all kinds of debts came out of the woodwork and we had to move in with Gr. Mere just to eat.  Mother and I were so poor that I couldn’t go to seminary school, and had to bring in what money I could with weaving.      Mother died in child birth later that summer, and the baby died soon after her, though Matthias’ pretty wife tried to keep it alive, and we buried them together.  I left Geay with Da’s loom later that night and made my way through Kintyre until I heard about Gaffneyis.  I’m hoping to join as a drummer, but I’m hoping to make a living as a weaver if I’m not learned enough to drum.  If I drum, I could save up enough money to attend a university or send my boys to one, when I find a good woman, which doesn’t seem likely given all that I’ve seen with the regiment so far.  Signed and dated Anno Domini 1640     Please don’t “Fire at” Will’m Keane