Bruach Blend (12 page)

When I presented myself at Morag's croft Ruari and Erchy had already fitted the wire ‘corngathers' to their scythes and had begun work. Following in their wake I joined Morag and Janet in gathering up the fallen scythe-sweeps of corn and separating them into slim sheaves which we then tied with a twist of oat stalks. I had but little experience of making sheaves and that experience had led me to regard it as one of the more exacting tasks of the croft, since not only had the sheaves to be more or less uniform in girth – Morag had me almost counting the stalks so constant were her injunctions against making the sheaves too fat or too thin – but properly, the confusion of stalks had to be bunched with the ears lying tidily together and the ends butting trimly. In my efforts to comply with my tutor's instructions I found myself cradling each sheaf on my left arm as I might cradle an infant while with the right hand and forearm I coaxed and pushed at the stalks until they were all lying tolerably level. Then I tied them and meekly submitted them for scrutiny. Deft sheaf-making needs much practice and despite the excellent counselling my sheaves lying among those made by Morag and Janet were too readily identifiable by their lack of symmetry. The two women generously cloaked their amused dismay with occasional commendation which, though spurious, was clearly intended as encouragement; the two men took far less trouble to disguise their ridicule and to my ears even the breeze itself as it whispered through the new-cut swathes sounded as if it was having difficulty in suppressing its chuckles.

We worked on steadily, almost soundlessly save for our own voices and the mutterings of a few monitoring gulls who hovered so close Morag declared that we could almost speak to them. Once we halted for a quick strupak which Behag brought out to us but then we were back at work, and just as the men kept up the rhythm of their scythe strokes so did our bodies continue to stoop and straighten, stoop and straighten as we gathered and tied the sheaves before upending them in threes so they would shed the rain. My back ached; my arms and neck and even my cheeks were rasped by the rough corn stalks and fretted by the wind and sun; fragments of chaff had worked their way into my eyes and my feet were lacerated by the spiky stubble thrusting through my flimsy sandals. But since there was a tacit determination that the corn harvest once begun must be finished by sunset – God and the weather permitting – we allowed ourselves no respite save perhaps briefly when Ruari and Erchy, pausing to sharpen a scythe, made some comment which seemed to justify a moment's consideration before a reply was given. Then we took the opportunity to relax for a fleeting moment or two, throwing back our heads to let the breeze cool our necks and pressing the palms of our hands hard against our backs in an effort to push the aches from our bones. However, if we prolonged the pause the men quickly began to taunt us on our idleness or to chide us mockingly for shirking to which Janet and Morag retorted with equal derision that their inexpert scything was making our task more difficult. Indignation on both sides soon gave way to banter and banter to laughter which temporarily shook the tiredness from our bodies and stimulated us to further effort.

At last the scythe strokes ceased almost with the suddenness of a clock stopping and straightening up we saw there was no corn left standing. There was a moment of silence as we stood surveying the stubble and on the flushed, moist faces of my companions there was an expression of contentment that the mellowing sunlight lit almost to ecstasy. Ruari took out his pipe and Erchy lit a cigarette and while Morag and Janet and I finished tying the remaining sheaves the two men murmured together assessing the yield of corn.

‘You have plenty corn, I'm thinkin',' Ruari called to Morag.

‘Aye,' admitted Morag cautiously. ‘I believe I have so supposin' the rain will keep away until I have it stacked just.'

Ruari treated her to a disparaging glance. In Bruach there was a precept that corn must be left standing for three Sundays in the field before it could be considered dry enough to be built into a winter stack and the possibility that Bruach could be without rain for close on three weeks he considered too remote for spoken contempt.

The men picked up their scythes and resting them over their shoulders returned with Morag to the cottage for their well-earned strupak. Janet and I stayed to up-end the remaining sheaves.

‘Well that's finished for a whiley,' Janet said when the last sheaf had been set up. She flexed her shoulders, ‘And the Dear knows I'm that tired, I feel as if I'm not worth a docken at the end of it,' she added, and ended with a chuckle in case her remark should be construed as the beginning of a grumble. Taking off her work apron, she bundled it under her arm and moved off in the direction of the cottage.

