She was not only silent, but strange. Yet I found it pleasanter to be with her than in jollier homes where there was always the likelihood of tedious talk, likening one’s face to this and that past member of the family. Oonagh did not tease me with talk at all. In friendly silence we worked together, or rested; for sometimes she would fetch me out a glass of milk and a hunk of oatcake, and would herself sit down, her legs in the dark skirt spread comfortably upon the grass. She might hum to herself, or sing, more often in Gaelic but sometimes in English learnt at school. One song was a ballad of great length the chorus of which I picked up:
‘I wish I were,
But I wish in vain,
I wish I were
A young lass again.
But such a thing
Can never be
Till an Aipple grows
On an Oarange tree.’
Other times she might bring out of her pocket a clay pipe, and light up and puff away as good as any man.
One day, as I was making my way to Oonagh’s, I heard a creaking sound, as of wheels on a rough rocky road. It was Oonagh going up on the high moor to turn her peats. And the sound was like a fairy pipe to me. I longed to be up on the heights in the sea of heather. Maybe too I should find those exotic pink-spotted flowers. The cart had got a start on me, yet it was going slowly, the pony straining with the effort of pulling, Oonagh walking beside.
I took short cuts and made up on them. I called a greeting to Oonagh, who said nothing in reply but looked as if she were not averse to my presence. She was smoking her clay pipe, curls of grey smoke floating backwards in the wind. We plodded uphill behind the pony, who kept nodding his head, poor thing, as if endorsing our unspoken complaints about the steepness of our way. At last we gained the peat moor, and Oonagh got busy turning, puffing the while at her pipe, saying nothing.
I for my part was content; there was so much to see. Among the heather grew blaeberry bushes with their vivid green, and staghorn moss paved that hidden world which is inhabited by lizards and beetles. But I found no flowers. And after a while I came back to Oonagh where she was turning the wet sides of the peat to the wind. The wind had teased out strands of her grey-gold hair, and she squinted against sun and smoke. An old woman, with little power to amuse. I began to think it was time for getting home.
But Oonagh took her pipe out of her mouth and said, ‘Sheep.’ I gathered she was uneasy about their whereabouts and wanted to scan the hill grazing ground. We left the pony patiently switching from his flanks the flies that settled whenever the wind dropped. We went around a hillock. I gasped with delight.
There lay a lochan, sleek, still, its dark surface sprinkled around the rim with water lilies of purest white. As fast as I could through the deep heather, I made my way to it, and threw myself down on my stomach, stretching out a greedy hand for the nearest of the exquisite flowers. I secured one, but it had a long rubbery stem which seemed endless asitcame up out of the water. I broke off the flower head. But so far from feeling satisfied,
turn her peats, peats are stacked to dry before they are used for fuel. They
have to be turned during the drying process.
lochan, small loch.
I felt greedier than ever and reached out further for another flower. It was beyond my reach. I called to Oonagh, who had come back but made no effort to assist me, begging her to see if her longer arm could secure it.
I remember she came slowly, as if weighted down by her long heavy skirt and heavy boots, then got down awkwardly beside me. The wind had dropped for a moment. It was so still that reflections appeared in the water as if in a glass; the dark shape of the hillock; the clouds patterning the blue of the sky; a wild duck flying up to meet its counterpart flying down. Close to the brink our two reflections appeared. Then a small breeze came, and wrinkled the surface. The images were gone. Oonagh put out her arm. Her brown fingers closed below a flower and she pulled at it, dragging the stem like a discovered thing up and out. Another and another she procured, six or seven, cheerful and humming, her pipe laid down by her side.
I was about to say I had enough, and restrain Oonagh from further effort, when I found there was no need. The wind had dropped once more. The surface of the lochan was smooth, with images appearing on it again. Now Oonagh was bending so low her face almost met the water, shading her eyes with a hand spread on either side.
‘What is it, Oonagh?’ I asked. ‘What are you looking at? Are there fish?’
