LITTLE RATHIE'S "BURAL"
Devout-under-difficulties would have been the name of Lang Tammas had
he been of Covenanting times. So I thought one wintry afternoon, years
before I went to the schoolhouse, when he dropped in to ask the
pleasure of my company to the farmer of Little Rathie's "bural." As a
good Auld Licht, Tammas reserved his swallow-tail coat and "lum hat"
(chimney pot) for the kirk and funerals; but the coat would have
flapped villainously, to Tammas's eternal ignominy, had he for one rash
moment relaxed his hold on the bottom button, and it was only by
walking sideways, as horses sometimes try to do, that the hat could be
kept at the angle of decorum. Let it not be thought that Tammas had
asked me to Little Rathie's funeral on his own responsibility. Burals
were among the few events to break the monotony of an Auld Licht
winter, and invitations were as much sought after as cards to my lady's
dances in the south. This had been a fair average season for Tammas,
though of his four burials one had been a bairn's--a mere bagatelle;
but had it not been for the death of Little Rathie I would probably not
have been out that year at all.
The small farm of Little Rathie lies two miles from Thrums, and Tammas
and I trudged manfully through the snow, adding to our numbers as we
went. The dress of none differed materially from the precentor's, and
the general effect was of septuagenarians in each other's best clothes,
though living in low-roofed houses had bent most of them before their
time. By a rearrangement of garments, such as making Tammas change
coat, hat, and trousers with Cragiebuckle, Silva McQueen, and Sam'l
Wilkie respectively, a dexterous tailor might perhaps have supplied
each with a "fit." The talk was chiefly of Little Rathie, and
sometimes threatened to become animated, when another mourner would
fall in and restore the more fitting gloom.
"Ay, ay," the new comer would say, by way of responding to the sober
salutation, "Ay, Johnny." Then there was silence, but for the "gluck"
with which we lifted our feet from the slush.
"So Little Rathie's been ta'en awa'," Johnny would venture to say, by
and by.
"He's gone, Johnny; ay, man, he is so."
"Death must come to all," some one would waken up to murmur.
"Ay," Lang Tammas would reply, putting on the coping-stone, "in the
morning we are strong, and in the evening we are cut down."
"We are so, Tammas; ou ay, we are so; we're here the wan day an' gone
the neist."
"Little Rathie wasna a crittur I took till; no, I canna say he was,"
said Bowie Haggart, so called because his legs described a parabola,
"but he maks a very creeditable corp (corpse). I will say that for
him. It's wonderfu' hoo death improves a body. Ye cudna hae said as
Little Rathie was a weelfaured man when he was i' the flesh."
Bowie was the wright, and attended burials in his official capacity.
He had the gift of words to an uncommon degree, and I do not forget his
crushing blow at the reputation of the poet Burns, as delivered under
the auspices of the Thrums Literary Society. "I am of opeenion," said
Bowie, "that the works of Burns is of an immoral tendency. I have not
read them myself, but such is my opeenion."
"He was a queer stock, Little Rathie, michty queer," said Tammas
Haggart, Bowie's brother, who was a queer stock himself, but was not
aware of it; "but, ou, I'm thinkin' the wife had something to do wi't.
She was ill to manage, an' Little Rathie hadna the way o' the women.
He hadna the knack o' managin' them 's ye micht say--no, Little Rathie
hadna the knack."
"They're kittle cattle, the women," said the farmer of
Craigiebuckle--son of the Craigiebuckle mentioned elsewhere--a little
gloomily. "I've often thocht maiterimony is no onlike the lucky bags
th' auld wines has at the muckly. There's prizes an' blanks baith
inside, but, losh, ye're far frae sure what ye'll draw oot when ye put
in yer han'."
"Ou, weel," said Tammas, complacently, "there's truth in what ye say,
but the women can be managed if we have the knack."
"Some o' them," said Cragiebuckle, woefully.
"Ye had yer wark wi' the wife yersel, Tammas, so ye had," observed Lang
Tammas, unbending to suit his company.