There was by now a gentle coolness in the breeze which was doing much to anaesthetize the smarting of my skin and despite my own desire for a strupak so satisfying was the contemplation of the day's task completed that I wanted to linger and enjoy the sense of repose which seemed to be settling over the cornfield much as if the land having yielded its bounty was, like the reapers, preparing to relax. On the pretext of emptying my sandals of grain and chaff, I lagged behind and for a few snatched moments stood enjoying the slow throb of happiness that comes when a tedious job is finally disposed of; remembering the growing corn combed by the breeze into green strands across the plot; savouring the fresh straw-scented air; the sight of new corn stubble polished to brilliance by the tawny sunlight; the stooked corn sheaves which with their shaggy heads leaning together and skirts spread to catch the breeze reminded me of trios of little girls sharing some whispered secret.

‘Indeed have you no' seen enough of the corn for the day or are you wantin' to take it to bed with you?' Janet's voice interrupted my thoughts and I hurried to join her.

The men's scythes were hooked over the limb of a dead tree near Morag's cottage proclaiming their owners' presence in the kitchen where we found them drinking tea and eating wedges of the cake I had given to Morag that morning.

‘Are you no goin' to sit down yourself an' take a strupak?' protested Morag when I made no attempt to join them.

‘Just a cup in my hand,' I said using the Bruach idiom. ‘Then I must be away.' There was already a faint edge of twilight creeping above the mainland hills and with the hens to be fed and Bonny to be milked I was loth to sit down for fear of being unable to coax my weary limbs into functioning again.

‘Then you'll take a piece of your own cake, surely?' Morag pressed. I shook my head. There were fresh mackerel fillets waiting to be cooked for my supper and I wanted no cake to take the edge off my appetite.

‘It's good this,' said Erchy reaching for the last slice.

‘Of course it is,' I replied archly.

‘An' tell me now, did you bake this cake in the tin the old tinker made for you?' asked Morag.

‘I did,' I acknowledged, ‘but if I'd known yesterday that you were planning to gather in your corn today I would have baked a bigger one for you. Erchy himself could easily eat the whole of that.'

‘I would so if I got the chance,' agreed Erchy.

‘Whist!' Morag admonished. ‘Indeed but I'm well pleased with what you gave me,' she said, ‘but what I'm sayin' now is that it's as well you got the old tinker to make the tin for you when you did for he'll make no more.'

‘Why not?' I demanded.

‘Mo ghaoil,' she responded, ‘did you no hear he's passed on this three weeks back?'

‘He's dead?' The old tinker was by way of being a friend of mine and I felt slightly indignant that no one had spoken to me of his death until now.

‘He is so,' she confirmed.

‘Accident or old age?' I probed.

‘No accident nor age but a tumulus on the brain,' Morag explained. ‘They took him away to hostapol on the mainland but he didn't wait long there before he was gone.'

‘I don't believe he thought much of hospitals anyway, no nor doctors either,' Erchy observed. ‘Tinkers don't as a rule.'

‘No, I believe you're right about that,' I agreed, and suppressed a reminiscent grin.

