by Paula Guran
I wasn’t sure to what extent this was because he was a devout Catholic, his faith fire-hardened from having grown up in a Protestant culture of institutionalized religious prejudice. He was leery of anything that might contradict the Church, his faith threaded through with a profound anxiety about Hell. Occasionally, he spoke about the Passionist fathers who visited his local church when he was a boy to deliver terrifying sermons on the fate of the damned. (I wondered if this was part of the attraction horror films had for him, their glimpses of the infernal.) The standard by which a soul would be judged after death was a source of concern, even worry, for him. We had discussed the apparition of the Virgin Mary to the children at Fatima, during which, she had told one of the boys to whom she revealed herself that he was destined to spend a great deal of time in Purgatory. While Purgatory was not Hell, neither was it a place to which you would have expected a young child to be sent. What could he have done, Dad said, to merit such a punishment? With the perspective of the last year, it had become clear to me that his questions about my church attendance during the two years I lived in Albany, his concern about my dating a girl who wasn’t Catholic, were rooted in an honest desire to keep me out of Hell, whose smoky fires burned low and red in the corners of his mind.
I didn’t believe my father had anything to fear from eternal damnation. I wasn’t sure there was anything for him to be concerned about, one way or the other. During my youth, I had been as devout as my father. To be honest, I had loved my religion, which was full of all manner of marvelous stories, those in the Old and New Testaments, yes, and those in the lives of the saints, too. I shared some of dad’s nervousness at the threat of Hell, but I grew up in the post-Vatican II Church, when the rewards of salvation were emphasized over the torments of damnation. Once I entered adolescence, however, the joys of the opposite sex became vastly more compelling than the strictures of faith. If I was hardly original in this—indeed, compared to the rest of my high school classmates, I was the latest of late bloomers—I roamed off the beaten path in my growing intellectual disagreement with the Church. I found its positions on most social matters riven by contradiction; nor did it help that so many of the men who pronounced them did so with an air of self-righteousness that set my adolescent teeth on edge. The ritual of the Mass, and its central conceit, the intersection of the numinous with the mundane, continued to speak to me, albeit, in a more figurative sense than I was sure my father would have approved. Religion in general seemed to me increasingly figurative, less a description of some ultimate reality than, at best, another human invention to help us through the struggle of living. At worst, it was another way for a small group of men to hold sway over a significantly larger of people, politics with more elaborate costumes. Either way, it had nothing to do with any life after this one.
To be sure, I had taken comfort from the Church and its rituals during the days and weeks after Dad had died. By the following winter, though, my attendance at Mass had lapsed almost entirely. Even when my work schedule permitted me to take my mother and Mackenzie to church, I sat through the service listening with one ear, especially when the priest stood to deliver the sermon. Sometimes, I thought that I could have been a better Catholic if I lived in a country whose language I did not speak, so that I wouldn’t realize the priest was summarizing a Peanuts comic to explain God’s love for us. I missed the faith I’d had in my childhood, and I regretted its loss because it had been so important to my father, and had remained so for the rest of my family. Its loss filled me with a kind of terror, because it had taken with it my father, consigning him to a void in which I and everyone else I knew would, in the end, join him.
XI
No surprise: that night, I dreamed of Corpsemouth. I was standing on the shore of the Clyde. It was the same, twilit time I’d encountered in all my recent dreams. In front of me, the river was at low tide, exposing an expanse of waterlogged sand studded with rocks of varying size. Behind me, the Battery Park, Greenock’s riverfront park, stretched flat and green. Beyond where the water lapped the sand, a wall of yellowish fog sat on the river, veiling the opposite shore. From within the fog, I heard the slosh of water being parted by something large. Goosebumps raised on my arms as the air chilled. An enormous silhouette loomed through the fog. Fear filled me like water bubbling into a glass. The fog churned at its edge; waves splashed the beach. A leg taller, far taller, than I pushed into view. The color of brackish water, its flesh was dried and wrapped around enormous bones. There were figures tattooed on the skin, but the creases and folds from its withering rendered them indecipherable. A second leg appeared, carrying the rest of the monster with it, but I didn’t wait to see any more of it. I turned and ran for the edge of the park, which had receded almost to the horizon. Sand grabbed at my feet. I slipped on a rock and fell into another. When the giant hand closed on me, I wasn’t surprised. I woke as it lifted me into the air, my heart pounding, relieved that I didn’t have to see the old god’s face, its terrible mouth open for me.
