Neil McTaggart’s Crossing (7): A Story of 1920s Scottish Emigration to Canada (Podcast 1113 )

Neil McTaggart’s Crossing – Part 7: The Letter Home

News of Joseph Brisco’s departure rippled through the settlement like a thawing stream. By the month’s end, he would sail east across the Atlantic, returning to Scotland on family business. He had agreed to carry letters for anyone who wished to send word home, and the announcement stirred the community.

For many, it was a rare chance. Paper was fetched from drawers, pencils sharpened, ink prepared. Agnes spoke of writing to her mother in Ayrshire, her face softening at the thought of words bridging the ocean. Robert muttered he had little taste for scribbling, but even he considered a cousin in Glasgow worth a note. Thomas, quiet as ever, tucked away a scrap of paper with the intent of reaching out to an old schoolmate.

Neil listened, the weight pressing down on him. He longed to tell his mother he was alive, that he missed her voice in Kilbirnie, tea in the kitchen at dusk, that he carried the stone she had given him, but when he sat at the table, the pen heavy in his hand, shame swept in like a tide. The letters stumbled, crooked and uncertain, more blot than script. By the time he folded the page into his pocket, half ruined, his heart was raw.

That night, long after the others had gone to bed, Neil sat by the embers of the fire, staring at the faint glow. He imagined Joseph Brisco’s boat moored at the lake’s edge, waiting for the long road east and the sea beyond. The thought gnawed at him. He could stow away. Hide among the barrels, slip unseen into the hold. One crossing had carried him here; another might carry him back.

The idea clung to him, almost sweet in its desperation. Back to Kilbirnie, back to the familiar hills, back to where his illiteracy was a secret only his mother carried with gentle silence. The ache grew sharp. He almost rose, almost gathered his coat. But then another thought came, his mother opening the door to find him returned, empty-handed, wordless, unable to explain why he had fled. She had sent him forward, not back. To turn now would shame them both.

When dawn came, he had made his choice: he would not run. But the longing burned in him still, a hollow he carried into the day.

It was in this mood that he decided to take a walk and he met Esther. She came along the path by the kirk, her brother skipping ahead with a stick clattering against the stones. She bore a basket on her arm, her cheeks pink from the cold. When she slowed to speak, her eyes seemed to read him plainly.

“You’ll be writing to your people?” she asked.

Neil swallowed, the words caught in his throat. At last he pulled the crumpled sheet from his pocket. “I tried. I can’t… I never learned enough. She’ll think I’ve forgotten her.”

Esther looked at the page, then at him. She smoothed it gently against the basket lid. “Then speak it instead. I’ll write the words for you. Joseph Brisco will take them back.”

“You’d do that?” His voice was rough.

She smiled, not pitying but firm. “Of course. No one should be voiceless.”

They settled on the low stone wall by the kirk. Esther drew out her own clean sheet of paper, uncorked a tiny inkwell, and dipped her pen. She nodded at him to begin.

Neil spoke slowly, haltingly. “Tell her I am safe. The snow is deep, but the people are kind.”

Her pen moved smoothly, the black lines forming certainty where his hand had only left chaos.

“I miss her voice,” he said softly. “In the evenings, in the kitchen. Tell her I carry the stone she gave me.”

Esther glanced up briefly, her eyes warm, then bent again to her task. The pen scratched steadily until the page held his heart. When she handed it back, Neil traced the letters with a fingertip as though they might vanish.

“She’ll think I wrote this,” he murmured.

“She’ll know you meant it,” Esther replied. “That’s what matters.”

The moment stretched, warm and fragile until Neil noticed Thomas. His cousin stood not far off, leaning against a fencepost, watching. His face was long, jaw set, his eyes narrowed with something harder than mere curiosity.

Heat rose in Neil’s cheeks. He folded the letter quickly into his coat. “Thank you,” he said to Esther, hurried and low.

She only smiled, untroubled by Thomas’s stare. “Bring it to me again if you think of more. We’ll make the words fit.”

