The dawn was threading itself between the peaks of the mainland hills before the bus eventually stopped at the post office where the mail was to be delivered. Katac bundled her gumboots and souwester inside her oilskin and asked Hamish to look after them until she returned with the bus that evening.
‘Do you think you may be needin’ them before the day is out?’ he asked her with mock concern since he knew that away from their own small territory no respectable islander would care to be seen in such attire no matter what the weather.
‘Indeed no.’ There was a trace of indignation in Katac’s chuckle. ‘I wore those to save my own clothes comin’ over in the boat just,’ she told him. She jumped down.
‘Aye, well now see an’ don’t be missin’ the bus back now,’ teased Hamish.
‘I’ll mind,’ she laughed back at him, knowing that having brought her in on the bus unless he received a message to the contrary he would delay his return until she did come.
Down at the pier Katac made her way over the sloping, weed-slimy jetty to the waiting ferry boat. Already the sea was spread with light though the land was still grey with the gloom of a laggard dawn through which the craggy hills reflected the polish of the night’s rain. The crossing was lumpy; the sea sluicing over the bow every time the boat ploughed into a wave and Katac was glad when at last the ferry bumped and grated against the mainland slip. There was another weed-slimy slip to negotiate before she found herself with her two feet firmly on the tarmac of the road. Two minutes’ walk and she was in what always appeared to Katac as a city with its twelve shops, its railway station and its fish pier. It was, she soon realized, a sale day and there seemed to be people everywhere, mostly crofters and shepherds who had come in to buy animals or to sell them and who stood meanwhile in little groups beside the road, talking and arguing while their lean, watchful dogs crouched at their heels.
Katac stood for a few minutes looking at the sparse display in the window of the chemist’s shop and when she felt calm enough to go inside she made her purchases. Louse powder for the cattle; horse drench; foot rot ointment for the sheep and indigestion powder for her father. At the Marine store she got coir yarn for tying the haystacks; a new calf pail; a netting needle for her Uncle Padruig and a pair of rowlocks for her father’s dinghy. Next she called at the bakery where she bought a bag of fresh cookies and some of the teabread her mother so much liked. Finally at the General Store after she had purchased needles and pins and writing paper and envelopes and all the other odds and ends which never seemed important until you ran out of them her shopping list was complete. Complete except for the most important item of them all, her new boots which she had purposely left until last.
The lazy bell clanged noisily as she opened and shut the door of the little dark shop which smelled so strongly of new leather, Donald’s pipe and Donald’s dinner. There came a shuffling noise and Old Donald himself appeared from a doorway at the back of the shop. He peered at her for a moment or two and then, ‘Why, Katac! It’s yourself!’ he exclaimed. (Old Donald was past eighty, knew everybody and never took long to recognize a face.) ‘Come away in, lassie.’ As he shook her hand he called over his shoulder towards the doorway from which he had emerged. ‘Bella, see an’ get a wee strupak now for Katac Mackenzie that’s here.’ Turning to Katac again he asked, ‘Are ye alone the day, lassie?’ Concealing her pride Katac admitted she was. ‘My! My!’ he said, ‘it’s growing up fast you are then.’ He led her through into a room where a bright coal fire was piled high in the polished range and Bella, Donald’s middle-aged daughter was brewing tea. Bella greeted her and setting a chair near the fire told Katac to warm herself. She handed her a cup of steaming tea and on the hob beside her set a plate of cheese sandwiches and another plate of cookies spread with jam. Katac suddenly realized she was hungry and shyly stretching out her hand she helped herself to a sandwich.
