The minister was boyishly handsome, fortyish. Gill must have noticed my expression. “John Murdoch is our most eligible bachelor,” he said softly.
Before I could comment on that, Murdoch spoke.
“Let us pray.”
I expected the usual shuffle and creak of people dropping to their knees, but nobody moved. They didn’t even lower their heads, as far as I could tell. Reverend Murdoch had a lilting voice which sounded almost Welsh to me and, in spite of my distractibility, I found him captivating. He used as a text the story of the raising of Lazarus, and although I’d heard it before, the human drama suddenly became alive, not fossilized as a “Biblical story.” “As a man, Jesus grieved for Lazarus who was his friend. He wept.” It was an appropriate text for a funeral and the minister then went on to talk more personally about Tormod MacAulay, who had been an elder in the church. The Reverend had obviously known Tormod well, so his words seemed real, not just the empty platitudes I’d heard at so many of the funerals I’d attended, at which the dead person was a complete stranger to the minister conducting the service. According to what this minister said, Tormod had been an active man all his life until his illness, a man of warmth and humour. This was not the time to talk about his betrayal of his grandson and his sleazy exploitation of his employee, even if the Reverend knew about them. I’ve no doubt the other elements of his character were true, too.
From where I was sitting, I had a good view of Coral-Lyn, whose eyes were fixed on her fiancée. He had his head down and periodically wiped away tears. The intensity of her desire to go to him was palpable, almost more predatory than supportive, and I wondered what it would be like to be the recipient of that kind of feeling.
Andy stood up, faced the congregation, and led us in singing two Psalms unaccompanied, ragged but vigorous. There was another parting prayer, and the service was over. The men who had been seated in front of the partition stood up and filed to each side of the coffin. They grasped its handles, hoisted it aloft, and slowly walked down the aisle. One pew at a time, the rest of us followed them out.
Outside the church, we stood for a moment, me wishing I had purchased gloves as well as a hat. So much for spring weather. It was freezing here. We watched the ushers loading the coffin into the hearse. Coral-Lyn was with her man, and when he got into the car, she jumped in after him.
“Got to give Miss Cheerio credit for that.”
Lisa MacKenzie had come up behind me.
“Give her credit for what?” I asked.
“Traditionally, women don’t go to the graveside. That’s for the men. The lassies are back at the house making the funereal baked meats and sandwiches.”
I glanced around and realized that most of the group now drifting away from the church were women. In his parting words, the minister had invited everybody to take refreshments at the boarding house where Andy lived, and that’s where they seemed to be heading.
While Lisa and I were talking, Gill had stepped aside, and I could see him huddled over his cell phone. He was frowning and he glanced over at me. My heart did a little jump. Some news.
He disconnected and came over to us.
“Good afternoon, Lisa. Great bonnet you’ve got on.”
“What’s up?” I asked.
“I’ve got to get back to the station. Follow-up to that situation we were talking about. It will be occurring. No more news for you, sorry. I won’t be able to go to the house.”
“That’s okay.”
“If you’re concerned about getting Christine back to Stornoway, I can take her,” interjected Lisa.
“On your motorcycle?” Gill’s voice was incredulous.
“Yes! It’s safe. And she’s no a wuss, are you, Christine?”
I didn’t know how she could determine that on such short acquaintance. I am a coward about some things, and riding on the back of a motorcycle at the mercy of an unknown driver is one of them. On the other hand, if I took her up on the offer, I’d be able to stay for the post-funeral wake.
“Thanks, Lisa. Motorbike it is, if you promise not to speed.”
She laughed. “I’m so conservative, you’d never know me.”
I thought I’d keep an eye on what she was inhaling, just in case.
“I’ll call you later on,” said Gill.
He walked off to his car. Everybody else had pretty much left by now and a fine rain was starting to fall.
“Come on, let’s get going. Our hats will be ruined.” said Lisa. “You look good in yours, by the way.”
“And you.”
