This is pure fiction. However, I come by my interest in feuds honestly. My family has several going on in any one calendar year. _SJ
When the Macrory Boys spoke to each other again after three decades of silence, the inhabitants of Lochatyre Island felt cheated.
“The Boys should mark the occasion with a wee round for all,” complained Angus Houghton. It’s natural he felt that way. He was the owner of The Lowlander, where the non-existent wee round should have been purchased.
His wasn’t the only comment about a lack of fanfare. It was the general consensus. Hadn’t the islanders suffered all these years, themselves, from the feud? Choosing between the brothers to do business was a tricky proposition. Ladies felt the pressure too. For social occasions, one or the other Macrory wife ended up feeling snubbed.
Islanders learned about the abrupt cessation of hostilities between the two Macrory camps in bits and pieces, and unceremoniously.
"Dougie it was who marched into Dunc's cottage without so much as a by-yar-leave!” This was the report from Biddie Barr to her ailing friend Fenella Campbell. “Then he sat down at his brother's table," the Biddie continued. “Can ya feature those two old coots acting they had a chat jist yesterdy,” she cackled.
Fenella dropped her own little rumor bomb on top of Biddie’s triumphant head.
"That's not how I had it from ma daughter-in-law Marjorie," Fenella smiled. “She text messaged me right afore ya arrived." Fenella was smug beneath layers of quilt and technological superiority.
Apparently, two disparate accounts were circulating the island faster than a cormorant can swoop down to swipe an unwatched kitten. They both – the accounts, not bird and feline - had landed within moments of each other at Fenella’s sick bed.
Biddie glared at the cell phone ostentatiously propped up against the pitcher of water on Fenella’s bed table. She was annoyed at being both scooped and contradicted by the new technology for gossips. Biddie herself just had what her friend now called a "land line." The way Fenella emphasized the word ‘land’ made it seem unfit for geological formations surrounded by water.
Truth be told, Biddie wasn’t sure of her facts. It well might have been Dunc marching into Dougie’s place. And though she was anxious to learn the competitive version, she wasn’t about to admit defeat yet.
“Who said different,” she scoffed.
“Little Annie Roos, who plays dollies with ma granddaughter.”
Hmm. The Roos family lived closest to Dunc.
“And how did ya hear, Biddie?”
By accident, really. When she had left off the morning’s eggs at the parish hall for Pastor Keith, she overheard him telling his son in America, on the telephone. The parish land line.
"So, what ya offer is the fruits of eavesdropping," was Fenella’s sly pronouncement. Ostentatiously, she did not mention Biddie's recent hearing troubles. Fenella's son it was who ferried Biddie to and from her appointments with a Mainland specialist.
Fenella dismissed her friend's method of research, using the same economical gesture also to brush off non-existent smuffer crumbs from the bed. Smuffers were one of the (mercifully) few products of Biddie’s kitchen “Stuff in a muffin” their creator explained. But they were more like “suffers,” which everyone else called them. The dough part was so dense it formed a solid mass from which no crumbs could fall even if they wanted to - and even if the crust allowed penetration with such inadequate weaponry as teeth (human or animal).
“And ya,” Biddie retorted, “gi’ the tale of a child.”
Both were silent as they pondered how to learn the truth, united now in a desire for details.
“Tamara?” Fenella asked.
More silence.
“Teal, then?” and they shook their heads simultaneously.
No, the Macrory wives were not promising sources of information either. By nature - or maybe by long association with The Boys - they were exceptionally close-mouthed about personal business even for Scots women.
Biddie left Fenella's, determined to learn what she could from the Rooses and other neighbors close to the Macrory acreage. She would weave all their observations together. The result would be a story quilted better than the cloth which covered Fenella's skinny old bones, she told herself confidently.
She was to learn that her version of who marched into where was accurate after all. Unfortunately, that wasn’t as important as what everyone really wanted to know. Why, islanders wondered, had Dougie the Dour, as he was sometimes called, done the marching in the first place? And why had Dunc, the more stubborn brother, been so willing to invite his brother in?
Ay, that was Biddie’s God-given mission. To find the why of it.
Had Biddie been a fly on the wall of Duncan and Tamara Macrory’s kitchen when Douglas joined their supper, she wouldn’t be any the wiser now. The words spoken between The Boys were in a dialect she didn't know. They learned it as youngsters from their maternal grandmother Iona Hogg. She had come to the island to care for them while their own mother lay in a TB sanitarium for a year.
At that point in her life, widowed Grandy Hogg would speak only in the obscure dialect from the small fishing village of her own raising up - that is, when she spoke at all. She never knew that for years after her stint as caretaker for the grandsons, the clever little fellows flummoxed their schoolmates by communicating with each other in their grandy’s tongue. They got it right down to the sharpness with which she addressed everyone. The harsh consonants of the dialect so unlike the island’s lazy burr of a speech, were well suited to her sternness and when they grew into manhood, that of The Boys.
