A Small Death in the Great Glen (29 page)

She stared at the banknotes.

“I won it on a horse.”

And I'm Grace Kelly, she wanted to say. But she prayed that, even though the last thing she wanted was a television set, he would not let the girls down, he would keep his word this time. But she doubted it.

T
WELVE
 
 

Wednesday at the
Gazette,
two days before Halloween, the building and all who voyaged in her hummed to the weekly pre-publication countdown. A deadline had never been missed and, as McAllister often reminded them, was unlikely to be missed until they put some guts into this piddling wee paper. But the smell of print and paper tinged the pervasive cigarette smoke haze and adrenaline haar in the reporters' room. Joanne's Wednesday-night ritual was to wash her hair twice or the stink of tobacco would permeate her dreams.

Much had been left to the last afternoon. As always. Don, up and down stairs from the stone to the desk, would argue, often for form's sake, with the compositor over late changes. Rob was late, as usual, with a sports report on an intercounty shinty game. As he typed, his toes throbbed at memories of playing in the Camanachd Cup against Kingussie. The memory of the frozen, granite-hard pitches, the shin-shattering knocks, the chilblains and perpetual defeats, still hurt.

McAllister was putting the final touches to his editorial, then he was off to the funeral. A fervent plea for Hungary, a plea that a drop of sanity in an ocean of political stupidity may prevail, was his topic for the week as there was nothing he could write on the subject shaking the town. Maybe after the funeral, he thought. For now, Hungary. Don would take his red pencil through much of it, Joanne would retype it, two, three, four times, they would argue about the relevance in a local paper of news that was unconfirmed, only a whisper, from a country
no one cared about, and yet, yet … he knew he had to make a stand—if only for himself.

McAllister finished and left without a comment.

Joanne, looking up from the typewriter, blew a strand of hair from her face, stretched her shoulders and saw the cobblestones gleaming wet on the lane below.

“Oh no! It had better clear for Saturday night. I couldn't bear guising in the rain and the bonfire a fizzler.” She was also praying that Halloween would be a great success as, just as she had feared, there was no further word about the television. She couldn't bear the girls to be disappointed yet again.

Rob was confident of bad weather. “I remember once”—he took a break from pounding the Underwood so they didn't have to shout—“we went guising in sleet. I was nine and I came down with pneumonia after and my mum was
not
sympathetic.”

Joanne laughed. “Why not?”

“I insisted on going as a Roman gladiator. A belt, a sword, bare legs, sandals, a wee kilt thing and two bits of cardboard for armor. I turned from a Roman to a Pict—blue all over.”

Don came in with a flurry of paper. “Come on, come on”—he grabbed copy from Rob—“less o' the gabbing.”

They got back to their typing.

The service, conducted in the rituals of the Free Church of Scotland, was traditional. Rain was also traditional for a funeral. No women, no children, no outsiders could take part in the final rites, but outsiders had been allowed into the pews on a balcony overlooking the body of the kirk. The singing of the ancient psalms, the haunting plea for comfort and acknowledgment of God's will, was sung in Gaelic, the sound not dissimilar to the Aramaic of the Apostles. The words, unchanged in seventeen hundred years, and
sung in Scotland for more than a thousand years, sustained these austere Christians.

The service over, a plain wooden box was gently carried through the doors of the kirk as though it were a cradle, not a coffin. McAllister, the headmaster Frank Clark and a few other men, not of the faith but wishing to show support for Jamie's father, followed at the end of the procession, then hovered discreetly inside the lee of the high stone wall that surrounded the burying ground. Assembled around the open grave, the congregation of black-clad men put McAllister in mind of a gathering of hoodie crows. He shook the image away. The sonorous voice of the minister declared the last funerary rites, his strong cantor's voice uplifted into the wind, sending Jamie's spirit westward, along the glens, back to his ancestral home. “Over the sea to Skye” indeed.

