Lightly Poached Page 3

  As we drew near the cottage she shielded her eyes from the sun. ‘There’s the men busy at their bottoms,’ she observed.

  At the gable end of the house Erchy was thrusting a rusty gap-toothed saw through a plank of driftwood with the object of cutting it into lengths suitable for bottoms for lobster creels. The saw scrunched and jammed, scrunched and jammed again and again and Erchy swore and jounced, swore and jounced in retaliation. Nearby crouched Hector, chewing at a stalk of grass and watching the proceedings with cursory interest.

  ‘I’m after tellin’ Erchy he needs to take tsat saw to see a dentist,’ he quipped as we paused to watch.

  The saw, Erchy and his profanity jerked to a stop as he looked up. His face was red as a radish with exertion and a large bead of sweat dropped from his upper lip as he nodded acknowledgment of our presence.

  ‘Indeed I’m thinkin’ I could chew through it faster,’ he confessed, dragging a tired arm across his glistening brow and giving the saw a long look of disgust. It was rare to see a well-kept tool in Bruach and it struck me that Erchy might have sawn wood more efficiently with a curry comb.

  ‘It wouldn’t be so bad if that bugger would take his turn at it.’ Erchy nodded cheerfully at Hector.

  ‘Ach, I’m no good wiss a saw,’ Hector disclaimed hastily and giving Erchy a respectful look went on: ‘Erchy’s tsat good at it I believe if he had a mind he could make coffins as good as any undertaker.’

  ‘I’ll make one for you,’ retorted Erchy searingly. ‘An’ I’ll make it good an’ strong. That’s one job you won’t wriggle out of.’

  Hector smiled imperturbably. He turned to me. ‘Me an’ Erchy has a mind to go to Rhuna tsis evenin’,’ he disclosed. ‘She’ll stay calm enough, I reckon.’ He stared with indolent optimism at the sunlit sea, frisked into sharp-edged ripples by a tease of afternoon breeze.

  Erchy’s mother turned on her son with mock indignation. ‘How can you be goin’ away to Rhuna when only this mornin’ you were say in’ you hadn’t the time to take from makin’ the creels to bring home a load of peats just.’

  ‘An’ isn’t it for the sake of the creels we have to go to Rhuna?’ he exclaimed, glancing quickly at Hector, inviting endorsement of his statement. Hector’s wide-eyed assent was very convincing.

  ‘Ach!’ The old woman’s tone was explicit.

  ‘It’s true,’ Erchy insisted. ‘We need to go an’ gather up the hazels we cut earlier this year. You canna make creels without hazels any more than you can make bannocks without meal.’

  ‘I can see I’ll be needin’ to take home the peats myself, then,’ his mother said with pretended resignation as she flexed her shoulders proudly.

  ‘Aye, you will so,’ agreed her son.

  It seemed never to have occurred to Erchy and it would have been cruel to suggest to his mother that she was now too old to carry home heavy creels of peat from the moors. She had carried them since childhood and through the years her back had shaped itself to take the half-hundredweight or so of the loaded creels. Like her contemporaries she would continue to do so, insisting that stiff fingers could still grasp peats and a back rigid with rheumatism was still sound enough for burdens. Not until the day came when with only a token load of peats and making frequent stops for rest she found herself too breathless to totter to and from the moors would she give in. With a grunt that was acceptance of her son’s remark and a warm ‘thig a’s Tigh’ to me she made for the cottage. However, I hung back for a moment.

  ‘Does this trip to Rhuna mean there’s likely to be a cruise?’ I asked, looking appreciatively at the roan-coloured islands. ‘It promises to be a perfect evening for a sail.’

  ‘The sea makes no promises and breaks none,’ Erchy rebuked me.

  Hector contemplated his chewed stalk of grass, discarded it and chose another one. ‘We’re no likely to get away by ourselves, anyway,’ he remarked philosophically. ‘Tsere’s always plenty folks keen enough to go to Rhuna on a nice evenin’. I daresay we’ll get enough to sink tse boat.’

  ‘I’ll look out for you then?’ I suggested.

  ‘Aye, you’d best do that if you’re comin’,’ said Erchy. ‘At the back of eight or so.’ He bent to resume his contest with the saw.

