The Lost Pibroch, and other Sheiling Stories

“It’s a pity,” said she, “you brought no grave-clothes with you from Mull, my dear.”

“Are you grudging me yours?” asked Aoirig, coming round from wandering.

“No, nor grudging; fine ye ken it, cousin. But I know ye have them, and it’s a pity you should be dressed in another’s spinning than your own.”

“Ay, they’re yonder sure enough: clean and ready. And there’s more than that beside them. The linen I should have brought to a man’s home.”

“You and your man’s home! Is it Duart, my dear, among your own folk, or down to Inishail, you would have us take you?” Aoirig coughed till the red froth was at her lips.

“Duart is homely and Inishail is holy, sure enough, but I would have it Kilmalieu. They tell me it’s a fine kirkyard; but I never had the luck to see it.”

“It’s well enough, I’ll not deny, and it would not be so far to take you. Our folk have a space of their own among the MacVicars, below the parson.”

The woman in the bed signed for a sip of water, and they had it fast at her lips.

“Could you be putting me near the Macnicols?” she asked in a weakening voice. “The one I speak of was a Macnicol.”

“Ay, ay,” said the goodwife; “they were aye gallant among the girls.”

“Gallant he was,” said the one among the blankets. “I see him now. The best man ever I saw. It was at a wedding – ”

The woman’s breast racked and the spume spattered over the home-spun blankets.

Maisie was heating a death-shift at the peat-fire, turning it over in her hands, letting the dry airs into every seam and corner.

Looking at her preparation, the dying woman caught back her breath to ask why such trouble with a dead-shift.

“Ye would not have it on damp and cold,” said Maisie, settling the business. “I doubt it’ll be long in the sleeves, woman, for the goodwife has a lengthy reach.”

“It was at a marriage in Glenurchy,” said Aoirig in a haver, the pillows slipping down behind her back. “Yonder he is. A slim straight lad. Ronnal, O Ronnal my hero! What a dancer! not his match in Mull. Aye so – ”

A foot could be heard on the road, and one of the two sisters ran out, for she knew whom it would be. They had sent word to the town by Solomon in the morning for Macnicol the wright to come up with the stretching-board, thinking there was but an hour more for poor Macnicol’s were the footsteps, and there he was with the stretching-board under his arm – a good piece of larch rubbed smooth by sheet and shroud, and a little hollow worn at the head. He was a fat man, rolling a bit to one side on a short leg, gross and flabby at the jowl, and thick-lipped; but he might have been a swanky lad in his day, and there was a bit of good-humour in the corner of his eye, where you will never see it when one has been born with the uneasy mind. He was humming to himself as he came up the brae a Badenoch ditty they have in these parts on the winter nights, gossiping round the fire. Whom he was going to stretch he had no notion, except that it was a woman and a stranger to the glen.

The sister took him round to the corner of the house and in at the byre door, and told him to wait. “It’ll not be long now,” she said.

“Then she’s still to the fore,” said the wright. “I might have waited on the paymaster’s dram at Three Bridges if I had ken’t. Women are aye thrawn about dying. They’ll put it off to the last, when a man would be glad to be taking the road. Who is she, poor woman?”

“A cousin-german of Nanny’s,” said the sister, putting a bottle before him, and whipping out for some bannock and cheese. He sat down on a shearing-stool, facing the door, half open, between the byre he was in and the kitchen where Aoirig was at the dying. The stretching-board leaned against the wall outside.

“Aye so gentle, so kind,” the woman in the bed was saying in her last dover. “He kissed me first on a day like this. And the blue flowers from Aora?”

In the byre the wright was preeing the drink and paying little heed to food. It was the good warm stuff they brew on the side of Lochow, the heart of the very heart of the barley-fields, with the taste of gall and peat, and he mellowed with every quaich, and took to the soft lilting of Niall Ban’s song: —

“‘I am the Sergeant fell but kind
(Ho! ho! heroes, agus ho-e-ro! );
I only lift but the deaf and blind,
The wearied-out and the rest-inclined.
Many a booty I drive before,
Through the glens, through the glens.’
said the Sergeant Mor.”

Ben the house the goodwife was saying the prayers for the dying woman the woman should have said for herself while she had the wind for it, but Aoirig harped on her love-tale. She was going fast, and the sisters, putting their hands to her feet, could feel that they were cold as the rocks. Maisie’s arms were round her, and she seemed to have the notion that here was the grip of death, for she pushed her back.

“I am not so old – so old. There is Seana, my neighbour at Duart – long past the fourscore and still spinning – I am not so old – God of grace – so old – and the flowers – ”

A grey shiver went over her face; her breast heaved and fell in; her voice stopped with a gluck in the throat.

