The Hills is Lonely (11 page)

‘Why, people must die and graves must be dug,' Morag interposed regretfully.

‘Why shouldn't we just burn them?' asked Angus.

‘D'you mean we should all be incriminated?' Morag's voice rose shrilly.

‘Aye indeed.'

‘Angus Mor Ruari! May the Good Lord forgive you for your words,' prayed Morag with infinite pathos. ‘I hope nobody will have the wickedness to incriminate me when I die, or I'll haunt them sure as I'm here.' With this threat she drew herself up stiffly. ‘Why,' she taunted them as she turned to go, ‘to incriminate anybody is as wicked as murderin' them.'

I followed her out of the graveyard, after one hasty glance over my shoulder which snowed me the target being replaced and the men preparing to take up their positions. Morag evidently saw it too, for she paused and shouted warningly: ‘Johnny! See and don't leave your great-grandfather lyin' around or the seagulls will have him for sure.'

The next day, which was cold and blustery, we gathered at the house on the shore to see Ian Mor on his last journey.

‘It'll be the minister himself to bury him,' said Morag; ‘the missionary is laid aside.'

‘He's dead d'you mean?' I asked.

‘No, no, he's just laid aside through illness.'

By the time we arrived the coffin had already been brought from the house and had been placed on two kitchen chairs in front of the door. I recognised in the black-clad, bowler-hatted undertaker my friend the taxi-driver. He was moving with solemn decorum among the cluster of mourners, shaking hands, muttering greetings, and, to judge from the expressions of some of the people, indulging in some pretty humorous wisecracking at the same time.

The minister, wearing a black overcoat and hat, a striking canary-yellow muffler and brown boots, arrived in due course and insisted upon shaking hands with everyone lengthily and boisterously. The preliminaries over, he took up his station behind the coffin, and the men, except for those not directly under the minister's eye, doused their cigarettes and bowed their heads reverently, though only the undertaker removed his hat. The women began to leak out of the house to congregate in a colourful knot in the doorway. They commenced to knuckle their eyes with hard, work-coarsened hands and to sigh and moan, faintly at first and then louder, but their grief, despite quite genuine tears, seemed almost mechanical. Their expressions remained alert and watchful; their eyes, darting here and there, missed nothing of what was going on. Shortly after the service had begun, two latecomers—young girls dressed in blatant reds and blues—came galloping up, their faces glowing with the exercise and excitement. Without ceremony they pushed their way through the crowd of men and insinuated themselves into the huddled group in the doorway. They turned to face the coffin and miraculously their faces had become composed into masks of condolence.

It was sometimes difficult to hear the words of the service above the rustle of wind in the trees, the plashing of waves on the shingle, the wailing of the women and the mocking chorus of the seagulls as they hovered and wheeled above us. There was a glut of herring in the loch and the presence of the seagulls caused much discomfiture to the mourners who, from time to time, lifted irreverent heads to glare with savage apprehension at the offenders. Imperturbably the minister droned on, though when he came to the words ‘and the years of our age are threescore and ten' I got the impression, both from his tone and his countenance, that he was feeling rather cross with Ian Mor for having cheated him out of a job for nine years.

The service over, the men began to form themselves into a long double line. The first six grasped the handles of the coffin and, with the nearest male relative of the deceased man to lead the coffin by a silken cord, the procession moved off at a leisured pace. The minister, after bidding everyone a cheerful farewell, jumped into his car, which, after a preliminary grumble of its engine, leaped forward impatiently to envelop the mourners in a cloud of smoke before it disappeared into the distance. Some of the women remained to comfort the bereaved relatives and to fortify themselves with cups of tea; others chose to follow the cortège at a discreet distance. Morag suggested that we should take a short cut to the burial ground and thus save ourselves the fatigue of following the winding road. This we did but though we were separated from the funeral procession by some distance it was not too far to disguise the fact that for such a procession it was decidedly hilarious. There was not, as I had been led to believe by some writers on the Highlands, anything in the nature of a quarrel or a fight at any time, either in progress or even brewing. On the contrary, joviality was the keynote of the day. The men, even those carrying the coffin, puffed unconcernedly at cigarettes and laughed and chatted as they walked; stopping at every telegraph pole to change bearers. At one time, when only a drystone wall was between us and the road, I heard one of the mourners call out: ‘Lachy Murdy says he's cold.' Instantly the reply came: ‘Let's take out the corpse and put Lachy Murdy in—he'll be warm enough in there I doubt.'

