Rhanna

by Christine Marion Fraser

  ‘Ach, away you go, Fergus! She’ll keep for a few hours yet I’m thinkin’.’

  ‘How do you know! She could be quick and no one there.’

  ‘Not wi’ a first! Never wi’ a first!’

  She fell to grumbling until Fergus exploded. ‘Dammit, woman! Are you coming or not?’

  ‘Och, haud your tongue, man, I’m comin’! Just give me time to put on my breeks if that’s no’ too much to ask!’

  The window banged shut and Fergus was left to stamp his feet and swing his arms until the door opened and Biddy came out, calling a fond farewell to a big black cat which sat at the foot of the stairs mewing loudly.

  ‘Bide a wee, my lamb. I’ll try not to be too long. I’ve a nice bitty fish for your dinner!’

  Fergus snorted and Biddy gave him a cold look before flouncing over to the trap. She grumbled at everything on the journey to Laigmhor. She told him he shouldn’t have come for her so early. Babies didn’t just pop out the minute a pain started. There would be a long wait ahead and she had heartburn from rushing about so soon after her breakfast. He remained silent throughout the tirade. He knew her so well; her bark was only a front. When she was with her patients her gentleness and patience were matchless. She had assisted most of the younger population of Rhanna into the world, and their own offspring. Everyone dreaded the day when age or death robbed them of the kenspeckle old figure who had devoted her life to her work. She was Rhanna-born as were her parents and grandparents, and had only left the island to take her training, returning to assist the existing midwife, then carrying on alone when ‘Auld Murn’ collapsed and died at the age of eighty.

  Mirabelle had everything ready and Helen was curled in the chair by the bedroom fire looking very young in a blue nightdress. She giggled a little nervously when Fergus loomed big and speechless at her side. ‘Don’t look like that,’ she chided. ‘You’ll make me more scary than I am already.’

  ‘Pain bad?’ he grunted gruffly.

  ‘Getting worse now but I can thole it . . . och, c’mon now! We’ll laugh at this later.’

  Biddy intervened. ‘Out, my lad.’ She pushed him towards the door. ‘Men are so feckless at times like these it just gets me angry!’

  He tried to fill the gaps in his memory but it was useless. The day had passed in a blur with Mirabelle stolidly plodding up and down stairs, taking Biddy endless cups of tea and muttering under her breath.

  Nancy McKinnon, the young daily help from Portcull, darted about from kitchen to yard to hang out wet dishtowels and feed the hens. She slopped soup into bowls and made thick sandwiches filled with dry mutton and told herself Fergus was lucky to get anything at all. He filled the weary hours with essential farm duties, his voice clipped and cold when he gave orders to the men. By the end of the day they were glad to be out of his sight.

  Murdy McKinnon, a distant cousin of Nancy’s mother, kicked dung from his wellingtons and chewed viciously at a plug of tobacco.

  ‘He’s a bugger o’ a man is McKenzie,’ he complained to Jock Simpson, the amiable ploughman, who was employed in no one place but gave his services to the widely scattered farms on Rhanna. ‘My Cailleach just dropped our three lads like a ewe scatters its sham.’ He blew his nose on to the hard rutted road and rubbed the gob of mucus into the ground with his stoutly booted foot. ‘McKenzie seems to think no one never had a bairn but his wife!’

  Jock nodded placidly and was glad of the fact that he had never had the worry of a wife let alone a child. ‘Ach, you canny compare Laighmhor to yoursel’, Murdy. You wife o’ yours is a real blossom o’ a lass. Plenty o’ meat to her bones you might say. The wee lass McKenzie wed’s a nippet cratur – bonny, mind, but no’ made for rearin’ bairns.’

  Murdy sniffed and plodded on, his mind on his cosy cottage by the Fallan river. A hot meal would be waiting and his three sturdy sons would clamour for his attention. Later, his wife would regale him with all the local gossip while he smoked his pipe with his feet on top of the warm oven in the range. The scent of snow was heavy in the freezing air and the men hurried on, the dim lights of Laigmhor already well behind them.

  Teatime came and went, and Biddy decided it was time to call the doctor. She was getting anxious about Helen whose pains were violent but who was nowhere near giving birth.

