A Rope--In Case (12 page)

‘We wish to have speech with your daughter,' he told her.

‘My daughter is not well,' replied the old woman. ‘She is in her bed.'

The doctor then stepped forward. ‘If she is not well then I am here to cure her,' he asserted and pushing his way into the room he stood beside the recess bed where, sure enough, they found the ex-sweetheart. When the doctor drew back the clothes to examine the girl they saw the wound—which was just like a bullet wound—in her right thigh.

Fiona finished telling her story and there were a few seconds of silence before the shuffling of feet, the sniffings and spittings and the changing of positions began. Janet threw a couple of peats on to the fire and turned down the lamp which had begun to smoke.

‘It was a strange thing the way that old witch could work,' said Hamish meditatively. ‘I mind my grandfather was the only one hereabouts that she couldn't put a spell on.' He looked around for confirmation. ‘She said so herself,' he added.

‘Aye, that's right enough. Your grandfather was never afraid of the woman, I mind that,' affirmed old Roddy, ‘Though I was never able to understand why.'

‘I know why,' announced Hamish mysteriously.

Everyone looked at him. ‘You do?'

‘Aye, He told my father an' my father told me how he was able to manage it.' He fished in his pocket for a cigarette, lit it, took one long puff and then nipped it out and replaced it in the packet. The grocer had run out of cigarettes and everyone was having to economise. The complete silence and attention encouraged him to go on with his story.

‘It was like this,' he told us. ‘Every mornin' my grandfather would read the bible for the family an' give hay to the cow before he finished lacin' up his boots. Not until he had done those two things would he pull up the laces an' tie the knot. In the evenin' it was the other way; then he'd see to the cow first, an' read the bible before he'd undo his laces. He never forgot to do it this way an' he never breathed a word to a soul that this was how he protected himself from the witch's spells. Not until she was dead an' he told my father did he mention it. But she knew all the same. He got a right scare when she said to him one day, “There'll come a time, Hamish Mor, when you'll forget about the lacings on your boots an' then will be my chance.” '

‘If he never spoke to anybody of the way he saved himself from her spells how did the witch come to know of it?' asked Janet.

Hamish turned on her. ‘That's just it, now. How would she know unless she was a witch and had been tryin' to harm him?'

‘Was she never in his house?'

‘Indeed, no.' The denials came in a chorus from the older folk who remembered Hamish's grandfather. ‘Your grandfather would as soon let in the devil himself as that woman.'

‘She was a witch all right,' Hamish asserted.

‘I'm damty sure she was,' corroborated Erchy.

It was at another ceilidh held in Janet's house that I heard Fiona again tell the story of the cat and the witch. This time the ceilidh had been an organized one in honour of a guest of Janet's who was anxious to collect stories of the islands. He was an earnest young man wearing spectacles that Morag said were ‘like the bottoms of glass bottles' and he sat with his legs crossed and a note pad on his bony knees. I do not know if he was too engrossed in the stories he heard to remember his note pad or whether it was there merely to impress the spectators but so far as I could see he made no single jotting during the whole evening.

When Fiona finished narrating the young man asked: ‘Surely it couldn't have been a policeman they were supposed to have gone to? After all, policemen haven't been policemen for all that length of time.'

‘Since my time an' before,' contradicted old Roddy indignantly.

‘Yes, but surely this story must go back a lot longer than you or your immediate forbears?'

‘Indeed no!' argued Roddy. ‘How can that be when the witch is alive herself to this day?'

The young man managed to catch his pad as it slid off his knee. ‘Alive today?' he repeated.

‘Aye.' Roddy was firm. ‘You mind it's not the old mother but the daughter that's alive an' she's well, though she's near ninety, I doubt.'

The young man had a very prominent Adam's apple and it travelled up and-down several times before he spoke again.

‘Where does she live?' he asked weakly.

Roddy told him. ‘She's walked with a stick ever since …' Roddy recollected himself, ‘ever since the accident to her leg,' he continued, ‘an' she doesn't pretend to be a witch any more but she's alive today an' that's as true as I'm here.'

