Burning Down George Orwell's House, page 9
“Art school?”
“Aye, in Glasgow, no less. She didn’t even tell him she had applied until the acceptance letter arrived. I would speculate that every living soul on this island other than Gavin Pitcairn knows the importance of an education for Molly. The sheep and deer and seals know it. He called the school and threatened to burn it to the ground.”
“What an asshole.”
“He’s that, aye, but he’s also a good man in his way. He wants what he thinks is best for Jura, and it’s difficult to find fault with that impulse. That being said, before you go causing him any more trouble, I know for a fact that he would have burnt that school to the ground. Gavin’s entirely capable of such a thing, so unless you want to have your guts for garters you might want to stay clear of him, Ray.”
“Why, what did he say about me?”
“That at his first opportunity he plans to throw you into the Corryvreckan.”
“The whirlpool is real? Orwell mentioned it in his diary, but I thought he made it up.”
“I don’t know what you consider real or unreal, but right off the north tip of our island there’s a whirlpool which has swallowed up more fishing boats than you can count. Every few years the telly producers come out here to shoot yet another daft documentary about how Ulysses himself made it as far as the Hebrides. And some will argue that Corryvreckan is actually the mythical Charybdis, which makes it not so mythical by my reckoning.”
“You’re telling me that the sea monster from The Odyssey actually lives off the coast of Scotland?”
“That’s what they say.”
“And where do they say Scylla lives? Let me guess—Ireland?”
“As far as you’re concerned, she lives in Craighouse and goes by the name Gavin Pitcairn.”
Ray took a long drink. From the sound of things, he wouldn’t be able to buy supplies at The Stores or collect his mail for fear of being attacked by a crazed Scottish arsonist. “I’ll be right back,” he said, his tongue thick with whisky. He extracted a hundred quid from his wallet. “Give this to Pitcairn,” he told Farkas. “He says I owe him some money. That’s why he’s so mad. Tell him I’m sorry.”
“I’m afraid it may be a bit late for that, Ray, but I’m sure this will help. I’d encourage you to stay out of his way, which you will admit shouldn’t be too difficult for you up here. How’re you settling in, anyway?”
Good question. How was he settling in?
“Being here has definitely been liberating, and the whisky is spectacular. Do I remember correctly that you work at the distillery?” Speaking—or slurring, in this case—to someone other than himself felt great.
“I do, I do. I’m in charge of what you might call quality control.” Farkas touched his nose with a hairy finger. “This baby is my meal ticket. Or my drink ticket, I guess you could say. I possess an exceptionally acute sense of smell.”
“This house must be torture for you.”
“I’ll admit I detected a slight plumbing problem when I came in. And you’ve been burning garbage in the fireplace.”
“That’s quite a talent.”
“A blessing and a curse, Ray. A blessing and a curse, like most things. I will be happy to give you a tour—it’s quite an operation. And it’s my job, in a way, to keep a record of Jura’s history. Now I’m going to pour one more dram and head on back.”
“You just got here.”
“Aye, but I’ve quite a long walk ahead of me. I should inquire if given your interest in our Mr. Blair, you happened to take the opportunity to speak with Singer on your way over?”
“The ferryman?”
“The very same. He may be among the last of the locals who knew Blair personally. I’m not saying they were fast friends or anything, but I’ll be surprised if he doesn’t have some good stories for you—even if they aren’t what you might call true.” Stupidly, it never occurred to Ray that he should ask the older folks about meeting Orwell. Some of the longtime residents might still remember him. “And Miss Wayward up at Kinuachdrachd. I understand that her auntie knew Blair, though she’s known to be a bit weird even for a Diurach.”
“Is there anyone else I should speak to?”
“No one that I can think of off the top of my slightly intoxicated head. Oh … Mrs. Campbell.”
“I should talk to Mrs. Campbell?”
“No! She is devout in her hatred of everything having to do with Mr. Blair, a fact that might explain why the two of you got off to such an awful start.”
“You heard about that?”
“Everybody on Jura and Islay has heard about that,” he said.
“That’s not why she hates me, though. Or not the only reason. I really was terrible to her.”
“Aye, I heard that too.”
“What’s her problem with Orwell?”
Farkas finished his fifth or sixth glass of scotch. “Well, there’s been some speculation … and it’s no more than that. One story, set somewhere between myth and reality, goes that Mrs. Campbell’s dear mother, who lost her husband in the war, took quite a liking to Mr. Blair while he was here for the first time to inspect Barnhill.”
“And?”
“What do you mean ‘and?’ You’re going to have to keep your ears open on Jura, Ray. She took quite a liking to our Mr. Blair, if you know what I mean, while everybody else on the island detested the man. She may have even spent a few weeks here at Barnhill.”
Comprehension descended more slowly than it should have. “Are you telling me that Mrs. Campbell is Orwell’s illegitimate daughter?”
“I’m telling you nothing of the sort. Rather, I’m merely reporting, for your own edification, about some of the mythologies of the Isle of Jura, like Charybdis or our werewolf.”
“Jura has a wolf running loose? I might have seen it!”
“Not a wolf, a werewolf.”
