“Finish what ye were sayin’.”
“It’ll take a few minutes. It’s getting cold. When there’s no sunshine, a little whiskey helps.”
He eyed me suspiciously, paused for a moment to survey his animals, then stood with startling agility. “Aye, ye’re right,” he said. “A shot o’ whiskey’ll do us good. But ye’ll have to put up with a drafty place.”
The cottage’s single room reflected its occupant’s ascetic and unforgiving nature. Walled with stone and dimly lit, it had a peaked smoke-blackened ceiling made of roughly hewn boards, a small rock fireplace and wood-burning stove, a cot tucked into a tiny alcove, and a heavy wooden table with two stiff-backed chairs. Haig lit a kerosene lamp and put it on the table, then went to a set of shelves bolted to the wall near a metal sink, and found a half-finished bottle of whiskey. The box I’d brought stood in a corner, next to a rifle, saw, and axe.
It was colder than it was outside, but he made no move to light a fire. Sitting across from me at the table, he filled each glass, shoved one toward me, and took a swallow. The whiskey had a peaty smell, and I held it near my nose. Then I took a sip.
“It’s strong,” I said.
A tiny smile appeared on his elfin face. “Wait,” he said. “Just give it a minute.”
The whiskey’s burn went deeper, into my sinuses and past my heart.
“Wait some more,” he insisted. “Just wait.”
The burn went deeper still, into my stomach and down my spine. It was the most powerful whiskey I’d ever tasted.
“Have another taste,” he said proudly. “Ye willna’ get this in the States.”
I followed his instruction. This time the burn spread into my arms and shoulders. The bottle had no label. “Is this from the Ramsay Distillery?” I asked.
Facing me from across the table, his features softened by the light of the kerosene lamp, he was a gentler presence than before. “It’s not Ramsay’s,” he said. “That stuff, if there’s any left, isna’ really whiskey. It’s rocket fuel. All o’ it, I suspect, has traces o’ radioactivity.” There was no anger in this remark, nor any sense of recrimination. His features had relaxed, and for the first time he seemed undefensive. This might be the moment to offer him another view of his troubles and the happenings at MacDuff’s estate. Still, there was a serenity about him now, a softness that I didn’t want to disturb. It was better to nurture the trust between us. I sensed that without much leading from me he would make more self-disclosures.
And there was another reason for waiting. The drink had produced a state in me too wonderful to interrupt. My curiosity about him had lost its urgency. The winds off Beinn Bhreac, the views of the loch, and the whiskey had produced a marvelous elevation.
“It’s good medicine.” I nodded toward my glass. “Who makes it?”
My remark didn’t prompt a response. He sat erect, elbows on the table, holding eye contact for the first time since we’d met. His features seemed less pointed now, his posture more relaxed. It was almost as if I were facing another person.
“It’s a good one all right,” he said at last. “Got it from a cousin who’s got a distillery. It takes away most of the pain.” He rose and, without a limp, went to the fireplace, placed two logs on a pile of sticks, and started a fire. “Let’s sit where it’s warm,” he said, carrying his chair, the bottle, and his glass to the hearth. I joined him, and we sat looking into the flames. “Aye, it’s good medicine.” He poured himself a second glass. “Heer, have another.”
“Carrying the chair over here, you didn’t limp,” I ventured. “Has your stiffness gone away?”
“Not all o’ it. But this helps.” He nodded toward his glass. “Especially with those feelin’s I told ye about. A shot o’ whiskey changes that. Like right now. Instead o’ the buzzin’, it feels like I’m floatin’ in a mineral spring. In soda water or somethin’ like tha’. It’s a relief, I tell ye.”
“Like soda water?” I pretended innocence. “And it feels good?”
“Aye, it does,” he said matter-of-factly. “I feel like a new man now. But it won’t last long. The feelin’s’ll pass as soon as the whiskey’s worn off.”
“And what about your other pains?”
He flexed his neck and shoulders, and lifted his left arm over his head. “Well, they’re gone, to tell ye the truth. All gone. But they’ll be back.” He poked the fire with a stick. “So Murphy! Finish wha’ ye were tellin’ me. Those things ye’re puttin’ in yer book.”
