Bruach Blend (14 page)

I felt slightly dazed. The frail little ‘small wee body' turning out to be a drunken virago? ‘I'd have expected nine whiskies to have put her flat on her back for a week,' I said.

Ruari chortled. ‘How many drams it needed to do that to her I wouldn't be knowin',' he admitted. ‘But I doubt when she'd taken them the old tinker would be best pleased there wasn't much of a size to her seein' it was himself would have to carry her back to their place.'

‘Oh, the Dear!' observed Janet, utterly failing to conceal her amusement.

‘Carry her? Did she truly become as incapable as that?' I wanted to know.

‘Sure enough,' Erchy asserted. ‘Limp as an old coat she'd be an' many's the time I've seen him sling her over his shoulder an' go off with her after the bar was closed for the night.'

‘Aye, an' himself that drunk he would be weavin' about like tangle in the tide,' agreed Ruari. ‘Mind you, he must have been good to her or he would have just left her there.'

‘It's a terrible long way back from the bar to their hut,' Morag pointed out.

‘Ach, I don't suppose he'd carry her that far,' said Erchy. ‘Just far enough for the sake of appearances I reckon an' then he'd throw her at the side of the road. She'd keep there well enough till she would be makin' her own way.'

I looked at him with raised eyebrows. ‘It's as true as I'm here,' he assured me. ‘Tinks don't care, just.'

‘Aye, she's a fine lassie right enough,' said Tearlaich, his shrewd glance flicking over the sturdy, full-bosomed young tourist as if he was assessing her for carcass weight rather than charm or beauty.

Tearlaich and I had met outside the Post Office where I, having finished my business, was waiting while Morag got her paraffin can filled when we could walk home together.

‘An' who would it be you are after sayin' is a fine lassie?' asked Morag, joining us at that moment.

Tearlaich nodded towards the receding figure of the young woman. ‘That one from Glasgow that Lachy's so mad keen about,' he told her.

Morag put down her heavy can the better to study the tourist. ‘Lachy's a rascal,' she pronounced.

I shot her an amused glance. While her own nephew Hector's philanderings with women might have been described as rascally by those who did not understand his benevolent attentions to women, I hardly thought the normally reticent Lachy deserved the epithet.

‘It strikes me he's head over heels in love with the girl,' I said.

‘An' so he is,' agreed Morag. ‘See, she's kind of different from the lassies hereabouts, so it makes a nice change for him.' She smiled indulgently. ‘Indeed he's fairly enjoyin' himself is Lachy.'

From my own observations I would have thought the love affair between Lachy and the tourist was more intense than Morag was prepared to admit. I said, ‘I wonder if it will be just a holiday romance or if eventually they'll get married?'

Morag had bent to pick up her paraffin can but my question startled her into uprightness. ‘Marrit?' she repeated, and she and Tearlaich exchanged swift glances of understanding. ‘Lachy will no' be marryin' her at all, mo ghaoil,' she stated positively, and seeing my expression shook her head and added more emphatically. ‘Never while the Lord spares him.'

‘He'll find it hard enough to marry her if the Lord doesn't spare him,' said Tearlaich.

‘Why won't he marry her?' I asked.

‘What use would be a lassie like that to Lachy?' demanded Morag in reply.

I smiled uncertainly. ‘But surely when young people are in love they're not going to assess what use one is going to be to the other. They're in love and that's all they care about.'

‘Love,' mocked Morag. In the Gaelic language there are many words which express affection of the deepest kind and I could never understand why, when I used the English word ‘love', the Bruachites appeared to be stricken with an embarrassment which they attempted to conceal with ridicule. ‘Love doesn't milk the cattle an' rear the calves an' work the peats an' cook the potatoes,' Morag went on to explain. ‘In this place a man wants a woman to work beside him.'

From my experience the men of Bruach wanted their women not just to work beside them but to work instead of them if it could be managed but I forbore from saying so.

‘She could learn all these things,' I argued, though I did not remind her of my own apprenticeship.

‘Not someone from Glasgow,' refuted Morag, ‘not unless she had the Highlands in her blood.'