‘Aye are there fish!’ She turned her head over her shoulder to address me. Her wrinkled sunburnt face wore a radiant smile. ‘Put you your head down low and keep looking, m’eudail, and you will be seeing them. Grey like silver they are, leaping this way and that. Then suddenly they will leave the water and fly through the air.’
‘How can fish leave the water? They would die.’
She said ‘Tst!’ impatiently, and turned from me to gaze into the water again. I felt I was missing something and followed her example, bending down so low I smelt the heavy smell of water thick with weeds.
She was staring in, rapt, like a clairvoyant.
‘What are you seeing now?’ I pestered her.
She pointed. ‘See, see! See the palm trees moving.’ I could see the stems of the water lilies swaying to some little depth, the currents moving them.
‘That’s not –’ Something stopped the words on my tongue, the realization of the absurdity of it: how could palm trees grow in this cold windy place? I looked closely at Oonagh to see if she were joking at my expense. I took it upon myself to say, ‘See will you fall in!’
She cried sharply, ‘Bith sochd!’ – Be quiet! Her pointing finger moved like a magician’s over the still water. ‘Look now, what bonnie! A lily pool, it is lined with white stone, and a fountain in the middle of it, and the fishes are golden – look at them jinking this way and that between the flowers. White the flowers are, as sheets laid –’ If I had a question, I could not ask it, for something froze the words upon my lips. ‘See yon! There it is, the house itself. It’s coming. Look at that now!’ She turned her face towards me, smiling but with eyes unfocused, then turned to the water again. Her voice was so low it was all I could do to catch what she said.
What house? What house? I had heard – who has not? – of houses, villages overwhelmed by water, but away up here on the moor who had at any time built houses? And how could a little lochan cover them?
She put a hand on my back and pressed me down. ‘Here, look down here. Can you not see the house? It’s down there, deep, deep in. The white pillars and the steps and the roof with a shine on it. That’s the stars, m’eudail, bonnie stars they have there.’
I would have liked to ask her to let us leave the lochan and be going home. Indeed, I rose up on my knees, but she was talking still, chuckling to herself. ‘Aye there’s them! There’s the dark men, it’s coming this time, the dark men with the bright clothes on them.’
I felt a longing for home keener than my past longing for water lilies. The game, if game it was, was over for me. I should never be able to see more in the lochan than lily stems and the reflections of hill and cloud and our own faces. There, clear in the water, I saw Oonagh’s face, and was startled out of my senses; for the face in the water was young, the curve of cheek and chin like a girl’s. I looked in astonishment from the reflected to the real face and found it was indeed bright, youthful, transfigured with joy.
She was chanting to herself in an ecstasy, ‘When it is quiet he will come, himself will come. Out from between the pillars of his house, into my arms.’ Here ecstasy melted into tears, and she cried with both smiles and tears, ‘Tha m’ulaidh ort! Tha m’ulaidh!’ – I love you! I love you!
I cried out to her in fear, ‘Oonagh!’ And just as I spoke, a stiff breeze came. It ruffled the water from middle to brink. The still mirror was gone.
She jumped up and looked round at me in intense anger. Her face, old and brown, menaced me. Then, as if passing through a double enchantment,
she was quiet and serene again, familiar, friendly, my companion of the summer.
She said, sighing, ‘Aye, aye, just so. It is always the way. He willna stay for long. There’s aye a something. But when it is his time, he will come and stay.’ She looked down at her knees where the damp peaty earth had stained her dark skirt, and stooped and picked up her clay pipe and stuck it between her lips. She took it out once to ask me, ‘What were we doing at the lochan?’ But I was the silent one. I left my lilies behind, and walked with dragging steps after the cart and pony.
I was late home that evening. My mother was helping my grandmother at her churning. She called to me. Where had I been? My grandfather had come home without me.
