Braveheart Read online

  Redheaded Campbell, scarred and missing fingers, was stirred up. “Wallace is right!” he barked to his friends. “We fight ‘em!”

  But MacClannough, a slender man with fine features, was counseling caution and countered, “ Every nobleman who had any will to fight was at that meeting.”

  “So it's up to us! We show them we won’t lie down and be their slaves!” Malcolm Wallace said in a voice so hard and low that William felt chilled.

  “We just can’t beat an army with just the fifty farmers we can raise!” MacClannough said.

  “We don’t have to beat ‘em, just fight ‘em,” Malcolm said. “To show “em we’re not dogs, but men.”

  Young William watched from the darkness as his father dipped his finger into a jug of whiskey and used the wet finger to draw on the tabletop. “They have a camp here,” Malcolm said, looking from face to face. “We attack them at sunset tomorrow. Give us all night to run home.”

  The next day Malcolm and john saddled horses and led them from their barn; they were checking the short swords they had tucked into the grain sacks behind their saddles when William came out of the barn with his own horse.

  “William, you’re staying here, “ his father said.

  “I can fight,” William said.

  These words from his youngest son made Malcolm pause and kneel to look into William’s eyes.

  “Aye. But it's our wits that make us men. I love ya, boy. You stay.”

  Malcolm and John mounted their horses and rode away and left William watching them go. At the edge of their oat field they turned in their saddles and waved to him.

  William waved back and watched them until they disappeared on the curving trail up the valley.

  3

  THE PEACE OF THE SUMMER TWILIGHT HAD BEGUN TO SETtle over the Wallace farm. The wind whispered across the straw thatch of the rooftops, and the chickens scratched lazily around the barn. All was strangely quiet.

  Then William and this friend Hamish Campbell, redheaded like his father, ran from the rear of the house and ducked in beside the barn, breathless, gasping. The tow boy pressed their backs against the wall. William peered around a corner, then shrunk back and whispered, “They’re coming!”

  “How many?” Hamish shot back.

  “Three, maybe more!”

  “Armed?”

  “They’re English soldiers, ain’t they?” William demanded.

  “With your father and brother gone, they’ll kill us and burn the farm!”

  “It's up to us, Hamish!”

  Hamish leaned forward for a look, but William pulled him back and breathed hot words into his friend’s ear: “Not yet! Here he comes; be ready!”

  They waited heard heavy footsteps. Then from around the corner three enormous, ugly hogs appeared. The boys hurled rotten eggs. The eggs slapped the snouts of the pigs, who scattered as the boys charged, howling.

  The sun went down on their play. The boys walked toward the house, beneath a lavender sky. The house looked so much darker and emptier now. “Wanna stay with me tonight?” Hamish asked.

  “I wanna have supper waitin’,” William said.

  “We’ll get those English pigs tomorrow, “ Hamish said.

  “Aye, we’ll get ‘em,” William grinned.

  The sky had gone fully black and the stars were hard and bright above the house when William’s face appeared at the window and he looked toward the distant hills, where he saw trees and heather, but no sign of life. He turned back to the cook fire he had built in the grate and stirred at the stew he had made. He spooned up two steaming bowls full and set them out on the table.

  But he was only hoping. He looked out the window again; he was still all alone. So he left a candle burning on the table beside the stew and moved up the stairs.

  Night thawed into a foggy dawn, and William rose from his bed, where he had huddled, afraid to sleep, through a night that seemed to have no end. But now, with gray showing through the cracks of his broad windows, he rose, dressed, and moved down the hall. He stopped at the door of this father’s bedroom and saw the undisturbed bed. He moved on and passed the door of this brother’s room, also unrumpled.

  In the kitchen he found the two cold bowls of stew beside the exhausted candle. He spooned up his own cold porridge and ate alone.