“How much do you want to hear?” I asked.
“Take yer time.” He stretched his feet toward the fire. “I’ve got another bottle before we break into yers.”
For the next fifteen minutes or so, I told stories about luminous phenomena that accompany exalted states of mind. Without any reference to him, I described auras, halos, and other radiances attributed to shamans, yogis, Roman Catholic monks, Zen Buddhist roshis, Hasidic masters, Sufis, and modern Protestant saints; and similar lights reported by mountain climbers, golfers, and other sportspeople. He followed most of this with what seemed to be genuine interest, finishing the whiskey bottle, then opening a second from his cousin’s distillery. But not once did he give the slightest hint that he connected such things with his own experience. When I said that as a result of athletic or religious discipline, some people experience a life-giving effervescence, like “bubbly mineral springs,” as well as luminous phenomena, he gave no sign that he equated such feelings with the odd sensations he attributed to his radioactive poisoning. Toward the end of my recitation, he started to nod. When I finished, he was snoring. “Haig?” I said, fearing he might drop his glass. “Haig? What do you think?”
He woke abruptly. “Think? Sorry, Murphy, I didn’t hear ye. Think about what?”
“About these lights that yogis and athletes see around the body.”
“Aye.” He sat up to revive himself. “I believe ye. It’s an old tradition in the Church. My mother was Catholic. Talked about the ‘little Teresa’ and the halos that people saw around her.”
Finally my patience was waning. “Haig?” I asked. “Do any of these things resemble what you experience? The glowing? The burning? The buzzing? The tingling?”
“Noo, it’s not the same at all. Atomic poisonin’ isna’ the same as wha’ yer talkin’ about. It has nothin’ to do with that at all. For one thing, yer saintly activities wouldna’ account for the glowin’ around the house.”
“But no,” I said firmly. “There are stories about places that glow. The caves of Tibetan yogis. Monastic cells. I spent some time in a room where Sri Aurobindo, the Indian mystic, lived, and I swear to God, it had a light you couldn’t account for.”
“But not MacDuff’s!” he said with finality. “There’s been no saint nor mystic there. The place is just an atomic dump.” He gazed reflectively into the fire, then stood to stir it. “But ye know, Murphy, a strange thing. What ye’re sayin’ reminds me o’ somethin’. There was a man come round the place from time to time when I was sleepin’ in the distillery. Tall. Red-haired. Talked to me once about these things, and caused the damnedest thing to happen. The damnedest thing. It was the last time I saw him, one day after sundown. He was walkin’ across the hill where I was watchin’ the sheep, about a hundred yards from the house I’d say, when the place begins its glowin’. About the time he reaches me, I jump up shakin’ my fist and yellin’ how the place has ruined me, and he says—cool as ice—that he can stop it. And with that he comes right to my side, shakes my shoulders, slaps my back, and there’s no more light at a’! Just like that! Nothin’ to it. The house was back to normal. Then he squeezes my shoulder, gives me a great big smile, and says he couldn’t’ve done it without me. Now, wha’ do ye make o’ that?”
“How old was he?”
“About forty, I’d say. What’s that got to do with it?”
“Just curious.” I held back my excitement. “Was he a Scot?”
“From Fife, I’d say. First time he showed up, he talke
d about buyin’ whiskey from the distillery, and how he didn’t like comin’ so far to get it. Lived at a distance, he said, but felt like the land heer was a second home. Said he missed it whenever he left, missed it so much he was thinkin’ o’ ‘bringin’ his entire body heer to live.’ ”
“Bringing his entire body here? That’s an odd expression.”
“That’s the way he put it, ‘bringin’ his entire body’ to live heer. But wha’ d’ye make o’ wha’ he did, makin’ the glowin’ stop? Have ye come across anything like that?”
“Yes, as a matter of fact. Indian yogis say you can learn how to see auras at will, or not see them. They have Sanskrit names for it, all sorts of names, and say you can turn the ability on or off with practice. Muslim mystics talk about the ‘inner eye,’ which they can open whenever they want. Martial artists teach people how to see ‘ki,’ the energy that’s supposed to surround us. He might’ve done something like that to you.”
