Beautiful Just! (6 page)

‘Indeed no,' endorsed Janet. ‘An' there's been no stranger here for weeks past.'

‘It's the cigarette that is the mystery,' pronounced Lachlan. ‘Indeed I know of no man who could look like Neilly an' be smokin' a cigarette.'

‘Well, I did mention that he threw it away,' I reminded them but they ignored me and again fell to discussing the possible identity of the man I claimed to have seen. Each suggestion was rejected almost as quickly as it was offered.

‘It's strange if it was Neilly when you come to think of it,' Janet pointed out. ‘It's not as though you've ever had much to do with the man since you've been here.'

‘That's true,' I agreed. I had had very little to do with Neilly. Like everyone else we commented politely on the weather by way of greeting whenever we met but since Neilly rarely dropped in at any of the ceilidhs and since he did not shop at the grocery van or join up with the peat cutting parties in spring there was really no common meeting place. The only time I had exchanged more than half a dozen consecutive words with him was one day when I had been coming back from an early morning wander on the moors. I had been picking my way around the peat bogs when I heard a shout and looking in the direction from which it came I saw Neilly's wife, Barbac, sitting beside the road. She was clutching at her stomach and had obviously been vomiting but she insisted that she was all right except that when the vomiting struck her first she had fallen and twisted her knee so that now she ‘couldn't put her leg under her'. Would I go and get Neilly, she pleaded. It was over a mile across the moors to Neilly's house and when I reached it I was both breathless and flustered. Neiily was cleaning out the calf shed and I rushed towards him but the moment he saw me making in his direction he rushed inside the shed and shut the door. Fuming at his shyness I stood outside the door and bawled, ‘For goodness' sake come out,' I told him. ‘It's your wife.'

The door opened cautiously and Neilly appeared still holding the graipe which he had been using to throw out the manure. ‘My wife is away milkin' the cow,' he told me.

‘I know that,' I panted. ‘But she's sick. And she's twisted her leg.'

‘Oh, my, my! That's terrible!' Neilly's face was full of concern and he dug his graipe hurriedly into the ground. ‘I'd best be away up to the post office an' try will I catch the vet before he's out on his rounds,' he said.

‘Not the vet!' I told him breathlessly. ‘It's your wife who's needing attention.'

‘Oh, it's no the cow that's sick then?' Neilly's relief was staggeringly obvious. ‘It's my wife, you say?'

‘Yes,' I stressed. ‘She's twisted her leg somehow and she cannot walk. She's also been vomiting quite a lot and I'm afraid she's going to get very cold sitting out there on the moor. We must get help to her as quickly as possible.' I found I was still shouting at him, I was so repelled by his attitude now that he knew his cow was safe. ‘Would you like me to go up to the post office and telephone for the nurse while you go to your wife?' I asked him. ‘It wouldn't take her long to get here and she could bring your wife home in her car.'

‘The nurse is on holiday,' Neilly informed me almost exultantly. ‘You would need to get the nurse from the next village an' it would be an hour or more before she would get here.'

I looked at him defiantly. ‘I think I ought to telephone her all the same,' I said.

Neilly surveyed me with a calmness of expression that implied I was making a great deal of fuss over nothing at all. ‘You could do that if you've a mind,' he conceded. ‘An' I will get one or two of the men and we will take the bier for her. That will be the way of it just.' I made no comment. There were times when I thought Bruach would have been bereft without its funeral bier; it was put to such a variety of uses that I used to wonder why each crofter did not have one of his own. Returning from telephoning the nurse I was in time to see the rescue party setting off across the moors but looking ahead of them I also saw to my utter dismay that Barbac herself was already half way home! She had felt fine when she had done vomiting, she told me later and when her knee had suddenly ‘jumped back into its bones' she had carried on, milked the cow, and was on her way home when she had met the bier bearers. Barbac had subsequently professed herself grateful for my efforts to help but Neilly never made any secret of the fact that he despised me for the fuss I had made.

‘I'm no understandin' it at all,' said Anna Vic. ‘You'd think a man that has kept away from you in life would keep away from you in death,' she added.

