The Loud Halo (20 page)

The men rallied round the cow and carried and pushed the poor emaciated creature down towards the bog. By the time they returned the missionary had reassumed an appropriately obsequial air and commenced to read the burial service.

‘I was wonderin',' said Janet hesitantly to Morag and me as we watched the men carrying away the coffin for burial, ‘Johnny bein' so fond of his flowers, would we pick them and put them on his grave?' As we approved her thought she suggested it to Kirsty who apparently agreed for a few moments later we saw them gathering armfuls of the blooms and then following the cortege down the road.

We walked home in the September sun, discussing the remarkable ‘dose' the missionary had prescribed.

‘I doubt the linseed oil alone will be enough to turn the beast inside out,' Morag predicted.

Early on Friday morning I began the rather tedious process of making rowan wine and was putting a great deal of energy into pulping the berries when Erchy arrived.

‘Come an' we'll get your cupboard while the tide's high,' he said. ‘It'll not be so far to carry it down the shore.'

On one of my beachcombing expeditions I had found washed up a very nice ship's locker which I thought would do very well for a cupboard in my kitchen. It was much too big and heavy for me to carry home alone so I had asked Erchy if he would come with me some time and we would get it home by boat.

We dragged the dinghy down the beach and while Erchy took the oars I huddled in the stern. The morning held the threat of rain over the grey water and the hills looked cold and snuffly with shreds of white cloud clinging about them, like discarded paper handkerchiefs. Erchy was uncommunicative and the boat nosed forward with only the squeak of the oars in the rowlocks and the splash of the blades on the water for an accompaniment. A few lethargic raindrops fell, pitting the slack surface of the sea like the enlarged pores in an old woman's face.

Erchy's eyes suddenly became focussed on the land. ‘That looks like Kirsty on the shore there,' he said. I twisted round on the thwart and espied a figure hurrying along the edge of the cliff and stopping every few minutes to peer at the shore. ‘I wonder what she's after,' Erchy mused.

‘I think she's beckoning us to go in,' I said. ‘Do you think she's all right?'

‘We'd best go in and see, anyway,' Erchy replied. He steered the boat towards the shore and Kirsty scrambled agilely down the cliff and came towards us. Erchy got out and held the dinghy, greeting her with taut interrogation.

I was struck by her woebegone expression and the muted urgency of her voice. Only once before had I seen Kirsty looking so thoroughly discomfited and that had been when Erchy, stung by some innuendo she had made, had boldly taunted her in front of several people that he ‘didn't believe she'd ever had a man up her skirts in her life'. Kirsty, utterly shamefaced, had admitted that she ‘didn't believe she ever had'. Now it seemed, as she had not looked much affected by Johnny's funeral yesterday, that something equally disconcerting had happened.

‘I've lost my cow,' she informed us in a stricken voice.

‘Ach, well you expected to. The missionary told you that yesterday,' retorted Erchy.

‘I don't mean that. I'm sayin' I can't find her anywhere.'

Both Erchy and I stared a her with extravagant surprises.

‘You cannot find her?' Erchy repeated.

‘I've looked everywhere an' I cannot find the beast. Come an' see for yourselves.'

We pulled the dinghy above the tide and followed Kirsty to the bog where the cow had been left the previous evening.

There was no sign of the beast.

‘My God! What's these?' ejaculated Erchy, bending down to peer at some hoof marks scored deep into the bog. He scratched his head bewilderedly.

‘It's as though somebody was after chasin' the beast,' suggested Kirsty.

‘Indeed, if that dose has worked her I doubt she'll think she had the devil himself chasin' her,' he vouchsafed.

Together we followed the hoof marks and they led us strangely enough towards the burial ground. I think even before we came in sight of it that Kirsty and I suspected what had happened.

‘Somebody's left the gate open,' Kirsty said, and there was dread in her voice.

‘Them damty flowers!' Erchy upbraided her. ‘I said yesterday it was a daft idea an' I say it more so now.'

We stood in the open gateway of the burial ground and looked towards Johnny's grave, a little apart from all the other crowded graves. The cow stood beside it, sublimely chewing her cud. There was no sign of the lupins but all round and completely covering the grave there were seas and seas of manure, and the smell was appalling.