  In the kitchen Erchy’s mother was unwrapping crumbly oatcakes from a piece of bleached flour sack which in Bruach kitchens did duty as tea-towels. ‘They’re fresh-baked this mornin’ an’ left warm beside the fire,’ she told me. In my larder at home were fresh mackerel fillets waiting only to be dipped in oatmeal and baked for my supper and I had eaten frugally all day so as to be able to indulge in what had now become my favourite dish. But Erchy’s mother baked the most irresistible oatcakes in Bruach and I knew without doubt I should succumb. She cut a thick slice of homemade butter and placing it on the triangular cake offered it to me. In the Bruach idiom ‘my teeths watered’ as I watched the butter melting into a golden lake.

  There was a footstep outside followed by a Gaelic greeting. I recognised Morag’s voice.

  ‘Ach, so this is where you are!’ she said, coming inside and settling herself ready for the strupak which Erchy’s mother immediately prepared for her.

  I wiped the butter from my chin. ‘Why, were you looking forme?’ I asked.

  ‘No, but seein’ I was up at the Post Office Behag said would I call in an’ tell you she’ll likely be down for a wee ceilidh with you tonight. She sent away to the catalogue for a new skirt an’ she’s wantin’ you to gather her in round the middle.’

  ‘Not tonight,’ I said. ‘There’s going to be a cruise. Have you not heard?’

  ‘A cruise!’ she ejaculated. ‘What way are you goin’?’

  ‘To Rhuna,’ I replied. ‘Hector and Erchy have to go over to collect some hazels to finish their creels.’

  ‘If that’s the way of it, mo ghaoil, I doubt you’ll be seein’ Behag tonight except on the boat beside you,’ Morag said. ‘An’ myself too, likely,’ she added. ‘I haven’t set foot on Rhuna these ten years since.’

  ‘I was with you myself last time you were there, was I not?’ Erchy’s mother reminded her.

  ‘You were so,’ Morag acknowledged.

  ‘That man Hamish Beag was alive then. You mind the one that played the bagpipes and wouldn’t speak to a soul save his horse.’

  Morag nodded.

  ‘He played his bagpipes the night we was there,’ Erchy’s mother recalled.

  ‘Indeed, that’s true,’ returned Morag. She turned to me. ‘I’m teilin’ you, Miss Peckwitt, that man stood in the door of his house an’ the minute he started to play his pipes all the rats ran out an’ hid themselves they was that feared of the noise.’ The two women chuckled reminiscently.

  ‘They say he was forever blowin’ his bagpipes,’ said Erchy’s mother.

  ‘An’ they were right. That’s what folks say killed him in the end,’ Morag told us.

  ‘Not playing the bagpipes?’ I protested.

  ‘So they say.’ Morag nodded slowly. ‘Insanity of the lungs, that’s what he got with playin’ the pipes so much, mo ghaoil, an’ that’s what killed him in the end.’

  ‘Is there a strupach, cailleach?’ Erchy sauntered into the kitchen followed by Hector and in their wake came Tearlaich who was carrying a slightly less disabled saw than the one Erchy had been using. Morag shot Tearlaich a disapproving glance. He was something of a non-conformist in Bruach and he came in now with his jacket slung over his shoulder and his shirt open to the waist revealing a fuzzy chest as broad and muscular as that of a champion plough horse.

  ‘Are you no goin’ to fasten up your shirt seein’ there’s ladies present,’ she said to him, half jokingly. Tearlaich responded with a brazen smile but nevertheless began to do up his shirt buttons.

  Erchy’s mother’s eyes grew bright with pleasure as her kitchen filled and she busied herself buttering oatcakes and pouring cups of tea. ‘If the cows hadn’t yet to be milked we could have a ceilidh,’ she said wistfully.

 
The three men flopped down on the bench. I was sitting on an uneven stool and as I raised my overfull teacup to drink the stool wobbled and the hot tea slopped into my lap. I let out a startled exclamation and began mopping myself with a handkerchief. Tearlaich, who claimed to have acted as batman to a high-ranking officer during the war and who still retained a desultory interest in chivalry, immediately jumped up.

  ‘What are we doing taking the best seats for ourselves,’ he chided himself and the others. ‘Come now, Miss Peckwitt, and take my seat and I will have that old stool,’ he offered gallantly. Erchy and Hector flicked him the sort of glance that would have been merited by a potato that showed signs of blight.

  ‘That’s not goin’ to do her any harm at her age,’ Erchy said pitilessly.

