The door opened cautiously and Neilly appeared still holding the graipe which he had been using to throw out the manure. ‘My wife is away milkin’ the cow,’ he told me.
‘I know that,’ I panted. ‘But she’s sick. And she’s twisted her leg.’
‘Oh, my, my! That’s terrible!’ Neilly’s face was full of concern and he dug his graipe hurriedly into the ground. ‘I’d best be away up to the post office an’ try will I catch the vet before he’s out on his rounds,’ he said.
‘Not the vet!’ I told him breathlessly. ‘It’s your wife who’s needing attention.’
‘Oh, it’s no the cow that’s sick then?’ Neilly’s relief was staggeringly obvious. ‘It’s my wife, you say?’
‘Yes,’ I stressed. ‘She’s twisted her leg somehow and she cannot walk. She’s also been vomiting quite a lot and I’m afraid she’s going to get very cold sitting out there on the moor. We must get help to her as quickly as possible.’ I found I was still shouting at him, I was so repelled by his attitude now that he knew his cow was safe. ‘Would you like me to go up to the post office and telephone for the nurse while you go to your wife?’ I asked him. ‘It wouldn’t take her long to get here and she could bring your wife home in her car.’
‘The nurse is on holiday,’ Neilly informed me almost exultantly. ‘You would need to get the nurse from the next village an’ it would be an hour or more before she would get here.’
I looked at him defiantly. ‘I think I ought to telephone her all the same,’ I said.
Neilly surveyed me with a calmness of expression that implied I was making a great deal of fuss over nothing at all. ‘You could do that if you’ve a mind,’ he conceded. ‘An’ I will get one or two of the men and we will take the bier for her. That will be the way of it just.’ I made no comment. There were times when I thought Bruach would have been bereft without its funeral bier; it was put to such a variety of uses that I used to wonder why each crofter did not have one of his own. Returning from telephoning the nurse I was in time to see the rescue party setting off across the moors but looking ahead of them I also saw to my utter dismay that Barbac herself was already half way home! She had felt fine when she had done vomiting, she told me later and when her knee had suddenly ‘jumped back into its bones’ she had carried on, milked the cow, and was on her way home when she had met the bier bearers. Barbac had subsequently professed herself grateful for my efforts to help but Neilly never made any secret of the fact that he despised me for the fuss I had made.
‘I’m no understandin’ it at all,’ said Anna Vic. ‘You’d think a man that has kept away from you in life would keep away from you in death,’ she added.
‘There’s not many it could have been, all the same,’ said Tearlaich with a puzzled frown. ‘We was all away diggin’ his grave.’
‘An’ them that was no diggin’ was after sittin’ with the corpse,’ declared Erchy.
There was a long pause during which Janet placed more peats on the fire and brushed some ash from the hearth with a bundle of feathers. Then Morag said, ‘There’s some believes it takes a spirit three days to make up its mind where it’s goin’.’
Erchy and Johnny flicked her a surprised look but said nothing.
‘If they ever go at all rightly,’ said Lachlan.
‘Like Red Annie?’ asked Anna Vic.
‘Like Red Annie,’ agreed Lachlan. We knew we had only to relax now and stare into the fire while we waited for Lachlan to tell us the story of Red Annie. For the Bruachites no doubt it would be the umpteenth time they had heard it but for me Red Annie was still a stranger.
‘Poor Red Annie,’ began Lachlan. ‘Aye, she was young to go when she did.’ He took down a tin of baking soda from the mantelpiece and swallowed two teaspoonfuls before he took up the narrative again. ‘No more than twenty was she on the day she died. She was on her way back from yon village with a boll of meal an’ a hundred-weight of coarse salt roped to her back when it started to snow. Not heavy snow, mind, at first, but it was gettin’ thicker all the time an’ with the weight she had there was no tellin’ how it was holdin’ her back. No doubt she was makin’ herself believe if she kept goin’ she would be back before the night came down but with nine miles walked an’ another three still to go the struggle got too much for her an’ she burst her own heart. That’s the way they found her two days later, with the meal still roped to her back. My own father was one that went out to look for her an’ it was himself told me that.’
