Bruach Blend (6 page)

‘All right, old girl,' I comforted her. ‘We're nearly finished now so you'll be able to go back to him in a wee while.'

The next moment fear bounced against my stomach like a squash ball as the bull appeared in front of me and I crouched petrified as he moved a pace or two closer. ‘It's all right,' I told myself desperately. ‘It's Bonny he's after, not you,' but even had I tried to move his proximity had the effect of pinioning my feet to the ground and, as my chest grew tighter, I started to wonder how long my knees would take to unlock sufficiently for flight. I wondered if Crumley showed signs of attacking would Bonny protect me; wondered about the possibility of diving under her belly and making a swift run for the fence. The bull moved closer; trapping me between himself and Bonny, and my terrified gaze fixed itself on his red-rimmed eyes and on the span of his powerful horns, which at their base where they emerged from the fringe of shaggy hair between his ears were as thick as my forearm and yet which at their extremities were tapered to points as thin as the tip of my little finger. As he thrust his great head forward and his thick pink tongue came out and curled over his snout, I felt as if fear would kill me even if the bull didn't. He began to sniff at my coat. Enlightenment shot through my fear. The bull wanted a potach! Having seen or smelled the piece of potach I had given Bonny, he had now come for his share and since he had come as close as he was now without showing a trace of animosity surely he could intend no harm? Apprehension disintegrated and I was almost light-headed with relief as still shaking I took the remaining potach from my pocket and broke off another piece. Not daring to risk what he might interpret as the hostile action of throwing it towards him I held it out on the palm of my hand just as I had done for Bonny. He hesitated for a moment, blowing quick suspicious breaths over the potach, before his tongue came out to take it with almost kitten-like gentleness. It was incredible! Here I was actually hand-feeding a bull when only a minute before I had been so stricken with terror I felt unable to move. Slowly I rose and stood with my hand resting on Bonny's back, completely unafraid now as I watched him savouring his potach. It was good to have rid myself of my fear of bulls, I gloated, and thought how much pleasanter summer milking and nutting expeditions and evening wanderings would be now that I should no longer have to make surreptitious detours so as to avoid meeting the bull. Never again, I told myself, and felt so brave I wondered if I dared reach forward and tickle the bull between his horns. And then Bonny ruined everything! Her love for Crumley, it seemed, did not extend to sharing her potach with him. She was jealous and turning on him she clouted him with her horns before pushing him aside so as to get at the potach in my pocket. But Crumley also knew the potach was there and he lumbered back preparing to do battle for it. I was caught between the two of them and the situation was dangerous, for while their show of sparring was not to be taken seriously I could easily be knocked over and trampled on in the ensuing struggle. First rescuing the milk pail, I sidled round Bonny and made quickly and calmly for the fence. Immediately they broke off their sparring to follow me and as Crumley snorted irritably behind me the chill of fear played up and down my spine like a jet of icy cold water and I could not prevent myself from breaking into a run. Reaching the fence I scrambled heedlessly through the barbed wire and from the safety of the other side began to rage at Bonny.

‘You stupid, rotten cow!' I yelled. ‘You can just do without the rest of your potach.'

Always, ever since she had first calved, I had made it a habit to give her half a potach before she was milked and the other half when milking was finished and now she looked shocked and puzzled by my seeming neglect and desertion. I felt no compunction. During the brief interlude when I thought I had shed my fear I had experienced the same lilting joy as when I first realized I could swim and that I could ride a bicycle. I had so much wanted not to be afraid of the bull but now the fear was back where it always had been and I guessed it would be with me always.

Feeling the need to recover from the experience, I sat for a while on a cushion of heather and glared sourly at the two animals, who stood regarding me hopefully for a time until Bonny became disillusioned and turning away began to graze sulkily. Crumley lifted his head and bellowed argumentatively before he too began to graze. I continued to sit while the moors spread themselves with the fine gauze of darkness which in a Hebridean spring passes for night, and then, relenting, I threw the remains of the potach towards them before climbing back to the path along which I had come. At the gate I paused to look back to where the dark shapes of Bonny and Crumley were clearly silhouetted against the light of the sea. It seemed that Bonny had forgiven Crumley for she appeared to be licking his neck. I left them to their love-making.

