Beautiful Just! (4 page)

‘Oh, did no one tell you?' he began adroitly. ‘Yon fellow is after sendin' us goods now instead of money for our floats. We reckon we get a better deal this way than if we take the money.'

‘I see,' I said. ‘And when you were making this barter arrangement no one thought to leave me out of it?'

Erchy had the grace to look slightly discomfited. He bent down to inspect the net. ‘See now, that would cost you a pound or two if you were to buy it. So would the rope. More than you would get for the floats supposin' it was money he was after payin' you for them,' he complimented me.

Perceiving that willy-nilly I had been co-opted into providing Erchy and his confederates with replacement fishing gear I still played out the role of the unsuspecting novice.

‘What do I want with all that creel rope?' I demanded.

‘You could use it as clothes rope,' he suggested.

I laughed ironically. There was enough rope to stretch almost from one end of the village to the other. ‘I doubt if I'll live long enough to use all that up,' I said. ‘And as for the net,' I shrugged my shoulders, ‘What use have I for a herring net?'

‘Ach, you'll likely find a use for it,' he comforted. Because Erchy had seen me make leftover food into tasty dishes and make old dresses into new cushion covers he seemed to have a touching faith in my ability to produce a masterpiece out of something as uninspiring as a piece of herring net. ‘You could do well out of it, I'm thinkin',' he added.

‘How?' I asked.

‘Well, there's Hector,' he suggested. ‘Isn't Hector always havin' to borrow a net whenever he goes to the fishin'?'

‘Hector always has to borrow something whenever he does anything,' I retorted. I knew Hector too well to have any illusions about his ever recompensing me for the net except perhaps by occasional gifts of illicit fish. I had not known then, however, that in Bruach when a single woman or a widow owns a net which is borrowed for the fishing that woman is entitled to a share of the catch and there came a day when, my net having been borrowed and the herring having obligingly swum into it, I found myself the recipient of a whole creelful of fresh fish. For hours I scaled and gutted and salted. I ate the herring fresh; I made it into paste; I boiled it and mixed it with the poultry mash and when it started to smell I dug it as manure into the garden.

‘Didn't I tell you you would do well out of your net?' asked Erchy whose eyes were glowing with the excitement of ‘herring fever'.

‘You certainly did,' I replied, belching discretly. Herring invariably gave me indigestion.

I ceased collecting net floats and reverted to my former practice of heaving them back into the sea whenever I found them but a month or so later the carrier delivered another bundle from the float buyer and the same evening the postman brought me a postcard scrawled in green ink and with almost every other word accorded the dignity of a capital letter.

‘I am Happy sending Goods,' it read. ‘Many net floats Wanted Urgent Ernest.'

I debated whether or not to return the bundle unopened to ‘Urgent Ernest' but since doing so would have involved me in freight charges and since he had been trusting enough to send me goods without waiting for a consignment of floats I decided that the sensible thing to do was to collect more net floats and send off another mailbagful in return. This consignment brought me a letter which, like the postcard, was scrawled in bright green ink and liberally sprinkled with capitals, the only punctuation being exclamation marks:

‘Dear Friend', it began

‘Are you in Need of Spare Parts! I have at the Back of The Store Ernest! socked in Oil and Swearing as Good as New! Hundreds of Different! No rust on Ernest! Will send soonest if you are Missing! I am Eighty and still need many more Floats Urgent! … Your friend in the Lord!'

The letter itself I thought was worth another sackful of floats and I resumed my quest though admittedly with less enthusiasm than when I had expected to be paid in cash for my efforts. Since I did not consider myself in need of spare parts and since, to be honest, I was a little apprehensive of what the postman or the carrier might bring if I admitted to any deficiency I did not reply to the letter from my ‘Friend in the Lord!' but despite this there arrived for me a small sack containing a miscellany of large bolts and nuts and washers; a single rowlock that would fit no boat in Bruach and a mysteriously shaped metal object which was expertly identified for me by Hector as ‘A tsing for doin' somesin' wiss.' All the contents of the sack, as had been so ‘ernestly' claimed, were well soaked in oil as I found to my dismay when I emptied them out on to the kitchen floor. I bestowed them on Erchy who seemed pleased enough to get them and resolved that from that day forward I would send no more net floats. But I had reckoned without the old float buyer. At varying intervals bundles and parcels continued to arrive inexorably and urged on by quaint green-inked exhortations I began to liken myself to the Sorcerer's apprentice so compelled did I feel to gather more and more net floats in order to satisfy my ‘Friend in the Lord!'

It was with mingled relief and regret that eventually I received a green-inked letter telling me that the shortage of net floats was over and thanking me most ‘Ernestly!' for my help. It was not long afterwards that Erchy brought the news that the old net float buyer had ‘passed on'.