The women stirred round fast in the kitchen. Out on the clay floor the two sisters pushed the table and laid a sheet on it, the goodwife put aside the pillows and let Aoirig’s head fall back on the bed. Maisie put her hand to the clock and stopped it.

“Open the door, open the door!” cried the goodwife, turning round in a hurry and seeing the door still shut.

One of the sisters put a finger below the sneck and did as she was told, to let out the dead one’s ghost.

Outside, taking the air, to get the stir of the strong waters out of his head, was the wright.

He knew what the opening of the door meant, and he lifted his board and went in with it under his arm. A wafting of the spring smells came in at his back, and he stood with his bonnet in his hand.

“So this is the end o’t?” he said in a soft way, stamping out the fire on the floor.

He had but said it when Eurig sat up with a start in the bed, and the women cried out. She opened her eyes and looked at the man, with his fat face, his round back, and ill-made clothes, and the death-deal under his oxter, and then she fell back on the bed with her face stiffening.

“Here’s the board for ye,” said the wright, his face spotted white and his eyes staring. “I’ll go out a bit and take a look about me. I once knew a woman who was terribly like you, and she came from Mull.”

BLACK MURDO

“Mas breug uam e is breug thugam e.”

    – Gaelic Proverb.

I

BLACK MURDO’S wife was heavy, and ‘twas the time the little brown nats were pattering in Stronbuie wood. Stronbuie spreads out its greenness to the sun from the slope of Cladich. It is, in its season, full of the piping of birds and the hurry of wings, and the winds of it have the smell of a fat soil. The Diarmaids were the cunning folk to steal it; for if Stronshira is good, Stronbuie is better; and though the loops of Aora tangle themselves in the gardens of the Red Duke, Lochow has enchantment for the galley of a king. Fraoch Eilean, Innis Chonell, and Innis Chonain – they cluster on the bend of it like the gems on a brooch, Inishail of the Monks makes it holy, and Cruachan-ben, who lords it over Lorn, keeps the cold north wind from the shore. They may talk of Glenaora, but Stronbuie comes close, close to the heart!

For all that, ‘twas on a time a poor enough place for a woman in yon plight; for the rest of the clan crowded down on Innistiynich, all fighters and coarse men of the sword, and a skilly woman or a stretching-board was no nearer than a day’s tramp over the hill and down Aora glen to the walls of Inneraora. If one died on Cladich-side then – and ‘twas a dying time, for the Athol dogs were for ever at the harrying – it was but a rough burying, with no corranach and no mort-cloth; if a child came, it found but cold water and a cold world, whatever hearts might be. But for seven years no child came for Black Murdo.

They say, in the Gaelic old-word, that a stolen bitch will never throw clean pups nor a home-sick woman giants. Murdo recked nothing of that when he went wooing in a time of truce to Croit-bhile, the honey-croft that makes a red patch on the edge of Creag Dubh. He brought Silis home to the dull place at Stronbuie, and she baked his bannocks and ploughed his bit of soil, but her heart never left salt Finne-side. In the morning she would go to the hill to look through the blurred glen, and she would have made bargains with the ugliest crow that could flap on feathers for a day’s use of his wings. She could have walked it right often and gaily to her people’s place, but Black Murdo was of Clan Artair, and Artairich had not yet come under the bratach of Diarmaid, and bloody knives made a march-dyke between the two tartans.

Seven years and seven days went by, and Black Murdo, coming in on an evening after a hard day at the deer, found Silis making the curious wee clothes. He looked at her keen, questioning, and she bleached to the lips.

“So!” said he.

“Just so,” said she, breaking a thread with her teeth, and bending till the peat-flame dyed her neck like wine.

“God, and I’m the stout fellow!” said he, and out he went, down all the way to Portinsherrich, and lusty he was with the ale among the pretty men there.

Weeks chased each other like sheep in a fank, and Silis grew sick at the heart. There’s a time for a woman when the word of a woman is sweeter than a harp; but there were only foolish girls at Innistrynich, and coarse men of the sword. So Murdo stayed in from the roes when the time crept close. To see him do the heavy work of the house and carrying in the peats was a sorry sight.

Silis kept dreaming of Finne-side, where she had heard the long wave in the spring of the year when she had gone home on a password to a woman’s wedding with Long Coll. The same Long Coll had brothers, and one had put a man’s foolish sayings in her ears before ever she met Murdo, she a thin girl like a saugh-wand and not eighteen till Beltane. They called him – no matter – and he had the way with the women. Faith, it’s the strange art! It is not looks, nor dancing, nor the good heart, nor wit, but some soft fire of the eye and maybe a song to the bargain. Whatever it was, it had Silis, for all that her goodman Murdo had a man’s qualities and honesty extra.