The Gentle Folk

a short story

An old Scots mechanic – John McGrath by name – was the very last person in the U. S. A. who really believed in the Gentle Folk. And his was no charming childlike belief but one of experience for when he had been a comely Highland youth a fairy maid had seduced him and then striven to lure him away to her realm. There, she promised, he would abide in crystal mansions, dine with jolly company on dainty fare and live a hundred years for every ten he might in Scotland. But he fled to Ohio instead.

It was sure unusual wisdom in his youth that Johnny did manage to demur. The fair strange maid appeared in his little room in his family's cottage every night for weeks – slept with him, entreated him, caressed him more gently than human fingers can, professed her love, whispered in his ear – still he would not say "aye" though he deeply feared to say "nay". So then suddenly all in one day he sold what he could, gave away what was left, signed onto a freighter in Perth and was gone. And he didn't stop till he walked in the door of some kin in Perth County, Ohio. Yes, but mark this too: In the twilight evening of that day when our brave boy left home, his elder sister had been walking on the road back to her house and when this sister of his turned past a bend she came upon a strange maid standing on the roadside alone who was singing: "Oh what shall a poor forsaken lady do when her fickle lover's flown across the salty blue?"

All right now, a modest red brick house out on the edge of town in the town of Lochland, Perth County, Ohio. 1968. A girl and boy have called on the phone and stopped in – or I should say they're a woman and man, seeing they're actually students at the college – and they have a tape recorder. It's one of those big square heavy machines with the big spools like people had in 1968 and the boy did his best Hercules imitation with it for the girl's benefit as they came up the front walk. They are studying folklore and they have come specifically to hear old man McGrath tell all about the Gentle Folk and a little about himself. College students had just started doing that kind of thing, you know, in those days. So old Johnny McGrath is sitting in his lumpy threadbare easy chair on the back porch holding court with a big silly grin on his face and leaning toward a microphone like a TV star. He really loves it.

First thing after they turned it on, the boy had asked him if he lived alone and he had answered, "Oh yeah, my wife's been dead some twelve years now. I always told her she'd work herself to death," and he laughed, "and she did."

The boy brought the microphone back toward himself and said, "Looking around your place here, Mr. McGrath, one might get the impression that you work pretty hard too." The kid was really working with this project, trying hard to get enough of the atmosphere onto tape like his professor said. Looking around the yard, for posterity, the boy added, "You've got about an acre here, I guess. A nice garden. Bit of wood lot. I see you've been painting the fence here today. Do you have any livestock?"

"Nay. I tried keeping rabbits for a time but I could na' stand keeping 'em locked up."

The girl jumped in, "Do you have any children?"

Old Johnny hesitated for a long moment as if in doubt, but the girl didn't see the joke so he eventually answered, "None that I know of." In actual truth though, it had been a secret heartache to him that the luck of life had led him to marry a woman who, the doctor said, turned out to be barren.

Let me tell you how these two students came there. One of the neighbor children had been in the same professor's class a year before. Now that neighbor girl had been hearing McGrath say one thing or another about the Gentle Folk from time to time her whole life long so she wrote about it and that professor read that paper to his classes next year. Now that professor, of course, had been seeing "Scotland" one thing and "Scotland" something else around that corner of Ohio for his whole life. Thousands of Scots had settled round there so people had hardware stores with "Scotland" on the sign and "thrifty" grocery stores and so on and so on. There was a lot of tartan plaid painted on store fronts and here and there and so on. The high school teams were called "Celtic Warriors" and there was a bagpipe band that marched in parades. So on. But it was America and it was 1968. So that professor was just delighted that apparently some actual living person out there actually believed in fairies. To tell the truth, this boy and girl whom that professor sent had talked it over and agreed that old McGrath was either crazy or a liar and they just politely decided to keep their mouths shut on their scientific conclusions. Still, they really did want to record whatever he might say and he was a charming fellow. I guess they warmed up to him.

The night before in bed though, near approaching sleep but still not quite, he saw her face. He heard her voice too and he had not heard her talking for a long time. With a hard sharp edge to her musical voice she said, "Don't you speak ill of me Johnny. You'd be no gentleman speaking ill of me!"

And he answered most sincerely, "Never have I done and never will!" Then he sat up bolt upright and sweating.