‘Look at that, now,' said Erchy in an awestruck voice. ‘You cannot say she's stuck now, anyway.'

‘The defiler!' breathed Kirsty. ‘What will folks say of me when they see I've let my cow defile my own brother's grave?' She became almost human in her anguish. ‘What will the missionary say?'

‘Ach, if you say nothin' the rain'll get rid of the manure for you, but you'd best get the beast out of the way pretty quick,' Erchy advised. Kirsty ‘stood not upon the order of her going' and in a trice the cow was out of the burial ground and being driven up the road towards her byre.

Without a word Erchy closed the gate of the burial ground after us and we returned to the boat. When he had rowed a few strokes he rested on his oars. ‘That's the queerest dose ever I heard of to cure a sick beast,' he said, his voice full of wonder. ‘Man! But that must be a good cow doctor.' He resumed rowing again but his perplexed expression betrayed that he was still pondering the miracle of the cure.

By the time we reached home with the cupboard the rain was pouring unstintedly from a sagging grey sky. It continued over the weekend and on Monday morning Erchy, who had been doing some careful reconnoitring, reported that there was no longer any trace of manure to be seen at the burial ground. The village, if they noticed anything amiss, refrained from comment but the next time the missionary came out for a funeral he was heard impressing on Kirsty what a good man her brother must have been because the Lord had made the grass grow so much greener over and around his grave than anywhere else. He likened it to a ‘green halo'.

Now in case any interested farmer should read this account perhaps I ought to mention that Kirsty's cow lived for seven years after this event had taken place and during that time she produced four good calves.

As though it may have some significance, Erchy insists that I also mention that the missionary died within two years!

There was no sound of rain on the roof when I woke but the morning was damp and shot with chilliness, as though winter were already licking its chops. Blessedly the wind had dropped away to nothing so that, released from the necessity of physical combat with it when I went outside, I felt unburdened and relaxed. The cattle who had so long confined themselves to grazing the sheltered corries in the hills had moved upwards during the night so that they now stood elegantly silhouetted along the skyline, a sight which is locally believed to foretell a spell of fine weather. In a sheltered corner of my garden a few bedraggled plants that had waited so long for stillness opened their petals warily in response to the tremors of sunlight that managed to evade the glowering clouds.

I had planned a busy morning and was outside giving the kitchen mats a thorough beating and shaking when I became aware of the sound of voices and, slipping with typical Bruach curiosity to the end of the house, saw Morag, Yawn and Erchy, each carrying a sack and a pail and looking very workmanlike in their whelking clothes, coming down the path.

‘My, but you're starting the whelks early,' I called to them.

‘Aye, indeed. But they're sayin' there's a good price on them already,' returned Morag happily. ‘You should be leavin' that an' comin' with us.'

I detest picking whelks. ‘I'm going to do some washing while the rainwater tank is full,' I told them. ‘I've left it far too long as it is.'

Morag accepted my excuse without comment. Yawn treated me to a sardonic stare.

‘They're sayin' we're goin' to get the water at last,' rushed in Erchy consolingly, ‘so you'll be able to wash whenever you feel like it then.'

‘Are we really?' I demanded. ‘Is it really true?'

‘As true as I'm here,' declared Erchy with an air of misgiving. ‘Did you no' have the wee mannie round askin' for your signature on a paper?'

I had indeed had the ‘wee mannie' round but he had been almost gloatingly pessimistic as to the chance of the authorities piping water to my cottage in less than five years' time at least. The main obstacle, he had told me, was that the village was too scattered, thus making any scheme so far proposed too costly to be approved. Also, he had confided, not all the Bruachites considered piped water necessary, some of the more rigid Presbyterians maintaining that the Good Lord made the water to flow where He wanted it and therefore it was not right for Man to try to deflect its course, an attitude that I would have found too preposterous to believe had I not previously come up against it when the draining of a patch of boggy land had been proposed.

The ‘mannie' had suggested that it might be worth my while to install a ram pump at the well down by the shore and pipe water to the cottage from it.

‘I don't know if the supply would be adequate,' I had told him. ‘It's a very shallow little well.' Very obligingly he had come with me to inspect it.