‘I should like to have met him,' I said. ‘He must have been a real character if his letters are anything to go by.'

‘Aye, right enough I believe he was that,' said Erchy. ‘They're sayin' he hadn't much in the way of schoolin' but he wasn't wantin' sense when it came to the business.'

‘He sounded a very religions man,' I said.

‘Not just religious,' corrected Erchy. ‘But he was good with his religion. Not like some. They say he treated the fellows that worked for him well too,' he added.

‘It's nice to hear that,' I murmured, but as I thought of Ernest! socked in oil at the Back of the Store! I wondered.

‘Come the first calm day of the tide an' I swear I'll not wait even to put the pot on the fire before I'm away to the whelks,'
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declared Peggy Ruag with mock exasperation.

‘Indeed then it's the men will be swearin' when they'll be after comin' back to find there's no potatoes for their dinner,' warned the prim-mouthed Kirsty.

‘No matter,' supported Anna Vic. ‘Didn't I tell our own Lachy the other day just he can cook his potatoes himself as soon as a good day comes for the whelks.' She ended with a giggle of bravado.

Fiona and Peggy Ruag exchanged furtive smiles, knowing well that ‘our Lachy' ensured his mother's constant ministrations by affecting complete indifference to hunger. If she was not there to cook a meal for him Lachy would simply go without food which so worried his soft-hearted mother that no matter how demanding were her other chores she somehow contrived to have a cooked meal ready for her son when he came in.

‘Ach, but this weather's a curse right enough,' grumbled Peggy Ruag lightly.

Fiona and the three women had been on their way home from milking their cows when a savage squall of hail had sent them hurrying for the shelter of the Creagach.

‘I'm hearin' there's a good price on the whelks this year,' said Anna Vic, taking off her headscarf to shake it free from hailstones.

‘Indeed, I'm hearin' that too,' agreed Kirsty, rubbing at her stiff, red hands.

‘You'll be comin' to the whelks yourself now that you've left school, Fiona?' Peggy Ruag asked.

‘Ach, I might just as well,' replied Fiona noncommittally.

‘Me, I'm just strainin' to get at them an' I don't mind tellin' you,' confessed Peggy Ruag who though half Highland had not one whit of the Highlander's innate reserve. She chuckled. ‘It's this new catalogue that's makin' me so keen to get started,' she explained. ‘There's that much in it I want I could do with the whelks being in season all the year round.'

‘Here, no, don't say that,' protested Kirsty. ‘If there was whelks in the spring an' summer when would we see our beds for the work that would be in it?'

‘We'd fall asleep in the hay surely, an' get ourselves stacked along with it!' Anna Vic's shrill schoolgirl laughter made her fat stomach quake like a bog.

The whelking season lasted from November to March, conveniently filling the period between harvest and sowing and on relatively calm days when the ebb tide occurred during the hours of daylight the islanders, trussed with extra clothes almost to the point of immobility would converge on the shore with pails and sacks ready to begin the whelk gathering.

Fiona, who had left school only that summer, was as eager as Peggy Ruag for the weather to improve so that she could go whelk gathering and like Peggy it was the arrival of the new mail order catalogue that was responsible for her eagerness. Ever since she had been old enough to carry a pail she had shared increasingly in the work of the croft, helping to harvest the potatoes and turnips; gather in the hay and corn; gut and salt the herring for winter food and carry home creels of peat for the fire, but such work was instinctive; its reward the comfort and well-being of man and beast. But the rewards of whelking were cheques from the buyer at Billingsgate; cheques which old Marie at the post office would cash and with cash, as Peggy Beag had said, you could buy things from the catalogue – glamorous things like the new coat Fiona had set her heart on. ‘Janette', the caption read, ‘an enchanting coat in smooth blue wool mixture with a sumptuous collar of squirrel coney.' Fiona had never in her life possessed a shop coat, her mother having made all her coats from the lengths of rough hairy tweed her Aunt Sarah wove. But now she had left school she had the opportunity to go whelk gathering and she planned to earn enough money during the season to buy ‘Janette'.

‘Aye, well, I believe that's the squall over for a whiley,' said Anna Vic and the women moved from the shelter of the Creagach to stand for a minute gazing at the thundering walls of green water that were smashing themselves into a filigree of foam against the rocks of the shore.

‘It's no lookin' like good whelkin' weather at all,' observed Anna Vic sadly.

But during the night the wind was tamed to a shifty grumbling which by morning had subsided to a steady raw breeze that crisped the short grass of the crofts with frost. Fiona rose early and rushed to feed and milk the cows while her mother, who was also going whelking, fed the hens and calves and when they had padded themselves with extra clothing they went together down to the shore. The other women were waiting by the dinghy.

