Andrew Ervin - Burning Down George Orwell's House

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.”

“Well that is peculiar, isn’t it?”

“I talked to Farkas about it.”

“He wants you to believe he’s a werewolf, I suppose?”

“It’s the fact that he believes it that interests me.”

“He’s mad, of course,” Miriam said, “but there’s little accounting for the beliefs of others.” She lifted the spool again and waited for him to do the same. They arrived at the far end and spun the line around the post a few times at the spot she had marked, a few inches off the ground, then continued along the final open side of the enclosure. When they got to the last post, she cut the wire and the end jumped, biting into her sweater. “Almost got me that time,” she said. She pulled a hammer from her waistband and used the claw side to pull in the slack, wrapped the loose end around the pole, and then twisted the end around the wire she had already connected. “There’s another one down. If you won’t take a cup, how about a wee dram?”

That was not something Ray was about to refuse. “I would love that,” he said. “Then we’ll finish this off.”

The notches on the wooden pole and the two completed sections indicated that they had four more lines to run. It would be an all-day job, and the rain showed no signs of letting up. The dog watched them go into the house.