There were small murmurs of compassion from the women as they thought of the young red-haired Annie struggling through the blizzard only to collapse and die three miles away from her home.
‘It was a lonely way to die,’ said Anna Vic sadly.
‘Aye, an’ I’m thinkin’ it’s lonely she is to this day,’ continued Lachlan. ‘Why else would there be nothin’ but bracken will grow on the good land where she died?’ He looked around, inviting contradiction.
I, visualizing the road to Bruach and recalling no part of it that was lush enough to grow bracken, was unable to locate the particular spot where Red Annie was supposed to have died. At length I had to ask.
‘It’s no place on the road as you would know it, Miss Peckwitt,’ Lachlan explained. ‘This was back in my father’s time an’ the road then was higher up the hill.’
‘It used to go above the strath, over the shoulder of the hill,’ interjected Erchy. ‘You can still make out part of the old track.’
‘Aye, an’ if you look up there you will see in the middle of the good land there is a patch of bracken growin’ all to itself,’ said Lachlan, taking up the story again.
‘I have noticed that,’ I said, remembering the isolated circle of bracken among the greenness of the laird’s parkland. I had often pondered over the reason for its being there and wished that it had not been ‘estate land’ so that I could have climbed up to investigate it. ‘But why is it included in the laird’s park now?’ I asked.
‘Ach, when the new laird came he just told us he was goin’ to take the road down nearer the shore. He said it would be easier for us and I’m no sayin’ but that he wasn’t right but at the same time he took where the road had once been into his own park.’ Lachlan nodded wisely. ‘He might as well have left it,’ he went on, ‘for once he’d moved the road it seemed nothin’ but bracken would ever grow on the patch where Red Annie died, though there’d been good grazin’ there before. He even planted it with trees but he could never get them to cover that spot, just. He reckoned it was a kind of a wind funnel that killed everythin’,’ Lachlan added with a wry grunt. ‘But to my my own mind it was cursed.’
I was still trying to sort out the implication of Lachlan’s story when the door opened and Angy the fisherman came bringing in the fresh smell of the sea on his oilskins. I waited for the greetings to cease before I put to Lachlan the question that was puzzling me.
‘This story of Red Annie,’ I taxed him. ‘Do you mean that nothing will grow on that particular spot because she died there?’
‘Indeed no,’ responded Lachlan. ‘It is not that at all. It is because the laird moved the road away from where she died that nothin’ will grow there, you understand?’
I didn’t understand and I suppose it was obvious from my expression.
‘What I’m sayin’ is that a person’s spirit or ghost if you like always stays around the place where he died,’ expounded Lachlan patiently. ‘An’ so long as it has company the same as it had in life then it will no be a trouble to anyone at all. That patch of land where Red Annie died stayed good land so long as her spirit had the company of folks that was passin’ along the road. But when the laird moved the road then that was the time for things to change.’
‘You mean Annie’s ghost became lonely?’
‘Just that.’ He nodded approval at me. ‘That’s what we believe, anyway,’ he added.
‘Didn’t anyone try to dissuade the laird from moving the road?’ I asked.
‘They tried.
Right enough they tried but he wouldn’t listen to them at all. He thought he was doin’ them good by savin’ them havin’ to climb so high up the hill.’
‘But nobody told him why they didn’t want the road to be moved,’ Tearlaich said accusingly.
‘How would they tell him an’ him an Englishman?’ retorted Lachlan.
‘Aye well,’ said Johnny. ‘I’m mighty glad he did change the road. I wouldn’t want to take my bus that far up the hill. It’s plenty bad enough without that.’
I was too interested in Lachlan’s theory to let the subject drop. ‘Do you think then that all these haunted places we hear about are haunted simply because whoever is haunting them is missing company?’ I pursued.
‘Surely if the ghost gives trouble that would be the reason for it likely,’ he replied. ‘Maybe there was never any trouble until the place had been deserted for a while but once a ghost’s been left on its own it gets kind of vexed about it an’ maybe tries to get a bit of its own back by plaguin’ folks.’
Lachlan pushed his pipe into his mouth and taking the hint I ceased my questioning.
‘Well, I’m thinkin’ Neilly’s goin’ to be a sore miss to Barbac,’ said Morag piously.
