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 school-house, 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
villanously, to Tammas' eternal ignominy, had he for one rash moment
relaxed his hold of 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. Burials 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 be maks a vary 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 weel-faured 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 yo 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 wifies 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 ye 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 gypsy 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 neighbors 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
neighbor 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 afterward 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 whiskey.”
“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 vary seemilar case,” broke in Snecky Hobart
shrilly. “Maist o' ye'll mind 'at Donal was michty plagueit 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 new-comer. “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' 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 favoring 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 afterward that it had seemed at one time “vary
queistionable” whether Little Rathie would be buried that day at all.
The incomprehensible absence of Mr. Dishart (afterward 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 kirk-yard, 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 favored 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 short bread and a “brew” of toddy; but open Bibles lay on
the table, and the eyes of each were on his neighbors 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.