  After his breakfast, William was in the barn loft, shoveling corn down to feed the hogs, when he glimpsed something coming. He saw an ox cart rumbling down the curving land. Its driver was Campbell, with MacClannough walking behind it. The farmers glanced up at William, their faces grim.

  From his perch in the loft, William saw what the neighbors had brought: the bodies of this father and brother. The car stopped; Campbell, with a bandage around his left hand where more of this fingers ere now missing, studied the back to the ox as if it could tell him how to break such news. The butt of the ox seemed to tell him to be matter-of-fact.

  “William… Come down here, lad,” Campbell said.

  William looked away, he took quick breaths, he looked back, but the bodies were still there.

  4

  THE OUTSIDE OF THE HOUSE WAS NOW SURROUNDED BY horses, wagons, and neighbors. The undertaker arrived in his hearse, preloaded with coffins.

  William sat at the kitchen table, weeping holding the bowls of stew, hugging them as if they were his family. A neighbor woman moved up beside him. “Poor dear. That’s cold,” she said. “Let me get you something hot.”

  She reached for the bowls, but he held tightly to them.

  “There now darlin’….”

  “Get away from me!” William said.

  “Now, now.” Suddenly he was fighting her for the bowls; the stew spilled over her skirt, and the crockery bowls shattered. William burst from the room and rushed out into the year, where all neighbors had gathered. His wild grief disrupted the solemnity; they gawked at him. He looked everywhere, instinctively trying to find his father and brother. He spotted the ox cart, empty now, standing beside the shed, and ran towards its open door. Campbell saw him going and yelled, “William!” but it was too late; the boy disappeared inside the shed.

  There on a makeshift table lay the bodies of Malcolm and John Wallace. As William watched, the undertaker wrapped a cloth strip around his brother’s lower jaw and tied the ends of the strip into a knot at the top of his head. William’s father had already been bound for death this way.

  Old Campbell, the big grizzled redhead, stepped into the door, following William – but what could he say now? The undertaker went on with his work. William approached the table; the bodies didn’t look real to him, certainly not like his father and brother. He saw the wounds the dried blood. The undertaker poured water from a bowl and scrubbed off the blood. But the wounds remained.

  Campbell, MacClannough, and several other who had been gathered around the kitchen table in the Wallace house only two night before now carried the bodies of William’s father and brother to the two new graves, dug into the rocky soil beside the grave of Mary Wallace, its cairn weathered and overgrown with moss. The mourners were gathered in a circle around the three graves as the parish priest droned in Latin, and they tried to hold onto expressions of stoic grief, but the sight of the boy, standing alone in front of the graves of his dead mother as the bodies of his father and brother were lowered with ropes into the ground beside her, had all the neighbors shaken. He stood alone, and they seemed afraid even to look at him.

  At the foot of the graves, and just outside the circle of mourners, three of the farmers were whispering. “We gotta do somethin’ with the boy,” MacClannough said.

  “He’s got an uncle in Dunipace,” Campbell told him.

  “Malcolm had a brother?” MacClannough asked.

  “A cleric. Don’t think they got along. I sent a lad to fetch him.”

  “What if the uncle don’t come?” Stewart asked.

  They all thought about that question for a moment.

  “You don’t have a son, MacClannough, how about you?�
�� Campbell asked.

  But no one was anxious to adopt a grieving, rebellious boy. MacClannough looked at his wife and two daughters. His youngest daughter was five; she was a beautiful girl with long auburn hair, and she clung to her own mother’s hands as if the open graves were the mouths of death and might suck her parents in, too.

  Then the girl did what no one else there had thought to do; she moved to the softly weeping William and held out to him the thistle follower that she had carried to the graveside.

  William looked up at her and their young eyes met – children encountering grief for the first time. Everybody at the funeral had seen the gesture; it even stopped the local priest in the middle of his droning. As the girl moved back to her mother’s side, the priest had lost his place in the liturgy of death and could only mutter, “Amen. Rest in peace.”