It was a very long afternoon with that damn tape recorder. The fun wore off. It must have done something to his brain. Into that microphone he poured every bit he knew about them. He repeated some old beliefs that he himself thought nonsense – that fairies cannot cross running water or the ocean, that they live in the ancient barrows, steal away babies, blight crops, sink ships, poison cattle, wither men, that kind of thing, silly charms against fairies, silly things like that – he decided it was only fair to pass that all along. And he did not know for certain knowledge if it was not true. But mainly he passed on the realistic things about them that people in the old country in his generation knew, everything he knew, on and on. He mentioned that sometimes humans and fairies fall in love but the students did not ask anything personal from that. He then ventured an opinion, just in passing, that the Fair Folk hold individuals in question responsible for this. They take a wiser view, he thought, and falling in love to them is not like a bolt out of the blue but it's something you do and you must be responsible for it. But the two students did not question where this bit of philosophy may have come from.

That whole strange afternoon with that damn tape recorder did affect his brain in some mysterious way; he was sure he could feel it afterward and the feeling did not wear off and then when he sat up sweating after the vision in the night there was a damned buzzing in his ears. He thought it was a horse fly or mosquito in the house attacking him and in his deep distraction from some new half-seen vision in the dark he swatted at it several times. But then he listened to it. He heard it in both ears equally and it was constant, unchanging. It was kind of like the kind of busy hum that damn machine had made that whole damn afternoon. Or maybe not. Maybe it was like the ocean sounds sometimes when you lie in a bunk close by the hull in a steel ship and you listen very carefully, a deep liquid humming echoing sound full of distance, full of beings far away. Or maybe not; maybe it was a blood vessel bursting in his brain or a stroke or a tumor; maybe it was a fly of death after all buzzing in his ears.

When morning and a decent hour came he rushed out to the doctor's office. The dawning sun had brought him no relief, nor had a cup of coffee nor the morning news nor half a breakfast. In fact, by now he was a bit light-headed and definitely queasy. The buzzing in his ears was totally unabated and by the time he reached the center of town he'd fancied a dozen equally plausible medical causes for it and fancied quite a few likenesses for the sound. It was like the car motor in middle gear. It was like the radio hum between frequencies. It was like the background sound when he stepped outside his door in the daytime, the background whisper of all distant creatures going about their business.

The doctor examined him quite thoroughly as the doctor always did. This time, though, the fellow did a lot more looking inside his ears and throat and then testing his reflexes – having him walk about the room and stand in different postures while he was half naked, things like that. Not only that, but the doctor looked several times into some books. At the end of this, with his clothes back on, they sat together in two chairs in the examining room and talked.

The fellow told him, "I hope this won't alarm you but I don't know what it is."

McGrath interjected, "But is it serious?"

And the doctor answered, "I don't know what it is. If you were younger I'd just tell you to go home, go on about your business and see if it goes away. Many people get buzzing in the ears and it goes away with no ill effect and we don't know why. The brain is very complicated. Then there's an unlucky few who get buzzing in the ears for years with no ill effect, except it is so annoying and disturbing, and we don't know why. But then on the other hand sometimes it is a sign of something coming, a precursor. I'd like to put you in a hospital in the city just for observation, where they're more likely to save you in case something does happen."

"Something like a stroke?" Johnny asked.

"No, maybe like an aneurysm. Or maybe nothing."

So Johnny pondered. He rubbed one hand across his face and through his hair, and then the other hand across his face and through his hair. He closed his eyes and reached in deep inside, reaching for the in-most clock spring of this fear. Yes, he could feel something coming for sure. But without doubt he knew the doctor's plan was wrong. So he asked the fellow, "If I were a younger man you'd let me go?"

"Yes. But, you see, with someone in such good health as you have always been . . . well, sometimes with someone as healthy as you have been for so many years, sometimes suddenly there is a major problem."

So that's all it was. The fellow was just afraid for him; that's all. He asked, "So you think the whole rig's going to collapse at once? All the tires will blow and the engine will throw its rods all simultaneously and the gas tank will spring a leak?"

The doctor smiled and shook his head a little and relaxed. "Well, it happens that way sometimes." The fellow pondered a moment, deciding what to say, and then went on, "Look here, John, your file says you were born in eighteen ninety-eight but you look to me more like a man of forty-five or so. I've read about your kind of case but you're the only one I've seen." He pointed to a mirror across the room where they could see themselves side by side. "The first time I saw you I was young and now I'm middle-aged but you're the same. The same hair, the same skin, the same teeth, the same eyes. You've been to see me for a check-up every year, you broke your arm once and you got a cyst removed. That's all. But I'm afraid because I know it can't go on forever."

