John Knox in Paradise

Abstract

John Knox in Paradise by Sharyn McCrumb I loaned her eight guidebooks of Scotland, and all the maps 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. Some time 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—Cultowden , she says. I tell her how to say them 25 correctly, but I can't tell her much about them. It was a long time ago, and nobody minds any more. 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 there. "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—and she seemed hurt when I didn't know them as well. Barbry Ellen...A Fair Young Maid All in the Garden.... I collected Beatle cards in senior school. The one song that interested me was True Thomas, about a fellow from the Borders who gets carried off by the Queen of Elfland. He's minding his own business in the forest one day, and up she comes in a silken gown of fairy-green, takes him up on her white horse and hauls 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...