Foggy Mountain Breakdown and Other Stories

me in the bleachers, shredding a damp tissue and murmuring, “He’s leaving. He’s actually leaving.”

“We all have to go sometime,” I muttered.

“But he’s going away, and I’ll never see him again.”

“You never see him now,” I pointed out. “Except when you have him under surveillance, I mean. Maybe you could take some snapshots of him, and have them made into a poster. It would be about the same, you know.”

“He’s really leaving,” her voice trembled with misery. “He is going out of my life.”

“You look like a basset hound!” I hissed at her. “People are staring at you. Snap out of it!”

“I’ll never forget him,” said Carol Lee in her most mournful tones. “I’ll treasure the memory of him forever.”

Ah! I thought, the Nobility Phase of the Grand Passion has kicked in.

“I’ll treasure these memories of him, and someday when I am old and gray… when I’m thirty-five… I’ll tell my children about my first real love.”

“If your memory isn’t gone by then. Advanced senility.”

Carol Lee gave me a reproachful look through her tears, and I decided to save my breath. We watched the rest of the graduation ceremony in silence, punctuated by an occasional sniffle from the Bereaved One.

At last it was over. The diplomas were handed out, the mortarboards were thrown into the air, as the seniors had been carefully instructed not to do, and the spectators filed onto the field to mingle with the newly certified high school graduates. As we left the bleachers, Carol Lee trailed behind me in silent misery.

After a few moments’ reconnaissance, I spotted Cholly Barnes, diploma in hand, chatting with three of his classmates.

“Why don’t you go over and congratulate him?” I said. “He’s standing right over there with some of the other seniors.”

“Oh, I couldn’t!” whispered Carol Lee.

“Sure you could. It’s a public celebration. Just go over and say, ‘Congratulations. Best of luck in the future.’ ”

She looked stricken. “No, I couldn’t,” she said. “I don’t know him!”

We stood there for a few more minutes watching flashbulbs pop in the twilight, and then we turned and watched the white figure, gown flapping, bounce off into the warm June night.

JOHN KNOX IN PARADISE

I LOANED HER eight guidebooks of Scotland, and all the maps that I had, but she only looked at the castles, and the pictures of mountains against the sky. “Not like my mountains,” she said. “There aren’t any trees, but it’s close enough. I guess they must have felt at home.”

Her people, she meant: the McCourys. Sometime a few centuries back, to hear her tell it, they left Scotland for the New World, and walked the mountain passes from Pennsylvania to settle in the hollows of east Tennessee. She knows more history than I do, but she takes it all personally. Her eyes flash when she talks about the Jacobite cause, but she mispronounces most of the battles-Cul-low-den, she says. I tell her how to say them correctly, but I can’t tell her much about them. It was a long time ago, and nobody minds anymore.

She tells me I don’t look Scottish, whatever that means. Lots of people have brown eyes and brown hair. What would she know about it? She had never been in Scotland. “I’m a Celt,” she says, the way someone else might say, “I’m a duchess,” though I think it’s nothing much to be proud of, the way they’re carrying on in Belfast. She has the look of them, though, with that mass of black hair and the clear blue eyes of a bomb-throwing Irish saint. She looks at me sometimes, and she knows things I’d never dream of telling her.

She seems to expect me to know some kind of secret, but she’ll never say what it is. Fash’t, she’ll say. “Do you have that word?” Or clabbered, or red the room. Sometimes I’ve heard them, from my grandmother, perhaps, and she’ll smile as if I’d given her something, and say, “From mine, too.”

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