Sharyn McCrumb - Foggy Mountain Breakdown and Other Stories

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.