“Oh a werewolf. Of course.”
“I’m entirely serious and you would do well to hear me out. Have you not noticed anything suspicious hereabouts?”
“Well, I have been finding dead animals on my front step.”
“Aye, and who do you think might be responsible for leaving them there, the tax assessor? And if I had to speculate, I’d say the first one appeared the night you arrived. Is that right?”
“I have no problem believing that there’s a wolf or bear or something loose on the island. I’ve scraped the evidence off my stoop, and it has me scared so shitless that I feel trapped in this house, but do you really expect me to believe that at the next full moon a werewolf is going to show up at my door?”
“No, Ray, I don’t expect you to believe it, but neither your belief nor doubt changes the reality. I have it on the best possible authority that it is not an ordinary wolf, but a lycanthrope, and we don’t only appear during the full moon—that’s just Hollywood superstition.”
“What do you mean ‘we?’ ”
“Well, if you must know, I have every reason to believe that I am a werewolf.”
Ray looked at Farkas. He did not appear to be joking. “Okay, I’ll bite. Why do you believe that you’re a werewolf?”
“I have my reasons. We’ll save that story for another day. I know what you’re thinking, but I’m not insane. No more than most people at any rate. That night you first arrived, that was the equinox, if you recall.”
“I’ll have to trust you on that.”
“That’s when Gavin and Fuller and the men go out hunting, every solstice and equinox, same as they did when you got here. They don’t believe me any more than you do, so they have spent their entire lives trying to find and murder what was in your garden that night.”
“Very funny, Farkas.”
“There’s nothing funny about it, I assure you. I’ll take another wee splash after all, thank you. It’s not something I can control, and I do worry that someone’s going to get hurt, namely me.”
“All the same, I think I’d like to see the next hunt. It sounds fascinating.”
“Aye, it is most certainly that. But I’ll ask you to do me a wee personal favor and refrain from shooting me. You’re looking at me like I’m daft, which I suppose I can appreciate, but even if you don’t believe me … and I don’t expect that you do … remember that the difference between myth and reality isn’t quite as distinct here on Jura as you might believe. Now I should go, it’s a long walk. Many thanks for the whisky.”
“Any time,” Ray said. “I hope you’ll come again soon.”
“That I will, that I will. I give you my word that the very next time I feel like a five-mile stroll through a snake-infested swamp masquerading as a path, this will be my first stop. I’ll see you down at the distillery one of these days and we’ll try to sort things out with you and Gavin.”
“Should I really be worried about him?”
“I can’t say, but it will be best not to risk upsetting him further, just to be on the safe side. This money will help.” Farkas slugged back the remaining scotch and sat in the mudroom to put his boots on. From his coat pocket he produced a small stack of envelopes. “I nearly forgot,” he said. “I’ve brought your mail.”
Ray watched Farkas splash up the hill until he disappeared into the rainy night. He went to the kitchen and, seeing his own reflection again, drew the curtains closed and filled a mason jar with water from the tap. The mail included a stack of printed-out emails Bud had sent to him care of the hotel. He placed them in the fire without reading them. The papers curled one by one in the heat until whatever bullshit his former friend and boss wanted to regale him with went up the chimney.
He also received a greeting card with his mother’s neat cursive on the envelope. He tore it open. Inside, her handwritten salutation “Dearest Raymond” was followed by the printed message:
Thinking of you
and wishing you all
the blessings of our
Lord and Savior.
She had signed it at the bottom, “Mother.” Ray put that in the fire too, then regretted it. He would need to send her a letter soon. What to say?
You know what I saw today? That had been his parents’ favorite joke. Every day when his father came in from the fields or, later, got home from the plant, he would ask Ray the same question. The habit continued long after he stopped falling for it and after both of them had recognized that the son’s humoring of the father signaled a permanent and unmistakable sea change in the relationship. Yet it remained funny even now. Everything I looked at!
MOST NIGHTS RAY MANAGED to drag his unexercised body upstairs to sleep off the booze, but every once in a while the dull morning light found him in one of the sitting-room chairs, his back and neck howling with pain, at which point he either would or wouldn’t bother to heat up a mug of water before stirring scoops of crystalline coffee bits into it and starting a new day all over again. He had grown thinner than usual after two weeks of dieting on scotch and cookies. His eyes sank into their sockets while the bones in his cheeks angled forward. His beard had sprouted in uneven patches of black bristle until he found a pair of scissors and sculpted it to a semblance of evenness. When his clothes started to smell he hung them out an upstairs window and dried them by the sitting-room fire. There was nothing to be done about the sweat stains on the shirts’ white collars. He had come to Jura for some peace and quiet, but living alone sucked. He should have remembered that.
Farkas’s visit had reminded him how much he needed to get out of the house and talk to someone other than himself. He was so bored that he became willing to risk meeting a wolf out on the moors. The Paps were calling, but that would require a bit of planning and—if at all possible—a clear day. For the time being, he chose a more modest destination.
