The Loud Halo (12 page)

‘Indeed I heard that too,' confirmed Mary Anne. ‘So I didn't give them a bird at all. I wasn't for givin' then anythin' at first but the hens are layin' well just now so Jamie said to give them a few eggs.'

‘Somebody told me you gave them a pound of tea, too!' accused Morag.

‘Aye,' admitted Mary Anne self-consciously. ‘I had plenty so I thought I'd not be missin' it.'

‘I'm glad everyone didn't give them a chicken,' I said, regretting that I had put only half a crown into the toe of each of the tennis shoes.

‘Why do you say that?' asked Mors.

‘Because I didn't,' I replied.

‘Ach, well, I daresay you gave them eggs or potatoes or somethin'.' she suggested. ‘There was no call for everybody to give them chickens.'

‘I didn't give them anything at all,' I confessed. ‘The bride asked me for a pair of old tennis pumps I had and when I gave them to her I popped half a crown into the toe of each of them, but I wasn't asked to contribute anything to the feast.'

‘No indeed, and that was plenty to give them,' comforted Nelly Elly. ‘They were havin' a struggle to carry home the food they collected when I saw them. What with all they'd have from Lachy's cow and them havin' got a whole sack of potatoes from Roddy they'll be feedin' like kings and queens anyway—not but what they don't always,' she added.

‘Better than the rest of us,' agreed Morag, with a tremor of indignation. ‘An' not only that. Did you hear how he's been gettin' the petrol so they can go for a honeymoon?'

We all admitted that we had not heard.

‘Why, he's been takin' his van to a different spot each day an' there he leaves it an' stands himself beside it with an empty can. He stops every car and lorry as it comes by an' tells them he's run out of petrol and asks will he get a bit to see him home.' She paused for our exclamations. ‘Some of the drivers feels that sorry for him they'll give him near a canful,' she continued, ‘an' my fine fellow has a fifty-gallon drum in the back of his van so as soon as they're out of sight he nips round an' puts the petrol into it.'

‘Oh, my, my, he's the wily one,' chuckled Mary Anne appreciatively.

‘Hear that now!' said Nelly Elly with envy-tinged disapproval. ‘What will those tinks be after thinkin' of next?'

‘I wonder?' I murmured, as I was assailed by a sudden recollection. ‘I wonder if that's what he was up to the other day when Hamish saw him, broken down, as he thought, beside the road?'

‘Likely it was,' said Morag.

I started to chuckle as I recounted for the amusement of my companions the story Hamish had told me. It seemed he had been walking back to Bruach after delivering some sheep to the mainland when he had come across Hairy Willie, looking rather grimier and sweatier than usual, bending over the engine of his van. When Hamish had drawn alongside the tinker had proceeded to give him a brief but vitriolic description of the misdeameanours of the ancient engine and while he was in full spate a car drew up and a gentleman got out to ask if help was needed. Hairy Willie promptly replied that it was ‘Nothin' but a wee bitty petrol she was after wantin'.' But the gentleman, according to Hamish, had already started his own investigation and, to the tinker's very obvious surprise, had discovered that the tank contained ample petrol. He had continued his examination of the engine, poking and prodding, screwing and unscrewing, and eventually he had told Hairy Willie to try to start it. The engine had responded to the first pull. The mystified expression of the tinker had changed to one of such relief that the gentleman had asked anxiously if he had been stranded for long and how far away his home lay, to which questions Hairy Willie replied with his customary glib mendacity. ‘Thank you, thank you, sir,' he repeated again and again. ‘What would I have done now if yourself hadn't come along?'

‘It isn't I you should thank but God Almighty,' replied the gentleman. ‘It is He who sent me here to help you.'

‘Hairy Willie's face looked as though he had two tongues and had bitten both of them,' Hamish reported, ‘an' he turned to the man. “You must be a minister,” says he. “I am indeed,” says the man. “Is there anything wrong with that?” “Wrong!” shouts Hairy Willie. “Wrong? Man! Why the bloody hell didn't you tell me you was a minister, I might have started swearing' in front of you.” '

My companions exchanged looks before they permitted themselves to giggle demurely.

