Foggy Mountain Breakdown and Other Stories (6 page)

I
LOANED HER
eight guidebooks of Scotland, and all the maps that I had, but she only looked at the castles, and the pictures of mountains against the sky. “Not like my mountains,” she said. “There aren’t any trees, but it’s close enough. I guess they must have felt at home.”

Her people, she meant: the McCourys. Sometime a few centuries back, to hear her tell it, they left Scotland for the New World, and walked the mountain passes from Pennsylvania to settle in the hollows of east Tennessee. She knows more history than I do, but she takes it all personally. Her eyes flash when she talks about the Jacobite cause, but she mispronounces most of the battles—Cul-
low
-den, she says. I tell her how to say them correctly, but I can’t tell her much about them. It was a long time ago, and nobody minds anymore.

She tells me I don’t look Scottish, whatever that means. Lots of people have brown eyes and brown hair. What would she know about it? She had never been in Scotland. “I’m a Celt,” she says, the way someone else might say, “I’m a duchess,” though I think it’s nothing much to be proud of, the way they’re carrying on in Belfast. She has the look of them, though, with that mass of black hair and the clear blue eyes of a bomb-throwing Irish saint.
She looks at me sometimes, and she knows things I’d never dream of telling her.

She seems to expect me to know some kind of secret, but she’ll never say what it is.
Fash’t
, she’ll say. “Do you have that word?” Or
clabbered
, or
red the room
. Sometimes I’ve heard them, from my grandmother, perhaps, and she’ll smile as if I’d given her something, and say, “From mine, too.”

I wasn’t much help with the songs, not being musically inclined. I told her the ones I’d learned in Scouts, but she said they weren’t the right ones, and she sang a lot of snatches of songs—all sounding pretty much the same to me. She seemed hurt when I didn’t know them as well: “Barbry Ellen” … “A Fair Young Maid All in the Garden.” I collected Beatles cards in senior school.

The song that interested me was “True Thomas,” about a fellow from the Borders who gets carried off by the Queen of Elfland. He was minding his own business in the forest one day, and up she comes in a silken gown of fairy green and carries him off to the fairy kingdom. “I can see why he went,” I told her. “Even if it’s a bit dangerous, it’s a chance to escape from the dullness of ordinary life. But what did the Queen of Faerie want with an ordinary Scot?”

She smiled. “Perhaps Scots aren’t ordinary at all to a fairy queen. Or maybe she saw something in him that no one else could.”

“Wasn’t he supposed to be a prophet of some sort?” I asked, half remembering.

She shook her head. “That was later. She gave him that.” She sang the rest of the verses for me—about the queen showing Thomas the thorny path to heaven, the broad high road to hell, and the winding road to her kingdom. And how they traveled through the mists, past a stream where all the blood shed on the earth passed into the waters of Faerie. And finally she gives him an apple that will give him the gift of prophecy. “And ’til seven
years were gane and past / True Thomas on earth was never seen.”

“He got back then.”

“Yes. And became quite famous as a prophet. But the legend says that one day when Thomas was attending a village feast, a messenger came running in and said that two white deer had appeared at the edge of the forest, and Thomas said, ‘They’ve come for me,’ and off he went forever.”

“She made him go back again?”

She thought for a moment. “Perhaps she allowed him to go back again. Maybe they’re still together. Where is his village, Ercildoune? Does it still exist?”

“Earlston,” I corrected her. “Oh, yes. The A68 goes right past it.”

I don’t remember telling her that she could go along when I went back to Scotland. It’s as if one moment I was advising her on things she might like to see someday, and the next I was writing my parents for schedules of festivals that we might want to visit.

She fell asleep on my shoulder in the airplane, which was a bit strange, since she always seemed so worried about me whenever I took a flight anywhere. I held her, a little awkwardly, and it was hard to turn the pages of
U.S. News & World Report
with one hand; besides, I knew what people must be thinking, and I was right. As we were coming in to the airport, the stewardess told me to wake up my wife so that she could fasten her seat belt. “She’s not my wife!” I said. “Her passport is blue.”

