The Loud Halo (3 page)

‘It's no' friendly,' he argued.

‘It's perfectly correct,' I insisted.

‘Ach, no,' he said, fidgeting with embarrassment at having to argue with me. ‘As like as not tsey won't even read it if you say tsat.'

‘Why ever shouldn't they, Hector?' I demanded, my voice edged with asperity.

Hector frowned. ‘Well, if ever I get a letter and it begins with “Dear Sir” then I throw it straightway into the fire because I know it'll be a nasty one,' he explained.

Together we pondered the assortment of letters, deciphering names and addressing them in as friendly a manner as Hector wished and also, at his insistence, we informed the prospective buyers chattily that in Bruach it had been a very coarse winter; that the potatoes would surely be very late going into the ground this year and that the Department of Agriculture bull had arrived earlier than expected. Hector then professed himself completely satisfied. ‘I'll put a P.S. at tse end tellin' tsem tse price,' he said with true Gaelic finesse.

A month went by; a month of exhilarating dawns which heralded days that stretched themselves to hold more and more hours of gentle sunshine. The seared wintry grass of the crofts took on a more comely appearance and wherever one's glance rested there were bursting buds and courting birds and all the lovely lilting things of spring. Old men in creased dark clothes cams out of their winter hiding places and leaned against the walls of the houses, sampling the quality of the sunlight and pronouncing upon the condition of the cattle, upon the prospects of the fishing, or, if encouraged, upon the fate of the world. The children left off their tackety boots and thick hand-knit socks and skipped to school barefooted with the same friskiness as the young lambs bleating on the hills, while on the dry, heathery moors the local incendiarists, with whom every village in the Islands seems to be afflicted, wantonly satisfied their urges so that there was rarely a day when one did not see the spreading blue tendrils of heather smoke creeping steadily or tillering and racing menacingly according to the whim of the wind.

For all of us the days were full of the outdoors: cutting peats, turning them, lifting and finally stacking them; burning the unruly patches of sedge that no scythe could master; gathering up the stones which always seemed to stray on to the crofts during the winter of neglect; teaching new calves to drink from a pail while one stroked the sun-warmed curls of its back and endured the caress of a milky tongue. For the women there was in addition the annual blanket washing, perhaps in a zinc bath of water carried laboriously pailful by pailful from the well, perhaps in a cauldron over a wood fire beside the burn. We worked dedicatedly, cramming the days with toil, and when dusk approached and we could feel we had earned a respite we walked to our homes with the clean cool wind from the hill fanning our glowing faces and our bodies heavy with that good weariness that comes from physical labour in the open air.

It was after just such a day that I went out to my last chore of the evening. The sun had not long set in a splendour of vermilion and turquoise and the sky was still streaked as though it had been clawed by grey fingernails. Busy ripples flecked with silver raced across the loch and tumbled with Dresden tinkles on to the pebbles of the shore. The hills looked smug and withdrawn behind a faint veil of mist while across the water the brightest of the lighthouses was already beginning to show as a dim spark on the horizon. My line of newly washed blankets, now dry and wind softened, stirred lazily and as I unpegged each one I did it lingeringly and with a feeling of I ecstasy as though I might be dipping a flag in salute to the glory of the night.

‘Here! Come an' get me a drink of water. My hands is all sticky!' Erchy's voice, uneasy with authority, came from the direction of the house. Obediently, I gathered up the blankets and went indoors. Erchy was holding a large brush in front of him, its bristles sticky with glistening tar. His hands too were liberally coated. ‘I'm that thirsty I'm like to faint,' he told me.

I dumped the blankets on the table well out of his way and poured out a large mug of water. He drank it with audible relish but when I offered to make tea for him he declined it.

‘I didn't take my dinner yet,' he explained. (In Bruach one always ‘took' one's meals.)

‘Then you must be hungry. Let me give you a scone or something.'

‘I daren't wait,' he insisted. ‘See, I promised the cailleach I'd see to the cow for her tonight as she's goin' ceilidhin' over with Katy. She'll be makin' a swear at me already for bein' as late as I am.' He leaned his elbow on the dresser. ‘She wasn't for lettin' me come down here today at all but I told her I'd get the boat tarred while she was good and dry.'

