Sharyn McCrumb - Foggy Mountain Breakdown and Other Stories

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.”

She may have been rather quiet through dinner. I don’t know. I was telling her about the Loch Ness Centre, thinking that the monster would be an entertaining distraction from this afternoon’s bleakness, but she didn’t seem interested. She pushed her dish of apple crumble and custard toward my side of the table, and continued to toy with her napkin. I had just tasted the first forkful of apple, when she said, “I’m not sleeping alone.”

I gulped a mouthful of hot dessert, and managed to say, “Well, if you find you can’t sleep, tap on my door, and we can come downstairs and talk until you get sleepy.”

She smiled. “I booked a double room.” She looked like a cat lapping cream, knowing that the disabled bird will not be able to get away.

I didn’t quite see what I could do about it. Telling the proprietor that we weren’t married and that I wanted a room of my own would make me look foolish, but suppose we ran into someone from Edinburgh? It had to be just a matter of time before friends of my parents ran into us somewhere, and then what? She’d been married at least once (she won’t say much about her past), she’d got too much education for her own good, and she equated housework with indentured servitude. This was not the “nice girl” Mum was always on about my bringing home. Well, perhaps she’s just frightened of having nightmares about Culloden , I thought. There wouldn’t be any harm in my sleeping in the other bed, in that case. Except that there wasn’t one.

I went through seven copies of The Scottish Field after dinner, paying scrupulous attention to window treatments and garden layouts. “Imagine the care they take in planning a fox hunt,” I remarked, trying to strike up a conversation with the silent creature watching me from the counterpane. “They have to stop up the earths so that the fox will have no place to retreat to, make sure of the terrain. Such a lot of planning.”

“I know,” she said.

I read the magazines silently after that, hunched in the tiny chair beside the radiator, in a narrowing circle of yellow light from the rose-china table lamp. She looked asleep, curled up in the middle of the bed, her dark hair spilling onto my pillow. I supposed it was going to be my pillow, sooner or later. I undressed as quietly as possible and slid into the bed a good distance away from her. A few moments later I felt her hand like a warm cat’s paw along my back, and her lips brushed my shoulder blade.

I rolled over on my stomach and rested my head on my wrists. “Do you have permission to touch me?” I asked, as gently as one might remove a new kitten from velvet curtains.

“May I have permission to touch you?” She sounded amused.

“No.”

I heard a little intake of breath-she hadn’t expected that-and I was working out what to say about sin, and propriety, and all the rest of it, but she only said, “He whose love is thin and wise may view John Knox in paradise.”