Highland Portrait (17 page)

“Graphite?”  Robbie’s head cocked with interest at this stick.  “Aye.  I have heard of graphite, the English use it in their armaments.  Will this pencil explode?”

“Well, what a pencil does can be explosive, but the pencil itself won’t explode, it just leaves marks.”  She handed him the pencil.  He examined it, his eyes narrowing as he tried to determine how the graphite was put into the stick.  Once again he was impressed with the craftsmanship. He looked inquiringly at her, “Tegis?” he asked, handing it back to her.

“Yes.  From Texas.” She smiled thinking that a ten cent pencil could be a thing of miracles, miracles that she took for granted.  She looked at the pencil and truly saw an invention that may have changed the world - pencils were an extraordinary thing and were the very basic tools of her art.  Pencils left behind a record of one’s life, gave shape to human language, were the means to express the richness of the human heart, and they marked out the mathematical models of space travel. What an incredible gift was the pencil. 

Robbie sat down comfortably next to Stella, their shoulders and arms touching.  Stella welcomed the feel of him, the comfort and peace that his nearness imparted to her.  Stella had pulled up her dress so she could sit cross-legged on the hay covered dirt floor, her jeans preserving her modesty.  She was still barefoot and pulled the ends of dress over her feet to keep them warm. Robbie sat with his legs straight out in front him, leaning against the wooden stall.  She noted he had taken off his sword but laid it down within a hands distance from him, still alert to any danger that might interrupt them.  They were facing the barn door that Robbie left partially open to allow Ferghus to come back in.

“Ye are making marks?  Are ye writing?” he asked.  He looked at the small black book she had in her hand.  It had a black cloth cover, which he thought odd.  Most books of his experience were covered in leather, metal or wood and the bindings and covers were works of art in themselves.  He expected something even grander from Tegis, but this book was plain as if made for a poor man – but what would a poor man do with a book?

“I’m going to draw the farmer’s croft, Robbie.  I want to paint it when I get home and I need to put down some details while they’re still fresh in my mind.”

Robbie looked genuinely surprised – again.  “You are an artist, Stella?  That is what you do?”  Robbie tentatively reached for the small book.  She hesitated, thinking about what was in the book.  Had she drawn anything that she would have difficulty explaining?  She generally filled up a sketch book quickly and this one was less than a quarter filled, but she recalled that most of the drawings were craggy faced cowboys and horses.  She relented and allowed him to take the book from her.

He gently took the book weighing it in his hand, feeling the heft of it.   It was small, smaller than any book he had seen, perhaps an inch thick and as wide as his two palms together.  He ran his hands over the coarse cover thinking it odd there was no design or ornamentation on it.  The binding, however, was excellent, crisp and well made and the cover itself was stiff and hard, although he thought it was not wood.   He opened the cover of the book and touched the first page.  It was blank, smooth textured, but thick. It was made from rag and did not have the crispness of parchment, but seemed soft and absorbent.

Stella watched Robbie look at the book and again wondered about the miracle of small things.  In her world books were abundant, every household having books that were not only cheap but printed in color with pictures.  Books were a commodity that were so common they were found in grocery stores, piled high like forgotten junk merchandise in the bargain bins.  They were highly disposable and easily forgotten.  Most homes had at least one bookshelf and others had rooms filled with books shelves.  Not just professors or the rich, but ordinary people who found pleasure in reading and collecting books.  Her own books numbered in the hundreds and were stuffed without thought into rickety book shelves, large art books piled on the floor in short towers serving as side tables, and others scattered throughout the house wherever she left them, dropped without thought.  Her father’s books were in the thousands.  Not only had he written many books but he had spent a lifetime accumulating them.  He had books in every room of the house, packed in boxes in the garage and lying scattered about like flowers in an English garden.