‘Tar!' I repeated with a grimace of disgust. ‘Why is it you always put so much tar on your boats? Why don't you paint them in nice bright colours instead of just slathering them with dirty black tar?'

Erchy appeared slightly outraged. ‘Tar keeps out the water better than paint,' he defended. ‘Any splits in the planks or any places where she might be takin' in the water, once they're filled with tar they'll keep out the sea for as long as the season lasts,' he explained.

‘I'd like to think there was something more than a gob of tar between me and the sea,' I murmured.

‘Ach!' snorted Erchy.

‘Anyway it doesn't alter the fact that it's unsightly stuff,' I told him.

‘Damty sure it is,' agreed Erchy amiably. ‘Here,' he demanded. ‘D'you mind Tarry Ruari?'

I shook my head. ‘No,' I replied. ‘I've seen the house where he lived but he was dead when I came here.'

‘You've seen his house? Then you'll know the way it's tarred all over—the roof and the walls—all black?'

I remembered Ruari's house as a stained hovel of a place near a boggy slope of the burn and recalled Morag describing it as being ‘very delaborated'.

‘Yes,' I admitted, ‘it did look as if it might have been tarred.'

‘Now that's a man went mad with tar,' said Erchy with complete seriousness. ‘He tarred his wee boat inside and out over and over again until she was that heavy he could hardly pull her up the beach. Then he started tarring his house—outside at first and then on the inside. He even tarred the furniture. By God! but you never saw such a place in your life. Folks here just used to laugh at him at first but then the nurse went there one day and found he'd tarred the blankets on his bed. They came and took him away then.'

‘Good gracious!' I ejaculated. ‘Was he married?'

‘Oh, no,' explained Erchy simply. ‘Just daft.'

He moved vaguely towards the door. ‘I'd best be goin',' he said. ‘Thanks for the drink. I was badly needin' it.'

‘I'm sorry it wasn't something more sustaining,' I told him with spurious apology.

Erchy turned quickly. ‘Indeed but I wouldn't have thanked you for it just now, then.'

‘No?' I mocked.

‘Damty sure I wouldn't. If you'd handed me a bottle of whisky I would have given it back to you without a thought for it.'

‘I'd like to see you refuse whisky,' I said.

‘Well, you will someday at that.'

I smiled disbelievingly.

‘You know,' he went on, ‘I reckon that's the reason folks like me don't go bad with the drink like they do in Glasgow and them places. You see what I mean?'

I waited, not at all sure that I did.

‘What I'm sayin' is, take me at the cattle sale. I've plenty of money on me so I get drunk as hell on it for maybe two or three days. Well, then I come to the end of it and I don't want anything but to get out on to the hill. I make an excuse to go after the sheep and I'm away first light without my breakfast and only a wee potach in my pocket. When I get thirsty I put my head down into one of the burns—the colder the better—and I can tell you it's sweet! When I've had one drink I'm lookin forward to tastin' the water in the next place and the next. By the time I come back again I feel as though I never want to take a drop of whisky again in my life.'

‘But it doesn't last?' I queried.

‘No, thank God,' said Erchy fervently. He appeared to muse for a few moments before he spoke again. ‘Did I tell you I'm a big sheep man now?' he asked, changing the subject completely.

‘No,' I said. ‘Since when?'

‘I found them up on the hill one time when I was away like I've been tellin' you.'

‘Found them?' I echoed.

‘Aye, as true as I'm here.'

‘How long have they been lost?'

‘Well, it was about five years ago now that I was takin' some old ewes that I had to the sale and one of them went lame on the way so I drove her off to the side of the road and left her there. There was no sign of her by the time I got back so I never gave her another thought except that she'd probably go off somewhere quiet and die. The beast was only worth a few bob then, anyway. Well, like I was sayin', I was up there on the hill and in a wee corrie all by themselves I came on an old ewe and a ram, two sheep and three young lambs. I caught the ewe first an' there was my markings on her. I had the dog with me so I caught the rest of them an' they had no markings on them at all so I knew they must be mine. She would have been in lamb when I left her,' he explained, ‘an' it must have been a ram lamb.'