‘There's not many it could have been, all the same,' said Tearlaich with a puzzled frown. ‘We was all away diggin' his grave.'

‘An' them that was no diggin' was after sittin' with the corpse,' declared Erchy.

There was a long pause during which Janet placed more peats on the fire and brushed some ash from the hearth with a bundle of feathers. Then Morag said, ‘There's some believes it takes a spirit three days to make up its mind where it's goin'.'

Erchy and Johnny flicked her a surprised look but said nothing.

‘If they ever go at all rightly,' said Lachlan.

‘Like Red Annie?' asked Anna Vic.

‘Like Red Annie,' agreed Lachlan. We knew we had only to relax now and stare into the fire while we waited for Lachlan to tell us the story of Red Annie. For the Bruachites no doubt it would be the umpteenth time they had heard it but for me Red Annie was still a stranger.

‘Poor Red Annie,' began Lachlan. ‘Aye, she was young to go when she did.' He took down a tin of baking soda from the mantelpiece and swallowed two teaspoonfuls before he took up the narrative again. ‘No more than twenty was she on the day she died. She was on her way back from yon village with a boll of meal an' a hundred-weight of coarse salt roped to her back when it started to snow. Not heavy snow, mind, at first, but it was gettin' thicker all the time an' with the weight she had there was no tellin' how it was holdin' her back. No doubt she was makin' herself believe if she kept goin' she would be back before the night came down but with nine miles walked an' another three still to go the struggle got too much for her an' she burst her own heart. That's the way they found her two days later, with the meal still roped to her back. My own father was one that went out to look for her an' it was himself told me that.'

There were small murmurs of compassion from the women as they thought of the young red-haired Annie struggling through the blizzard only to collapse and die three miles away from her home.

‘It was a lonely way to die,' said Anna Vic sadly.

‘Aye, an' I'm thinkin' it's lonely she is to this day,' continued Lachlan. ‘Why else would there be nothin' but bracken will grow on the good land where she died?' He looked around, inviting contradiction.

I, visualizing the road to Bruach and recalling no part of it that was lush enough to grow bracken, was unable to locate the particular spot where Red Annie was supposed to have died. At length I had to ask.

‘It's no place on the road as you would know it, Miss Peckwitt,' Lachlan explained. ‘This was back in my father's time an' the road then was higher up the hill.'

‘It used to go above the strath, over the shoulder of the hill,' interjected Erchy. ‘You can still make out part of the old track.'

‘Aye, an' if you look up there you will see in the middle of the good land there is a patch of bracken growin' all to itself,' said Lachlan, taking up the story again.

‘I have noticed that,' I said, remembering the isolated circle of bracken among the greenness of the laird's parkland. I had often pondered over the reason for its being there and wished that it had not been ‘estate land' so that I could have climbed up to investigate it. ‘But why is it included in the laird's park now?' I asked.

‘Ach, when the new laird came he just told us he was goin' to take the road down nearer the shore. He said it would be easier for us and I'm no sayin' but that he wasn't right but at the same time he took where the road had once been into his own park.' Lachlan nodded wisely. ‘He might as well have left it,' he went on, ‘for once he'd moved the road it seemed nothin' but bracken would ever grow on the patch where Red Annie died, though there'd been good grazin' there before. He even planted it with trees but he could never get them to cover that spot, just. He reckoned it was a kind of a wind funnel that killed everythin',' Lachlan added with a wry grunt. ‘But to my my own mind it was cursed.'

I was still trying to sort out the implication of Lachlan's story when the door opened and Angy the fisherman came bringing in the fresh smell of the sea on his oilskins. I waited for the greetings to cease before I put to Lachlan the question that was puzzling me.

‘This story of Red Annie,' I taxed him. ‘Do you mean that nothing will grow on that particular spot because she died there?'

‘Indeed no,' responded Lachlan. ‘It is not that at all. It is because the laird moved the road away from where she died that nothin' will grow there, you understand?'

I didn't understand and I suppose it was obvious from my expression.