But this was not so in Robbie’s world.  Here books were precious, even though the printing press had made available millions of books by the time he had been born those books were not available to all.  Illiteracy was still the norm and the cost of books were prohibitive.  Books were of the dominion of the rich and the learned.  Those poor and illiterate that did find access to books most likely carved shoe soles from the binding and burnt the pages to warm themselves.  Having been to university he would be familiar with the importance of books and may have accumulated a number of books himself.  But probably not hundreds.

Robbie turned the blank page and his eyes widened.  He had seen much great art in Edinburgh, portraits and landscapes painted in bright oils, masterpieces of man’s ability to copy his environment and to create an eternal image that would outlast an individual’s lifetime.  He had always been impressed with the ability of men to duplicate likenesses and thought that at some point in his life he would have his own likeness duplicated.  But in this odd little book Robbie was looking at a picture drawn with the graphite tool that was far beyond the measure of any portrait he had ever seen.  It was so lifelike that Robbie held his breath.  Drawn in great detail was an old man, with a hat like Stella’s.  He was dressed in the same type of tunic as Stella, although his was striped, the folds shown true to form, seeming to be real, three-dimensional in their accuracy.  Robbie gingerly touched the page expecting to feel the cloth, but it was flat.

“Stella,” he whispered. “you did this?  With your pencil?”

“Yes,” she said shyly, “they’re just sketches. I’ll use them at some point and paint them onto canvas.  I do a lot of sketching wherever I go.”

“This is a masterpiece, Stella.  No artist in Scotland or England can match this.”  Robbie began to leaf slowly through the book looking at the collection of saddles, fences, cows, horses, boots and more people, all dressed in their strange Texas clothing.

“Robbie, I have superior materials.  My pencils and oils, my training, all the artistic tools I own are so much better than what’s available to your artists here.  If they had those tools they would be able to do this.  I am not even the best, Robbie.  There are others whose work is so precise that it looks like a pho….um, it looks real, lifelike.  You would be shocked.”  Stella wished she could explain photo-realism to Robbie, but she didn’t think he was ready yet…and might never be.

Robbie knew that he held a true treasure in his hand.  This simple book, so coarse in its appearance held ‘treasures’ of art that would shame even the greatest artists of his time.  It was worth a king’s ransom.  He worried that when he married Stella, and he was determined he would, how he would provide her with pencils.  Could she do this in ink?  Surely an artist as talented as her could use ink as well as pencil.

Stella took the book from Robbie and turned to the first page.  She always left the first page blank to write in identifying times, places, dates and so forth.  Today it would serve a greater purpose.  She gave the pencil to Robbie.

“Here, Robbie.  Write your name,” she handed the book back to him.  Robbie set the book on his lap and rolling the pencil between his fingers, getting the feel of the slender wood, he moved it around, his hand becoming familiar with its length and weight.  He placed the point to the page and wrote.  She noted that he wrote with ease, not halting or clenching the pencil, but moving smoothly across the page with a practiced elegance.

“This pencil is a fine instrument, Stella.  I like it very much.”  He handed the book back to Stella.  Stella was thrilled to have Robbie’s name in her book.  She remembered back to her high school yearbook and all the signatures she had collected of all her friends.  At first glance it looked illegible, but her father had taught her how to read the script of old documents and she read it out loud slowly.

“I, Robert MacDougall, set my hand to this book of treasures on this the fourteenth day of July in the year of our Lord 1604.”  Stella smiled and touched the page.  His writing was strong, with the proscribed flourishes of his time.  Beautiful, well formed and masculine.  This would be her most valuable possession when she got home.  At once she had a tingling of regret at having to leave Robbie.  She was beginning to feel a significant connection and was feeling some reluctance to letting go.

“You will draw the croft now?” asked Robbie.  He was anxious to see her at work.  Stella looked at him in the soft light of the candle, his face so eager to see more of what was new to him.  He truly did have a scientific bent of mind.  She thought that if he had been born during her time he might have been an engineer, or a physicist, certainly a mathematician of some note.  She was once again overwhelmed by his masculinity.  His strength pulsed through the air and she was captured by it, felt her feminine self respond to him.  She drew a deep breath.