Now that the moment had come she felt too shy to mention her new boots and except for replying to Donald’s enquiries about her family and the happenings on the island she ate in silence, wishing all the time that Donald would mention the subject of her boots. But he seemed to have forgotten them and when she had drunk two cups of tea and eaten more than half of the sandwiches and cookies he still had not mentioned the reason for her visit. She tried to conceal her mounting dismay as she sat politely while Bella took over the conversation and Donald puffed at his pipe, nodded occasional agreement and spat regularly into the fire. Twice the shop bell clanged and Donald went to answer it. Each time she hoped he would bring her boots when he returned but no! Each time he returned empty handed. Katac was on tenterhooks. Had he forgotten sending the postcard saying her boots had arrived? Or worse, had he in the meantime sold them to someone else? She looked at the clock. Soon she would have to leave to catch the ferry and yet old Donald was just sitting calmly smoking his pipe as if there was all day still to do business. She began to despair. Dare she ask him? she wondered and if she dared how would she phrase the question obliquely enough to save them both embarrassment if the boots had already been sold to someone else? At last with only half an hour to go before the ferry left she stood up. ‘I’d best be on my way,’ she announced.
Donald looked at the clock. ‘Aye,’ he agreed. The ferry will no be long waitin’.’
Trying to summon up courage to ask about the boots Katac picked up her bag and pretended to re-arrange her parcels. Suddenly Donald sat up and knocking out his pipe emphatically against the bars of the grate said, ‘You’ll be wantin’ your boots, Katac?’
She felt her heart miss a beat. The old bodach, she thought. He has just been teasing me all the time.
‘Aye,’ she answered casually, as though she too had only just remembered them. ‘Aye, I may as well take them if you have them.’ She thought her voice sounded tight and hoped neither Bella nor Donald would notice.
‘Didn’t I say in the postcard I had them here waitin’ on you?’ said Donald testily. ‘Sit ye down, lassie, till I get them.’ He went off muttering into the shop and a minute later returned with a boot box which he dumped on the table as if it contained something distasteful to him. Fearful of appearing too eager Katac did not stir for a moment and then, leaning forward, she slid the box across the table towards her. She lifted the lid and folded back a layer of tissue. She caught her breath. The boots were just as she imagined they would be; black and shiny and with lovely pointed toes. Her hill boots always had round stumpy toes which began to turn up after she had worn them a few times. ‘What else can you expect?’ her father had retorted when she had pointed it out to him. ‘You’re always after goin’ uphill in this place an’ surely the toes of your boots will turn up.’ Gently Katac lifted the boots from the box; she counted the buttons – eleven on each. Wonderful, she thought. Her mother’s best boots had only ten buttons. She wanted to hug them to her but aware that Bella and Donald were watching her she examined the boots critically and allowed her exultation to show only in a small smile of approval. ‘They’re nice,’ she permitted herself to say. Nice indeed! she thought, they’re beautiful just!
‘Best try them on,’ suggested Bella practically. Katac slipped off her hill boots. Thank goodness she had managed to keep her stockings dry, she reflected as she drew on the new boots. ‘They fit fine,’ she pronounced.
‘Not too tight any place?’ questioned Bella.
Katac shook her head. Indeed her toes did feel a wee bitty cramped but she was sure it was only because of the accustomed roominess of her hill boots. ‘No,’ she insisted firmly, ‘they’re not too tight at all.’ They could have crippled her but she would not have gone away without them now. She slipped them off and put on her hill boots which looked even more clumsy and unsightly than they had before. ‘I’ll take them,’ she told Donald, putting the new boots carefully back into their box.
Donald removed his pipe from his mouth. ‘What will you be doin’ with boots such as those, lassie?’ he demanded scornfully. ‘Can ye climb hills and chase after cat
tle in such things?’ he went on. ‘Tell me now what is a lassie like you to do with yon?’ He pointed the stem of his pipe at the boot box.
Katac smiled and without comment handed him a note from her purse. He took it and still muttering about the unsuitability of the boots he went into the shop and returned with some change. Carefully Katac tucked the boot box at the bottom of her shopping bag and covered it with parcels which would take no harm from a bit of wetting. She thanked Bella for the tea and said goodbye to Old Donald, promising to remember them both to her parents and also to tell her father that Donald had in stock his favourite make of cleated boots.
‘You were not forgettin’ to come back, then?’ Hamish hailed her as he saw her approaching the bus. She climbed in beside him and grinned. ‘Did you do all your shopping?’ he asked.
‘Every bit of it,’ she told him, indicating her fall shopping bags.