  Fergus, thankful for something to do, strode out of the warm kitchen and met the first flakes of snow from a leaden sky. Lachlan’s house was but a short walk from the farm and later he remembered nothing of it. His memory was only of Phebie McLachlan, outlined in the dim light from the hall, her two-year-old son Niall clutched in her arms.

  ‘Can Lachlan come?’

  It wasn’t so much a question as a demand, and Phebie’s welcoming smile faded a little. She and her husband were incomers in Rhanna. Their four years there were a mere breath in time as far as the islanders were concerned and every move they made was watched warily by the natives. Lachlan was a Stornoway man and because he ‘had the Gaelic’ was more at an advantage than Phebie who hailed from Glasgow. They had met while he was at Glasgow University studying medicine, had literally ‘fallen’ for each other when he, late for a class, had bumped into her in the middle of Argyle Street and they had both landed in the gutter, he with a fractured wrist and she with bruises and a ‘jelly nose’.

  A year later they were married and moved to England where he had managed to get his first post as a doctor. But he pined for the Hebrides and when the post of Medical Officer became vacant on Rhanna he applied for the job and got it.

  But being a doctor was one thing; earning the confidence of the canny crofters was another. They compared him continually with ‘Auld McLure’ who’d been Rhanna-born and bred and who knew every one of his patients and their ways. He had not been very well up on ‘fancy modern cures’ but that had not greatly mattered: he had healed with the wisdom of familiarity and age-old cures. Simply by spending an hour or so ‘cracking’ with a patient and having a dram or two had done more good than any medicine found in a bottle. ‘Except for the stuff the tint o’ an amber river,’ the islanders joked with a glint in their eyes.

  But Lachlan was making progress. His fluent Gaelic overcame a great many hurdles because the Rhanna folk were lazy, with the unhurried calmness of purpose passed down through generations, and they did not care to translate every thought or expression into English. Many of the older folk knew no other tongue than Gaelic. The young people had the English – they had to learn it before going to school or they didn’t go at all – but even they found it more natural to use their native tongue and poor Phebie had been at a loss until she built up a reasonable Gaelic vocabulary.

  ‘Auld McLure’, now buried beside his wife and daughter in the Hillock Kirkyard, was still well remembered by his old cronies but his name was now less on their lips. Young McLachlan ‘was a bright one and no mistake’. Lachlan, looking at bunions that ought never to have been, and administering to bronchial chests that could have been prevented with a little care, cursed ‘Auld McLure’ under his breath and set about righting the ails of the islanders. After four years of hard work they held him in respect and marvelled at his ‘fancy ways’ that really worked. His tall young figure and boyish smile, his kind yet firm way of dealing with even the most difficult of patients, had earned him a firm place in the hearts of the Rhanna folk. With patience and a good deal of understanding Phebie, too, had won her way into the affections of the islanders. Even so she’d been glad of the advent of Helen who was a ‘foreigner’ like herself but who didn’t mind the tag in the least. With her vivacity and joy of living she drew people like a magnet and they came to her, the wary Rhannaites, because they could not help themselves. They spoke about her ‘scrawny wee figure’ and told each other she would ‘never make a farmer’s wife’ but not a day passed without one of them seated cosily in the kitchen taking a Strupak and listening to her gay chatter, some of which they couldn’t understand but which made them smile anyway it sounded so cheery. Ceilidhs were part and par
cel of island life but the McKenzies had been a family who had kept themselves to themselves and Laigmhor had always been a quiet, dreaming place.

  Now, with Helen it rang with gossip and song. Ceilidhs there were now a regular occurrence and Phebie was glad of Helen because she made life so precious a thing to be lived and passed the exuberance she felt to everyone she met.

  The friendship between Fergus and Lachlan had developed with painstaking slowness. Fergus was a son of Rhanna, and caution and dourness had been his heritage. In his heart he admired the young doctor but it was not his way to let such feelings show. Enough it was that he could pass the time of day with Lachlan without feeling the impatience that others roused in him. With the exception of Hamish Cameron he had very little in common with his own kind. With them he experienced an anger because they squabbled like children over matters of little importance. With Lachlan he felt no need to indulge in silly superfluous chatter. Peaceable silences could fall between them and he didn’t feel he had to search his mind for something to say to fill the time. He was at ease in Lachlan’s company and Lachlan knew he was honoured by the friendship – the islanders were quick to tell him so.