‘What I'm sayin' is that a person's spirit or ghost if you like always stays around the place where he died,' expounded Lachlan patiently. ‘An' so long as it has company the same as it had in life then it will no be a trouble to anyone at all. That patch of land where Red Annie died stayed good land so long as her spirit had the company of folks that was passin' along the road. But when the laird moved the road then that was the time for things to change.'

‘You mean Annie's ghost became lonely?'

‘Just that.' He nodded approval at me. ‘That's what we believe, anyway,' he added.

‘Didn't anyone try to dissuade the laird from moving the road?' I asked.

‘They tried. Right enough they tried but he wouldn't listen to them at all. He thought he was doin' them good by savin' them havin' to climb so high up the hill.'

‘But nobody told him why they didn't want the road to be moved,' Tearlaich said accusingly.

‘How would they tell him an' him an Englishman?' retorted Lachlan.

‘Aye well,' said Johnny. ‘I'm mighty glad he did change the road. I wouldn't want to take my bus that far up the hill. It's plenty bad enough without that.'

I was too interested in Lachlan's theory to let the subject drop. ‘Do you think then that all these haunted places we hear about are haunted simply because whoever is haunting them is missing company?' I pursued.

‘Surely if the ghost gives trouble that would be the reason for it likely,' he replied. ‘Maybe there was never any trouble until the place had been deserted for a while but once a ghost's been left on its own it gets kind of vexed about it an' maybe tries to get a bit of its own back by plaguin' folks.'

Lachlan pushed his pipe into his mouth and taking the hint I ceased my questioning.

‘Well, I'm thinkin' Neilly's goin' to be a sore miss to Barbac,' said Morag piously.

‘Aye, right enough,' concurred Angy. ‘When are you buryin' him?' Angy fished from a mainland port and came home only at weekends so that he was not as well acquainted with Bruach affairs as were the rest.

‘Monday,' Erchy told him.

‘Hell, you're for keepin' him long enough,' Angy expostulated. ‘He'll be smellin' by Monday.'

‘What do you care?' demanded Tearlaich. ‘You won't have to carry him. You'll be away at sea again by then likely.'

‘Aye, thank God!' retaliated Angy. He lit a cigarette. ‘As a matter of fact we had a death on board our own boat today. That's why I'm in so early.'

‘Who was that?' asked Morag.

‘Ach, no one you'd be knowin'. It was a fellow that hasn't been with us for long.'

‘How did he die?'

‘He just collapsed,' Angy said. ‘The way of it was there was a big kick in the tides today an' we had to rush off down to the harbour for fear of missin' it. This fellow was keepin' up with the rest of us all right then as soon as we got aboard he just crumpled up an' died.' Angy seemed to enjoy the shocked expressions on our faces.

‘It would be his heart likely?' asked Janet.

‘Aye, I would think it couldn't be much else,' agreed Angy.

‘So you didn't get your day's fishin' after all your rushin',' observed Erchy.

‘Indeed we did,' Angy assured him. ‘An' a good day's fishin' it was too for all we were in early.'

‘You were lucky then,' Erchy told him. ‘I would think you'd be kept back with the doctor an' everybody wantin' to ask you what happened.'

‘Ach we didn't wait for all that,' said Angy.

‘You surely didn't take a dead man to sea with you?' challenged Janet in an outraged voice.

‘We did not then,' Angy told her. ‘What we did was wrap him up in a piece of tarpaulin we had aboard an' then four of us carried him up to the fish store between us.'

‘You put him in the fish store?' Anna Vic squeaked.

‘Aye, there was a slab there handy, you see. An' there was some of these labels they put on the fish boxes, so we just wrote on a couple of them an' stuck them on the tarpaulin.'

‘An' what did you say on the labels?' asked Erchy.

‘ “To be delivered”,' said Angy. ‘I believe that's what they usually say.'

‘Oh, hear!' whispered Janet.

‘You didn't even straighten the man out?' exclaimed Morag.

‘I tell you there was no time. We were near missin' the tide as it was.' Angy was entirely unabashed.

‘Whatever would the fish salesman say when he came to unwrap what he would think would be a good catch of fish an' finds a corpse just?' asked Anna Vic. Angy only shrugged. ‘An' what would they do with him supposin' they found him?'