She laughed. “I thought I needed a wee bit of colour.”
The house where the funeral reception was to be held was a beige pebble-stuccoed cottage with fresh green paint on the trim and a narrow, tidy garden. A tall, middle-aged woman was standing at the door greeting arrivals.
“Good morning, Penelope,” said Lisa. “I’d like you to meet Miss Christine Morris, who is visiting us from Canada. Chris, this is Miss Barbara Stewart.”
Miss Stewart beamed at me and shook my hand vigorously. She was a well-fleshed woman with springy grey hair and a tanned healthy-looking skin. She was wearing a patterned navy dress with a single row of pearls at the throat.
“Canada! We must have a chat. I have relatives who live in Canada.”
I was saved by another woman who came into the yard behind us, and Miss Stewart reached out to her.
“Murdina. Come on in.”
Lisa and I moved on into the small entrance hall, which was largely taken up with a decent-sized freezer, at the moment draped with a crocheted black cover. The bathroom was directly in front of us, door ajar to reveal pristine towels and gleaming fixtures. There was a hall to the left, which I assumed led to the bedrooms. Three or four people were standing in the hall with plates of refreshments in their hands, and they looked at us with friendly curiosity. I expected that at any minute somebody would come over and ask if I happened to have met their uncle Joe who lived in Manitoba. The living room was directly to the right and jammed with chattering women. As we hovered on the threshold, one of them turned around and greeted us. She was tall and weather-browned and was also wearing a dark-patterned summer dress, although hers was maroon-coloured, not navy. For a moment, I was startled that Miss Stewart had metamorphosed herself ahead of us into the room, and I actually glanced over my shoulder to check it out. The woman chuckled.
“I know that look. No, you’re not losing your mind. I’m Penelope. You met my twin sister, Barbara, at the door.”
You’d have fooled me. Lisa started to make introductions again, but it was hard to hear above the noise. Penelope smiled at me. “Give me your coats. Do you want to keep your hats?
Lisa did. I relinquished mine happily.
“Do have a look at the memorial we put together for Tormod,” Penelope said, indicating something at the other side of the room, and then she moved on to serve the rest of the crowd.
“Hang on,” said Lisa, and she took my hand and pushed into the crowd with lots of “excuse me’s,” me following in her wake like a baby pilot fish.
The mantelpiece had been set up as the memorial site, and there was a narrow oasis of space around it. A large framed photograph was on a plant stand in the middle of the hearth, where the fire would be. Several photographs of different sizes were on the mantelshelf and on two smaller tables.
Sitting tucked into the corner beside the hearth was a diminutive, white-haired woman, and she smiled a greeting.
“Matainn mhah, Lisa. Ciamar a tha thu?”
“Very well, thank you, Mrs. MacNeil. And you?”
I couldn’t understand what she replied, but I gathered she was in excellent health.
“You should have a look at the photographs,” she said. “Barbara and Penelope asked around for pictures of Tormod, and they put the best up there. It’s a good history of him.”
She got stiffly to her feet and joined us in front of the set-up. The central photograph was in an ornate silver frame. Torm
od was in a formal brown suit. I could see the backdrop was the high podium of the church we had just come from.
“He had just been made an elder of the church,” said Mrs. MacNeil. “He was very conscientious, I must say. Never missed a service until this past year when he got ill.”
Her voice was sad.
“That’s him when he was about six months old.” She pointed to the picture on the left. A chubby baby was seated on the floor, curly hair, big eyes.
“Aww,” said Lisa.
“He was a bonny boy and he remained so all of his life.” Mrs MacNeil smiled. “Quite a masher as we used to call him in my day.”
The next photograph was of an adolescent Tormod, flanked on either side by two lanky girls in identical print dresses.
“Are those the Misses Stewart?” I asked.
“Yes, indeed. Tormod’s mother’s sister married James Stewart, and Penelope and Barbara are their daughters.”
Lisa pointed to the next picture. “Oh my, they don’t look too happy do they?”