On the return trip they collected two male passengers from the hotel where they had been partaking freely of the ‘water of life’ and for a while the lorry resounded to their vociferous rendering of ‘Hello, Patsy Fagan’, the two men vying with each other in holding the higher notes but when the first bend in the road abruptly decanted them and the benches on to the pile of mailbags their singing dissolved into a wail of good humoured protest which was itself soon followed by complete silence. Hamish, after stopping the lorry to investigate, reported that they had fallen asleep on the mattress of mailbags.
There were just as many stops on the homeward journey as there had been in the morning but now they were for the depositing of mail in the little pillar boxes. The two merry makers were wakened and put off the bus at their respective gates and a long blast on the horn together with a shout from Hamish ensured that someone would see they reached home safely.
Back home, Katac’s mother was waiting at the landing place, a hurricane lantern swinging from her hand. She picked up the bag and with a ‘goodnight’ to Angus Mhor they went into the cottage. Katac set out her purchases while her mother nodded approval. The new boots she unpacked last of all.
‘You’d best get them out of the way before your father sees them just,’ her mother said when she saw the box.
Katac nodded. Her father had agreed to her having a pair of light boots but it would not deter him from expressing his scorn when he saw them. She held up the boots for her mother to see and in the lamp light she thought they shone like silk. Her mother’s eyes widened and she smiled admiringly as she too counted the buttons. She weighed the boots in her hands. ‘My, but they’re beautiful just,’ she murmured. She handed them back to Katac. ‘Beautiful just,’ she repeated. Katac was satisfied. Her father would grumble but then she would make sure he did not see the boots until she was wearing them and by then it would be too late to return them.
That night she went to bed rather earlier than usual, since not only was she tired after the excitement of her day but she wanted to be alone to admire her boots without being observed. She placed them on top of the clothes chest so she could see them easily from her bed and when she had undressed and said her prayers she lay in her bed watching the flickering candlelight play on her boots. She saw herself taking her place in church the following Sunday and pictured the admiring glances, the other girls most of whom would be wearing heavy hill boots. Just as she was about to dout the candle a disturbing thought struck her. What if it should be raining so heavily on Sunday that the path to the church was little more than a bog? Birthday present or not she knew in that case she would not be allowed to wear her new boots. The thought was unbearable. Surely it wouldn’t rain on Sunday? Surely it couldn’t rain and spoil what was to be her special day? She took a deep resolute breath and slipping out of bed she went down on her knees and said a little guiltily, a little defiantly, since she had been taught that one does not ask God for personal favours, ‘Dear God,’ she prayed, ‘please, please make it a nice day on Sunday. I do want to wear my shiny boots.’
A Gun for Sale
The hen that had been sitting on a clutch of eggs for the past three weeks had succeeded in hatching out only three chicks one of which was such a weakling it seemed unlikely to survive.
‘An’ the other two are cockerels, I doubt,’ said Erchy with ill-concealed satisfaction.
‘I don’t seem to have much success with chick rearing,’ I lamented. ‘I can’t think what I do wrong.’
Erchy looked at me curiously. ‘It’s more like the cockerel that does wrong,’ he quipped.
‘Ach, ‘tis maybe nothin’ to do with you at all,’ comforted Morag. ‘I mind myself at times havin’ trouble with clockin’ hens. They’re like as though they don’t care sometimes whether or no any chicks comes out of the eggs so long as they get a good sit first.’
‘Did you keep her quiet while she was clockin’?’ probed Erchy. I nodded. ‘An’ she didn’t go leavin’ them to get cold?’
‘I’m sure she didn’t,’ I told him.
He shook his head. ‘Ach, then I don’t know what’s the matter with them,’ he said and turned his attention to the netting needle which he was dexterously threading in and out through the mesh of a net which looked too dry ever to have seen the sea.
‘An’ are you sure the cockerel was with the hens before you put down the eggs?’ asked Morag.
‘Of course he was,’ I replied. ‘He’s always with them.’
‘You’d best not be too sure about that,’ she warned. ‘I mind havin’ two sittin’s of eggs wasted one after the other an’ what did I find was at the back of it but the cockerel had gone off into a sulk because of our own Hector.’
‘Because of Hector?’ I repeated, biting back a smile.