  I refused to give up my stool, knowing that if I sat near them neither Erchy nor Hector would be able to resist indulging in the time-honoured trick of leaving a teaspoon in their tea until it was really hot, then whipping it out and pressing it on to my bare arm. Tearlaich promptly resumed his seat on the bench. He offered his saw to Erchy.

  ‘Here,’ he said. ‘Take a lend of this.’

  Erchy took it without enthusiasm at first but then examining the handle more closely he exclaimed: ‘Here, this is my own saw! I know him by these three cuts on the handle.’

  Tearlaich leaned over to inspect the notches. ‘Aye,’ he allowed. ‘It’s marked all right.’

  ‘Where did you get him from then?’ Erchy demanded.

  ‘From Johnny Mor Alistair.’

  ‘Oh, that bugger!’ commented Erchy, without venom. His mother darted him a reproving glance. No matter how much evidence she heard to the contrary she would undoubtedly go to her grave still cherishing the belief that her son never swore except in Gaelic.

  ‘No wonder he didn’t mind me gettin’ the lend of it for you,’ Tearlaich mused.

  ‘Hell, no! But it wasn’t Johnny Mor Alistair that took him from me in the first place I believe it was Lachlan Beag that had him to make his wee hoosie when his brother was comin’ home an’ bringin’ that fancy girl friend of his.’

  ‘Oh, her,’ responded Tearlaich derisively. ‘The one that was too swanky to use the heather like the rest of us.’ He grunted. ‘It’s a good thing he didn’t marry that one. If she had to have a wee hoosie before she’d marry him God knows what she would have been askin’ for next.’

  ‘One of them Rolls-Royces to carry home the peats, likely,’ submitted Hector with a smile.

  Erchy still held the saw. ‘He was a good saw when he was new,’ he murmured sadly.

  ‘Did you get it new?’ asked Tearlaich incredulously.

  ‘No, but my father did,’ replied Erchy. ‘He got him from the blacksmith after he died.’

  ‘But the blacksmith died twenty years since,’ Tearlaich expostulated.

  ‘Aye, an’ he was as good as new then.’ Erchy ran his fingers along the toothed edge. ‘He’s still better than that one I was usin’, anyway.’ He put the saw on the floor under the bench. ‘I’d like to know who Johnny Mor Alistair got him from all the same.’

  ‘Who knows where any of the tools in this place comes from,’ retorted Tearlaich, adding as an afterthought, ‘From hell itself by the look of most of them.’

  He took out a packet of cigarettes and extracting four pushed one behind his ear, gave one to Erchy, one to Hector and was about to bestow the fourth one on me when he suddenly changed his mind and pushed it back into the packet which he then held out to me. ‘Sao,’ he invited politely.

  Hector stretched out his hand and helped himself to a piece of oatcake from the table. ‘Indeed amn’t I wishin’ Behag could make tsem as good as tsese,’ he said plaintively.

  ‘Ach, but she was never born to it,’ Morag defended. Behag’s parents had both been crofters but as they were never married Behag herself had been adopted by a Glasgow couple and had visited Bruach only for occasional holidays until she met and married Hector.

  ‘It’s funny that,’ observed Erchy with a puzzled frown.

  ‘What’s funny?’ asked Hector.

  ‘The way Behag was adopted. You’d think with her mother bein’ from Bruach her own parents would have kept the child and been glad to do it.’

  ‘It’s always struck me as odd,’ I interposed. I had lived there long enough now to know that any child born in Bruach was sure of a welcome.

  ‘Indeed her mother’s parents wanted her to keep the child!’ exclaimed Morag indignantly. ‘But Kate, that was Behag’s mother, thought she could do better.’

  ‘What happened, then?’ I asked.

  ‘It was like this, mo ghaoil,’ began Morag. ‘When Behag was no more than about two years old her mother went off to work in Glasgow an’ she went an’ got herself married to a man that lived in a nice house an’ seemed to have plenty of money. He lived with his parents an’ was brought up one of these Papists but ach, I suppose they were gettin’ old so they made no fuss about havin’ a nice girl like Kate to look after them in spite of her havin’ a different religion. The husband must have been a decent man for all that, for he made no objection to Kate havin’ Behag to live with them an’ so they were all set up until he goes an’ dies on them suddenly.’

  ‘He was very smart about his dyin’, I mind,’ interpolated Erchy’s mother.

  ‘Smart!’ echoed Morag. ‘Indeed he was. He didn’t have time to do whatever it is these Papists do before they die anyway, so Kate told me.’

