Burning Down George Orwell's House (12 page)

“Jura has a wolf running loose? I might have seen it!”

“Not a wolf, a werewolf.”

“Oh a werewolf. Of course.”

“I'm entirely serious and you would do well to hear me out. Have you not noticed anything suspicious hereabouts?”

“Well, I have been finding dead animals on my front step.”

“Aye, and who do you think might be responsible for leaving them there, the tax assessor? And if I had to speculate, I'd say the first one appeared the night you arrived. Is that right?”

“I have no problem believing that there's a wolf or bear or something loose on the island. I've scraped the evidence off my stoop, and it has me scared so shitless that I feel trapped in this house, but do you really expect me to believe that at the next full moon a werewolf is going to show up at my door?”

“No, Ray, I don't expect you to believe it, but neither your belief nor doubt changes the reality. I have it on the best possible authority that it is not an ordinary wolf, but a lycanthrope, and we don't only appear during the full moon—that's just Hollywood superstition.”

“What do you mean ‘we?' ”

“Well, if you must know, I have every reason to believe that I am a werewolf.”

Ray looked at Farkas. He did not appear to be joking. “Okay, I'll bite. Why do you believe that you're a werewolf?”

“I have my reasons. We'll save that story for another day. I
know what you're thinking, but I'm not insane. No more than most people at any rate. That night you first arrived, that was the equinox, if you recall.”

“I'll have to trust you on that.”

“That's when Gavin and Fuller and the men go out hunting, every solstice and equinox, same as they did when you got here. They don't believe me any more than you do, so they have spent their entire lives trying to find and murder what was in your garden that night.”

“Very funny, Farkas.”

“There's nothing funny about it, I assure you. I'll take another wee splash after all, thank you. It's not something I can control, and I do worry that someone's going to get hurt, namely me.”

“All the same, I think I'd like to see the next hunt. It sounds fascinating.”

“Aye, it is most certainly that. But I'll ask you to do me a wee personal favor and refrain from shooting me. You're looking at me like I'm daft, which I suppose I can appreciate, but even if you don't believe me … and I don't expect that you do … remember that the difference between myth and reality isn't quite as distinct here on Jura as you might believe. Now I should go, it's a long walk. Many thanks for the whisky.”

“Any time,” Ray said. “I hope you'll come again soon.”

“That I will, that I will. I give you my word that the very next time I feel like a five-mile stroll through a snake-infested swamp masquerading as a path, this will be my first stop. I'll
see you down at the distillery one of these days and we'll try to sort things out with you and Gavin.”

“Should I really be worried about him?”

“I can't say, but it will be best not to risk upsetting him further, just to be on the safe side. This money will help.” Farkas slugged back the remaining scotch and sat in the mudroom to put his boots on. From his coat pocket he produced a small stack of envelopes. “I nearly forgot,” he said. “I've brought your mail.”

Ray watched Farkas splash up the hill until he disappeared into the rainy night. He went to the kitchen and, seeing his own reflection again, drew the curtains closed and filled a mason jar with water from the tap. The mail included a stack of printed-out emails Bud had sent to him care of the hotel. He placed them in the fire without reading them. The papers curled one by one in the heat until whatever bullshit his former friend and boss wanted to regale him with went up the chimney.

He also received a greeting card with his mother's neat cursive on the envelope. He tore it open. Inside, her handwritten salutation “Dearest Raymond” was followed by the printed message:

She had signed it at the bottom, “Mother.” Ray put that in the fire too, then regretted it. He would need to send her a letter soon. What to say?

You know what I saw today?
That had been his parents' favorite joke. Every day when his father came in from the fields or, later, got home from the plant, he would ask Ray the same question. The habit continued long after he stopped falling for it and after both of them had recognized that the son's humoring of the father signaled a permanent and unmistakable sea change in the relationship. Yet it remained funny even now.
Everything I looked at!

M
OST NIGHTS
R
AY MANAGED
to drag his unexercised body upstairs to sleep off the booze, but every once in a while the dull morning light found him in one of the sitting-room chairs, his back and neck howling with pain, at which point he either would or wouldn't bother to heat up a mug of water before stirring scoops of crystalline coffee bits into it and starting a new day all over again. He had grown thinner than usual after two weeks of dieting on scotch and cookies. His eyes sank into their sockets while the bones in his cheeks angled forward. His beard had sprouted in uneven patches of black bristle until he found a pair of scissors and sculpted it to a semblance of evenness. When his clothes started to smell he hung them out an upstairs window and dried them by the sitting-room fire. There was nothing to be done about the sweat stains on the shirts' white collars. He had come to Jura
for some peace and quiet, but living alone sucked. He should have remembered that.

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.

Pelts and furs and unidentifiable animal skulls decorated the walls and covered the chairs and sofa. A chandelier made from deer antlers hung from the low ceiling. The smell of simmering stew wafted from the kitchen, where Miriam went and then returned with a tray on which she balanced a plate of scones, a bottle of the local whisky, and two empty jelly jars. “Oh do sit down,” she said. She poured two large drams. “Welcome to the Isle of Jura,” she said.

“Slàinte,” Ray said.

“Well, well,” she said. She sounded impressed. “Slàinte.” She took a long drink and he did the same. It tasted like French kissing a leather-clad supermodel, and felt like someone had turned the thermometer in his stomach back up to a reasonable temperature. He couldn't get a good look at the bottle. “If you don't mind me asking, Mr. Welter, I—”