Katie kept each of her grandfather’s stories as though they were her own memories; her imagination permitted it. These auditory heirlooms, given in melodious recounting and, in later years, through sharp breaths and frail smiles, were consumed and transformed by Katie’s love. To Katie, hearing such histories was like watching a play, but later, in maturity, with the old man long buried in Auchnorty kirkyard, Katie felt her mental reproductions to be inferior adaptations of his depictions. Her attempts to reassemble the scenes were obstructed by tricky particulars. Yet, when the Roch Wood fell, and Katie stood pale under the silent apathy of November’s morning sun, she recalled one of her grandfather’s tales and recognised herself as an actor upon the stage of future heritage.
It begins with one woodland and ends with none. Beyond mossy stone dykes and the quiet burn in which Katie’s late great-aunt washed clothes daily, there is a heather-quilted hill: Formartine Brae. Lang syne, the coarse shrubs usurped the hill’s lanky pines—which, bare to the tip like paintbrushes, threatened to dab green splotches on the sky’s blue canvas—and its great beeches, which boasted of thick trunks with enough rings to rival a jeweller’s shop. Katie’s grandfather, once ‘Jimmy’, instead of ‘Granda Jim’, played beneath that canopy.
Jimmy exercised such a talent for scaling trees that someone remarked that some prehistoric primate instinct must still have stirred within the boy. Yet, Jimmy evolved plenty, constantly adapting from one clothes size to the next, while his aunt stitched and cut in a firmly maintained rhythm alongside to keep up with the growth of her sister’s bairn. Sometimes, Jimmy sought boughs which cradled abandoned nests; it was hard for Jimmy to think that they had once cradled the whole wide world to now-flitted hatchlings, that they were what the wee bit croft and the Brae were to him!
It was, for Katie, hardest to think that her own Roch Wood of childhood play was flattened in one night like her grandfather’s beloved Formartine Brae wood had been decades prior. She had felt sounds which he had heard in his box-bed back then: rumbling lightning lashing and cracking upon the bleak countryside, howling gales haunting the intervals while the mind recalled wolves from childhood schoolbooks and phantoms from folklore, and trees thrashing alongside, having stood too long but refusing to go, before the creaking collapse of crowded rows toppling each other drummed the very earth like a quivering heart.
She had experienced. Now, Katie passed ripped trunks snapped as though on a whim of the wind, that ill-tempered artist, and uprooted plants which, in beautiful thrawn resolution, hauled their life’s work from the soil. Katie sensed echoes of Jimmy Muir and gentle Granda Jim as a guilty, oppressive sense of inseparability arose; memory, past, presence, reality, tale, truth, and exhaustion blended in the dizzying dances of the stumps’ hypnotic rings and the mocking impatience and hunger of earthen holes.
Escaping, Katie greeted a woman. This elderly interlocutor, with a sweeping, gesturing hand wrinkled and swollen with work, curtly stated that ‘With aw wir burning an cutting, nature’s daein it tae hersel tae get the hassle ower with!’ as she left the younger of the pair in a withering wreckage with quiet light glowing upon her face.