“Yes, I’m going to draw the croft,” she opened up the book to a fresh page and began to swiftly lay in the lines of the croft.  She drew it from the point of view of walking into from the door so that she might get in as much of the area as possible.  Robbie watched with fascination as she guided her pencil across the page, knowing without hesitation where each line, each mark, belonged.  He was intrigued that she did not miss any of the details, each small feature of the farmer’s croft rendered in exactness, small things that he had not noticed while he was there.  He had not noted the farmer’s boots lying next to the hearth or the wife’s sewing basket of yarns next to her chair.  How had he missed the large grey cat in the corner or the empty cradle near the butter churn.

Ferghus, returning from his trip to find dinner, had the remains of a hare in his mouth, two long ears and half a head with what Stella thought was brain parts dangling from a crushed skull.  Ferghus stretched out next to Robbie and dropped his bounty, sniffing it and placing his paw on top, to establish ownership.  Stella looked at the rabbit ears and winced.

“Och, Ferghus, yer a fine lad and ‘tis a fine meal ye’ve brought me.”  Robbie laughed.  He picked up the rabbit ears and offered it to Stella. “Are ye hungry, lass? Ferghus has saved some of his meal t’ share with us and it looks tasty.  What say ye?,” Robbie looked serious as he offered her the remains.  Stella looked at him, horrified.  She could only stare at it, leaning away from the nastiness, thinking that in spite of his scientific mind Robbie was still somewhat barbarian. 

Robbie proffered it again delighting in her look of horror and curled lips. “If ye nay want it then I’ll finish it meself, lass.”  Stella looked at him and saw that his eyes were twinkling.  He was teasing her.  She exhaled and smiled, accepting his good humor and happy that he felt at ease having a joke on her. 

“No thank, you Robbie, I’m full.  But you go ahead and enjoy!”  she smiled brightly and inclined her head indicating the wretched piece of hare.  Ferghus whined to have the thing back.

There was a pleased friendliness to Robbie’s smile, as if crossing the line from formality to the intimacy of a casual tease had been a natural occurrence, not a calculated risk.  He had reached across a divide and found her willing to let him cross.

Stella yawned as she finished up her sketching and Robbie, having given the ears back to Ferghus, took the book from her delighting in the picture.  He once again thumbed through the pages and looked at the details of the other sketches.

“These are all of Tegis?”
              “Yes, I did them at a friend’s ranch, um, horse farm.  The men you see there are called cowboys.”

“Cowboys,” he repeated the word as if it were a foreign language. “What do they do, these cowboys?”

Stella thought for a moment about what a cowboy did and how it would relate to Robbie’s world.

“Well, they are a combination of hostler and shepherd.  They tend the horses and all the cows.”  Robbie looked at the picture of one of the cowboys putting a halter on a horse.  He noted a few cows in the background.

“How many cows does he shepherd?”  Robbie couldn’t imagine why a grown man would manage cows when in Scotland a young boy or girl was all that was needed to tend a cow.

“Well, I think there at the Three Bar S ranch, um, horse farm, they have about five thousand head of cattle – or cows.”  Stella had gotten up and was looking for her socks.  The temperature was dropping and she was barefoot and she so hated being barefoot.

Robbie looked at her dumbfounded.  “Tegis has five thousand cows?”  Robbie was beginning to wonder if Tegis was not the most astounding place on the globe.

“Oh, heavens no, Robbie.  The Three Bar S farm has five thousand.  In the whole of Texas there is probably a million cows.”

“Now you jest with me, lass.”  Stella pulled on her socks and looked at Robbie’s serious face. Gone was the teasing smile.  He got up and went to close the barn door.

“Ok, only a half million.”  She smiled, reached for her sketch book and put it, along with her pencil, in her backpack.  She surreptitiously unwrapped a granola bar. She wanted to share a bit of sweetness with him before they settled in for the night.

“Stella, how big is this Tegis?”  Stella stopped for a moment and tried to figure out a relative comparison.