‘Aye, right enough,’ concurred Angy. ‘When are you buryin’ him?’ Angy fished from a mainland port and came home only at weekends so that he was not as well acquainted with Bruach affairs as were the rest.
‘Monday,’ Erchy told him.
‘Hell, you’re for keepin’ him long enough,’ Angy expostulated. ‘He’ll be smellin’ by Monday.’
‘What do you care?’ demanded Tearlaich. ‘You won’t have to carry him. You’ll be away at sea again by then likely.’
‘Aye, thank God!’ retaliated Angy. He lit a cigarette. ‘As a matter of fact we had a death on board our own boat today. That’s why I’m in so early.’
‘Who was that?’ asked Morag.
‘Ach, no one you’d be knowin’. It was a fellow that hasn’t been with us for long.’
‘How did he die?’
‘He just collapsed,’ Angy said. ‘The way of it was there was a big kick in the tides today an’ we had to rush off down to the harbour for fear of missin’ it. This fellow was keepin’ up with the rest of us all right then as soon as we got aboard he just crumpled up an’ died.’ Angy seemed to enjoy the shocked expressions on our faces.
‘It would be his heart likely?’ asked Janet.
‘Aye, I would think it couldn’t be much else,’ agreed Angy.
‘So you didn’t get your day’s fishin’ after all your rushin’,’ observed Erchy.
‘Indeed we did,’ Angy assured him. ‘An’ a good day’s fishin’ it was too for all we were in early.’
‘You were lucky then,’ Erchy told him. ‘I would think you’d be kept back with the doctor an’ everybody wantin’ to ask you what happened.’
‘Ach we didn’t wait for all that,’ said Angy.
‘You surely didn’t take a dead man to sea with you?’ challenged Janet in an outraged voice.
‘We did not then,’ Angy told her. ‘What we did was wrap him up in a piece of tarpaulin we had aboard an’ then four of us carried him up to the fish store between us.’
‘You put him in the fish store?’ Anna Vic squeaked.
‘Aye, there was a slab there handy, you see. An’ there was some of these labels they put on the fish boxes, so we just wrote on a couple of them an’ stuck them on the tarpaulin.’
‘An’ what did you say on the labels?’ asked Erchy.
‘ “To be delivered”,’ said Angy. ‘I believe that’s what they usually say.’
‘Oh, hear!’ whispered Janet.
‘You didn’t even straighten the man out?’ exclaimed Morag.
‘I tell you there was no time. We were near missin’ the tide as it was.’ Angy was entirely unabashed.
‘Whatever would the fish salesman say when he came to unwrap what he would think would be a good catch of fish an’ finds a corpse just?’ asked Anna Vic. Angy only shrugged. ‘An’ what would they do with him supposin’ they found him?’
‘I don’t know an’ I don’t care.’ Angy was becoming impatient. ‘All I know is they’d find him all right. We left him in a place where they couldn’t miss him.’
‘Where was that?’ asked Morag.
‘Didn’t I tell you, on the fish slab itself,’ retorted Angy. ‘An’ since they’d need to have the slab clear before they started filletin’ the fish, they’d have to do somethin’ with him. They wouldn’t just leave him there.’
I found myself swallowing rather hard.
‘The poor man!’ breathed Morag.
‘Ach, he wasn’t much of a fellow,’ said Angy dismissively. ‘He was only a fisherman because he couldn’t keep another job an’ he was nothin’ but a bloody landlubber aboard. Honest, he was so scared of the sea he couldn’t pee from the time we left the harbour till the time we got back in again.’
I stood up. ‘It’s time I was away home to my bed,’ I announced. There was a general move to go and as we stood outside assessing the night before we took our different paths Erchy said, I suspected with the intention of frightening me, ‘I’d like fine to know whether it was Neilly’s ghost you saw last night.’
‘Ach, how could it have been?’ asked Tearlaich. ‘What would Neilly be wantin’ from Miss Peckwitt?’
‘Did you say it was about nine o’clock when you saw him?’ Erchy would not leave the subject alone.
‘Yes,’ I said resignedly.
‘Then I doubt he was wantin’ in to have a listen to the news on the wireless,’ said Erchy.