‘It's strange no one has noticed them before,' I said.

‘Ach, no, not where they was,' he told me. ‘Nobody goes much round the back of the Beinn there, an' the corrie they was in you wouldn't see from the path. That old ewe's a hardy, though,' he muttered appreciatively, ‘she hadn't as much fleece left on her as you'd need to bait a hook.' He made another vague move towards the door but in his reminiscent mood I knew he would linger for another half-hour at least before he finally detached himself from the cottage, so I began preparing my evening meal.

‘It must be very pleasant to come across a flock of sheep you didn't know you had,' I remarked as I grated cheese into a basin.

Erchy watched me curiously. ‘Aye,' he admitted. He came back to the table. ‘What's that you're makin'?'

‘Oh, just a cheese sauce,' I told him.

‘I mind fine when my sister was at home—she's a cook in Edinburgh, you know, and she has to make these fancy things there—she found some cheese in the cupboard that had gone dry. Ach, I can eat the stuff in the winter all right but not in the summer when there's plenty of crowdie,' he explained hurriedly. ‘She handed me one of those grater things and told me to get on and grate it for her. Hell, by the time I'd finished all my fingernails had gone into the basin, too. When I showed her she was mad at me so I told her she wasn't to make me do it for her again,' he finished with remembered triumph. I opened a bottle and poured a little of its contents into the pan. Erchy sniffed.

‘That's beer!' he accused. ‘I thought you didn't like it?'

‘I don't like to drink it,' I said. ‘But I do sometimes use it in sauces.'

‘I wouldn't fancy beer like that,' he said, shaking his head. ‘Now if it was whisky …'

‘There you go again,' I taunted. ‘You're obsessed with whisky.'

‘No, not me,' he denied. ‘I like to have a good drink when I have one but that's only when I have the money. I'm not like these folks from Rudha that has a bottle sent out on the bus two or three times every week.'

‘Tell me, Erchy,' I asked, for he had touched on a subject that had been puzzling me for a long time, ‘how do they manage to afford bottles of whisky two or three times a week? They're only crofters and some of them even draw Public Assistance, yet they seem to be able to buy drink and cigarettes as much as ever they want to. They don't seem to go short of anything.'

‘No, an' I'm damty sure they never will,' said Erchy, looking mysterious.

‘What's their secret?' I cajoled.

‘Well, it was durin' the war,' Erchy began. ‘There must have been a big wreck some place out here an' there was lots of stuff came ashore one night. The Rudha folks got word of it an' they was all waitin' to grab it. Trunks packed with money, folks say there was, an' they hid it all away. There was plenty of corpses too, scattered all over the shore, so when they'd taken as much stuff as they wanted for themselves the Rudha people told us an' then they told the pollis. Ach, it was a dirty trick,' said Erchy with disgust creeping into his tones. ‘Anyway, the pollis didn't come out straight away so as soon as it got dark me an' Tearlach went over there to see would we find anythin'. All we found was bolls of flour, plenty of them, and corpses, dozens of them too, all over the shore. An' the moon was shinin' on them so that they gleamed an' the tide was washin' round some of them makin' their limbs move so that you'd think they were tryin' to get up. God! We got that scared we just lifted a boll of flour on to each other's back an' we ran home with it as fast as we could go. Indeed I don't believe we stopped for breath until we got to within sight of Anna's house, an' we never went back there neither.'

The path to Rudha was four miles of narrow sheep track along the shoulder of the hill, below which the land slid steeply to the jagged rocks of the shore. Even in broad daylight the uninitiated take one look and either turn back or tackle it quakingly on all fours.

‘An then the pollis came,' continued Erchy, ‘an' they took away the corpses but they left the bolls of flour. The rest of the folks here just went then and helped themselves.' He sighed. ‘That's all Bruach ever got out of it—a few bolls of flour, except for Tearlach's dog that got a good feed off one of the legs of the corpses,' he added reflectively.

I put on the tablecloth. ‘Your mother will be giving you up for lost,' I reminded him.