The remotest reach of civilization on the island was a village a mile or so north called Kinuachdrachd. According to his diaries, Orwell had had friends there, some crofters. That was in the spring of 1946 so it was unfathomable that they were still alive, but Ray wanted to at least see where Orwell took a walk every morning; he would go there for his milk, until he acquired his own moo-cow.
Ray got dressed and headed out. If the sheep could get used to the rain, so could he. What he could not tolerate, however, was another stinking animal carcass. The smell was atrocious. He tossed it into the shrubberies. His socks were already drenched by the time he got up to the road. So much for his expensive boots. The rain was not going to stop him. The weather on Jura was no worse than the storms that rolled in from Lake Michigan—that’s what he told himself. The wind churned the surface of the sound. He could make out a small, craggy archipelago that hadn’t showed up on the maps. The mainland lurked ever so faintly in the distance.
Kinuachdrachd turned out to be a settlement of a dozen buildings, some of them in ruins. It looked like a fishing village, or like a fishing village was supposed to look. Smoke rose from the chimney of a little cottage and that was where Ray went. Around the back, a woman was wrestling with a ball of barbed wire. She had a pole through the middle to lift it, but it looked heavy. She was building an enclosure of some sort and having a tough time. A large dog heard Ray approach and it charged at him in a fury of teeth and slobber. The animal looked only semidomesticated, like it had never been indoors a day in its life, and like it was hungry for something other than its owner’s table scraps. Ray froze—wasn’t that what one was supposed to do? His heart stopped beating as if trying not to call attention to itself. There was nowhere to run, no trees to climb. He could almost feel the teeth sinking into his calf and tearing his pants leg. He tried to figure out where he would need to go for a regimen of rabies shots—Oban, maybe, if not all the way back to Glasgow—when the woman whistled and the dog stopped. It looked disappointed, but trotted back and plopped itself into a puddle in front of its doghouse.
The woman looked to be about seventy. She put the spool down with a grunt and wiped her hands on her overalls. Two of the four sides of the fence were already in place. “I guess you must be Mr. Welter.”
“I must be,” he said.
“Give me a hand with this, would you?” She nodded toward an extra pair of gloves near the back door of the cottage and held up a length of barbed wire. “Mind the ends—these are quite sharp,” she said.
“Don’t worry,” he said. “I grew up on a farm and know my way around some barbed wire.”
She looked at him with some concentration, sizing him up. “Based on what Mr. Pitcairn says, I imagined you were a bit prissier than all that.”
“From what I can tell, that man is a borderline sociopath.”
“That’s where you’re wrong, Mr. Welter. There’s nothing borderline about him, which is to say he’s an utter and complete sociopath, but he’s our utter and complete sociopath. It takes all sorts and he’s exactly as God made him.”
The woman’s face was leathery and wind beaten and beautiful. She looked like someone comfortable with her own fortitude. She had earned the crow’s-feet that led like ancient aqueducts from the sides of her eyes and Ray couldn’t help but think of the countless hours he had spent behind desks and in cubicles, staring at computers and watching web videos about animals doing amusing things. He had wasted so much of his life.
One end of the barbed wire had been wrapped and tied around a core post. The two of them lifted the spool together by the pole and let it unwind as they walked the length of the fence. “Go slow now,” she said. “That’s it.” It was a huge job and he couldn’t imagine that she had completed the first two sides by herself.
“Well my plan is to stay as far away from Pitcairn as possible.”
“Aye, that might be for the best, he’s a troubled soul, but in his heart he means well and he wants what’s best for Jura, or what he believes to be best.”
“And what’s that?”
The line got snagged on some debris on the ground. Ray held the entire spool—far heavier than it looked—while she got it loose again. “The sad part of it all is that for all his lip service about maintaining our way of life, as he calls it, and I’m not entirely sure what he means by that, he himself does not feel bound in any way by our traditional Highlands hospitality.” She put her side of the spool down again and removed a glove to shake his hand. “Speaking of which, I’m Miriam Wayward. Can I offer you a cup of tea?”
“Nice to meet you, Mrs. Wayward.” These people and their tea. Ray would never feel entirely at home in a nation that didn’t know how to brew a decent cup of coffee. “I was told to stay clear of you.”
“You’re welcome to do that if you like, or you can come in for a cup, and it’s Miss not Mrs., but by all means call me Miriam. Allow me to guess: Mr. Pitcairn told you I was a witch who cooks the bones of children in a big pot and casts evil spells on my enemies?”
“Something like that. Mrs. Bennett says you’re quite friendly, but that I should leave Mr. Harris alone.”
“Aye, he prefers his solitude, it’s true, and he should thank our Maker every day that solitude isn’t a crime even in this ruinous age. No tea, then?”
“Let’s finish this first, Miriam. Are you building a pen for your dog?”
“Aye, to keep her in and some intruders out.”
“Intruders? Is there much crime on Jura?”
She laughed. “Crime on Jura? Never, not unless you consider driving whilst intoxicated a crime, but then there would be no getting anywhere. We have some sort of predator on the loose these days, not that I can tell you how it got here. Mr. Pitcairn wants to suggest it’s a wolf, but I find that difficult to believe.”
“I saw it in my garden the night I arrived, and there have been dead animals at my door.”