I’d made a sort of schedule, starting with Edinburgh, because a number of tourist attractions are close together, but after we’d landed at Prestwick, she said she wanted to go and see the Roman wall, which is miles to the south. “I want to make sure it’s still standing,” she said. I assured her it was, because we drove past it every time we went to visit my uncle in Yorkshire. “It hasn’t kept
them out, though,” she said sadly. I’ve no idea what she was talking about. I told her that we were going to do Edinburgh first, and that her border patrol could bloody well wait.

I took her to the Palace of Holyroodhouse, and the Royal Mile, and St. Giles, and tried to tell her about them. She always listens very carefully, but then she’ll laugh and say, “You don’t pronounce short e’s; you make them sound like a’s,” and I know she hasn’t understood a word. Except when she gets me to talk about myself, and then she hears things whether I say them or not.

I showed her the skyscrapers in Glasgow, and the Forth Road Bridge, and the new IBM plant, but I don’t think she was paying attention, because straight after that, she asks me which side I would have taken in the ’45. I told her that independence would have been an economic disaster—look at Eire and the mess they’re in. “Now then,” I said, “would you rather see the botanical gardens or the university?”

“Culloden,” she said softly.

That’s miles to the north, near Inverness. I told her we might get there eventually—too bloody soon for my taste, whenever we got there. It’s only an old field, I said. The battle’s been over for centuries. And it’ll probably be raining.

I wonder what Thomas would have shown the Queen of Elfland if they had stayed in this world? I suppose they’d have skipped John Knox’s house. We should have done. I don’t know what I expected of her there—a story about her great-grandfather the clergyman, perhaps. She looked around a bit at the exhibits, but she was most interested in whether Arthur’s Seat was visible from the upstairs window. That was her favorite place in Edinburgh. She wanted to know if that was the hill of the sleeping warriors, and I’d no idea what she meant. It’s folklore, apparently. A legend that King Arthur and his knights are sleeping under some hill in Britain (not that
one, I’m sure!), and that if the country ever needed them, they would awaken and do battle. When she told me that, I thought of her Tennessee kinfolks, who seemed to be sleeping under every hill in Strathclyde, as often as they haunted our travels.

Anything was likely to conjure them up from the hollows of their own hills—her father and uncles, from some outlandish place called Pigeon Roost, Tennessee—and she’d tell me this story about their mining days or that tale about a bee-tracker. Sometimes I had to look at the mountains, bare against the sky, to remember whose country we were in.

She finds history in the strangest places, and misses it entirely when it’s really there. I could barely get her to look at the armor and French swords in the museum at Edinburgh Castle, but she spent nearly an hour in a nasty wind looking at a herd of shaggy cows on a hillside. She wanted to climb over the fence to go and pet one, but I was firm. I could hardly get her to look at the steam engine exhibits in the Royal Museum of Scotland, but a jumble shop on Drummond Street fascinated her. She found an old wooden Marconi radio, the sort people must have listened to Churchill on during the war. “At home, it would have been an Atwater Kent,” she told me. “When my daddy was a little boy, nobody in town could afford one. It was the Depression, and people had been laid off by the railroad. So when the Dempsey-Tunney fight was to be broadcast on the radio—why, of course everyone wanted to hear it. It was the first live broadcast of a thing like that. The furniture store downtown opened up that evening and invited the whole town in to listen to the fight on their display model Atwater Kent. My dad still talks about it.” She and the proprietor went on about Churchill (him) and the Grand Ole Opry (her), until I had leafed through every copy of
Punch
in the shop.

She’s never forgiven me for not speaking Gaelic. What good is it? My schoolboy French is useless enough. But
she picks up every word she can, and mangles the pronouncing of it. She learned how to say “I love you,” and she says it to me often, though of course it doesn’t count, being a language neither of us speaks. “
Tha gaol agam ort
,” she’ll say, with a teasing smile, when I’ve corrected her about the silly way she holds her knife and fork to cut. Even if it’s in Gaelic, I know what it means, and it makes me uneasy. What would people think?

We wouldn’t have time to go to the Highlands, I told her. The conference I had to attend would keep me busy for most of the week, though I could take some time off in the afternoons to show her around. There were lots of things to see in Strathclyde, after all. Edinburgh alone could take weeks if you did it properly. She hardly looked at the exhibits in Knox’s house, though, just kept looking out the window toward the hill as if she were waiting to be rescued. I gathered she didn’t care for John Knox, but I’m Church of Scotland, of course, so I felt that I ought to say something on his behalf.