  ‘What happened to Kate then?’ enquired Erchy.

  ‘Didn’t the daughter come home from abroad when her brother died an’ say she’d look after the old folk now, an’ Kate was told plainly either she’d change her religion or she’d get out an’ take Behag with her.’

  ‘The house an’ the money belonged to the old folk all the time seemingly,’ supplied Erchy’s mother. ‘Kate got nothin’ but a few pounds out of it for all her work.’

  ‘Did Kate get out?’ I asked.

  ‘She got out,’ declared Hector grimly.

  ‘Surely she got out.’ Morag’s tone made it plain there had been no alternative for a girl born and bred in Bruach. ‘But Kate’s parents were both dead by that time an’ only her brother an’ his wife in the croft. She didn’t think much of the brother’s wife so she had to take work herself an’ get Behag adopted. It was lucky she did for she died soon after.’ Morag shook her head. ‘She had a sad life in a way, did Behag’s mother. A sad life an’ a short one.’

  ‘This couple that adopted Behag,’ pursued Erchy. ‘Were they good to her?’

  ‘Good enough,’ said Hector.

  ‘Why did they take her?’ asked Tearlaich. ‘Was it because they couldn’t have bairns of their own?’

  ‘Well, of course,’ began Morag but Erchy cut her short.

  ‘There’s no of course about it,’ he told her. ‘Some of these folks that adopt children do it because they get paid more for havin’ an adopted child than if it was one of their own.’

  ‘That’s true,’ conceded Morag.

  ‘An’ that’s as it should be,’ put in Tearlaich. ‘You’d expect to be paid more. After all if you’ve made your children you’ve had the fun as well.’

  ‘Whisht now!’ commanded Erchy’s mother, with a glance at me.

  ‘The shame about Behag is that she hasn’t the Gaelic,’ said Erchy, changing the subject.

  ‘I don’t care about her havin’ tse Gaelic,’ Hector responded. ‘I can as well make her understand what I want of her in English as in Gaelic, but all tse same I wish she could learn to make oatcakes as good as tsese.’ He broke off a large piece and stuffed it into his mouth.

  ‘She tries,’ Morag told him.

  ‘Aye, she tries. But you know yourself tse ones she makes are tsat bitty most of tsem drops on tse floor for tse hens to eat.’

  ‘Us girls had to learn,’ Erchy’s mother told him. ‘If we wasted oatmeal it was our job to grind more on the quern stones an’ that was hard work.’ Leaning over the table a
nd clasping her hands round an imaginary stick she strained, miming vividly the action of grinding the oats between the circular stones and her face became set into lines of remembered effort. She relaxed with a smile. ‘How I hated havin’ to do it,’ she said.

  ‘But the smell of it!’ Morag reminded her. ‘Did ever meal smell so good? Not like this stuff we get already ground these days.’

  ‘To my mind nothin’ smells as good these days as it once did,’ Erchy’s mother rejoined. ‘I remember when I was young the way the flowers threw up their scent at you as you walked through the grass in the spring an’ summer. An’ in the autumn the tang of the heather would drift in of an evenin’ over the crofts like a scented shawl.’

  ‘An’ the burn in spate,’ Morag recalled. ‘Once you turned your back on the sea you could smell the burn as surely as a fox smells a new lamb from afar off.’

  ‘An’ the honey! D’you mind the honey?’ exclaimed Erchy’s mother, her eyes glowing with reminiscence. ‘The way it was that strong you could fairly taste the sweetness of it on your lips as you walked in the heather.’

  ‘Aye, an’ the hems of your skirt would be sticky with it when you came to take off your clothes at night.’

  ‘It’s funny you never smell such things now,’ went on Erchy’s mother. ‘It’s like as though the lovely smells of the place had been washed away with all the rain that’s in it.’

  ‘You’re right,’ agreed Morag. ‘I’ve noticed that myself.’

  Erchy seemed to be growing more and more uneasy as the recollections continued. ‘Of course everythin’ smells the same, you silly cailleachs,’ he broke in. ‘It’s just you two gettin’ old that’s the trouble.’

  Morag looked momentarily stricken but his mother smiled confidently. ‘My nose is still above the ground,’ she told him as she gathered up the cloth in which the oatcakes had been wrapped. Going to the doorway she flicked off the crumbs to a waiting cluster of hens.