‘I daresay the supply might be good enough if it was dug out a bit,' he suggested. ‘But wait, now, till I test it.' Full of enthusiasm he had hurried hack to his car, returning with a thin metal rod about four or five feet long with which he had proceeded to probe the depth of the well. It went down eventually to about two-thirds of its length.

‘Just as I thought,' he told me cheerfully. ‘You'd have plenty water there if you could get it dug out a bit more. It's just that it's all silted up with not being used for so long.'

I had been grateful for his encouragement and as we walked back to the car he had very kindly worked out for me the probable cost of the installation. ‘Of course, you'll understand mine's only a very rough estimate,' he had cautioned. ‘I don't really take anything to do with the water department at all. It's only that somebody's been badgering the council about getting the water here and seeing I was coming out this way they asked me to collect signatures.'

‘You're not from the water department then?' I had asked.

‘No, no. Water's not my job at all.'

‘Oh,' I said innocently, ‘I assumed that you carried that rod with you for testing the depth of the wells so that you could advise people as to their suitability for providing a piped supply.'

‘This rod? Oh, no indeed. This is a grave poker.' He wriggled it carefully into position across the seats of his car. ‘You know,' he explained chattily, oblivious to the tenseness of the moment, ‘there's a rule now that corpses must be buried four feet down. But they won't take any notice of it hereabouts if I don't go round all the burial grounds every so often and prod the graves to see how deep they've put them.'

‘A grave poker?' I echoed.

‘Yes, indeed.' He darted a suspicious glance at my face. ‘I suppose it sounds kind of funny to you, being a stranger.'

I agreed that it did.

‘Well, goodbye,' he said brightly, getting back into his car. ‘I'm very pleased to have been able to help you.'

Back in the kitchen I had fortified myself with a cup of tea—made from rainwater.

‘I don't believe they mean to give us the water at all,' said Morag, her voice full of scepticism. ‘We've been promised it now for twenty-five years that I know of an' there's still no sign of it. I doubt I'll never see it in my time, anyway.'

‘Damty sure you will,' replied Erchy with a surge of confidence.

Yawn still continued to stare at me with sardonic amusement but as the conversation seemed to have petered out and Morag and Erchy were starting to move away I began to shake some of the mud from my mats. Yawn still made no move to follow his companions, so I grinned at him fatuously, wishing he would say something or else go. A few more moments under his embarrassing scrutiny and I would be driven to asking him what was wrong. Suddenly he spoke.

‘I'm thinkin' you must be one of them arishtocrats.'

It was my turn to stare. Anything less like an aristocrat than I looked at that moment in my gumboots, soiled overall rubber gloves and with a muddy mat clutched in either hand I could not have imagined. ‘Why do you say that?' I asked in undisguised bewilderment.

‘'Tis only arishtocrats that wears rubber gloves to shake mats,' he admonished me. ‘Next thing we know you'll be takin' to cuttin' your peats with a knife and fork.' He permitted himself a short grunt of laughter. ‘I knew some people once from hereabouts and they went to live for a time in Edinburgh. When they came back here they was that arishtocratic they put on gloves to eat their salt herrin'.' Satisfied now that he had made his criticism, but still mumbling condemnation, he turned to follow the other two.

I continued with my chores, speculating again as to the financial possibility of having my own piped water supply but it was indeed futile speculation for I had already come to the decision that it would cost more than I could afford. I argued with myself that the energy used in carrying water could be so much more profitably spent in doing other things. I had learned to be frugal—water that had been used for my own toilet was then re-heated to wash towels, etc., and then tipped into a pail for washing floors. But it was not just the energy I grudged, it was the time it all took. I am not blessed with singlemindedness so that more often than not when I took up my pails and started to hurry to the well I would catch a glimpse of a strange bird, so that I had to freeze while I tried to identify it. Or, enchanted by the sight of greenfinches feeding on the seeds of the burdock plants that grew against the stone dykes, I would ignore the urgency of my task. Sometimes it was a new flower among the heather that caught my attention, or the particular shades and patterns of a mossy bank. Always there was so much wildness and beauty accompanying even the most mundane outside work and I could not bear to let myself pass it by.