‘But,' I pointed out, ‘look at that man in Keppoch who brought home a bride from Glasgow …'

‘Her that wouldn't learn to milk a cow nor cut a peat in all the time she was marrit to him?' interrupted Morag scathingly,

‘They were a happy family,' I insisted.

‘They were so, till he died,' she admitted. ‘An' didn't he die long before he needed to through workin' so hard doin' her share as well as his own?' She turned to Tearlaich. ‘Was that not the way of it, Tearlaich?'

‘That was the way of it,' supported Tearlaich absentmindedly. He was still looking towards the distant figure of the young tourist. ‘I'm thinkin' if Lachy plans to marry that one she'll not be wantin' to keep the feast till the weddin' night,' and added after a slight pause: ‘All the same, if he's not careful he might land himself with a Miss Wade the same as Hamish.'

In the days of her comparative youth Miss Wade had made her first visit to Bruach and had fallen in love with the then-handsome Hamish and for thirty-five years now, so the Bruachites claimed, she had been returning every year to Bruach for her holidays with the hope that some day Hamish would ask her to marry him.

‘Oh, right enough Hamish made a great fuss of her like the men does over any lassie that comes from the town,' Morag had said when she told me the story. ‘But then Hamish was certain she would be goin' back to her own home an' her own kind an' he wasn't likely to see her again. But ach, though he was surprised when she came back the next year he didn't think much of it so the two of them passed the time together. He got a bit of a shock when she came back the next year an' the next an' when folks started teasin' him as to what Miss Wade had in mind he took the fright of his life at the woman an' he's been tryin' to keep out of her way since.

‘She still comes, though,' I had pointed out, ‘and Hamish is still a bachelor. Maybe they will make a match of it some day.'

‘Never till two Sabbaths meets,' Morag had reiterated. ‘At the age she is now a man wouldn't be wantin' her for warmin' his bed, let alone tryin' to teach her the ways of the croft.'

To be fair I believe Miss Wade had tried her hand at milking cows and cutting peats and working in the hay. Whether her efforts had shown too little promise or whether she herself had found the tasks too distasteful was a matter for surmise, but certainly I had never seen her within shouting distance of a cow byre or a peat hag or even on the croft when there was work to be done. According to the crofter widow with whom she regularly stayed, after thirty-five holidays in Bruach Miss Wade had still not mastered the lighting of an oil lamp.

‘Lachy's gey young to be thinkin' of marryin',' said Tearlaich, who at fifty plus was still only thinking about it.

I could not remember how old Lachy was but I did recall he had been old enough to vote at the last election three years previously, but of course in Bruach the age of thirty-five was regarded as being the ideal for marriage for both men and women, the reason being that their children would then be there to look after them in their old age.

‘It doesn't take much thinkin' about to choose a Member of Parliament,' said Tearlaich, ‘but a wife, now, that's different.…' He would no doubt have continued discoursing on the necessary attributes needed for a crofter's wife but our chat was interrupted by the noise of an engine and turning to look up the brae we saw the carrier's lorry breasting the hill.

‘I wonder will he have my tar?' said Tearlaich, as with unexpected gallantry he picked up Morag's can. ‘I'll take this as far as the lorry,' he offered. ‘We'll likely get a lift down the brae with him.'

‘I hope he's bringing something for me,' I said, and could not have known how prophetic were my words.

‘That would be your mirror, likely?' asked Morag.

I nodded. Hoping to improve the appearance of my small kitchen and give the effect of more light I had some weeks earlier ordered a fairly large wall mirror from a store on the mainland. Two weeks previously I had received notification from the railway company that a package awaited me at the station. Now I was fairly confident that the mirror would be on the carrier's lorry.

The carrier's first words confirmed my hopes. ‘I have a “glass with care” for you, Miss Peckwitt,' he called as he stopped the lorry beside us.

‘Oh, good! I do hope it's not broken,' I exclaimed.

The driver looked affronted. ‘If she is she was broken before I put a hand on her,' he said.