By this time we were rounding the head of the loch where the wet, black hills gloomed over acres of shore which the tide had left to a shifting mosaic of seabirds. Hooded crows swaggered uneasily among the fringes of salt weed and an occasional heron stood in aristocratic aloofness, with feathered ‘widow's weeds' lifting gently in the breeze.

‘Here comes the boys!' announced Morag, and I drew in to the side of the road. There had been a cattle sale at the loch side that morning and the Bruach men had started out at two o' clock to walk their cattle to it. They were trudging their long way back now, driving before them either cattle they had bought at the sale or cattle they had refused to sell because of poor prices. Morag put down the window. ‘How did the sale go, boys?' she demanded eagerly.

‘No' bad,' they admitted.

‘Good prices?'

‘Ach, no' bad.'

‘What did our own Ruari make on his beasts?' It was not done to ask a man outright what he got for his cattle. You asked him about a neighbour's or a friend's beasts and hoped he would volunteer to tell you how he himself had fared.

‘I believe he got seventy for the two of them.'

‘The dear knows!' exclaimed Morag noncommittally. ‘An' is he after buyin' a beast in for himself?'

‘Aye,' was the disdainful reply. ‘A right queer beastie, too, that looks as if it's been crossed with a camel.'

‘The fool!' said Morag with derision. She turned her attention to wee Shamus, who at eight years old had achieved the status of manhood by being allowed to walk his widowed mother's cow through the night to the sale. His valiant efforts to disguise his tiredness were not helped by the fact that he had a black and swollen eye.

‘Shamus!' Morag taxed him. ‘You've not been fighting', surely?'

‘I have not then,' replied Shamus with flushed stubborness.

‘You haven't? Then how is it you have such a black eye?'

Shamus kicked his gumbooted foot in the grass. ‘Well, you see,' he said profoundly, ‘somebody struck somebody.' But before she could question him further he had darted off to turn a cow who was trying to dodge past him.

Erchy, red-faced with exertion, came hurrying up to the car. ‘Here,' he told us, ‘I'm thinkin' I'll come back with you.'

‘You will not,' we told him. ‘We're cramped enough as it is.'

‘I could sit on top,' he coaxed.

‘No.' We were adamant.

‘Ach, well, I'm comin' back tonight yet,' he told us as we were moving off. ‘I'm feelin' I need a good drink after all the runnin' about I'm after doin' today.'

‘You'll be needin' your bed, more likely,' Morag said, but he too was running to head off a recalcitrant cow.

‘If they get the Bruach men with their cattle money and the tinkers after the weddin' they'll have a wild night at the bar tonight,' she prophesied.

We arrived at the church a little before twelve, but though there was a fair number of people standing in coy groups outside the church they were obviously not the wedding party. I pulled Joanna in behind a parked van close to the church gates before I realised with a shock that it was an ambulance. With a look of dazed enquiry I turned to Morag. Bruach modes of transport were often wildly unorthodox but surely, I thought, not an ambulance for a bride!

‘Ach, no,' Morag reassured me. ‘Likely it's the driver himself come to take a look at the weddin'.'

‘We'll no go into the church, will we?' asked Nelly Elly.

‘Why not?' I replied. ‘I thought that was why we came.'

‘Ach, no indeed, I could never go into the church with the tinks,' she giggled.

‘You're not goin' in yourself, are you, Miss Peckwitt?' Mary Anne enquired.

‘If Miss Peckwitt's goin' in I'll go along with her,' said Morag venturesomely.

‘Of course I'm going in,' I said, and getting out of the car made for the church door, whither they all followed me with eager resignation.

Just as we reached the entrance someone shouted, ‘Here they come!' and pausing to look back along the road we saw the disordered procession of tinkers coming towards us. The bride and all the female tinkers, frequently impinging on one another as they walked, headed the procession, while the groom with the equally undisciplined male tinkers followed close on their heels. Untrammelled children dove in and out with a liveliness that was in no way affected by their lengthy walk.

A thought struck me. ‘What happened about the bouquet?' I enquired. ‘Did the grocer get any coloured toilet rolls?'

‘Not him,' replied Nelly Elly. ‘Why would he do that when it's just left with them he'll be?'

