Storm Over Rhanna

by Christine Marion Fraser

  ‘Tam McKinnon!’ Kate’s lusty screech had made her husband back away in trepidation. ‘I worshipped that bodach and tended the old bugger hand and foot. He was a wreck before I took and cared for him and that’s the thanks I get. A monk, eh? Paying penance for sins he didny commit – well, you’re just about to pay yours for all the lyin’ and cheatin’ you did commit! Off wi’ your vest and drawers this minute, my lad, and while we’re about it fetch the shears from the scullery till I crop your hair!’

  If Joe had heard all that he would have felt very sorry for Tam and laughed at the rest – he could afford to laugh now he was out from under Kate’s well-meant but overpowering rule. As for the talk about Grace and Captain Mac – that was the biggest laugh of all. From the day they had wed Grace was devoted to himself, and if later on she thought to take either Mac or Bob to her kindly bosom, well, all power to her elbow. She had given him more happiness these last months than he had known in a lifetime, and if her capacity for loving reached out to embrace others he would be glad in the knowing that she wouldn’t spend the remainder of her life alone and lonely.

  So Old Joe was happy as things stood. He worshipped Grace, enjoyed the agreeable companionship of Captain Mac, and he looked forward to the visits of all those bairns who had shared their eager youth with him and now came to entertain him with their talk of family and home.

  Yet, betimes it was strange, mused the old man, hearing these boys talk about their children when only yesterday they were bairns themselves, no more than knee high, eyes big with wonder, cheeks bulging with the boilings he kept in a jar for them to enjoy as they listened in eager silence to the tales he had to tell. Good stories they were too. Forbye entertaining children he had been one of the best seanachaidhs on Rhanna, keeping everyone spellbound at winter firesides when gales battered the land, and it was safe and good to be indoors where all the witches and Hags were contained within the bounds of his fertile imagination. That one about the one-eyed Hag of the Minch – God, it was good that. The warty caillich had been one of his favourites – now, had the eye been on the right or the left side of her face? Or had it been in the middle? He chuckled and lay back in his chair, his green eyes very faraway under their straggling canopy of white . . .

  ‘Did you say somthing, Joe?’ Matthew looked at the old man and his eyes filled with tenderness as he wondered if such a frail body would see another summer on Rhanna.

  Joe stirred, came back to reality with an effort. ‘I was wandering, lad,’ he explained softly, openly admitting for the first time that his concentration wasn’t as it had been.

  ‘You’re tired, my man.’ Aunt Grace put a pan of milk to heat on the fire. ‘You’ll sup your cocoa and then get off to bed.’

  Grant got to his feet, his strapping youthful figure suddenly filling the small room. ‘Ay, it’s time I was going anyway. Fiona likes me home in time to see Ian to bed.’

  His apologetic grin successfully hid his thoughts. ‘Come home early, Grant,’ his wife had told him as they kissed at the door. ‘There’s a storm brewing and I love it when Ian’s in bed and it’s just you and me together on the sofa. It’s so cosy with the wind howling and shrieking outside.’

  ‘Havers, woman,’ Old Joe told his wife stubbornly, ‘I’m no’ goin’ to bed yet. I’m restless wi’ the storm blowin’ and will no’ sleep for hours. I’d rather hae a dram than that bairn’s food you have there in the pan.’

  Captain Mac looked at Grace, she nodded, and he went over to the sideboard for the whisky. ‘You’ll stay and hae a sup afore you go?’ he glanced enquiringly from Matthew to Grant.

  ‘Och well,’ Grant folded himself back into his chair. ‘Fiona and the baby will keep for a whilie yet.’

  Matthew grinned, ‘Ay, and Tina will be over at Granny Ann’s the night. Granda John is having a birthday. There will be a wee ceilidh waitin’ for me there so it will do no harm to get warmed up a bittie first.’

  Old Joe shivered suddenly. An oddly oppressive feeling of doom enveloped him, a sensing that something terrible was about to happen to someone there – in the room. He had experienced such things before, way back in his younger days when men were lost at sea never to return to their islands. It was just the storm, he convinced himself . . .

  ‘You’re cold, Joe,’ Grace was there, happing his knees in a tartan rug. ‘A wee tot will be just the thing to heat you up.’