She stamped her foot. “You could have done without John Knox,” she told me, coming between me and the display of Bibles I was trying to look at. “He has turned your Celtic blood to holy water, and locked your spirit into the soul of a chartered accountant.” She looked up at me with a taunting half smile. “Are you going to kiss me or not?”

If she had known how nervous I was, it would have proved her point, but before I had time to consider the blasphemous implications of doing it under Dominie’s very roof, I took her by the shoulders and kissed her. It wasn’t supposed to be much of a kiss—I pursed my lips the way people do when they’re miming a kiss from the window of a train—but she flattened her mouth against mine and moved her head a little. I nearly backed into the case of Bibles.

“You need practice,” she said briskly.

“So do you!” I shot back. I had to help her pick up the
map of Scotland and twenty postcards that were scattered all over the floor, but we went to lunch right after that, and laughed and talked as if nothing had happened.

We rented a white Morgan roadster for our tour of the Highlands. An old one, of course, but it was in pretty good shape. When she wasn’t driving (flying would be a more accurate way of describing it), she’d lean back against the door and sing tuneless Gaelic songs that she must have learned off an Alan Stivell tape. Scottish music, she called it.

It was no good taking the map along when she wouldn’t follow it. She’d navigate by instinct, or sheer folly, I sometimes thought. I’d complain about it, but she’d never let me hear the end of it when it worked. Once she took us up a dirt track into some farmer’s cow pasture, and I despaired for the car’s suspension system, but there in the middle of a stone-studded croft was a fairy ring in the grass and a marker saying that Thomas the Rhymer was believed to have lived near here. I don’t know why she chose that path, when there was a perfectly good trunk road and a paved side road to choose from as well, but she said the other roads were too well-traveled for her.

“I wonder why the fairies left Scotland,” I mused, trying to humor her.

She answered me in Gaelic. I’ve no idea what she said.

We nearly got lost trying to navigate around Inverness. The haar swirled around the Morgan like a white shroud, so that we seemed to be entirely alone on the road. I tried to help her by consulting the city map of Inverness, and by looking for road signs, but she told me to be quiet or we’d be lost on that godforsaken road forever. I gave up and went to sleep. Had nightmares about people’s faces appearing in patches of fog, but I couldn’t make out what they were saying. I woke up when the car stopped; she’d found what she was looking for: Culloden.

I knew I shouldn’t have let her go there. She looked out at the flat field buried under the low-lying mists just as if there were something there to watch. “This was so stupid,” she said softly, the mist in her eyes. “Where’s the glory in it? They brought the wrong size ammunition for the cannon; they left the food in Inverness; they hadn’t slept for days; and they charged an army of muskets and bayonets with unwieldy swords.”

“It was a long time ago,” I said.

“A year for every day I’ve known you.” She smiled. “Well, you’ll be safe. I can’t see you out there with kilt and claymore, missing a meal.”

I nearly said, “Of course I’m safe from a war that’s finished,” but something about the dark meadow in the fog made me uneasy. I half expected her to conjure up some family ghosts from the Highland dead, but she just walked around a bit, looked at the cairn of stones commemorating the soldiers, and read the inscriptions on the historical markers.

“It was all so pointless,” she said, as we walked back to the car. “Why couldn’t they see what was going to happen?”

I was thinking out my answer, involving previous confrontations, discrepancies in weaponry, and inept leadership, when she stepped ankle-deep into a puddle and began to cry. I surrendered my handkerchief, which she proceeded to use to wipe the muddy water from her foot, still crying.

“You’re not hurt, for heaven’s sake!” I told her. “You’re carrying on as if it were blood!”

I thought she was all right by the time we reached Queen’s Garden, an old-fashioned bed-and-breakfast place she’d found in some guidebook to Scotland. I couldn’t get her to stay in anything that was less than a century old. I sent her in to book the rooms, while I was seeing to the tire pressures on the Morgan. She was waiting for me downstairs when I came in, looking quite at home in a
chintz-covered chair. She looked up at me, smiling. “You can bring the bags in later. I want to go to dinner now.”