‘Did she manage to get hold of some coloured paper, then?'

‘Well, indeed but didn't Enac and Fiona go over to the mainland to get themselves some boots last week, an' them feelin' that sorry for the tinker girl not gettin' her bucket they went into all the hotel lavatories and took a bit. They even went through the train while it was in the station and took some of them paper towels. Aye, but the old tinker body was well pleased when they gave it to her. The girls was well pleased too because she told them they'd have rich husbands and good luck for the rest of their lives through it.' She chuckled. ‘Ach, but the men are sayin' we're all goin' daft over this weddin'.'

Distinct sounds of hilarity were now reaching us from the distance, but as they neared the church the tinkers hushed their children and their own voices and allowed their features to resume the masks of mendicancy we knew so well.

We slipped into the church and took our seats on a back pew and taking courage from our example, most of the onlookers followed suit. So quickly did the church fill that when the tinkers arrived there were only a few pews vacant. Embarrassed and bewildered, they squeezed themselves in, waiting vainly under the unrelenting eye of the minister to be told what to do. Hairy Willie came in and stood surveying the congregation with an artficially induced benignity. He was resplendent in his ‘Canadian trip' clothes, his battered black hat being crushed under his arm. His normally shaggy hair had been cropped so close to his head that it looked as though he was wearing a nylon skull cap. Morag nudged me.

‘I believe that's the haircut all the men is gettin' in Glasgow,' she whispered. ‘I believe they call it the “cruel cut”.'

The minister beckoned and in response Hairy Willie and his best man loped eagerly up the aisle towards him shaking the minister's decorum perceptibly. He fended them off with a rigidly held prayer-book and indicated where they should stand. Hairy Willie complied and stood with his hands clasped nonchalantly behind him. There was a hissing in the front pews and the bridegroom turned round and bestowed on his supporters a jaunty smile accompanied by a convivial wink to which they responded with such uninhibited whisperings that the minister, no doubt apprehensive of blasphemy, spoke to him quietly. Hairy Willie obligingly faced the chancel and stood to attention until perhaps recalling that the black hat crushed to shapelessness under his arm had been given to him by the minister, he reached for it and, holding it behind his back, proceeded to remould it to its original shape.

The stir of excitement that always precedes the entrance of the bride was by no means lacking at this wedding. One of the tinker children who had no doubt been held captive to this moment in the porch burst through the door, ran up the aisle and pummelling his two fists into the bridegroom's broad back yelled, ‘She's comin' for ye!' He was quickly seized by a tinker at the end of the pew and pushed protestingly out of sight among the packed bodies, and all eyes turned towards the door as the bride appeared holding determinedly on to the arm of a vacillating old man who I at once recognised to be a spruced-up version of the tinker who had coveted my teeth.

I was astonished. She looked as pretty as any young bride I had ever seen. The warmhearted Mary Anne had not only washed and bleached her grandmother's dress but had re-made it so that the bodice fitted perfectly and the long skirt draped itself to conceal all but the toes of my old tennis shoes which peeped out a little dustily as she walked. Her bouquet, which she held in front of her much as a housewife might hold a flue-brush, was most artistic, though the green foliage betrayed itself by its hygienic pallor. As she walked up the aisle she turned to smile with delighted appraisal at the congregation on either side of her. She looked radiant and I do not think there was a single person present who was not extremely touched by the whole event.

Erchy was mucking-out his cow-byre when I called on him to ask if I could borrow his saw.

‘My God! but I had a good laugh out of them tinks the night of the weddin',' he said.

I looked at him searchingly. Erchy had been to a cattle sale on the day of the tinkers' wedding and on such occasions his stories of subsequent happenings were not usually very lucid, due to his own inebriation.

‘Aye,' he went on. ‘That Hairy Willie was as drunk as I don't know what an' when one of them pulled his trousers away from his backside an' poured a pint of beer down inside Hairy Willie didn't even feel it.' Erchy leaned on his fork and smiled out at the pewter-grey sea.

‘What I'd like to know is whether they got away on their honeymoon as they were supposed to?' I asked. ‘There were quite a few people here who didn't believe they'd ever get away.'