  ‘Ach, just someone walkin’ over my grave,’ the old man made light of it, ‘but I’m no’ for dyin’ yet, no’ when there’s good whisky waitin’ to be supped.’

  Captain Mac was not a whisky man. Into his own glass he poured a large measure of rum, then seated himself down to plunge the poker into the red-hot cinders in the grate.

  Everyone waited. It was a familiar ritual, one peculiar to Mac. The poker was withdrawn, its red-hot tip immersed in the rum, inciting the liquid to hiss and sizzle and release the fragrance of burning rum into the room.

  Captain Mac took the glass in his big brown hands and settled himself back with a contented sigh. It was his favourite time; his pipe; his rum; his stockinged feet planted squarely on the hearth; Joe in his chair; Grace in hers; the company of friends, well kent, well loved. Raising his glass he cried, ‘Slàinte! Here’s to us, wha’s like us!’

  ‘Damt few and they’re a’ deid.’ Joe had been waiting for his cue.

  ‘Not all,’ Mac spoke softly. ‘There is one among us very much alive and kicking.’ Affectionately he regarded. the old man in the chair opposite, the lamplight shining in his thick thatch of white hair, gilding the lush beard with silver. ‘God, man,’ Captain Mac shook his head and pulled thoughtfully on his own luxuriant whiskers, ‘I’m seventy years old myself yet I mind you telling me your tales when I was a bairn. The love I had for the sea was nurtured in me by you and to my mind you’re worth your weight in gold. To you I raise my glass. A toast to your abiding strength. To Joe!’

  ‘To Joe!’ Everyone toasted, everyone drank. Aunt Grace sipping daintily from her glass, heedless of a large tear that rolled and splashed down into it.

  ‘And now.’ Captain Mac took Joe’s pipe, plugged it with a fill of baccy, did likewise to his own, folded his feet comfortably and looked around. ‘’Tis a night for the best seanachaidh in all Rhanna to tell us a tale or two.’

  ‘Ach yes.’ Aunt Grace beheld her husband’s shining face and gave her willing consent.

  ‘Ay, that would be grand.’ Grant relinquished his vision of himself and Fiona cuddled together on the couch. There was plenty of time for them to indulge their passions – Old Joe’s time was running out, let him savour what was left. ‘I’ll pretend I’m a boy again wi’ all the mysteries o’ the world lying at Joe’s door waiting to be revealed.’

  Matthew settled himself more comfortably on his cushion, drew up his knees and stared into his glass. In it he seemed to see Tina’s bonny, placid face, the youthful ones of his children, those of his parents. His father was seventy-eight now, his birthday ceilidh would be in full swing with all his cronies popping in for a blether and a dram. Matthew smiled. A new pipe nestled in his pocket for Granda John, as he was known to everyone. Grandma Ann was forever complaining that the old one spewed more foul-smelling reek than a lum on fire . . .

  ‘I am thinkin’ o’ a wonderful day in summer,’ Old Joe had begun his tale, ‘when all the sea was calm and blue and faraway islands were like dazzling gems way off on the horizon. Me and my mates were aboard a fishing vessel trawling for herring in the Sea o’ The Hebrides . . .’

  The lilting old voice was like a song, musical, soothing. Outside the wind rose to gale force but inside Aunt Grace’s little harbour house it was summer – an illusion brought about by one old man whose gift of storytelling had been granted to him long before the cradle . . .

  After Tina had departed into the night, Mark went through to the kitchen to take his meal from the oven and set it on the table. He tried to feel appreciative of the warm fire, the peace, the delicious steak and kidney pie
steaming provocatively on his plate. But it was no use. After just a few forkfuls he pushed the food away half-eaten and rose from his chair to pace about the house, watched anxiously by Mutt who had been hoping for some tasty titbits from his master’s plate before the cats polished off the lot. The Manse cats were ruthless opportunists. Whenever they thought they could get away with it they ganged up on the big, floppy, good-natured dog to wrest from him his own particular place at the fire; the most comfortable chair; the tastiest scraps from the table.