Neil rose, lifting the water pail, but Thomas was already pushing away from the post. He fell into step beside Neil as they turned for home. For a while, only the crunch of their boots broke the silence.

At last Thomas spoke, his voice flat. “You’ve found yourself a fine secretary.”

Neil bristled. “I only wanted to send word to my mother.”

Thomas’s mouth tightened. “Aye. Looked like more than writing words, the way you bent together.”

Neil stopped walking, turning on him. “You’ve no call to speak that way.”

“I’ve every call,” Thomas snapped, eyes on the white road ahead. “Folk notice. And we can’t afford more trouble.”

Neil’s temper flared hot, fed by shame, by jealousy, by the sting of always being measured and found lacking. “What is it you’re guarding so fiercely, Thomas? Why do you glare at me like a trespasser every time I draw breath?” He heard his own voice rise, felt the anger carry him forward over a line he had not meant to cross. “Who was Maggie?”

The name seemed to fall between them like a stone breaking ice. Thomas froze, his face paling against the cold. For a moment Neil thought he would not answer, but then Thomas’s voice came low, rough.

“She was my sister.” He swallowed, hard. “Fever took her last winter. And I won’t watch more of this family slip away not to sickness, not to foolishness.”

His words hung raw in the air, cutting through the frost. The woods at the track’s edge seemed to draw back into silence. Neil felt his anger falter all at once, leaving only the dull ache of shame.

“I didn’t know,” he said quietly.

“Yeah,” Thomas said. “You didn’t.” He started walking again, faster now, as if the pace itself might clear the sting from his throat. Neil followed, the pail swinging heavy, the letter a small, hot weight against his breast.

They went on without speaking. The sky had the hard, pale look of days that never quite warm up. Their breath smoked. A jay bird flared blue and grey across the path and vanished among the pines. Neil tried to shape an apology but found no steady footing in words. He thought of Esther’s pen, how easily meaning flowed for her. He thought of Thomas’s face when he said fever took her, how the hardness in him was not born of malice but of something broken and still unhealed.

“I wasn’t trying to bring trouble,” Neil managed at last. “Only to get the words right for my mother.”

Thomas didn’t look at him. “Get your own house straight first,” he said. “Then look to another.”

“My house?” Neil’s voice clipped. “I’ve no house here. Only work, and a bed near your fire.”

Neil had no answer that didn’t taste of bitterness. He swallowed it down. The homestead came into view, thin smoke lifting from the chimney, the barn pitched like a dark shoulder against the snow.

At the threshold, Thomas veered toward the barn without a backward glance. Neil stood a moment in the yard, the cold biting through his coat. He pressed the letter flat against his chest, wanting the ink to dry without smudge, wanting the words to hold and the thought came of running away again.

He went to the door.

Inside, the warmth met him in a low wave. Agnes looked up from the pot she was stirring. “You were long,” she said, not unkindly.

“I met Esther,” Neil answered, and forced himself to steady the words. “She helped me set down a letter for my mother. Joseph Brisco will carry it when he goes.”

Agnes’s face softened. “Good. It will do your mother’s heart right.”

Neil nodded, though what he felt was not relief alone but a tangle: gratitude for Esther’s hand, shame for the words he had thrown at Thomas, and a strange, stubborn spark that told him he could still learn to fix what was broken in him. He slipped the letter into the small chest where Robert kept spare nails and a Bible with cracked leather, safe from stray sparks and careless hands.

That night, lying by the hearth, he turned the day over in his mind the desperate pull to flee, the spared choice; the slow, sure scratching of Esther’s pen; the hard steps home beside Thomas and the name that had split the cold. He would not stow away. The letter would make the crossing without him, carrying the truth his hand could not. He would remain.

But the path he had chosen meant walking between gratitude and suspicion, hope and tension. He felt the weight of it pressing in like the winter, and he held the stone in his pocket until the last ember went dark.