XII
The following day, my cousin, Gabriel, and his wife, Leslie, drove me, Mackenzie, and our mom to Glasgow. Gabriel was Uncle Stewart and Aunt Betty’s second oldest, which made him five years older than I was. The times my parents had taken my brother and sisters and me to Scotland when we were growing up, Gabriel had always been the kindest of my cousins, willing to talk to my brother and me as equals about all manner of serious subjects: nuclear war, the fate of the human race, life on other planets. He worked for the railroad, in what capacity I wasn’t clear. Leslie was an elementary school teacher; she and Gabriel had been married for eight years.
After we found a parking spot, Leslie, Mom, and Mackenzie set off for Sauchiehall Street and its assorted shops, Gabriel and I for the West End Museum, a sprawling, Victorian extravagance in red stone whose center was crowned by a selection of turrets that suggested a fairy tale castle full of treasure. The museum, I had learned from a follow-up conversation with Uncle Stewart, was where the engraved rocks removed from the burial site east of Dumbarton Rock had been sent and were currently on display. I wasn’t sure why I wanted to see them; it might have been for no more complicated a reason than that my uncle had told me about them. I hadn’t shared my objective with my cousin, but he was happy to accompany me across the museum’s wide, green lawn.
Inside, we traversed a large, echoing gallery to the stairs to the third floor, where the exhibit on Scotland’s Ancient Cultures was located. The display was at the far end of the level. It had been organized around a half-dozen modest display cases, each of which contained a handful of relics of the country’s oldest-known inhabitants. Large photographs of the Scottish countryside, each seven feet high by five wide, had been hung in the midst of the cases. Gabriel strolled over to a display case showing the rusted blade of an old sword. In front of a picture of a shallow brook running at the base of a snow-topped mountain, I found what I had come to see.
The only thing in its case, the piece of grey stone was rectangular, larger than I had anticipated, the size of a small table. The white lettering on the glass cover identified it as having been unearthed in 1933 on Gibbon’s Farm in Dunbartonshire. The description pointed out the pairs of concentric circles visible on the stone’s upper right quadrant, as well as the U-shape directly below them, which I thought resembled a horseshoe. The approximate date given for the stone was 500 ACE. I crouched to get a closer look at the stone, which brought me level with its base. From that position, I noticed a series of marks in the rock. At first, I took them for the scrapes and scars left by whatever tools had been used to extricate the slab. Then they came into focus, and I was looking at a row of characters. A rough square whose upper right corner didn’t connect was followed by a triangle with rounded ends, which was succeeded by a pair of parallel lines slanting from right to left. Fourth was an approximate circle with a line through its center, a crescent like a frown fifth. Last was another square, only, this one’s edges failed to connect in the lower left c
orner, instead turning inside in a series of right angles to form a stylized maze.
It was as if I were looking at the figures through a tunnel. Everything except that patch of rock was dark. I could hear the steady click and sigh of my father’s respirator, the faster, high-pitched beep of the heart monitor, the intermittent beep of a machine keeping track of some other function. I could smell the antibacterial foam we applied to our hands every time we entered his room. I could feel the thin blanket we helped him pull up because the room was too cold. My heart fluttered in my chest. I went to stand, and fell onto my butt. I looked up, and still saw the symbols on the stone. I remembered the expression on my father’s face when he showed them to me, the frustration.
Gabriel’s hand on my shoulder brought me back to myself. “What happened?” he said. “Are you okay?”
“Lost my balance,” I said, pushing to my feet. “I squatted down to get a better look at the exhibit, and I fell right over. I’m fine.”