"Ye're speakin' aboot the bit wife's bural," said Tammas Haggart, with
a chuckle, "ay, ay, that brocht her to reason."
Without much pressure Haggart retold a story known to the majority of
his hearers. He had not the "knack" of managing women apparently when
he married, for he and his gipsy wife "agreed ill thegither" at first.
Once Chirsty left him and took up her abode in a house just across the
wynd. Instead of routing her out, Tammas, without taking any one into
his confidence, determined to treat Chirsty as dead, and celebrate her
decease in a "lyke wake"--a last wake. These wakes were very general
in Thrums in the old days, though they had ceased to be common by the
date of Little Rathie's death. For three days before the burial the
friends and neighbours of the mourners were invited into the house to
partake of food and drink by the side of the corpse. The dead lay on
chairs covered with a white sheet. Dirges were sung, and the deceased
was extolled, but when night came the lights were extinguished, and the
corpse was left alone. On the morning of the funeral tables were
spread with a white cloth outside the house, and food and drink were
placed upon them. No neighbour could pass the tables without paying
his respects to the dead; and even when the house was in a busy, narrow
thoroughfare, this part of the ceremony was never omitted. Tammas did
not give Chirsty a wake inside the house; but one Friday morning--it
was market-day, and the square was consequently full--it went through
the town that the tables were spread before his door. Young and old
collected, wandering round the house, and Tammas stood at the tables in
his blacks inviting every one to eat and drink. He was pressed to tell
what it meant; but nothing could be got from him except that his wife
was dead. At times he pressed his hands to his heart, and then he
would make wry faces, trying hard to cry. Chirsty watched from a
window across the street, until she perhaps began to fear that she
really was dead. Unable to stand it any longer, she rushed out into
her husband's arms, and shortly afterwards she could have been seen
dismantling the tables.
"She's gone this fower year," Tammas said, when he had finished his
story, "but up to the end I had no more trouble wi' Chirsty. No, I had
the knack o' her."
"I've heard tell, though," said the sceptical Craigiebuckle, "as
Chirsty only cam back to ye because she cudna bear to see the fowk
makkin' sae free wi' the whisky."
"I mind hoo she bottled it up at ance, and drove the laddies awa',"
said Bowie, "an' I hae seen her after that, Tammas, giein' ye up yer
fut an' you no sayin' a word."
"Ou, ay," said the wife-tamer, in the tone of a man who could afford to
be generous in trifles, "women maun talk, an' a man hasna aye time to
conterdick them, but frae that day I had the knack o' Chirsty."
"Donal Elshioner's was a very seemilar case," broke in Snecky Hobart,
shrilly. "Maist o' ye'll mind 'at Donal was michty plague't wi' a
drucken wife. Ay, weel, wan day Bowie's man was carryin' a coffin past
Donal's door, and Donal an' the wife was there. Says Donal, 'Put doon
yer coffin, my man, an' tell's wha it's for.' The laddie rests the
coffin on its end, an' says he, 'It's for Davie Fairbrother's
guid-wife.' 'Ay, then,' says Donal, 'tak it awa', tak it awa' to
Davie, an' tell 'im as ye kin a man wi' a wife 'at wid be glad to
neifer (exchange) wi' him.' Man, that terrified Donal's wife; it did
so."
As we delved up the twisting road between two fields, that leads to the
farm of Little Rathie, the talk became less general, and another
mourner who joined us there was told that the farmer was gone.
"We must all fade as a leaf," said Lang Tammas.
"So we maun, so we maun," admitted the newcomer. "They say," he added,
solemnly, "as Little Rathie has left a full teapot."
The reference was to the safe in which the old people in the district
stored their gains.
"He was thrifty," said Tammas Haggart, "an' shrewd, too, was Little
Rathie. I mind Mr. Dishart admonishin' him for no attendin' a special
weather service i' the kirk, when Finny an' Lintool, the twa adjoinin'
farmers, baith attendit. 'Ou,' says Little Rathie, 'I thocht to mysel,
thinks I, if they get rain for prayin' for't on Finny an' Lintool,
we're bound to get the benefit o't on Little Rathie.'"