The following day when I saw Morag I asked her about the strange man I had encountered on the moors.

‘Ach, it would be yon man from London that's stayin' with Kirsty an' calls himself a playwright,' she explained.

‘How interesting,' I said. ‘But I haven't seen him around at all. Has he been here long?'

‘Around two weeks since,' she told me. ‘An' indeed. Miss Peckwitt, but you're lucky you haven't seen the likes of him for Kirsty is after wishin' she'd never set eyes on the man at all.'

‘Why ever not?'

‘He's a wicked man, so Kirsty tells me.' Her voice sounded quite vehement. ‘A really bad man.'

‘Wicked?' I echoed. Bruachites were so tolerant it sounded strange to hear of anyone being described as ‘wicked'. ‘He looked harmless enough.'

‘Wasn't it Kirsty herself told me or I wouldn't be believin' it by seein' him just,' said Morag. ‘But Kirsty is sayin' he stays inside the house all day, ‘peckin' at a writetyper machine like a cock at the corn, an' it's in the evenin's just that he takes a walk to himself.'

‘That doesn't sound very wicked,' I pointed out with a smile. ‘Inconvenient for Kirsty, no doubt, but hardly wicked.'

‘Indeed no, mo ghaoil. But didn't Kirsty take a look at some of his writin' one day while she was cleanin' his bedroom an' the Dear knows but she says she was like to faint with the shock it gave her.' Morag gave me a significant look and tried hard to feign reluctance to continue.

‘Why was she so shocked?' I pressed.

Morag did not look at me. ‘It was about dirty men an' dirty women, Miss Peckwitt,' she confided in a scathing whisper. ‘Dirty such as you an' me an' decent folk the world over wouldn't think of thinkin' never mind writin'.'

‘Really!'

‘Indeed it was so.' Morag's voice grew more confiding. ‘Poor Kirsty there that's never known a man's hand up her skirts in all her life an' she didn't know what to say to herself when she read it. She couldn't tell the meanin' of some of what was written at first till young Annac that's workin' for her explained about them. Then she couldn't believe her own eyes or ears.' Morag's lips were so tightly pursed that I knew I would have to guess at the subject of the writing and I wondered how much of the contents of the play Kirsty had felt inclined to divulge. I wondered too how explicitly descriptive the writing would have to be to so distress a minister-worshipping and rigidly pious spinster like Kirsty. ‘It's upset her that much she's not been able to bring herself to even look at his bed since, never mind make it for him, she's after tellin' me,' Morag continued. ‘She has to get young Annac to see to it for her.…'

‘She's not likely to be wanting him to come back next year,' I observed.

‘No indeed,' agreed Morag. ‘It's a wonder to me the cushions officers haven't been out after him.' I waited for her to elucidate, knowing it would soon come. ‘If they're against us makin' ourselves a wee drop of whisky why wouldn't they be against a man for writin' the things he was after writin'? There's more harm in that to my way of thinkin'.'

We sat together staring contemplatively at the startled-looking sea wavelets racing before the fresh breeze; at the clean carved shapes of the islands; at the gently blue sky strewn with clouds that looked as soft and inviting as white fur rugs; at mists lit with rainbows and mountains silvered with sunlight. Morag turned to me. ‘You would wonder, mo ghaoil, would you not, what like of man would come to a place like Bruach to write a play about dirty people in London?' she asked.

‘It's back to the herrin' for me next week, if I'm spared,' said Willy with a yawn and as much of a stretch as he could manage in the confines of the wooden armchair.

‘Is that so?' asked Murdoch.

‘Aye,' Willy confirmed. ‘I'm away on the bus in the mornin'.' He screwed himself round to face Johnny, the bus driver, who was sitting pincered between Erchy and Hector on a low wooden stool which might comfortably have accommodated two small children, ‘See now an' don't go without me,' he warned.