“So you wanted to see this, eh?” Gabriel gestured at the stone. “Let me guess: Dad told you his Corpsemouth story, didn’t he? Including the part about the mysterious graveyard whose sacred stones were removed. Am I right?”
“Yes.”
“You know he made up all of that.”
“Not this.” I nodded at the display case.
“No, but it’s only a piece of rock with a couple of circles on it. There’s nothing magical about it.”
I was surprised by his bluntness. “I don’t know,” I said, “it’s kind of cool. We don’t have anything like this in New York.”
He shrugged.
“What about the figures on the end, there?” I said.
“What do you mean?”
“These ones,” I said, pointing to the half-dozen characters on the stone’s base.
He bent to inspect them. “Looks like someone was playing with their penknife. What’s the display say about them?”
“Nothing.”
“That’s your answer, then.”
I was tempted to tell Gabriel about the last time I’d seen these same figures, but saying that my late father had written them on a piece of paper for me after emerging from surgery during which his heart had been stopped sounded too lurid, too melodramatic. Instead, I said, “I suppose you’re right. Why don’t we go see what the ladies have been up to?”
XIII
On the way to our meeting spot on Sauchiehall Street, though, past shop windows full of high end clothes, shoes, and liquor, I asked my cousin if he truly believed his father had invented the story of Corpsemouth. “Not completely,” he said. “Dad reads all kinds of books; I’m sure he’s run across something like his monster in one of them. The king that’s in the story, Riderch, he was real, and had his castle at Dumbarton Rock.”
“But no Merlin,” I said.
“Actually, there is a story about Merlin showing up there,” Gabriel said. “What is it they say? If you’re going to tell a lie, make sure to fit as much of the truth into it as you can manage.”
“It’s not exactly a lie,” I said, “it’s a story.”
Gabriel didn’t answer.
XIV
For the rest of our excursion, which ended with dinner at Glasgow’s Hard Rock Café, and for the return drive to Greenock, which took us past Dumbarton Rock, those symbols floated near the surface of my thoughts. As far as I could remember, my father hadn’t taken us to visit the West End Museum during any of our family trips to Scotland. Nor, as far as I knew, had he gone to the place on his own, although this was difficult to the point of impossible to be certain of. He’d never mentioned it, and he’d had no trouble telling us about his visit to the Louvre, while he’d been in Paris on one of his business trips. I asked my mother about it during our dinner at the Hard Rock, delivering my question at the end of a short appreciation of the museum. “There was a lot of fascinating stuff in it,” I said. “Did you and Dad ever go there?”
A year past his death, Mom’s eyes could still shine with tears, her cheeks blanche, at the mention of my father, of their life together. She reached for her napkin, dabbed the corners of her eyes. “No,” she said, returning the napkin to the table. “I think I went on a school trip there—I don’t remember how old I was. Just a girl.”
“What about Dad?” I said. “Did his school visit the museum, too?”
“I don’t know,” Mom said. “They probably did, but he never mentioned it to me.”
“Oh,” I said. “I was wondering. Because, you know, you guys took us to a lot of museums when we were young.” Which was true.
“That’s what happens when you’re traveling with children,” she said. “No, in our younger days—BC, we used to say, Before Children—Dad and I went on picnics, or out dancing.”
So perhaps my father had been to the museum as a boy, and perhaps on that occasion he had seen the weird symbols carved on the base of the rock. And perhaps his brain had tossed up that memory as his anesthesia wore off. The last perhaps, however, seemed one too many. Yes, the mind was a complex, subtle organ, and especially after a dramatic experience, who could predict its every last response? Yet this felt more like special pleading to me than admitting that something strange had happened to my father, and whatever its parameters, it had left him with a message for me written in characters I couldn’t read.