“Is tha’ right?” Haig stood motionless in front of the fire, then turned to face me. “Ye know, Murphy, sometimes I can do it! Every now and then, in the right mood, I can turn the glowin’ off. Around the house, around my body, ever since the stranger did it.”
“Which could mean you don’t have radioactive poisoning.”
“Nooo …” He stretched the word for emphasis. “Noo. I can turn the glowin’ off sometimes, but not the stuff that causes it. Not the poisonin’. Not the iodine or plutonium. Some people with cancer canna’ feel it, but tha’ doesna’ mean it isn’t there.” His resignation was a palpable force. It seemed futile now to argue with him. “Murphy, I’ve got to get the cows for milkin’. It’ll take an hour or moor. I suppose ye’ll need to be movin’ on.”
He was coming to the end of his tolerance for company, but I wasn’t going to leave without learning more about the man with red hair. “I’d like to go with you,” I said. “Do you mind?”
“The cows’ll not like it,” he said, carrying our glasses to the sink. “As ye’ve seen, they’re jumpy with strangers.”
“Well, this has been good.” I stood to leave. “But let me ask you two more questions.”
“What are they?” He moved toward the door. “There’s not much time for the milkin’.”
“That man, the one who stopped the glowing—did he give you any indication that he’d been to the property when MacDuff was alive? Any hint of that at all?”
“Not that I can think of. But he looked to be forty, and as far as I know MacDuff died more than thirty years ago. If the man had been there then, he would’ve been a little boy.”
“Did he tell you what he did for a living? He wasn’t a golf professional, was he?”
“He gave no hint o’ that. But judgin’ by his energy, and his stature, and his sense o’ command, he might’ve been a sea captain. It seemed he traveled in different parts o’ the world.”
“How did you get that idea?”
Haig opened the door and stepped outside. “Oh, I don’t know.” He gazed across the loch. “It’s just my feelin’. The way he spoke. The way he looked. There was somethin’ big about ’im. Not just his physical size, but somethin’—I don’t know—somethin’ full o’ the wide world. Like he’d been to distant places.”
Far below, the loch had turned to steel grey, and the lowering hills were growing dark on this overcast summer evening. “It’s been a good talk, Murphy.” Haig offered me his callused hand. “Thanks for the whiskey, and good luck with yer book.” Then he limped away, and disappeared in the fields behind his house.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
GOLF: ITS ROOTS in God and Nature, with Appendices, Supplements, Index, and Notes. Professor Crail’s well-worn but handsome tome, all 733 pages of it, was a reassuring presence. I laid it on the desk of my hotel room and admired its embossed leather cover. It was good to know that as early as 1893 a learned professor of Greek philosophy had entertained the possibilities represented by such chapter titles as “Clairvoyance on the Links of East Lothian” and “The Unmasking of Atheists in Golf.” Hannigan and I were not alone in our openness to golf’s spiritual anomalies. Turning to the appendix describing the apparent demonic possession at Muirfield, I read:
After the infamous match, upon the entreaty of several friends, the unfortunate Garrick, with Mrs. Garrick, turned for help to the Society for Psychical Research, and were interviewed by Frederic Myers himself as well as his colleague Frank Podmore. Besides providing evidence of golf’s ability to evoke supernormal events, these conversations comprised a form of “metatherapy,” to use a term now favored by certain clergy associated with the Society. By all accounts, the Myers-Podmore ministration was successful, relieving both husband and wife of various psychic afflictions, including their murderous impulses toward one another. It also led to notable improvements of Mr. Garrick’s golf. The eminent gentleman, it seems, has since been able to play the game without a curious disability he had suffered for several years, namely, the illusory perception of a loathsome toad squatting obscenely upon each hole into which he would putt.