McAllister knew of the psalmody of the Free Church but had never before been immersed in the eerie sound. On the walk along the riverbank back to the office, the chanting from the presentor, answered back and forth by the voices of the mourners, a sound more like the ocean breaking rhythmically against the shoreline than singing, had become imprinted on his brain. Any effort on his part would not rid him of that sound, this he knew, and would always, any and every time heard, be the anthem to this time, this place, this tragedy.

They were almost done, the final proofs all that was left. McAllister shooed them all off with “I'll finish up here. See you in the Market Bar in half an hour or so.”

Don needed no encouragement. Rob neither. As he was halfway out the door, he turned back and asked Joanne, “Join us for a drink?”

She looked doubtful.

“Come on, we can smuggle you into the back bar.”

“All right, just this once. I've a night to myself, the girls are with their grandparents and Bill has gone out west. But if I'm seen, there goes what's left of my reputation.”

“Blame it on me.”

“Always,” she solemnly promised. Then she stopped, lifted her head, stretched her neck and stood for a second, like a stag at bay, and sniffed.

“Burning toffee.”

Rob laughed, “Halloween,” and tucked her arm under his to walk down the rain-slick cobbles of the brae.

That week, the last in October, the town smelled of toffee and turnips. Treadle sewing machines clunked as children changed their minds a dozen times on what to wear but settled on whatever their mothers could produce, old clothes being at a premium, cloth and clothes rationing a not-too-distant memory for most. In Annie's case, it was less what to wear than who to be. And that Wednesday night a final decision had to be made.

“Now you be careful with that knife. It's sharp. I don't know what your grandad's thinking of.”

Granny disapproved of everything, thought Annie, but Wee Jean ignored the warning, continuing to carefully, messily, carve out the insides of her turnip, chewing a chunk of the raw neep as she worked.

Grandad had taken over the kitchen for turnip-lantern carving. Granny Ross stood over the boiling sugar for toffee apples. Carved turnips covered the sideboard and the top of the pantry and were all over the draining board. Another group of grinning gargoyle faces, finished except for the candles, were waiting in the galvanized washtub.

The lanterns were one-upmanship on Annie's part. She had not been chosen for the Halloween concert, although she was
by far the most theatrical of the troupe. The Brownies and Girl Guides, the Cubs and Scouts, were part of the entertainment for the night. Joanne knew why Annie had been left out of the Brownies' concert group. Her grandparents had no idea, her father neither. Annie knew, cared, would never show it and would never forget the slight.

There was still a lot to be done, two days before Halloween night. Fabric, cut and ready to sew, lay on the sitting room floor. A crown, or a hat and bow and arrow, were yet to be made.

“Will you make my crown next, Granny?” Annie kept pestering.

“I keep telling you, Maid Marion didn't wear a crown.”

“She did so. She's a princess.”

This conversation had been going on for about two and a half weeks. Grandad intervened. “I'm sure she was a princess.”

Annie looked up triumphantly.

“Aye,” he continued, “a princess all right. Mind you, didn't she have to disguise herself as one of they forest folk so the bad king wouldn't know she was a princess? And of course, princesses don't have bows and arrows.”

It worked. One crown forgotten, one set of arrows to be made. At least it stopped her questioning him about the funeral. And took his granddaughter's mind off the infernal topic of a television set.

Television! That's for those with more money than sense, was Grandad Ross's opinion of the newfangled device.

McAllister walked into the Market Bar twenty minutes later, his hair and coat damp from the fine persistent rain.

“All finished.” He looked at Joanne. “A dram?”

“Why not?” She had been drinking ginger beer.

Now, settled deep into a chair, the leather of which looked and felt like it had been tanned from the hide of a mastodon,
Joanne propped her feet up on the fender of the stone fireplace, once part of a forge, and warmed her toes. Cozy, she thought. I could get to like this. Don and Rob were in the public bar, forbidden to women by custom and fear of public denunciation as a harlot.

She accepted the drink from her boss, thinking herself a very modern woman—first a job, now a whisky.

“Right. Hoodie crows?” McAllister settled deep into the chair with his whisky and a cigarette.