  As the grave diggers shoveled dirt over the coffins, Campbell and his son Hamish moved to William and took his shoulders.

  “Come on, lad. Come on…,” Campbell said.

  They all filtered back toward the house. Outside the house, Campbell slipped the undertaker some coins as final payment. The undertaker climbed up into the wagon box and lifted the reins; but before he could snap them a figure appeared riding toward them. A lone, stiff figure that made everyone pause.

  The figure drew closer. It was Argyle Wallace in black clerical priestly garb. He looked like a human buzzard; his face was craggy, permanently furious.

  “You must be the relative of the deceased, “ the priest said.

  Argyle only glowered at the man who retreated. Argyle dismounted and glared at William.

  “Uncle Argyle?” William said.

  “We’ll sleep here tonight. You’ll come home with me. We’ll let the house and the lands, too – plenty of willing neighbors.”

  “I don’t want to leave,” William said.

  “Didn’t want your father to die either, did ya? But it happened.

  The people wanted to stay and eat the food they had brought, but a contingent of English soldiers rode up, a dozed mounted men carrying lances. The leader of the soldiers looked down at the funeral bunting.

  “Someone dead from this household?” the leader asked.

  “We just had a funeral, isn’t that what it means in England as well?” Argyle said.

  “What it means in England – and in Scotland, too – is that rebels have forfeited their lands,” the leader answered. The mounted soldiers behind him shifted their pikes and eyed the unarmed farmers.

  “My brother and nephew died two days ago when their hay cart turned over,” Argyle said. “Their graves have been consecrated, and any man who disturbs them now incurs eternal damnation.” Argyle’s eyes burned like the hell fires he spoke of. “So please. Dig them up.”

  Outmaneuvered, the leader reined his horse away. Several of the farmers spat on the ground. Argyle glared at them.

  “Funeral’s over. Go home,” Argyle said.

  That night inside the kitchen, William and Argyle sat together at the table. Argyle had laid out a proper meal with exact place settings.

  “Not that spoon, that one’s for soup,” Argyle told the boy. “Dip away from you. And don’t slurp.” They ate in silence for a few minutes. Then Uncle Argyle asked, “Did the priest say anything about the Resurrection? Or was it all about Judgment?”

  “It was in Latin, sir.”

  “Non loqis Latinum? You don’t speak Latin? We shall have to fix that, wont we? Did he give the poetic benediction? The Lord bless thee and keep thee? Patris benefactum et… It was Malcolm’s favorite?

  Argyle knew nothing about tucking a boy in bed; that was clear in William’s bedroom that night when he stood awkwardly idle as William scrubbed his face at the washstand and crawled into bed. His bushy eyebrows and narrow lips move toward each other as if to join in a kiss somewhere at the tip of his hawkish nose, and his eyes blinked so rapidly that he gave the appearance of a bird who has just been raped in the face and now has no idea what to do next, which in fact was very much Uncle Argyle’s situation at the moment. All day long he had know exactly what to say and do, but now he was baffled. “Had enough to eat?” he demanded of William, and the boy nodded. “You’ve washed your face? Yes, of course, you just did that.” His eyes narrowed as if he’d caught the boy trying to get away with something.

  “I always say them as I’m falling asleep, so my dreams will be open to God all night long,” the boy said.

  “Who told you that?”

  “My father.”

  There was a long pause. William wondered if he had done something wrong. “Good night, Uncle,” William said.

  Argyle grunted and started out. Then he stopped, turned back and leaned down over William, and with great tenderness the grizzled old uncle kissed his nephew on his hair.

  Alone in the kitchen, Argyle sat down by the hearth and stared at the embers. He had ridden all day, ever since he’d gotten the news of the death of his brother and his nephew John. All day his mind had buzzed with practical issues: how he must save his brother’s land from confiscation, see to their proper burial, and see to the raising of this son Malcolm and left behind. He had accomplished it all; Argyle Wallace was a man who accomplished everything he set out to do or died trying. The boy would come home with him, that was settled. Argyle had never had a boy around, or even a wife for that matter, but Argyle was an ecclesiastic, and the teacher in him like the challenge of this wild colt of a nephew.