‘Will we make for the Carraig?' asked Anna Vic of Fiona's mother.

‘Aye, that's the best place I'm thinkin'.'

Fiona's mother was the most expert whelk gatherer on the island and it was always left to her to say where the best picking would be. They dumped their pails and sacks into the dinghy and climbed in.

‘I wish I wasn't so feared of the water,' moaned Peggy Ruag, planting herself nervously in the middle of a thwart. She giggled. ‘But I'm glad to say my love of money overcomes my fear,' she admitted gaily. Fiona and Kirsty took an oar each and pulled away from the shore.

‘Kirsty, what in the name of Goodness have you on under your coat?' shrilled Anna Vic and Kirsty almost lost an oar as she tried to pull her oilskin over her bright red pyjama-covered knees. ‘Why, you look as if you have the pillar box from the post office hidden there.'

Kirsty blushed. ‘Indeed I never thought the day would come when I would be wearin' men's attire,' she explained apologetically. ‘But I felt such cold in my legs as soon as I went outdoors this mornin' an' then when I was lookin' for somethin' warm to put on to go to the whelks I saw these an' I yielded to temptation.'

‘However did you come by them?' demanded Peggy Ruag. ‘An' you a woman that says she's never had a man in her life?'

‘It's to that American tourist was stayin' a year or two back they rightly belong,' Kirsty told her. ‘He left them behind when he went an' I never heard from him again sayin' whereabouts he was.'

The chaffing and chatter continued until after about half an hour's rowing Fiona's mother pointed to the land. ‘See an' make for the rocks there,' she instructed, indicating a stretch of lonely boulder-strewn shore backed by imposing cliffs which even yet were echoing the rumbling of the previous day's storm. Fiona and Kirsty turned the boat, making for a weed-carpeted inlet between great slabs of sloping rocks and as they approached a surprised otter slid sinuously over the rocks and into the water.

‘I don't like that at all,' remarked Anna Vic edgily. ‘The old folk wouldn't think that was a good sign to start the whelkin'.'

‘Ach, you're no believin' them tales, surely?' scoffed Peggy Ruag, alluding to the ceilidh stories of witches transforming themselves into otters to accomplish some of their ill-wishing.

‘Our fathers believed it, right enough,' maintained Anna Vic.

‘Aye, an' our grandfathers an' before them their grandfathers too, I daresay,' conceded Peggy. ‘But to my mind the only way the otters could injure the whelkin' would be by eatin' them all before we got to them.' She chuckled. ‘There's no sense in them old tales, at all,' she assured Anna Vic.

Fiona and Kirsty shipped their oars as the dinghy slid on to the tangle and the women got out and dispersed along the shore eager to begin gathering.

Fiona chose her spot and set to work. At first it was fun turning over the boulders; watching the sparks fly as they crashed against one another; smelling the sharp whiffs of brimstone; seeing the instant panic of the writhing catfish; the eruption of the newly exposed colonies of seething sandlice; the sleekly smug anemones; the spotted gunnels and the tiny green crabs scuttling for new sanctuaries, but as the limpet-encrusted rocks grated the skin from her fingers it became harsh, exacting work and she began to realize why her mother's hands were rough and insensitive as blocks of dry peat. For the first hour the whelks were scarce but as she shuffled with icy feet in pursuit of the ebbing tide they became more abundant so that instead of rattling thinly on the bottom of her pail when she threw them in she had the comfort of hearing them plop on to what had become a satisfying half pailful. But she was disappointed with her speed of picking. At this rate it was going to take the whole period of low tides to gather the five pailfuls needed to fill a hundredweight sack. Crouched down among the rocks she was effectively isolated from the other women so that she could not compare her progress with theirs and even when she straightened up to flap her arms across her chest in an effort to generate some warmth into her chilled body she could see no sign of them. No doubt they were too absorbed in their whelk gathering to be conscious of the cold, she thought, and aiming to become similarly immune she hunched down, hearing nothing above the crashing of the rocks and the booming of the swell; seeing nothing but the mosaic of shingle and smashed shell uncovered by the boulders. The frosty wind burned her cheeks and glazed her eyes so that she had to blink constantly so as to distinguish the blue-black whelk shells she sought from the grey shells of dog-whelks which they so closely resembled and which, she had been told, being poisonous must be avoided at all costs. She picked on doggedly, probing beneath boulders that were too big for her to move and trying not to think of the conger eels that might be lurking beneath them ready to fasten their strong teeth into her fingers should they stray too near; trying to ignore the gripping cold; her bruised and bleeding fingers; her nails already worn down to the tender quick by the coarse shell sand among which she had to scramble for the whelks; the sea water stinging her grazes so that she was almost grateful for the desensitizing effect of the bleak wind.