Andrew Ervin - Burning Down George Orwell's House

“You’re making me very thirsty,” Ray said.

“To tell you the truth, all this talking has given me quite a thirst too. Now, technically, I’m not supposed to do this, but we have some experimental batches over here. What the marketing people call our boutique barrels. These don’t often travel far beyond Craighouse.” Farkas extracted the cork from a cask. “Sometimes I’ll fill a barrel with madeira or dessert wine or whatever comes to mind, simply to see how the malt takes to the treated wood. That’s a fairly common practice these days, but I’ve had the idea of setting the insides of a cask on fire and aging some malt in the charred remains. Let’s see how she looks!” Ray followed him over to another cask. “Here we are,” Farkas said. He used a thin hose to extract two drams of black, opaque whisky. “Now that’s something! Slàinte!”

“Thank you, cheers!”

The scotch tasted like a forest fire, all smoky and ashy. It made Ray thirsty and quenched the thirst at the same time. It was unique, and kind of gross.

“Not quite ready yet, is it?”

“It’s pretty interesting.”

“Aye, that it is. We’ll try her again another day and see if she behaves a bit better. Now let’s get you to the hotel. I imagine you’ve already missed supper.”

“That’s all right, I’m not very hungry.” Not for Fuller’s stew, anyway. “I really appreciate your showing me around. You’re like a mad scientist.”

“You’re wrong on both counts. I’m neither mad, contrary to what everybody believes, and I’m certainly no scientist, just a humble man charged with recording Jura’s natural history one bottle at a time. Now I know what you’re thinking, Ray,” Farkas said. They stopped at the road to take in the sights. The fog had swallowed the water and was coming for the hotel next. Cars, trucks, motorbikes, and the odd horse or two filled the parking lot. People had gathered together from all over the island to hunt down a wild animal and far more importantly, Ray now surmised, to maintain the vestiges of Jura’s traditions. They were here out of a sense of shared responsibility, but also to celebrate themselves. “You’re a smart man. A man who can see beyond the trappings of his present circumstances. And that’s why I’m so glad you’ve come to stay with us. You’re a man of vision. You’re thinking that the natural life of the present is equally worthy of recording, am I right? Certainly it is. Here you go. Slàinte.”

He handed Ray his flask one last time. The whisky tasted different yet again, as if Farkas had been secretly switching them. The flavors — licorice, sour cherry, honey — came one after the other and were followed by a burst of laughter and the squawk of bagpipes. The party was in full swing. There were maybe fifty people in all, with more stragglers pulling in every few minutes.

“And here’s what I want you to try to understand,” Farkas said. “You have already affected the natural life of Jura, we all have, and I would not want for it to be any other way. Unlike our Gavin here”—Pitcairn had appeared, coughing into a handkerchief, on the hotel’s porch—“I recognize that change is unavoidable and I appreciate the likes of you who try to affect things for the better. Even your visit today will have an effect.” He took his flask back and drained the final, precious drops.

“I find it tragic,” Ray said, “that that scotch is gone now and it’ll never exist again.”

“Now I’m not prone to excessive philosophizing, not even about such important topics as malt whisky, but that particular batch was made to be drunk and enjoyed, and it was. It’s gone, aye, but that’s the way of all things. And that’s one reason we’ll continue to make more this year and next year and the year after that and every year until the seas rise and reclaim our little island. The batch you had a small hand in today will tell some lucky sod in the future a great deal about who we were and where we lived, just like this one has done. Even your three minutes of stirring will make a difference down the road in one bottle or another.”

Ray looked around. It was a glorious night: damp and so misty that he couldn’t see more than a few feet in front of him. The fog demanded a certain presence of mind, a being here that did not come easily otherwise, like everything that mattered in the entire world was contained in his immediate vicinity. The party was raging, and he couldn’t wait to join in.

He had watched enough overblown PBS costume dramas with Helen to expect the full foxhunting circus. Buglers and beagles, tweed waistcoats and whinnying steeds snorting their oat-breath into the mist. The reality wasn’t all that far off. Cigarette smoke and the salty stench of whisky hung in the air. A pack of braying dogs was tied up someplace behind the hotel. The assembled men ranged in age from young teenagers to the antiquated ferryman, Singer, and taken together they resembled a good, old-fashioned mob. Many wore kilts in the tartans of their proud, if dwindling, clans. They sang crude songs and told familiar jokes and spat in the dirt. They carried hunting rifles, pitchforks, torches that fought off the encroaching night. Bagpipers wheezed out nationalistic hymns and drunken-sailor ditties. The mist made it difficult to see from one side of the parking lot to the other, but he recognized a few faces from his first night on the island. Was that already three months ago? Even the dour Mr. Harris was sulking around. Pitcairn’s phlegmatic chortle rose above the commotion. The periodic discharge of a rifle cracked through the conversations and songs and they silenced the men and hounds alike for an instant, only to have them resume their boasts and oaths and threats and wagers. Bottles of scotch better than what Ray had brought got passed around freely and he availed himself of a swig from each and every last one. A ten-year-old and then another, and another. A sixteen came by — rich caramel and brine and seaweed and cotton candy — and another ten or maybe one he had already sampled. He felt loose, and ready for the evening’s spectacle. He was going to shoot a werewolf! Only he hadn’t brought a gun; maybe that was okay.

The ferryman ambled over. He brandished a rifle even older than himself. It might as well have been a musket and should have been in a museum.

“Hello, Mr. Singer,” Ray said.

“If it isn’t our Orwell aficionado!” He was so far along in his booze that he couldn’t stand straight. He held the rifle by its iron barrel and leaned on it like a cane.

“Farkas tells me that you knew him?”

“Who’s that?” Singer asked. “Farkas?”

“Orwell.”

“George Orwell?” He took a long swig from a bottle of whisky and made faces like he was chewing it without teeth. Some of it dribbled down his white-bristled chin and glistened in the lamplight.

“The very same.”

“I spoke to him on several occasions, aye.” He looked around to be sure no one was eavesdropping and lowered his voice to a whisper. “I can let you in on a little-known fact about our George Orwell.”

“What is it?” Ray asked.

“I don’t suppose there’s any harm in telling you this,” Singer said.

“Yes?”

“I mean, the man is dead and gone, as they say, so I don’t really see the harm.”

“Yes?”

“Enough time has passed and we need to let bygones be bygones.”

“Yes? Yes?”

Singer took another long drink. “You will be surprised to learn, young man, that George Orwell was not his real, God given name.”

That was it? That was Singer’s big secret? “You don’t say,” he said.

“No, no.” Singer looked around again. “His real name — and you should write this down — his real name was Eric Blair. E-R-I–C.”