  Malcolm was dead. That was that. When things couldn’t be changed, they had to be faced, dealt with. Argyle had done that. But now he sat by the fire and he wanted no sleep, and all he could think about was the time many years ago when he and Malcolm were boys and had just gone to their bed in the loft of their father’s house. Argyle had insisted that his brother pray properly on his knees by the bedside, as Argyle always did. And Argyle remembered how so many years, ago Malcolm had told him that he had decided to pray from within the bed, so he would fall asleep with his dreams open to God.

  Malcolm’s huge broadsword now lay beside the hearth, next to Argyle’s hand. Argyle lifted it and turned the tip to the floor, so that the handle stood before his eyes like the cross.

  He began the benediction: “The Lord bless thee and keep thee….” Then tears of grief spilled down the old man’s cheeks, and he wept beside the fire.

  5

  DURING HIS SLEEP THAT NIGHT, WILLIAM HAD MORE nightmares. Once again the boy stood in the doorway of the barn and looked at the garish, hung faces in his nightmare. Then a mangled hand came from behind him and grasped his shoulder. William gasped, but the hand held him gently. He turned and saw his father and his brother! They were wounded, bloody, but they smiled at him; they were alive! William wept with joy and reached to hug them, but his father stretched forth a forbidding hand. William kept reaching out helplessly. His father and brother moved past him to the hanged knights. Two empty nooses were there. Before the boy’s weeping eyes they put their heads into the nooses and hoisted themselves up. William’s grief exploded; his tears erupted and he awakened in his bedroom with tears flooding down his face.

  A dream! Still upset, still grieving, he got up and went looking for his uncle.

  William moved down to the room where his uncle would be sleeping. He opened the door. The bed had not been slept in. He moved downstairs to the kitchen, but his uncle was not there either. For a moment William thought that his uncle might have abandoned him. Then the boy heard a strange, haunting sound—distant, carried by the wind. He moved to the window and saw only moonlight. He opened the window and heard it more clearly: bagpipes.

  William lit a candle and threw open the door. Wind rushed in and blew out his candle. But he heard the pipes, louder in the wind.

  William was barefoot and cold, covered only by the nightshirt, but he stepped outside. The sound of the pipes was growing louder. He moved through the moonlight, drawn toward—the graveyard! He stopped as he realized this, then forced himself on.


  He moved to the top of the hill where his ancestors were buried and discovered a haunting scene: two dozen men, the farmer/warriors of his neighborhood, were gathered in kilts—and, among them, a core of bagpipers. The pipes wailed an ancient Scottish dirge, a tune of grief and redemption, a melody that, with some modification, has come down to the modern time as “Amazing Grace.”

  Then William saw his uncle standing at the fringes of the torchlight. Uncle Argyle must have heard them and walked out, too. But what was he doing holding the massive broadsword?

  William moved up beside his uncle. Argyle glanced down but said nothing.

  “What are they doing?” William whispered

  “Saying good-bye in their own way—playing outlawed tunes with outlawed pipes.” They watched as the farmers stood enriching the graves, the music flowing through their veins. Some prayed; some wept; some, their lips moving without their hands making the sign of the cross, seemed to mutter private vows. Argyle whispered, half to William and half to himself, this, dead from fighting the English.”

  William took the sword from his uncle and tried to lift it. Slowly, Argyle took the sword back.

  “First learn to use this,” Argyle said. He tapped William on the forehead with the tip of his finger. “Then I will teach you to use this.”

  With an expert’s easy fluidity, he lifted the huge sword. It glistened in the torchlight. The music played; the notes mingled with the smoke of the torches, hung in the air, swirled in the Scottish breeze, and rose toward the stars.