"Tod," said Snecky, "there's some sense in that; an' what says the
minister?"
"I d'na kin what he said," admitted Haggart; "but he took Little Rathie
up to the manse, an' if ever I saw a man lookin' sma', it was Little
Rathie when he cam oot."
The deceased had left behind him a daughter (herself now known as
Little Rathie), quite capable of attending to the ramshackle "but and
ben"; and I remember how she nipped off Tammas's consolations to go out
and feed the hens. To the number of about twenty we assembled round
the end of the house to escape the bitter wind, and here I lost the
precentor, who, as an Auld Licht elder, joined the chief mourners
inside. The post of distinction at a funeral is near the coffin; but
it is not given to every one to be a relative of the deceased, and
there is always much competition and genteelly concealed disappointment
over the few open vacancies. The window of the room was decently
veiled, but the mourners outside knew what was happening within, and
that it was not all prayer, neither mourning. A few of the more
reverent uncovered their heads at intervals; but it would be idle to
deny that there was a feeling that Little Rathie's daughter was
favouring Tammas and others somewhat invidiously. Indeed, Robbie
Gibruth did not scruple to remark that she had made "an inauspeecious
beginning." Tammas Haggart, who was melancholy when not sarcastic,
though he brightened up wonderfully at funerals, reminded Robbie that
disappointment is the lot of man on his earthly pilgrimage; but Haggart
knew who were to be invited back after the burial to the farm, and was
inclined to make much of his position. The secret would doubtless have
been wormed from him had not public attention been directed into
another channel. A prayer was certainly being offered up inside; but
the voice was not the voice of the minister.
Lang Tammas told me afterwards that it had seemed at one time "very
questionable" whether Little Rathie would be buried that day at all.
The incomprehensible absence of Mr. Dishart (afterwards satisfactorily
explained) had raised the unexpected question of the legality of a
burial in a case where the minister had not prayed over the "corp."
There had even been an indulgence in hot words, and the Reverend
Alexander Kewans, a "stickit minister," but not of the Auld Licht
persuasion, had withdrawn in dudgeon on hearing Tammas asked to conduct
the ceremony instead of himself. But, great as Tammas was on religious
questions, a pillar of the Auld Licht kirk, the Shorter Catechism at
his finger-ends, a sad want of words at the very time when he needed
them most, incapacitated him for prayer in public, and it was
providential that Bowie proved himself a man of parts. But Tammas
tells me that the wright grossly abused his position, by praying at
such length that Craigiebuckle fell asleep, and the mistress had to
rise and hang the pot on the fire higher up the joist, lest its
contents should burn before the return from the funeral. Loury grew
the sky, and more and more anxious the face of Little Rathie's
daughter, and still Bowie prayed on. Had it not been for the
impatience of the precentor and the grumbling of the mourners outside,
there is no saying when the remains would have been lifted through the
"bole," or little window.
Hearses had hardly come in at this time and the coffin was carried by
the mourners on long stakes. The straggling procession of pedestrians
behind wound its slow way in the waning light to the kirkyard, showing
startlingly black against the dazzling snow; and it was not until the
earth rattled on the coffin-lid that Little Rathie's nearest male
relative seemed to remember his last mournful duty to the dead.
Sidling up to the favoured mourners, he remarked casually and in the
most emotionless tone he could assume: "They're expec'in ye to stap
doon the length o' Little Rathie noo. Aye, aye, he's gone. Na, na,
nae refoosal, Da-avit; ye was aye a guid friend till him, an' it's
onything a body can do for him noo."
Though the uninvited slunk away sorrowfully, the entertainment provided
at Auld Licht houses of mourning was characteristic of a stern and
sober sect. They got to eat and to drink to the extent, as a rule, of
a "lippy" of shortbread and a "brew" of toddy; but open Bibles lay on
the table, and the eyes of each were on his neighbours to catch them
transgressing, and offer up a prayer for them on the spot. Ay me!
there is no Bowie nowadays to fill an absent minister's shoes.