I said I had been talking to Oonagh. Then, in a sudden longing to be reassured, I told the whole of it; about the lochan and how she had stared down into its depths and spoken of things she could see. My mother cried out, then stopped short with a hand at her mouth. It was left to my grandmother to speak. ‘You must not go far from the place with Oonagh. It is not safe. Your grandfather should have warned you.’
‘Why?’ I cried, angry at the hint of blame.
My mother had regained control over herself. ‘There is nothing against her, Ellen. Nothing at all. She is a good woman. For all they do not like her in their houses at such times as churning, she is respected. She has never done harm to a living. She is even mindful of the means of grace’ – by which she meant she was a churchgoer – ‘All the same, you will do well to keep away from her when she goes near water.’ She made a signal to my grandmother.
But my grandmother did not see it or did not heed. ‘She fell in love with the lochan itself, they say.’ She paused maddeningly, took off the wooden lid and pulled the plunger up, a weird mass of horsehair and cream, and tested for butter forming. ‘Some say the eachd uisge has put a spell upon her.’
My mother cried out along with me in remonstrance. My grandmother at last saw what was required of her and said nothing more, but began to churn mightily, singing a Psalm to swallow up any inauspicious influence and make the butter come firm and sweet.
My mother came to me when I was in bed. ‘About the eachd uisge; you must not be afraid. There is no such thing. Your father, at any rate, would not approve of it. And about her being in love with the lochan; that is all nonsense, for she had a human lover. That is to say, there was a man she loved.’ Her blue eyes grew thoughtful. The story hid within them. I lay still in my bed, listening with an eagerness near to apprehension. Yet it was like a story told already, I needed only the details.
It was some childish disappointment – my mother thought that Oonagh’s new dress, such a rare possession, had been usurped by a sister – which made her run away over the moors to the lochan to hide her tears there. By its brink she should have been alone, but she began to hear the small clatter of oars in rowlocks. Curiosity drew her. It was not Jock from Corrie, nor Lachlan from Reneudin: it was a stranger. When he saw that she was weeping, however, he pulled in to the shore. ‘Why are you weeping?’ he asked in Gaelic, that tender language; and in the same tongue she answered him, ‘For nothing at all.’ For suddenly it seemed as nothing. When he put a kindly hand to her head,
straightening the snood ribbon, a feeling she had never known swept all through her, swept over him too.
Often after that, so ran my mother’s whispered tale in the darkening room, they met at the lochan. He had come for a holiday to Glen Urquhart, for the fishing. He would take his boat out and sit with dipped oars, while she knelt at the boat’s rim trying to see his image in the water, too shy still to look directly at him. Later they would lie by the brink. What passed between them my mother did not say, nor would I have known.
Summer was nearly over when he told her what surely she must have known all the time. He was going away, and not to the town, not even to Aberdeen or to Glasgow; over the unimaginable seas to a foreign land. Seeing her face, he avowed, ‘I will not forget you. One day when I have got rich I will come back and we will be always together.’ She saw his image there in the water as he said it; saw it plainly in the still water, for all time, forever. Then a breeze came and it was gone.
I could picture Oonagh as winter set in, snow on the far mountains, a bitter wind searing the nearer hills. In the cold of the morning she would crouch at the hearth, relighting the fire, clinging to her dreams, unwilling to leave them for the long vacuous day. But she was not forgotten, my mother said. Letters, a great novelty, came from foreign parts. Many people would have liked to examine them, but she would snatch them and run away with them over the moor to the lochan. It was in her light step and her singing that the contents of the letters could be guessed at. But sometimes she talked of the marvels of life abroad. So fantastic it seemed that people laughed as if at a jest.
Then after a while – did I not know? – the letters stopped coming. Months went by, seasons went by, and years. I pictured them in the mutations of the rowan tree: its young leaves; its pale blossom; its berries going from green to orange to red; then the tree bare again. But the reality was toil, long toil, hard toil, many reverses, little to eat. Years went by; father and mother dying; sisters marrying and settling in other homes; Oonagh left where
she was. Even if she had had the inclination to look into the small dim mirror in the house she had little time. Only in the coming of young men about the place might she have known she was comely to look at. They had brought gifts, as wooers; but never could she give answering love, and by and by they had grown discouraged – who could blame them? – and had found other girls as beautiful and not so strange. For she had strange ways. She would leave tasks in the midst and run off over the moors to the lochan. She began to say she had a lover, a husband, a home in its depths.