But understanding of the dialect was not immediately required when Dougie appeared. He merely nodded. His brother nodded back. Tamara’s mouth fell open, but she shut it quick enough and affected the nonchalance now mingling in the air with the fragrance of supper stew. She got up to the stove, filled another cracked china bowl with tatties and neep – potatoes and turnips – and set it down in front of her brother-in-law.
To watch the three in action at the small wood table, you would have thought this meal sharing was a daily occurrence. Tamara asked after Teal. They discussed cows and the new ferry schedule.
“At thee seekin?” Dunc eventually asked in the dialect. What do you want.
Tamara mumbled something and left the room. Neither man noticed.
“A drink is shorter than a tale,” Dougie replied with an old Scots saying.
Had Biddie the fly been an astute observer, it would have noted a slight upturning of Dunc’s lips as he went to fetch the whisky and two glasses. No matter what the brothers were to speak about, the feud was clearly over.
They drained the whisky glasses quickly and Dunc refilled them.
"Muckle guid," Dougie declared.
Another round. Another. Dunc emerged to fetch more whiskey from the cellar.
"They'll be singin about women soon," Tamara thought, overhearing animal noises from the next room.
Instead, it suddenly grew quiet. Dougie was ready to get down to business.
"No a livin soul but us speak Grandy Hogg's words," he informed his brother.
"No murmur?" Dunc asked.
"Some linguist fellows to St. Andrews College lookin hard. Can't find ane. All dead, where Grandy was born. Ain’t even no village."
"The way, today."
"The St. Andrews linguist fellows be payin guid to them that speaks it, for their recordings and such like."
Duncan grinned. "And we the last two? Even Grandy Hogg ud hev a laugh off that."
"I'd cray’n the pants she coomin to see oos now - would be to scold not to laugh."
"Thee'rt 65 years, man! Time to stand up to the Grandy!"
"Fine woman, fine woman," said Dougie, pointing vaguely upward, until just then he tripped over nothing and his pointing changed direction.
They fell back to ‘kithgatherin’ - telling the family stories that had been bottled up as carefully as rare whisky all these years of the feud. Both took pleasure in speaking them aloud with the only other person who remembered. The singing Tamara predicted came to pass too, eventually.
The Boys passed out at the same instant, draped over each other on the floor. Tamara walked over to Teal's place, where she found Dougie's wife worrying.
"Air ya to tell me they killed each other?” she asked.
"Well, girl, the worst to happen now is your husband will go deaf from the racket in his ear. I'm used to Dunc's snoring, but Dougie hasn't heard it since they was young."
In the end, The Boys had a party at The Lowlander after all and made a fine offer to pay for 25 haggis pizzas. But the CNN producer who was springing for the whisky ended up paying for the food too. The Boys were still a bit dazed from being world heroes, it seemed - but not dazed enough to insist about paying for anything once another offered.
"They ended their feud to save an ancient language from disappearing off the face of the earth," the reporter said into the microphone, trying to preserve dignity amidst the Pub chaos. He looked down with distaste at the haggis stain on his shirt, visible to millions of viewers. The stain had been deposited there deliberately by a wild-eyed Scotsman in kilts who took offense when the reporter wouldn't taste the pizza.
"Don't like haggis?" he growled. The reporter half-expected Braveheart wielding an axe to show up next.
"What was that mess on your clothes," his wife asked when he flew home the next day. Overcome as he was with whisky and being the target of wounded Scots pride, he didn't answer and went straight to bed.
All islanders present at the historic scene - which was all of them - agreed it was a party to remember.
For once, the two rival island gossips stuck together.
"We're being upstaged by the CIA or the CNN - whatever tis, and everyone else too," Biddie said with pursed lips. All islanders had a story about seeing the Macrorys together by now. Fenella was feeling better than she had for months from all the attention. Everyone who'd been the recipient of her gossip in the past wanted to repay her in kind.
"Don't ye fret," Fenella consoled her. "Jist help me be to that party and we'll find new gossip, or invent it if we moost."
But her son had forbidden her to get out of bed.
"He threatened to throw me over his shoulder and carry me out of the pub were I to show up," she explained.
In the end, Biddie and Pastor Keith smuggled her out of the house dressed as a nun from the Catholic contemplative order headquartered on the island next door. The nuns were rarely seen on Lochatyre, and when Father Keith came up with the plan and the outfit, the women exchanged glances. Once the fuss over The Boys died down, they intended to investigate their Pastor's sudden interest in religion.
As for the brothers, they became, truly, as boys again and were rarely apart after the feud ended. Scowls disappeared from their faces and personalities. They took their wives out dancing once.
"I feel like a blush bride," Teal confessed to Tamara the next day.
"Dunc was too busy in the bed to snore much," her sister-in-law confided, giggling.
But this is Scotland. The end to a story can't be too happy or there will be nothing to complain about and no one will be happy, Biddie pointed out sensibly.
They sat in Fenella's son skiff on an ecumenical mission to their nun neighbors.
"Ah, hush it," said Fenella, health back to normal now. "There's plenty news waiting to be spread. Now that the CPR has gone, it's oors, yours and mine, to fight over."
Lochatyre, in all its rocky, uncompromising splendor, retreated in the distance.
the end