But most important for my general thesis here, the material uncovered by Podmore and Myers prompted the Society chapter in Edinburgh, of which I am a member, in collaboration with the American Society for Psychical Research and its Boston chapter, to collect other incidents in sport involving phantom figures and related phenomena. During activities as diverse as mountain climbing, long sea voyages, and ballooning, disembodied figures have appeared, either to console, terrify, guide, or inspire the persons involved. This is especially true for golf. As of this writing, several dozen firsthand reports have been drawn from reputable witnesses of apparitions on golf courses in Scotland, England, Ireland, and America, and these have been supplemented by several dozen more in the general literature of adventure and sport. These incidents have usually involved a single witness, but on several occasions, as in the Muirfield case, a fairly large group has witnessed the ghostly entity.
The material we have collected comprises a “census of phantom figures in golf” analogous to the much larger “Census of Hallucinations” lately conducted by the Society under the leadership of Mrs. Henry Sidgwick. From this material, it is possible to draw the following conclusions:
• Most of the percipients involved have been brought to a state of hypervigilance, either by strenuous physical exertion, extreme danger, or, as in golf played by its truest devotees, unremitting mental frustration and continuous psychic trauma. Such vigilance resembles the condition sought by Hindoo yogis, whirling dervishes of the Middle East, and tower-dwelling Christian ascetics such as St. Simeon Stylites.
• This condition is often accompanied in golf by a subtle sensory deprivation resulting from a compulsive attention to the ball that gives freer play to latent telepathic, clairvoyant, ectoplasmic, and other powers that are normally inhibited by visual and auditory stimulation. That golf has been called by various wits “a form of penitential prayer,” a “dark night of the soul in broad daylight,” “hypnotic somnambulism” and “a good walk spoiled” shows that this is the case.
• The phantom figures in these cases frequently appear in two or more places at once, or in a second or third location after an interval so extremely brief that they could not have traveled there by any ordinary means of locomotion.
• Such apparitions are sometimes accompanied by music, voices, or fragrances for which there is no apparent cause; increases or decreases of temperature; inexplicable luminosities; or sensations of supraphysical touch.
• In several cases, the phantom involved tried to communicate with the percipient (or percipients), either telepathically or by means of gesture and movement, to warn, admonish, uplift, or otherwise instruct them. Sometimes, however, such communications have no readily discernible purpose. In the Garrick case, for example, a few of the onlookers claimed that the apparition merely mimicked the behavior of the four cursing men, flailing about “with an ectoplasmic stick.”
Hannigan had been right in thinki
ng that the book might help to restore my confidence. Since my return to Edinburgh two days before, the phenomena surrounding Shivas Irons had grown more and more distant, and almost to the vanishing point after our rousing arguments the previous night with Hannigan’s fellow professors. Every story about Haig and the abandoned distillery that I’d summoned the courage to tell had been dissected wittily, sliced thoroughly, and ground to conceptual powder. I opened Crail’s book again, and turned to the chapter titled “Ochema: the Subtle Body in Golf,” in which I found this:
Terms such as astroeides or augoeides, the “star-like” or “silver” body—which was distinguished by certain Platonists from the soma pneumatikon, or soul vehicle in its inferior aspects, and from the eidolon, imago, simulacrum, skia, or umbra, different forms of the soul after bodily death—represent states of luminous embodiment intuited or directly experienced by ancient initiates. They stand for something real. They are not merely philosophical abstractions. They point us toward that greater condition terrestrial evolution might one day produce.
Astroeides, or augoeides, I propose, has a certain resonance with the condition and character of Angus Pattersone, the former golf champion of Fife, and are just as apt as any other noun or adjective with which writers of the day described him. No one could adequately portray or explain the man’s extraordinary brightness of body and soul, or the uplifting effects of his ebullience on others. These terms of Platonic mysticism, perhaps, are better suited to the task than ordinary English.
Following some half-conscious instinct, I turned the page to discover this passage, marked with a star on its margin and underlined with ink:
These richly suggestive terms associated with Pythagorean, Platonic, and Neoplatonic doctrines of the subtle body can, when joined with contemporary studies of supernormal experience, give us hints about the life to come, in both senses of the phrase as I use it here, namely life after death and the higher earthly existence that our world is struggling to realize. By assembling the different kinds of experience that such terms represent, we might better envision the next great stage of human evolution.
The Kingdom of Shivas Irons Page 16