It was Tormod on his wedding day. A handsome young man, his bride younger and not at all pretty. No white gown and flowers here. He was in his Sunday-best suit, she in a tailored two-piece. They were smiling for the camera, but their pose was stiff, their arms by their sides, not even linked.
Mrs. MacNeil puckered her lips. “That was an unfortunate marriage. Chalk and cheese don’t mix.”
“But they had to get married, didn’t they? Margaret had a bun in the oven.”
I felt irritated with Lisa. She’d better grow out of the need to shock before too long. She merely sounded crude, and Mrs. MacNeil was a sweet woman. However, she was Lisa’s match.
“I presume you mean that Peggy had conceived prior to her marriage date. Yes, that did seem to be the case, but that’s not a good reason for not making a marriage work. I do believe she could have made him a good wife if he had accepted the circumstances.”
In other words, Tormod felt tricked and trapped into marriage and never forgave her.
I might have passed right over the next photograph, because it had been enlarged from a smaller print, so it was a bit fuzzy. However, Mrs. MacNeil had adopted the role of moral guardian.
“No matter what, they had two beautiful children.” She indicated the photograph.
Tormod was sitting on a bench. On his left was a boy of about five or six, on his right, leaning away from him, a girl, probably about three years of age. She was smiling, and she had her head comfortably against the arm of a young girl seated next to her. This girl was just on the edge of puberty, skinny, with wavy, dark hair that fell to her shoulders. She was squinting into the sun and grinning cheerfully at something off-camera. I grabbed the picture from the shelf so I could look at it more closely.
“Who are these children, Mrs MacNeil?”
“Those are Tormod’s two bairns. Iain has passed on now, far too young, but that’s for God to say, not us. The little girl is his daughter, named Peggy after her mother. And she’s gone far away, too. Not passed on you understand, but her mother took her out of the country when she was but a lassie, and she hasna seen her homeland since.” She shook her head in sorrow.
“Mrs. MacNeil, who is the other girl sitting beside Peggy?”
She peered more closely at the photograph, while Lisa looked over her shoulder.
“That would be Shona MacAulay.”
“MacAulay? She was related?”
“She was. She was Tormod’s cousin. She was much younger, of course. His father was William MacAulay, the eldest son of William MacAulay of Carloway. Shona’s father was Norman, who was the third-eldest in the family. The second child was a daughter, Sarah. She married a MacNeil, and it was her first born, Alexander, who was my husband. I myself was a MacLeod before my marriage.”
I was drowning in a sea of genealogy.
“Excuse me, Mrs. MacNeil. Could we get back to this girl for a minute? Do you know what happened to her?”
“It’s dreadful isn’t it. And they look so happy, don’t they?”
“What was dreadful, Mrs. MacNeil?”
“All three of them are now gone from us.”
“Including her?”
“Yes. Poor Shona. She was so full of life and mischief.”
“What’s the matter?” Lisa asked, staring at me.
I shrugged. “Nothing.”
The photograph had been taken about fifty years ago, but the slightly tilted smile was the tipoff. That and the dark, straight eyebrows. As far as I was concerned, I was looking at a picture of my mother, Joan Morris.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
At that moment, Lisa redeemed herself in my eyes.
“I’ve never heard of Shona MacAulay. What’s the story, Mary?” she asked.
Mrs. MacNeil sat down again with a sigh of relief. She seemed happy to gossip to us, but suddenly, Barbara or Penelope appeared with a tray, on which sat cups of tea, already milked and probably sugared.
“Cuppas for everybody?”
Lisa refused, but Mrs. MacNeil and I took one. I waited as patiently as I could.
The initial sips over, she said. “Where was I?”
“You were going to tell us what happened to Shona MacAulay.”
“She went to Canada and ran off with a Red Indian when she was barely eighteen. She died somewhere in the wilderness. Such a tragic waste.”
“She died? How?”