‘Indeed it was so,’ she replied with complete seriousness. ‘Hector was mendin’ a net at the time the way Erchy is doin’ now an’ I don’t rightly know the cause of it but when Hector mends nets it seems he gets kind of tormented into singin’ to himself, an’ the Dear knows but when Hector sings the cockerel is after leggin’ it away that fast the hens don’t see him again for maybe more than a day or two.’
I grinned. ‘That probably explains it,’ I said. ‘Hector was doing a bit of net mending down on the shore a few weeks ago. Maybe my cockerel heard him singing and ran for his life.’
‘I wouldn’t be surprised at that,’ said Morag.
‘What are you wantin’ more chickens for, anyway?’ asked Erchy. ‘Didn’t I see you feedin’ your hens on their own eggs not so long back?’
‘Yes, I was,’ I admitted. ‘But you know yourself there is a glut just now.’ It seemed stupid to be feeding eggs back to the hens which had laid them but in spring and for most of the summer there were always plenty of eggs and as the number I could myself dispose of was limited and everyone else in Bruach was similarly glutted virtually the only thing left for one to do was to ‘put the surplus back where they came from’. At one time I used to pack them into sturdy boxes and post them to friends in England but it seemed to me that either the egg boxes became less study or the post office grew more careless in its handling of them but there came so many reports of broken eggs being received that I gave up the practice. In autumn and winter, however, it was a different story. The autumn moult put a temporary stop to egg production and then, just when the hens had re-feathered and had recommenced laying the winter storms would come to act like a cork on the flow of eggs. Of course in times of plenty I preserved eggs by various methods and these eggs I used for cooking but I missed not being able to indulge a fancy for a fresh egg whenever I felt like it and since in winter not only eggs but fish, milk and crowdie were also scarce and there was the added risk of severe weather isolating us from supplies I was anxious to rear some pullets which should commence laying in the late autumn so that there might be a chance of their carrying on until the older hens began again in the early spring. I had tried the same plan the previous year and it had failed. Now once again I was faced with a meagre hatch of three chicks and as Erchy predicted, with my sort of luck, undoubted
ly two of them would turn out to be cockerels. I was disgusted with my broody hen, with my cockerel and with my own apparent inability to foresee and provide the conditions a hen needed to produce a full hatch of chicks.
‘I suppose no-one has a sitting hen I could borrow so that I can try again?’ I asked hopelessly. As I expected my companions shook their heads. ‘Do you know of anyone who has chicks for sale?’ I enquired.
‘Not hereabouts,’ said Erchy, ‘but there’s a place in the paper says he sells chicks. You could try him if you’ve a mind.’
Erchy brought the paper and I wrote to the farmer concerned; as a consequence it was arranged that I should collect a dozen day-old chicks from him the following week. As soon as I announced my intention of taking the new car I had acquired to the mainland Morag, Erchy and Hector volunteered to fill the remaining three seats. Morag was coming, as she put it, ‘to see a new country just’; Erchy wanted to see a man about a gun and Hector had always wanted to ‘see a boat over tsere just.’ I sometimes suspected that if I had announced I was proposing to climb Everest Hector would have suggested coming along ‘to see a boat over tsere just’.
It was a pleasant day for our journey; calm and mild with rags of mist in the hills and a hazy sun tinting the sea, and as I drove along it struck me, not by any means for the first time, how fortunate I and my companions were that our way of life permitted us to take a few hours off from our work without having to ask permission from an employer or without having a sneaking feeling of guilt that we might be neglecting our chores. Morag of course had Behag to carry on in her absence; Erchy was more or less a freelance and Hector had never at any time succumbed to the burden of regular duties but I, being alone, had got up early and milked my cow and fed the poultry. There had been no mucking out to do since at this time of year Bonny was out on the hill day and night and so until the time came for the evening feeding and milking there was really nothing that demanded my presence. Had I stayed at home I would have been weeding potatoes or stacking peats but so long as the weather did not betray me too badly those tasks would still be accomplished by my working twice as long another day. Meantime I was free; I had amiable company and the car was running sweetly. The auguries were all for a blissful day.
Beautiful Just! Page 7