The old tinker used to visit Bruach periodically, selling his water dippers and milk pails, and he was usually accompanied by a tiny woman whom he referred to as his ‘small wee body' or sometimes less dotingly as ‘the body' and who I surmised was his wife. They were a curious pair; he with a face tanned to the colour of liver sausage, roguishly glinting eyes and thick lips that only loosely enclosed a tongue that I knew well could spill out piety and profanity, flattery and execration with a similar degree of neutrality and expertise. The ‘small wee body', on the other hand, was pale and timid-looking, her thin mouth constantly sucked into a virtuous pucker that was puzzlingly belied at times by a merry glint in her eyes. The old man, according to Morag, was one of the few genuine tinkers still roaming the island, though many Bruachites disputed her assertion, arguing that only the ‘small wee body' was genuinely Highland the old man being ‘more than a leg an' a half Irish'. Moreover, they claimed that his pails and dippers were not his own work but were purchased from ironmongers on the mainland, the tinker supplying only his trademark of a ‘strengthening' dribble of solder around the base so as to fool people into thinking they were buying genuine ‘tinker-made'. But whether they were genuinely ‘tinkered' or not, the Bruachites still bought his pails and dippers and apparently found no cause for dissatisfaction. I too had used his pails and dippers and also on one occasion I had at Morag's suggestion asked the old man to fashion for me a cake tin of a size which I had found it impossible to buy in any of the mainland shops or from any mail order catalogue. The reason I required such a ‘bespoke' tin was for making Victoria sandwich cakes of which I am extremely fond, and the best sandwich cake I happen to believe is one that has been baked in a single tin deep enough to allow for a cake to be cut through the middle before being sandwiched together with filling. Sandwich cakes baked in the recommended two shallow tins never in my opinion turn out to have quite the delectable moistness of texture which I always find so irresistible. At the time I possessed only one tin which was of suitable depth but unfortunately it was too large in diameter and as a consequence unless there were sufficient ‘droppersin' for strupaks the cake would grow stale before I could consume the half of it. Resolving therefore to put the old tinker to the test, I told him of my problem, gave him the approximate measurements of the tin I wanted him to make for me, and waited to see what would happen.

I was in the middle of baking when next he called and wiping the dough from my hands I went to answer his summons of, ‘Are ye within there, mam?' shouted through the open door. Lifting an arm with its shining cluster of milk pails in salute, he acknowledged my appearance with easy confidence. Beside him stood the ‘small wee body', who was diffidently offering for my inspection a shiny round tin which at first glance appeared to be exactly what I wanted.

‘Oh, you've made it for me! How splendid!' I exclaimed delightedly, but as soon as I took the tin from her and examined it more closely my enthusiasm waned. Undoubtedly it was genuinely ‘tinkermade'. Even without the well-known lion trademark which decorated the bottom the number of joins would have proclaimed the fact irrefutably. I wondered how many island scrap heaps had been raided to provide the raw materials for the tin. Pleasure gave way to dismay when closer scrutiny revealed that the base was made up of three separate pieces of tin joined by ‘seams' which, when I turned the tin over, I saw were secured by what, even to my untrained eye, looked to be excessively shaky-handed dribbles of solder. I imagined that unless the tin was first lined with paper any cake baked in it would have to be scraped out rather than turned out.

‘Will it stand heat?' I asked dubiously, turning the tin over and over.

‘Indeed, mam, supposin' you was to put that tin in a fire oven and bake it, it would come out as good as new,' he assured me with nimble complacency.

‘Well, that is the idea,' I reminded him. ‘I want it for baking cakes, not feeding the hens.'

If there was a flicker of consternation in his eyes it was succeeded within the space of a blink by a look of utter guilelessness. ‘God's truth, mam!' he ejaculated, ‘ 'tis the lazy tongue of me that's given you the wrong word for it. What I'm trying to say is, mam, that that tin wouldn't crack at the sight of a furnace.' He turned to his companion. ‘ “The body” here will tell you that now.'

‘The body's' attention had been momentarily diverted by a moo from Bonny who was tethered further down the croft and I had a fleeting though perhaps false impression that his foot had moved furtively in her direction, startling her into response. ‘Oh, indeed, mam, a furnace,' she corroborated instantly in a voice that was barely more audible than the sound of a brush sweeping over a polished floor and, still not satisfied with my reaction, she emphasized, ‘A hot furnace, mam. Sure the hotter the better for that one.' She was looking at the old man as she spoke and it crossed my mind that perhaps he would indeed stand more heat than the tin he had made for me. In any case since ‘small wee body' reputedly had never lived in anything more substantial than a sod and tarpaulin hut with an open fire and a hole in the roof through which the smoke escaped, her experience of cake-baking was likely to have been severely limited and her assurances therefore could carry little conviction. However, since I had asked the tinker to make the tin especially for me I felt I had no alternative but to purchase it from him. At least, I told myself, I had a genuine ‘tinker-made' tin and even if, as seemed likely, it was unsuitable for cake-baking at least it would be a source of interest and curiosity to my friends.