Loud laughter rippled along the line, Lachy Murdy himself laughing louder than anyone.

At the graveside there was no prayer or service whatever. The coffin was stripped of its ornaments by the undertaker and earth was thrown on top of it by any man who could find a spade. It was all done with as little ceremony as a dog inters a bone, and those not actively engaged in shovelling attended desultorily to the graves of their kinsmen, uprooting weeds and throwing them indifferently on to the surrounding graves. Old men, pipes in mouths, shambled among the tombstones, spitting recklessly.

As the earth shovelling progressed I heard Lachy call a halt and point towards the clump of bushes beside which I had stood the previous night. I glanced at Morag. Her eye was fixed steadily on Johnny whom we had observed to pause once or twice and to cast furtive glances about him. I wondered if he had mislaid his great-grandfather.

‘Let's go now,' I implored my landlady.

She turned a distasteful glance on the rest of the women who were hanging round the grave like voracious seagulls round a fish pier.

‘There, look at that!' she said. ‘Ian Mor was a bachelor and there's more women at his funeral than ever I seen before. Indeed,' she went on pointedly, ‘they've been chasin' him all his life and now they've chased him to his grave.' The promptness with which she agreed to my suggestion that we return home made it plain that she herself was not going to be accused of such forward behaviour.

That night both Lachy and Johnny were among those who dropped in at Morag's house to ceilidh. Naturally funerals were the main topic of the conversation.

‘Come, Morag.' said Lachy, pulling out a bottle of whisky from his pocket. ‘Give us some tots and we'll have a drink.'

‘What'll we drink to?' someone asked.

‘We'll drink to the hope that the rest of the people to die here from now on will have been ailin' for three months or so before they go.'

‘That's a terrible thing to wish for,' I ejaculated. ‘Surely you yourself would not care to be ill all that time?'

‘Indeed but I would,' retorted Lachy.

‘But why?' I asked.

‘Because I know fine how heavy folks are when they die suddenly,' said Lachy candidly. ‘It's no fair on the folks who have to carry when a corpse hasn't lost a bit of weight first. Just look at Ian Mor,' he continued, warming to his subject. ‘Seventeen stone that man was and ill less than a week. It's no right I'm tellin' you. It near killed some of us today the weight of him.'

‘That's right enough,' agreed Johnny fervently, and his words were echoed with approbation by every other man present.

‘You sounded as though you were being killed,' I said drily.

‘We ought to have a bier that can be drawn by a horse in this place,' said Lachy, ignoring my sarcasm.

‘A what?' demanded Ruari, a hand to his ear.

‘A bier—a horse bier,' vociferated Lachy.

‘There's no enough beer for the men in this place without givin' it to the horses indeed,' roared Ruari amid laughter.

Morag changed the subject. ‘Miss Peckwitt was tellin' me she was awful shocked that none of you men took off his hat when the service was on,' she told them, her lips quirking faintly.

Several pairs of astonished eyes were turned on me.

‘Take off our hats?' repeated Lachy foolishly. ‘Why now would we do that? Our heads were not hot!'

‘The undertaker took off his hat, I noticed,' put in someone.

‘Aye,' answered another, ‘tryin' to shame us folk into followin' suit so that we'd catch our death of cold and make plenty of work for him I doubt. Ach, but we're too wise here for that sort of caper.'

They were indeed too wise altogether.

‘If I'm spared,' remarked Morag one hazy morning in early spring, ‘I'll be after puttin' the stirk to the sale on Friday. Will you be comin' with me?'

‘I will,' I replied promptly as I spooned thick yellow cream on to my steaming porridge. ‘But where is the sale and how do we get there?'