‘You will need to be there in plenty time, then,' Johnny told him. ‘Ruari Hamish has lobsters an' crabs to go away an' there's venison to be sent to the laird. They'll keep me back loadin' them so I'll need to be away early to make up the time.' He looked down at the floor as he was speaking so that Willy should not see the twinkle in his eyes. But Willy was not to be fooled. His own eyes, shiny and speckled as black opals, fixed Johnny briefly before he turned away. ‘Ach, to hell with you,' he replied affably.

Though he was a native of Bruach, the village saw little of Willy except between seasons when the fishing boat on which he crewed was laid up for overhaul and painting. To all intents and purposes Willy had forsaken Bruach; rejected the culture and traditions of the croft and had become a mainland-based fisherman, worldly and rough-edged. However, when he made his periodic visits home, to placate his elderly parents who still worked and cherished their small croft, he went through the motions of conforming to the faith and dogma imposed on him by his upbringing, but his attitude was too patently cynical, his observations too glibly satirical, to deceive any but those who wished to be deceived or, as in the Bruach idiom, ‘those who would not be seem”. Nevertheless Bruach still regarded Willy as a son of the croft and welcomed him accordingly, particularly at the ceilidhs during the long dark winter evenings when, for the crofters, gossip and story-telling and singing were the only means of passing the time. Willy brought not just news of fishing to kindle the memories of the old men who had been fishermen in their youth but mainland news and anecdotes; stories which never reached the newspapers even had the newspapers reached Bruach, and these along with tales of life aboard the fishing boat and of his own and his mates' frequently bawdy escapades in the various fishing ports ensured him an avid audience, recriminative though the reactions to some of his disclosures might be.

It was at a ceilidh we were gathered now: a homespun, lamp-lit ceilidh in Marjac's house where the room was warmed as much by the number of bodies as by the unstinted fire of peats. Outside a gale was blowing; a gale which we had struggled against as we made our various ways to the ceilidh and now, tight-packed in the small room, we were relaxed and glad to be indoors, grateful for the company and the warmth which cocooned us against the wildness of the night.

Willy was described in Bruach as being ‘always the good man for a laugh', but his stories were not always about the lighter side of life and his announcement that he was soon to return to the fishing had been tossed into the shocked silence which had followed his horrifying story of a tinker family on the mainland. He could vouch for the truth of the story, Willy assured us, because the tinker woman concerned had been in the same hospital as the wife of one of his fishing mates. In fact he had seen the woman for himself, ‘no more than thirty years of age if she was that an' about as white as her bandages an' so thin you'd think she'd snap in two at a touch'. According to Willy, the tinker family had been living along with others of their kind in an encampment some distance outside the town and one night the husband, a habitual drunkard, had returned home and set fire to the tent in which his two young children were sleeping. The children had perished in the fire and the wife, in attempting to rescue them, had been severely burned about the legs and arms. The husband subsequently vanished from the scene and before proper enquiries could be made the rest of the tinker encampment quickly disappeared. ‘An' now she has nothin' an' nobody in the wide world to do for her,' Willy told us. ‘An' there she was in the ward of the hospital, propped up with pillows with not a soul to visit her an' her shrivelling like a snail that's had salt on it when anybody so much as came near her as if she would be expectin' a blow from them.'

‘Ach, the man must have been a monster, surely?' said Ian, amidst several more compassionate exclamations and head-shakings.

‘The poor woman!' Morag said feelingly, and spoke for everyone present.

‘Aye, indeed,' agreed Willy, who had clearly been touched by the plight of the young tinker woman. ‘My mate's wife what I was visitin' at the time was sayin' herself would have gone over to talk to her only for the woman bein' a tink.'

‘I believe I would have made myself go to her, all the same,' mused Morag.

‘Ach, what would be the use of it?' asked Willy. ‘There's not much you can say to a tink.'

His statement was accepted unquestioningly and in the ensuing silence I suspected each one of us was composing a mental image of the tinker woman, injured, bereft and alone in her hospital bed. Willy, reckoning we had been given sufficient time truly to absorb the story, deliberately changed the subject by announcing his imminent departure and there was a perceptible lightening of mood.