  No matter how much he worried or fretted the cats seemed somehow to win, and it looked as if they were going to come up trumps again tonight. From the corner of one golden-brown eye Mutt could see them, sneaking up on the dining chairs to paw the plates towards them with an expertise born of long practice. Tub, a huge shaggy white cat, was the leader. Whatever she did Tib and Tab just followed suit. At this present moment they were all licking the plate containing the soup dregs, from that they progressed to the dish containing the remains of the mouthwatering meat pie . . .

  Mutt could stand it no longer. His jaws drooled profusely, a worried whine rose up in his throat. But it was all to no avail. The master of the house was in one of his deeply thoughtful moods. A great sigh shuddered out of Mutt’s dejected frame and he retired to the kitchen fire, there to sink his nose in his paws and reflect on just how unfair life was to an honest-natured dog who had never, and to his own cost, stolen anything from any table – except maybe in the daft, long-ago days of puppyhood when he hadn’t known any better.

  Mark, for once oblivious to small domestic upheavals among his animals, paused in the hall, frowning. Something about this night was making him uneasy and it had nothing to do with the gale blowing outside. He was used by now to such adverse weather conditions. They were part and parcel of island life and he had long ago learned to cope with them. No, it was something else, a feeling that all was not quite right out there in the wild, blustery darkness.

  Striding through to his study, he went straight to the window to pull back the curtains and peer outside. His instincts had been right. There were lights out there, not the familiar lights of the village but a moving mass of them, bobbing and winking all along the road to the harbour.

  Without a moment’s hesitation he ran to the hall stand to don his heavy tweed jacket and grab a torch from the window ledge. Mutt came out of the kitchen to watch him, reproach in every taut muscle.

  Mark laughed. ‘Ach, alright, lad, you can have it. But not a word to Tina, you know how she fusses about my meals.’

  Mutt sighed again. Surely, surely, his master knew him better than that. Had he never taken note of the fact that his dog never took things from the table? Or were all human beings too wrapped up in their own affairs to bother with those of their animals?

  With drooping tail Mutt slunk sadly back to the kitchen where his nose told him that every last scrap had been scoffed from the plates – and worse, in his short absence those devilish cats had taken over his very own special cushion with the lovely loose cover wherein all sorts of small doggy treasures could be hidden from feline eyes. Tub and Tib were sprawled over one side of it, Tab plunk in the middle, all contendedly washing their whiskers and licking gravy from their lips, their green gleaming orbs watching him with self-satisfied triumph.

  It was too much. Mustering as much dignity as he could into his floppy, clumsy limbs, Mutt padded over to his master’s chair and jumped up to bury his nose in his tail in an effort to try and forget all about the injustices of life in the safe and happy realms of sleep.

  Once outside the house, Mark James ran to the gate atop the Hillock which was a quick way down to the village and one he used most often in preference to the more conventional route along the driveway.

  ‘He breeah!’

  The minister almost jumped out of his skin. To have the Gaelic for ‘it is fine’ thrown at him out of the pitch blackness of that drear demented night was nerve shattering to say the least. Frantically he swung his torch in the direction of the voice. The small circle of light found and stayed on the woebegone countenance of Dodie, who appeared to have just come out of the kirkyard. The sight of his stooped and flapping black figure did nothing to soothe the minister’s nerves.

  ‘Dodie!’ he exclaimed. ‘What on earth are you doing up here on a night like this?’

  The old eccentric shuffled his huge feet in embarrassment. ‘Will you promise no’ to be telling a soul if I whisper a wee secret to you?’ he babbled excitedly.

  ‘No, of course not, but I’ll never hear if you whisper. Just talk in your normal voice for I can vouch that there’s no’ another living soul up here to eavesdrop on you.’

  Dodie drew a sodden sleeve over his nose. ‘Well, I put a wee stone in a corner o’ the kirkyard in memory o’ my Ealasaid. No’ another body knows about it but myself and yourself too, now that I’ve told you, Mr James,’ he finished in respectful tones for he had taken to the young minister from the beginning and always felt at ease in his company.

  ‘Ealasaid you say!’ Mark had to shout to make himself heard above the howl of the wind.

  ‘Wheesht, wheesht!’ Dodie warned in panic, glancing over his bony shoulder as if expecting the entire village to have ringed itself round the Hillock ‘to spy on him’.