XV
Back in Greenock, we dropped Mom, Mackenzie, and Leslie off at Stewart and Betty’s. Gabriel and I drove back to his house, in order, he said, for him to initiate his American cousin into the mysteries of the single malt. He and Leslie lived on a steep street that gave a view of the Clyde. The houses along it sat on a succession of terraces, like enormous stairs descending the hillside. He parked in a short gravel driveway, and led me first into his and Leslie’s house, to deposit her day’s purchases on the living room couch, then out a pair of French doors, into the back garden. A brick path took us through rows of flowering bushes to a wooden hut whose door was flanked on the right by a large window. A hand-painted sign over the door read GABE’S HORN; under the name, the artist had drawn a simplified trumpet from whose mouth alcohol poured. My cousin opened the door, flicked a light switch within, and ushered me into the building.
To the right, a short bar stood in front of a shelf lined with bottles of Scotch, with some better varieties of vodka and bourbon to either side of them. Behind the bottles, a mirror the length of the bar doubled the size of the room. To the left, a quartet of chairs surrounded a round table. Beyond the table, a chrome jukebox stood against the wall. Posters and pennants of the local soccer team, the Greenock Morton, decorated the walls, with framed photographs of Gabriel and Leslie in assorted vacation settings among them. Gabriel made for the bar, which he slipped behind to survey his selection of whisky.
There were a couple of tall stools in front of the bar. I settled onto one of them and said, “This is great.”
Gabriel glanced over his shoulder at me. “Do you think so? It’s just something Leslie and me put together in our spare time.”
“It’s fantastic,” I said.
“We like to come out here after a day at work, or if we’re having friends over.”
“It reminds me of a place my dad took me to,” I said. “There was a guy who was a friend of his—through work, but he was from Scotland, too. One night, Dad had to go over to his house—to pick up something for work, I think—and he brought me along with him. I was thirteen or fourteen. This man led us down to his basement, which he had set up as a bar—though not as nice as this one. He passed my dad a glass of something—I don’t know what it was, but Dad told me afterwards that our host had not been stingy with his booze. I had a ginger ale, which he gave to me out of one of those specialized dispensers you see in real bars, with the hose and all the different buttons on top of it. I was thoroughly impressed. The guy had been in the RAF during the war—he had a couple of big pictures of planes on the wall. The three of us sat around talking about that for an hour. I felt so grown
up, you know?”
“Aye.” Gabriel nodded. He had picked three bottles and set them on the bar. “I have some ginger ale in the refrigerator, but I think it’s time for something a wee bit more mature.” From under the bar, he produced a pair of whisky glasses, along with a small pitcher of water. He opened one of the bottles and tipped respectable amounts of its amber contents into both glasses. To each he added a literal drop of water. I picked up the one closest to me, and raised it to my nose. The odor of its contents, sharp, threaded with honey, was the smell of I couldn’t count how many family parties. It was me playing waiter to my father’s bartender, gathering drink orders from whichever guests were there for the latest First Communion, or Confirmation, or Graduation, and conveying them to Dad, who had opened the liquor cabinet in the kitchen and stood ready to dispense its contents. It was me returning to those guests with one or two or three glasses in my hands, delivering them to their recipients, and hurrying back to the kitchen for the next ones. It was me carrying to a particular friend a liquor my father had secured specifically for them, making sure to let them know Dad had said this was something special for them.
“Cheers,” Gabriel said, lifting his glass to me.
“Cheers,” I said, repeating the gesture to him.
The whisky flared on my tongue, and flamed all the way down my throat to my stomach, where it detonated in a burst of heat. Eyes watering, I coughed, and set the half-empty glass on the bar.
“You said you’re not much of a Scotch drinker,” Gabriel said.
“Not much as in, never,” I said. “Which is strange, considering it was the drink of choice at family get-togethers.”
“Try sipping it,” Gabriel said. “You want to be able to savor a good single malt.”
“Okay.” I took a more measured drink, and tasted honey mixed with something woody, almost bitter. I described it to Gabriel. “That’s the peat,” he said. I nodded, trying more. The flavor was not what I was used to: it filled the mouth, asserting itself as did none of the mixed drinks I’d previously had. I’d never been much of any kind of drinker, and I felt the liquor’s potency before I was finished with the glass. My cousin’s bar and its contents softened, their edges slightly less defined. Something inside me loosened. I said, “All right. What’s wrong with your dad’s monster story?”