‘An' she still has the wound in her right thigh, plain as I don't know what,' put in Hamish.

The young man looked no longer incredulous but eager.

‘Would I be able to see her?' he asked.

‘Surely,' they told him.

The next day the young man said good-bye to Janet and continued on his travels. The bus driver reported that he was asking more questions about the witch and had expressed his intention of loitering around her croft. The driver had suggested that he call on the old lady. She was, he assured the young man, quite harmless now and willing to admit she had once been a witch.

The last news we had of the young man was that he was in hospital. He had fallen somewhere, quite near the witch's croft it was said, and had injured his shoulder.

I could not help wondering if his injuries were the result of his going up to a strange woman and asking her to show him her right thigh.

Another intriguing story which I once heard at a ceilidh is worth recounting here because in a minor way I was involved in a sequel. It concerned an old shooting lodge which was situated in a lonely corrie some miles from Bruach and was supposed to have a haunted attic bedroom. In this lodge the river watchers stayed during the three months of the salmon fishing season but for the rest of the year it lay empty and unvisited. Though it was, it seemed, only the one bedroom that was haunted by a rather noisy ghost the watchers rejected all the rooms save the kitchen where they bunked together in front of a good bright fire. Only one man from Bruach had ever had the courage to sleep in the ghost's bedroom. This was old Finlay who told the story himself.

‘They said I would never do it,' he related. ‘But I knew so long as I had my bible with me I would come to no harm.' Finlay was an exceedingly devout man. ‘I got into bed an' I read from the good book, an' I made sure before I settled myself down that it was right to my hand the moment I woke up. I must have gone to sleep then till about two o'clock in the mornin' an' I woke up in the dark, knowin' that the door of the room had just opened. “Is that you, Neilac?” I called out, thinkin' at first he'd come across some poachers an' needed help. There was no answer. An' then I felt a heaviness on my feet at the bottom of the bed. It came up over my body slow an' heavy an' pressin' down. I could feel it was an evil thing the way it was affectin' me an' I was pantin' with the fear of it. Then I remembered my bible an' I picked it up an' held it tight in front of me. As soon as I did that the heaviness started to move away down again. Down an' away from the bed an' the room, till the door closed again.'

‘An' did you stay in the room?' Anna Vic asked in a hushed voice.

‘Aye, I did. An' I slept till the mornin' then.'

‘I would have been out of my bed an' the room an' away down to the kitchen in no time at all,' Hamish said with a laugh.

Finlay nodded understandingly. ‘Aye, but you have not my faith,' he said. ‘I knew so long as I held tight on to my bible the thing, whatever it was, would be overcome. An' it was overcome, an' that's the way of it.'

‘Would you ever sleep in that room again?' asked Erchy.

‘No, I would not,' replied Finlay.

Some two years after Finlay had died we heard that the shooting lodge had been let to a party of tourists. Hector took them and their luggage in his boat and as was expected of him reported afterwards on their eccentricities. Early the following morning I came across Erchy and Hector down at the shore hauling up their boat.

‘An early trip?' I commented.

‘It was the doctor,' supplied Hector.

‘An accident?' We were used to climbers failing in the hills.

‘No, no. It was at the lodge.' Hector seemed to be sulking, no doubt because taking a doctor was supposed to be an errand of mercy, and he liked his errands to be more remunerative. Erchy took up the explanation.

‘It was a man from that party of tourists Hector took over yesterday just. One of the men had a heart attack.'

‘Is he very ill?'

‘Aye, pretty bad, the doctor says.'

‘The foolishness of some people,' I said, ‘to go to an out-of-the-way place like the lodge when they're likely to be subject to heart attacks.'

‘That's what I said myself to the doctor,' replied Erchy. ‘He told me there was no sign of a bad heart. The man was perfectly fit.' There seemed to be some significance in the way he was looking at me and I suddenly recalled old Finlay's story.