It happened too often that breakable things were already broken by the time they reached Bruach and I had cogitated for some time before committing myself to ordering the mirror. It would have been much less risky if I could have gone to the mainland and brought the mirror back in my car, but the care of the animals tied me to the croft and I knew it might be a year or more before I could make the trip. Unlike the Hebrideans, who believed that ‘hope deferred' was good practice because it ultimately quelled desire, my own temperament led me to endorse the old proverb that ‘hope deferred maketh the heart sick'. Having set my heart on a mirror for the kitchen, I wanted it as speedily as possible, so, after balancing the risks of its journey by rail and carrier against the frustration of waiting, I ordered the mirror, stressing to the suppliers the innumerable hazards of the journey and appealing to them to pack it with extreme care. I knew, of course, the mirror would be insured against breakage
en route
but insurance is little recompense for the abyss of disappointment one feels when one unpacks a much-anticipated parcel only to find the contents shattered.

We climbed aboard the lorry, Morag and I in the cab beside the driver and Tearlaich perched on the load. At Tearlaich's cottage we dropped him, a large fifty-five-gallon drum of tar and a tin of paint; at other crofts along the way the driver unloaded more tar drums along with bags of meal; coils of rope and chains, and at Dugald's croft a small net-covered box containing a live puppy.

Dugald regarded the box with palpable annoyance. ‘What's this?' he asked.

‘What does it look like?' the carrier taxed him. ‘You must have sent away for the dog, surely?'

‘Indeed I did so a while back but I'm gettin' one now from Alistair Ruag over on Rhuna. I'm no wantin' to keep two dogs.' He began to turn away. ‘You can take him an' send him back on the train tomorrow.'

‘Hell, man!' protested the carrier, ‘you'll have to take the beast now he's here.'

‘Indeed I will not,' Dugald replied testily. ‘Didn't I write to the man more than a week ago tellin' him not to send the dog seein' I got another?'

‘You cannot have given him enough notice or surely he would not have taken the trouble to pay out good money to send it,' accused the carrier.

‘That is a lie,' insisted Dugald, his testiness increasing. ‘The man is wantin' to force me to take a beast he cannot get rid of any place else just.' Untying the net, he condescended to lift the small black and white bundle from the box by the scruff of the neck. The puppy stank of dung with which its hindquarters were caked and as Dugald surveyed it with dislike the puppy whimpered with terror. ‘I reckon he'll no' be much good,' he said off-handedly as he replaced the puppy in the box. ‘There's too much white on him for a start.'

Bruach sheepdogs were mostly black with perhaps a white throat and chest. A dog with too high a proportion of white in its colouring they believed was likely to have poor eyesight or to develop poor eyesight prematurely and be of little use for working hill sheep where it needed to see long distances.

The puppy did not whimper as I bent forward and lifted it gently on to my lap. ‘I'll keep him,' I said.

Dugald's mouth fell open. ‘Indeed you will no,' he said when he had recovered himself. ‘Why would you be keepin' a sheep dog when you have no sheep?' He made a derogatory sound in the back of his throat as he looked down and saw my hand resting protectively on the puppy. ‘You'll be after makin' a pet of him just an' likely he'll get away from you an' be chasin' other folk's sheep.'

As in all sheep country Bruach had its problems with sheep-worrying dogs and I could well understand Dugald's fears but at that moment I was in no mood to allay them. Instead I smiled at him with a set, determined smile which I hope masked at least some of my real feelings. ‘I'll keep him, Dugald,' I repeated. ‘Just tell me how much they're asking for him and I'll either give Johnny, the bus driver, the money in the morning and then he can give it to you, or if you like you can tell me the address of the owner and I'll write to him direct.' I knew I was being high-handed but it was necessary that I should be so.

Dugald glared at me while the puppy, oblivious of the combat, bestowed a series of tiny-tongued caresses on my hand before turning himself round to nestle more deeply and trustingly in my lap. ‘There's no need for either of us to argue any more,' I told Dugald.

‘Indeed there is so!' he opposed authoritatively. ‘It is myself the dog was sent to an' it is myself will be tellin' the carrier to take him back where he came from. It is best that the man who sent him should learn his lesson for fear he would be tryin' the same trick over again.'