Morag poured out two cups of tea from the pot and taking one for herself sat down on the edge of the sofa.

‘The cattle float will be takin' him on Thursday evenin',' she explained, ‘and we'll folly by bus on Friday mornin'.'

I was infinitely relieved that the few shreds of dignity I had managed to retain were sufficient to prevent there being any suggestion that I might occupy a spare stall in the cattle float.

‘But I thought you had only one stirk and surely you said that was a female?' I said.

‘So I did,' elucidated Morag, ‘and so he will be when she's older you understand?'

I nodded wisely, accepting the fact that it was not nature but the Gaelic language which was responsible for the beast's being temporarily an hermaphrodite.

‘You'll need good boots to your feets and a good stick to your hand,' warned my landlady seriously. ‘Why, there's some of them beasts that wild, they'd be ridin' you round the ring on their horns for nothin' at all.'

I put down my cup and stared at Morag. The sight of the most placidly grazing cow had always been sufficient to fill me with trepidation; the prospect of horn riding I viewed with complete terror.

‘Then count me out,' I said decisively. ‘I've neither the figure nor the inclination to become a toreador.'

‘Ach, you can always stay out of the field if you've a mind,' cajoled Morag, who loathed going anywhere at all without a companion.

I relented, though not without misgivings, but stressed most emphatically that I had a mind.

‘In that case,' went on my landlady nimbly, ‘will you 'phone for me from the new kosk to tell the cattle float to come.'

Morag claimed to be ‘feart to death' of the 'phone, so, after giving a hand with the breakfast dishes, I went up the road towards the post office beside which stood the new telephone kiosk. This was a very recent arrival in Bruach and its installation had naturally excited a good deal of interest. Almost immediately it had become a popular evening rendezvous for the youth of the neighbourhood and, within a few days, or even hours, countless people were to be observed busily popping in and out, lifting the receiver, dialling numbers and indulging in prolonged and apparently cordial conversations with unseen friends; all regardless of the fact that the 'phone was as yet connected to nothing more responsive than the outside of the post office wall.

Though on arrival the kiosk had been an unimpressive pink, Lachy, who was by way of being the village odd job man, had soon transformed its pallidness into a vivid and arresting red. It was perhaps regrettable that for such odd jobs as Lachy deigned to undertake he would accept no payment but whisky; and as he always insisted on drinking the wages before commencing the work the results of his labours were frequently somewhat startling. On this occasion Lachy excelled himself, and even Bruach had been astonished when, next morning, unsuspecting crofters opened pillar-box red doors to discover striped sheep, cows with fiery horns and hens that looked as though they had been crossed with flamingoes. Lachy had succeeded in ‘painting the town red' with a vengeance. But though Bruach was surprised, it was in no way dismayed. The escapade was dismissed with a philosophical shrug of the shoulders, sometimes with a smile, and in nearly every case it was left to the weather to remove, or at least modify, the damage. Only two of the villagers showed distinct signs of wrath. One was Kirsty, the gaunt and prim-mouthed spinster of ‘Beach Terrace', who had had the misfortune to leave a pair of combinations and a chaste white nightgown hanging on the clothes line overnight, with disastrous results.

‘When I came to gather them in, Miss Peckwitt,' she told me, with tears of indignation in her eyes, ‘I fell down on my knees on the grass, for I thought the Lord Himself had struck at me for wearin' such fancy underwear.'

The other was the over-sized, over-aged schoolmistress who was seen the next morning in full pursuit of the miscreant, furiously pelting him with threats, with insults, and with cauliflowers from her carefully tended garden—cauliflowers which had overnight exchanged their blonde heads for red ones.

As to the success of the actual ‘odd job', one could perhaps best judge from the following notice which appeared a day or two later in the window of the post office:

WANTED: Boy
under sixteen
to scrape paint off glass in kiosk

It was some weeks now since everything had been made ship-shape and Bruach had been connected with the outside world. To all but the excessively righteous it was a welcome link, and though the latter professed to regard it as an implement of the Devil their condemnation did not extend to their being rung up by friends.