‘Aye,' said Erchy, seeing my expression. ‘That was what I was after thinkin' myself, so I asked the doctor. It was quite right. The man was sleepin' in the haunted room an' it was just after two o'clock in the mornin' when they thought they heard a noise an' went to see if he was all right.'

The quiet November evening was pierced by the full-throated blare of the steamer's siren. I hastened to pull back the curtains and set a lamp in the window to indicate to the crew that someone was making preparations to meet them. While I drew on gumboots I searched the darkness for the port and starboard and masthead lights which should soon detach themselves from the star-studded night. The steamer was scheduled to call every six weeks bringing us bulk supplies from Glasgow but circumstances made her visits erratic. She might be delayed for days at some other port of call; the captain might be deterred by the weather conditions off the always inhospitable Bruach shore but round about the time the boat could be expected we had to be constantly vigilant. As soon as we heard the siren's warning of her approach it was necessary to indicate in some way our preparedness, otherwise the captain, seeing no sign of acknowledgment, would head straight out to sea again without pausing, leaving us to watch our much needed and long anticipated supplies being withheld for another six weeks or so. Sometimes our goods lay on the steamer for six months before we had an opportunity to collect them.

Down at the shore dinghies were already being launched amid a clatter of Gaelic and a scuffle of shingle; torches flashed over wet stones and dark seaweed; the rhythmic sound of oars in rowlocks receded as the boats drew away from the shore. There was no pier at Bruach where the steamer might come alongside and so she lay about a quarter of a mile offshore, her position marked by her lights and their spilled reflections. The waiting people ashore heard shouted instructions and exhortations from the steamer's crew coming with ringing clarity across the water. Lowering heavy goods like drums of tar, bolls of meal and weighty tea-chests over the side of the ship and down into the dinghies that clung alongside was hazardous enough in daylight. Darkness increased the risk of accident.

I leaned in the shelter of a boulder and relished the excitement which the arrival of the steamer always injected into the village, though rarely was anything but the most mundane of cargoes discharged. Townspeople might find it difficult to believe that such things as a tea-chest full of basic foodstuffs or a roll of wire-netting could cause any stirring of excitement but in Bruach life was stark and pared to necessities; luxuries were neither envisaged nor demanded. It was the arrival of necessities that gave us our thrills. We could be as excited over the delivery of our winter stores as a town housewife might be at the arrival of a longed-for suite of new furniture. Similarly the appearance of a new roll of wire-netting or a bundle of gleaming corrugated iron sheets in a village where sheds and fences were mostly contrived of driftwood and rusted wire was likely to cause as much interest and admiration as the appearance of the neighbour's sleek new car in a suburban street. Such admissions might suggest that life in Bruach was bleak and monotonous; it was not, but I found it unvarying to the extent that the most prosaic event could provide me with a disproportionate amount of pleasure. I have exalted over the delivery of a ton of shiny new coal, and experienced a flutter of exhilaration when the chemist substituted an unfamiliar brand of toothpaste in my quarterly parcel.

The steamer's engine spread the bay with noise; we heard the anchor go aboard to shouts of farewell. Her lights were lost again amongst the stars as she steamed out to sea. There was the sound of oars again and soon burdened boats were scraping on the shingle. By this time Janet and Morag had joined me and together we helped by holding the dinghies to save them bumping about too much while the men unloaded. The tide was coming in quickly and the sea surged and swirled round our feet in noisy white rushes that filled our boots before we could dodge away. The breeze was light but full of shivers and I kept one gloved hand on the gunwale of the boat while I tucked the other under an armpit. My shoulders were hunched with cold.

‘There's two tea-chests an' a roll of wire nettin' for you,' Erchy told me.

‘Aye,' I managed to acknowledge through chattering teeth.

‘Are you cold?' he demanded, astonished.

I nodded.

‘I'm sweatin' like I don't know what,' he confessed, and added, ‘Ach, you'll be warm enough yourself by the time you've got this lot up to your house.' He lifted two tea chests out of the dinghy and dumped them on the shingle above the tide. ‘I'll give you a lift with them on to your back when I've finished,' he promised and went back to continue unloading.