‘More like to listen to the weather forecast,’ put in Johnny. ‘He’d be wantin’ to know what like of weather he was goin’ to get for his own funeral.’
The Shenagelly
I had been over to the mainland and had finished all my business there several hours before the bus was due to return to Bruach and since the inducements to linger on the mainland were limited to the chilly railway station buffet and the equally chilly local tearoom, both of which offered identical fare and provided identical comfort, i.e. tea and stale cake and straight-backed wooden benches I resolved to begin walking back to Bruach and to take the opportunity of calling in on a friend who lived close to the bus route. When I set out it was a pleasant afternoon in November, cold and clear except for the tendrils of mist which a lisping wind was curling round the crook-backed hills. The wide moors, gashed by the black troughs of peat diggings, stretched on either side of the road and there was no sound save that of my own footsteps; the occasional ‘clunk’ of a raven; the mewing of a buzzard and from somewhere in the hills the echoing bleating of sheep. My friend’s house was about six miles away and before I had covered five miles I had seen the tendrils of mist spread, densen and merge to enfold all but the skirt edges of the hills and the sky greying to release a thin drizzle of chilly rain. I was beginning to grow tired of walking but I quickened my step, thinking of my friend’s warm bright kitchen and of the strupak which would undoubtedly be prepared for me there. However as I approached the house I began to suspect I might be in for a disappointment There was no smoke eddying round the chimney and as I opened the gate I saw with some surprise that the door of the house was tight shut. I turned the handle and poking my head inside called out, ‘Are you there, Marie?’ The only response was an inarticulate croak from the direction of the fireplace where an old man sat like a fossil in a wooden chair beside the sluggish peat fire. I recalled Marie having told me about a ninety-year-old uncle of hers who was coming to live with her and guessed that this was he.
‘He Fluke,’ I said. The old man only stared at me warily without moving his lips. I assumed he was deaf and shouted my greeting. ‘He Fluke.’ He nodded but his ‘He Fluke’ in return was reluctant and barely audible. I stepped inside and he shrank back in his chair. ‘Is Marie not at home?’ I asked and then repeated my question in a louder voice.
‘Ha Nyall!’ His voice wa
s thick and his faded old eyes wide with apprehension.
I moved towards a chair and sat down.
The fire was piled with dry peats but only a wisp of smoke was threading its way round them and I wondered if I dared offer to set the fire blazing again by pushing in some of the dry twigs which lay ready on the hearth.
‘Is Marie about the croft?’ I asked. I had to shout the question three times before he understood it and each time I leaned forward to shout he cringed further and further away from me.
‘Ha Nyall!’ he muttered and then in a slightly more confident voice added, ‘The doctor.’
My heart sank. If Marie had gone to see the doctor then in all probability she would be returning on the very bus which I had to catch. I realized it was no use waiting. There was no welcome for me here for though the old man was ninety, almost stone deaf and crippled with rheumatism he was obviously so scared of my being a stranger that I feared he might die of fright if I stayed.
‘Oidche Mhath!’ I called defeatedly as I closed the door behind me.
‘Oidche Mhath!’ The reply came with an instant of animation. It was beginning to grow dark; lamplight glowed behind the misted windows of the croft houses and as I walked on through the scattered village I debated what I should do. The cold had not worried me hitherto but now after my rebuff at Marie’s cottage I was aware that my hands and feet were really very cold; that my clothes felt clammy and that my legs were aching with weariness, yet the bus was not due for at least another two hours. Once I had left the village behind there would be no more houses, no shelter of any kind; not even the faintest glimmer of light to be discerned until I came in sight of Bruach while the road itself as it began to wind its way through night-soaked hills would grow steadily darker and eerier. I had taken a torch with me to the mainland intending to get new batteries for it but alas I was informed there was a shortage of batteries so my empty torch lay uselessly at the bottom of my bag. I thought of seeking shelter at one of the croft houses, knowing that I had only to ask and not just shelter but a welcome strupak would be immediately forthcoming but I also knew from my own experience that this hour, just when dusk is closing in over the land, is always the busiest one of the crofter’s day and I was loath to burden them with the company of a stranger.
Beautiful Just! Page 5