Memory and Straw by Memory & Straw (epub)

Author:Memory & Straw (epub)
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, literary fiction, modern fiction, folklore, AI, identity
Publisher: Luath Press
Published: 2017-06-13T16:29:25+00:00

10

MAGNUS – GRANDFATHER MAGNUS – looked after Anna as she approached old age. And in retrospect, that perfect thing, he was the one who entered modernity. He was the first to move. Really move, I mean. Of course the others had travelled, including John who had seen the Taj Mahal and the Somme, but in a sense they had never really left. Whether in India or in Inverness, they were still really elsewhere: back in the glen, amidst imagined eternal things.

Magnus was employed by the estate as a ghillie – helping the nobility on their fishing and deer-stalking adventures, though he was also a jack-of-all-trades on the property, able to put his hands to everything from building bothies to establishing the orchards. He was class-conscious, knowing from the first day he set foot on the estate that everything and everyone had its place, and though he knew that order was established by man, he also believed that it was ordained by God. Not that he couldn’t see the nobility’s folly and stupidity – for wasn’t everyone in the world from the King down to the lowest commoner a sinner? However, that didn’t extinguish the law.

Magnus himself was gentle, knowing that his job was neither to establish nor to abolish the law, but to see that it was obeyed. He was also the gamekeeper. One of his main tasks was to prevent poaching on the owner’s lands and to control unwelcome natural predators, such as foxes and otters. He would trap and kill them with due care and efficiency. He was the guardian of things that could be caught and eaten: deer and salmon, pheasants and trout.

Gardening changed him. He then began to nourish and protect things for their beauty alone. For their colour and fragrance, not their taste or value. For the pure pleasure of smelling the jasmine, and seeing the primroses covering the river-banks. For the delights of the eye, the sounds of bees on the clover, the smell of wild garlic in the air, the soft touch of petals as he pruned the roses.

What colours each season brought! The white of winter and the purple of autumn, the bright yellow of spring and the thousand colours of summer. He learned that no colour existed on its own. The snowdrops were only white because they were on green grass. The roses were redder the greener the stalks. Everything was relative to its immediate neighbour, varied depending on what was around. Nothing was solid in its own ground. He became less certain of things. Of himself.

‘For to be sure of yourself is to be sure of nothing,’ old Joe the Master Mariner told him one evening. ‘To be sure of himself is the last thing any man ought to be sure of.’

Maybe that’s why Magnus liked rain. When the heavens opened and the streams overflowed, everything changed instantly. Solid rocks became wet, steam rose from the thatch. Like a parched horse at the trough, the earth drank in the rain. Things would, after all, grow.

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