  ‘A real dour one that,’ sniffed Behag Beag, the postmistress, when Lachlan went into her shop one day to buy stamps. ‘Aye was – even as a bairn. Used to keek at me wi’ thon queer brooding eyes o’ his! Black as his moods they are. Alick was a different laddie altogether. A weak sort right enough but kindly in his ways. Fergus did all the fightin’ for him at school for he couldny stick up for himself but he wasny to blame, he never got the chance to prove himself – it’s no wonder he was aye in trouble when he grew older. That poor lass . . .’ She shook her head sadly and let the words hang in the air before continuing. ‘Fergus had to stick his nose into that affair as well. Always leadin’ Alick’s life for him – aye – you’ll regret makin’ friends wi’ that man! Not a word o’ cheer you’ll get from him and that’s a fact!’

  Lachlan smiled to himself as Behag’s mournful tones fell on his ears. She was the soul of doom with her down-turned mouth and jowls that hung from a wizened face. Thin wisps of hair escaped a threadbare headscarf and her whole demeanour reminded him of a doleful bloodhound. She complained incessantly about her rheumatism, her customers and her lot in general and if Lachlan had cause to cross her path he took care to always appear to be rushing off on some emergency.

  James Balfour, the laird, and his sickly little wife were quite upset that Lachlan had made friends with one of their tenant farmers. They lived in Burnbreddie – a large gloomy house which stood on a rocky outcrop on the western side of Rhanna. The estate reached back for three miles and more and Robbie Beag, Behag’s brother, was the ghillie. Away from his sister’s watchful eye he spent his days browsing through the estate, swigging whisky from a hip flask and shooting hares and rabbits which he gave to his friends. He also landed fresh trout and salmon from the two rivers and these also found their way to the tables of the crofters. Behag, unaware of her brother’s generosity, gave lavish Strupaks, sublimely believing that she and she alone was the sole benefactor of Burnbreddie spoils, and her neighbours came and partook of her fare with a great show of surprise at the treats offered and all the while they shared with round-faced, blue-eyed Robbie, the greatest secret on the island.

  The laird, big and blustering with a red face and a bulbous nose that told of too much rich feeding and an unrestrained tippling from the fine brands of whisky in his cellar, came from a long line of Gaels and had earned his father’s disapproval when he’d come home from college in England and announced his intention of marrying an Englishwoman. All manner of threats had no effect and he’d married the woman of his choice in the end. Despite his English education he spoke a strange mixture of Gaelic and English so that words burbled from him in waves of almost unintelligible sound, his voice thickly slurred by a lifetime of drinking. Madam Balfour was much more articulate and honeyed tones dripped from a small prim mouth. She had been pretty at one time and had small delicate features, but time had twisted them, time and the bitterness she’d harboured for years at being brought to live on a remote island among ‘peasants and barbarians who knew nothing of civilization’.

  The young James Balfour had seemed a good catch. But when he came into Burnbreddie and its estate and decided to live there, his wife was furious at first, then resigned, but her feelings manifested themselves in an open ear for malicious gossip and a barely concealed superiority towards the crofting community of Rhanna. She was slightly more tolerant of the people who had tenanted their farms for generations, but when she spoke of Fergus the honey in her voice was tinged with bitterness and her beady, pale grey eyes glinted with malice.

  ‘I really don’t know what you see in that man,’ she sniffed to Lachlan. ‘A good farmer, I grant you, but not the type one would have for dinner, if you see what I mean. He barely speaks to me – I don’t know why because I was brought up to be civil to everyone – but these farming people have a rough streak, would you not say? Mind you, his mother was a fine woman, more genteel, but then of course she didn’t really belong here. She was from the north, farming people but better quality than the McKenzies. Alick was like her, a bit more manners than his brother. What a pity he was such a weakling in other ways, but then his father’s blood is in him. Fergus is like his father all over, no control of his emotions at all! Have you ever experienced his temper? Dear me, it’s frightening! I wonder he ever found himself a wife and such a flighty little thing too. Pretty as a bluebell in her way but she’ll never make a farmer’s wife. I . . .’

  She had stopped in mid-sentence as the doctor lanced the boil that had ripened on her neck. He dressed it but his touch was less gentle than usual and she looked at him in pained surprise, wondering if she’d said anything to upset him. He had found himself wishing that he could have stitched her tight little mouth so that she could never speak again. He found her a hypochondriac nuisance with too many airs and graces. He disliked her all the more for miscalling Fergus to whom he had grown very close. In the beginning he’d found it difficult to get underneath the man’s steel exterior but patience had won and he admired Fergus for being his own man.

