Free The Serpent by Neil M. Gunn Page A

live in a country place; he knew it suddenly and certainly.
    But Tom had his tools, though so far he had not had the heart to do much with them.
    One night he returned late. His parents were in bed and the door on the latch. In the morning his mother asked him where he had been, and he answered that he had been to a certain house on the Heights as he had promised to oil a clock there.
    And now the curious thing was that though he had borne the evenings at home with a certain kind of pleasure, yet when he was outside and on the point of returning, he found himself in the grip of an overwhelming reluctance to enter the house until his parents had retired. More than once he leaned against a sheltering wall, looking into the hurrying dark night, danced softly on his toes to keep himself warm, waiting for the light to go out. When he heard his mother’s voice, its queer compressed nasal sound, singing far away in a still cavern of the night, he would hearken, the smile fixed on his face, and look around upon the night, in a momentary cunning glee, and feel himself withdrawn andinvulnerable, friend of the eddies that whirled invisibly by, and of the darkness up in the mountains.
    One sleety cold day, while in the barn by himself, reluctant to go in to the warm fire and his father’s pale bearded face against the pillow, he suddenly had the idea that he would rig himself up a wooden bench, with racks pinned to the wall behind for his tools. There was no slightest chance of his getting away now before the crops were put down in the spring, and unless he were going to give in to the kitchen life altogether, he had better get something to do inside four walls. There was not much room in the barn, but by erecting a couple of rough wooden partitions, which would permit of animal feed being piled up, he would manage.
    When his mother came out to see what was keeping him in the cold, he explained his plan. ‘Why should we go to the joiner to get a new door in the cart if I could do it myself? Or to the blacksmith for many a thing, like sharpening a coulter, when I could do it just as well. It would be a pity if I forgot my trade altogether.’
    He spoke indifferently, not looking at her, and was surprised at the readiness with which she fell in with his plan. He would need a little money to buy wood and nails and a few bits of metal, he said, but he could buy them cheaply in the town when he went to cart the coal to the schoolhouse.
    She nodded thoughtfully. ‘You could surely have all the carting money for that, at least. And it would be something for you to do, in the winter days.’
    â€˜Yes, I would like to have something to do.’
    As if a hidden sadness had come from his voice, she asked, ‘You’re not taking long for Glasgow, are you?’
    â€˜No, not particularly. Only I would like to have something to do.’
    She stood quite silent, further personal words beyond her. ‘I’ll go and see him this minute.’ And she set off, the concentration of purpose in her whole body.
    That had been another rare period in his life, perhaps because it had been one of sheer creation, of making something to his own design to fulfil a purpose that waspart of his being. Perhaps, too, the absence of all outside compulsion, particularly the compulsion of time, helped to give the undertaking an air of freedom, of choice, and this freedom may again have been enhanced by contrast with the cold miry fields and that warm dazing quietude of the kitchen. He had escaped into his own place, into himself, and in no time life came all alive in his hands. And alive in his lips that whistled a few soft hissing notes of no particular tune as he turned a shaft of timber this way and that, and eyed its possibilities, and saw the completed article before it was fashioned. The journey to the town was no drudgery, it was an adventure. He saw things on the way, observed them with the humour of the watcher’s eye, and