“Nobody really knows, my dear. All we heard was that she had passed away very soon after she arrived. One of those colonial illnesses, probably.” She didn’t give me time to ascertain exactly what a “colonial illness” might be. “You see, the problem was she and Annie didn’t get along.” Another drink of tea. “Annie Stewart became her stepmother. She was a sister of James Stewart, who was the father of Barbara and Penelope, by the way. His wife, Barbara Morrison, was Tormod’s aunt.”
She glanced at me over her teacup, as if to see if I was following all of this. I wasn’t.
“What did her and Annie Stewart not getting along have to do with dying in the wilderness?” Lisa’s tone was more polite than truly interested. She had no idea I was seething with frustration. However, with somebody like Mrs. MacNeil, you could not hurry them nor lead them. I tried to calm down.
“Ach, there wasn’t a direct connection as such, but if Shona hadn’t been sent away to boarding school on the mainland, she wouldn’t have gone back there to work when she left school and she wouldn’t have gone off to Canada like that.”
There was a logic in there somewhere.
“Mrs. MacNeil, could we backtrack for a moment?” I interjected. “You said Annie Stewart was Shona’s stepmother?”
“That’s right. Annie had a good heart, but she just wasn’t used to children. She took care of her parents until they both died suddenly of the influenza. I suppose Annie was... oh, she must have been thirty at the time. I know that doesn’t sound old these days, but it was considered so then. She had no doubt resigned herself to spinsterhood. She had never had a sweetheart, by all accounts, but she was comely enough to attract Norman MacAulay, who up and married her not more than a year after his first wife died. That was Kirsteen Morrison from Barva. She was only forty-four when she passed away.” She lowered her voice. “It was cancer. Took her off within six months.”
I tut-tutted. Lisa shifted restlessly, then took off her hat and fluffed up her hair.
“Lovely hat dear, so colourful.”
“Thank you, Mary.”
“Shall I go on? This must be boring old history to you and mean nothing at all to Miss Morris.”
“Please continue,” I said. “It’s quite fascinating.”
Lisa threw me a sceptical look.
“The problem was that Annie didn’t know what to do with Shona, who was just a wee girl. She’d been born when her mother thought she’d done with child-bearing, so she was the baby of the family and everybody indulged her. Then her mammy died and her pappa brought home another wife. I imagine she
resented having to mind a new mother. Which is only natural, isn’t it?”
We agreed.
“So... as I was saying. When Shona started to grow into a young woman, things got much worse with Annie. They fought constantly, by all accounts. Norman tried to discipline the girl, but it did no good.” She sighed. “Poor mite. He was very severe, everybody knew it. He was used to raising boys, you see, not a wee lass. Finally, when she was but fourteen, Shona was packed off to a boarding school on the mainland. Which they could ill afford, by the way. At the same time, right out of the blue, Annie, who had seemed to be as barren as a board, poor woman, found she was expecting. After her own bairn came, she had even less time for Shona, who hardly came home at all. When the lassie could legally leave school, she did, but she stayed on the mainland and found some kind of work.” Again she lowered her voice to whisper the unmentionable. “She got in with a bad crowd. Wild parties and drinking, that sort of thing. She was only just eighteen when the news came that she’d run off to Canada. Then we heard she had taken up with a Red Indian and was living in the wilderness. And that was where she died, may she rest in peace.”
“Did they bring her back here to be buried?”
Mrs. MacNeil shook her head. “The family decided against it. Annie was not at all well. She suffered from terrible nervous states. Norman didn’t want to leave her alone. They decided to leave things as they were. I presume the Red Indian man took care of the funeral. If they do that kind of thing, that is.”
She finished off her cup of tea. My tea was cold by now.
“Norman just asked for prayers in the church. There wasn’t anything more formal than that. Some might say they were cold-hearted. I was expecting my second, so I was preoccupied with my own affairs, but it all seemed very odd and unnatural.”
Does Your Mother Know? Page 16