  He was glad too that Phebie had found a friend in Helen. When Niall was born, Helen was at hand like a gay sunbeam, helping in every way she could. Now it was her turn to bring a child into the world and Phebie was worried because her friend looked too frail for such an ordeal.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ Lachlan said one night when Helen had had a Strupak with them before departing for home. ‘The skinny wee ones are sometimes the best in childbirth. It’s the ones with too much meat to them we’ve to watch!’

  ‘Lachy! You’re getting at me, you – you whittrick that you are! I’ll – I’ll . . .’

  His brown eyes had twinkled and he shouted with laughter, throwing his arms round her warm plump waist. ‘I love you the way you are – like a bonny pink rose just waiting to be plucked!’ He nuzzled her neck and caught the roundness of her breasts with eager hands.

  ‘Lachy!’ she had cried, but softly, her voice enticing and her fair hair falling over her face. ‘Lachy! Niall’s crying, I must go up to him.’

  ‘Later,’ he said, his tanned skin flushed. ‘A bit of crying won’t do him any harm but waiting won’t be good for me at all. Just feel and see what you’ve done to me. Now, Phebie – here – by the fire!’

  But things like these were far from Phebie’s mind when she opened the door of Slochmhor and saw Fergus standing against the black background of moor. Snowflakes were whirling around his muscular coatless figure and a keening wind whipped the black hair from his brow, tossing it over eyes that were darkly intent with the urgency of his quest.

  She heard his clipped question and her heart leaped strangely in her breast. Niall stirred in her arms and gurgled happily. ‘Where Elly? Elly comin’ soon?’

  ‘Weesht,’ said Phebie, shivering in the bite of the wind. ‘Come in, Fergus, you must be frozen. Els
peth will make you a Strupak.’

  ‘I’m not here for tea! I’m here for Lachlan! Dammit woman, are you deaf? Helen needs Lachlan!’

  ‘B-but – he’s not here,’ faltered Phebie. ‘He was called out to Glan Fallan. One of the Taylor bairns at Croft na Beinn has pneumonia. He left three hours ago and I’m getting worried. If this weather keeps up there’ll be drifts. Oh, Fergus, what if he can’t get back over the Glen? It gets blocked so quickly at Downie’s Pass!’

  Fergus exploded. ‘What about Helen? He must come!’

  Phebie shivered again. ‘There’s no need to shout, Fergus McKenzie! Lachlan can’t be in two places at once . . . and on a night like this I fear for his safety too.’

  Elspeth Morrison, Phebie’s housekeeper, came bustling into the shaft of light. She was thin and angular, her bony features always strangely immobile no matter her mood. When she saw Fergus she gave a horselike snort.

  ‘Humph! I might have known who was shoutin’ like the de’il! Can you no’ come into the house like other folk? The heat is just fleein’ out the door.’

  ‘Hold your tongue, you old yowe!’ roared Fergus with a glare that would have quelled the bravest heart. ‘If you were in my house you’d know your place all right!’

  Elspeth stuck her sharp nose in the air. She was inclined to be annoyed with Laigmhor in general because the previous week she’d fallen out with Mirabelle over a recipe for tablet.

  ‘Your house!’ She sniffed. ‘I wouldny be seen dead in it! As for anybody you can get to work for you – they must be gey weak in the head if you ask me!’

  ‘That’s enough, Elspeth!’ ordered Phebie sharply. From the corner of her eye she had seen Fergus’s fists bunching with rage and she couldn’t blame him. Elspeth’s tongue was sharp and bold. Many blamed her bitterness on her husband Hector who was a fisherman. When he was away her whole demeanour softened. When he came home and drank the cold of the sea from his bones till he was a sodden lump of cursing humanity, his wife bore the brunt of his fists and foul language and she in turn spat cynical words at her fellow creatures and was not popular even among the fisherwives on the harbour. She vowed a hatred for all men and prayed that her husband would be lost to sea. It was quite common knowledge that she went about saying, ‘The sea’s the best place for his carcase. He’d make a nice feast for the gulls but the craturs would likely die of alcoholic poisonin’.’