  ‘Ay, ay, you remember my bonny cow? She fell over the cliff last summer and I miss her that much I thought to put up a wee stone for her so that I can come up here and speak to her the way I used to when she was alive—’ The tears were spilling, stemmed only by the old man’s fiercely scrubbing, frozen hands.

  ‘Come on, man,’ Mark put a kindly hand under Dodie’s sharply defined elbow realizing as he did so that there was so little meat on the old eccentric’s bones they seemed to stick out of his shabby layers of clothing at every angle. He had grown frail these last months and the minister suspected that he had pined himself into a state of near starvation. ‘I’ll take you back to the Mafise,’ he explained as he guided the stumbling, clumsy footsteps back up the brae. ‘You can have a bite to eat there and a good heat at the fire.’

  Dodie made no protest but allowed himself to be led inside to the kitchen, there to be greeted rapturously by Mutt who adored the smelly old man, not just because he always carried a titbit in his tattered pocket whenever he had to pass the Manse, but also because he was the one human being in all the land who seemed really to understand animals and everything they tried so hard to convey.

  Quickly the minister made a pot of tea and heated some soup from the big pot Tina had prepared that morning. He left Dodie seated cosily by the fire, dunking bread into his soup, Mutt’s muzzle rested adoringly on one jutting kneebone, Tub, Tib and Tab draped respectively on the chair back, the chair arm, across Dodie’s bent but amenable shoulder.

  Mark knew that when he got back Podie would be gone, leaving only his aroma and his dirty dishes behind, and as he hurried down the brae he vowed that something would have to be done to ensure that the old man’s lonely cottage up in the hills wouldn’t become his tomb, for if he went on the way he was doing he would most certainly starve himself to death altogether.

  Mark walked along briskly, body bent into the wind, eyes closed to slits to protect them from the blatters of icy rain hurling over the land. Guided by the mass of storm lanterns he arrived breathless at the harbour. The doors of the big boatshed were open wide, inside a crowd of men were working at the winch before knocking away the chocks that helped keep the Rhanna lifeboat in place.

  ‘’Tis yourself, Mr James.’ Ranald held up his lantern to scrutinize the minister’s face. ‘A terrible thing just, eh?’

  ‘What’s terrible, Ranald?’

  ‘A boat in trouble out beyond the Sgor Creags – a big boat I’m thinkin’ too. Maybe a cargo vessel or such like.’

  Mark was well used to Ranald and his fantasies, but the very mention of the treacherous rocks out there by Port Rum Point brought a shiver to his spine. He had heard so many stories about their dangers. Fe
rgus of the Glen had lost his arm in a terrible accident many years ago while trying to rescue his brother Alick from the sea; that same brother and Rachel Jodl’s father had died on those self same rocks when a fishing boat had run aground.

  Mark went into the shed to help the men. The twenty-foot diesel-powered boat was starting to move down the slipway that would plunge her straight into the water. At the last moment the minister saw Grant McKenzie’s face, beside him that of Matthew, Tina’s husband.

  ‘Grant! Matthew! Good luck, I’ll pray for you! I’ll pray for you all!’

  The boat hit the water with a mighty splash. The crowd on shore held their lanterns aloft and cheered. Mark dug his hands in his pockets. Beside him old Jim Jim shook his head and remarked, ‘That bugger Canty Tam was right after all – if you will excuse the language, Mr James. This very afternoon he predicted the worst storm of all was yet to come – and she’s here, Mr James, she’s here! He’ll get wind o’ this in a whilie and will be over to see will the men be bringing back dead bodies from out the ocean.’

  Mark blinked rainwater from his eyes and stared out beyond the black waters of the harbour. ‘God go with you,’ he prayed silently – and wondered why his thoughts were only for the men in the lifeboat and not for those in the stricken vessel out there beyond the reefs.

  Chapter Ten

  The lifeboat left the comparative calm of the harbour to meet with the full fury of the Atlantic Ocean. Captain Mac was at the wheel, his big capable brown hands planted firmly on its wooden rim, his keen blue eyes screwed to slits in his bewhiskered face as he strained his vision into the black night. The rotating wiper whirred valiantly round, sloshing rivers of water off the window, but even so the business of steering the boat through the savage night was a nerve-wracking one and only a man of Captain Mac’s experience could have tackled it so calmly, standing there as he was, nonchalantly humming a Gaelic lullaby under his breath.