At last only one brother remained, and a hard life he had of it trying to keep the croft with her fitful aid. He took a dislike to the place. He had a sweetheart whose family moved to the east, where farming was more rewarding. He could go there, and take his sister with him.
But when he told her of the plan, Oonagh would not hear of leaving. How could she leave her home, the trysting place, where alone she had hope of being with her lover? And perhaps in his heart her brother was not sorry to escape.
‘She has lived ever since, as you see, alone.’ My mother rose to go, but I held her back.
‘He never came again then, her lover?’
She paused, as if reluctant to continue the story, but at last she said, ‘Yes, he did come. That was the funny thing, he did come back to her.’ One day a carriage and pair was observed coming up the Brae, along the main road past Druim, to Loch Laide. It stopped where some men were working at the side of the road. A gentleman got out, dressed I suppose in old-world style, twin gold chains reposing on his stomach, one for his watch, one for his sovereign case. To the surprise of the men he put his question in Gaelic. ‘Was there a family living yet in the moorland croft behind the Leitir? And a girl called Oonagh, was she married yet?’ The older among them knew who he was then, and I have no doubt they left the ditch uncleared to go and spread the news. The time was come at last. That poor solitary woman, whom some shunned as unlucky because lovelorn, would get her due reward at last. There was no mistaking the eagerness on the stranger’s face.
I cried out, ‘Then why – ?’
My mother seemed to shiver. He returned in less than an hour. This time he did not speak, but went away as fast as he could. The account of their meeting came from a child who, curious, ran over the heather and got near enough to witness the manner of it. Oonagh came to the door to receive her caller, then stopped short at seeing a stranger. He held his hands out. ‘Do you not remember me? I have come back as I said I would.’ She stared at him bewildered, making no move towards him, no sign of recognition. ‘I have never loved anyone as I could have loved you. I am home now. I will make up to you for all the years I have left you forsaken.’
‘Then why? Did he not live long after coming?’
‘He lived all right. He is still alive, alive and prospering. He is in business in the town. It was Oonagh who would not… It was as if she had never seen him before. She would not let him touch her. She said the only man she loved was in the lochan. I tell you only what you know.
‘From that the story has grown that she is in love with the spirit of the lochan, or even that the eachd uisge, about which your father will tell you there is no such thing, has put a spell upon her. It is only now and again the idea takes hold of her. She is quiet and has done no one any harm. All the same, Ellen, if you go to her place you must not go out on the moors with her.’
I needed no forbidding. I was a timid child. I doubt if I went to the tiny croft ever again. And she never asked me. Whenever we met, at school-house service or on the Druim road, she would smile from her wrinkled sunburnt face, if she were not contentedly puffing at her clay pipe. That was all.
But sometimes, when I heard the creaking sound of a cart upon a rocky road, I would be visited by a perverse longing to go with her again to her lochan and see that ecstasy I might not share.
PART SIX:
ENVOY
WHY EVERYONE SHOULD BE ABLE TO TELL A STORY
John Lorne Campbell
Once there was an Uistman who was travelling home, at the time when the passage wasn’t as easy as it is today. In those days travellers used to come by the Isle of Skye, crossing the sea from Dunvegan to Lochmaddy. This man had been away working at the harvest on the mainland. He was walking through Skye on his way home, and at nightfall he came to a house, and thought he would stay there till morning, as he had a long way to go. He went in, and I’m sure he was made welcome by the man of the house, who asked him if he had any tales or stories. The Uistman replied that he had never known any.
Scottish Folk and Fairy Tales from Burns to Buchan (Penguin Classics) Page 20