"No, it can't go on forever, I know that." There was a quaver in his voice. "You're right that something's coming too, sure as anything, just around the bend. But something's always coming. You know, now to speak on it, I bet that's why we're here with our feet on this flat ground at all; to see what's coming."

Well, he wasn't going to any hospital or some strange city just to make the doctor feel better. What he really had to do was get home and relax. He decided that he very badly needed to calm down. He determined at all cost to make a pot of chamomile tea. But then on walking out into the street he realized with great surprise that the buzzing had been soft while they had sat and talked. Just now suddenly it was loud again. So he drove away from the doctor's office very slowly, thinking furiously, and turned left, the wrong way, at the light. He experimented inside his head a while and yes indeed the sound would depend on how he listened to it. When he turned his thoughts deliberately away, yet gave some little corner of attention, there was a great lessening of both volume and rhythm, like a cello playing softly. Lost in thought, he kept on driving quite a while. Actually for a moment he did notice that he wasn't going home but it really didn't matter; he could have driven those roads around there in his sleep. When he gave the buzzing really full attention that was different too because he could discern a number of different notes in concert and some of these notes seemed very intriguing for unknown reasons. In a way, of course, he was asleep and he awoke suddenly with a start, the car quite still and his foot pressed firmly down upon the brake.

There were cars stopped in the road. It was a back road but there were several cars all stopped. People were turning off onto the roadside and getting out and talking with each other and walking off into the woods. It was a bright sunny summer noon. The barber's wife, Mary McCutchen walked up to Johnny where he sat there in his car stopped in the road and Mary said, "What do you think?"

He shook his head vaguely. It was surprising that the music didn't change from shaking his head but only from his thoughts. He stammered at the good woman half a minute, utterly lost, but finally made out one end of his tongue from the other. "What in the world is going on?" he asked her.

And she laughed at that. "What in the world? That's a good one. What world do you mean?" And she slapped him on the shoulder and she walked away, back off with the others into the woods.

So he pulled over too and he got out. He saw now it was just a little copse and out beyond these trees, beyond the people where they stood, there was a big pasture they were staring at and pointing. Johnny came up on little Bill Cahoon, the hardware man, who was holding a paper, a photograph, that people came and looked at in his hand though no one seemed to want to touch it. "A big round thing with lights just like a saucer," Bill was saying, "just like they say, and it landed right out over there and left that big circular mark. I was standing right exactly here when it landed. Eleven-seventeen p.m. last night and I don't give a damn if you believe me."

So Johnny looked out where the little hardware man was pointing and suddenly in his mind's eye he saw home. There was a fairy ring where the Gentle Folk had danced one of their reels there in the short-cropped pasture grass.

Johnny McGrath had been to war, World War One. He had simply been a truck mechanic back behind the lines over in France but the horror of the thing had found him nonetheless. He was close enough to the shooting that big artillery rounds could come in where his lot had stayed and one time one of these big bombs just came out of nowhere, out of a quiet night. It was the very first shot of an offensive, you see. There was a great explosion among his company's tents and then confusion. As luck would have it he had just walked out across the road to look up at the stars and though his ears were ringing he was safe.

Suddenly now that same sensation overflowed his heart: gratitude and relief. And he began to look about himself with different eyes at these innocent civilian once-born mortal folk whom he had known so long. "What fools these mortals be." The line from Shakespeare curled around his consciousness among a curving rise and fall of woodwind melody that now pervaded all his thoughts. But that word "fool" was lush and green with pity in his mind, pity for all these folk with their innocent silly vision of saucer machines from space, with all their lives so penned in by false horizons. And still he knew himself as mortal too. Still he knew that he had chosen to be mortal and he knew the outcome of that choice was coming due.

He waited up that night, you may be sure. He had no food, no drink but water and that pot of tea. After a great deal of reverie and puzzling it all about, he thought what he might do. He took a tin whistle that he had for many years, the good old Scottish kind, and sat out on the porch in back in that ancient easy chair and tried to play along beside the melody he heard. Immediately it seemed to be right. It seemed the melody would wait for him a while, sometimes, then whirl away a bit and then come back at last to let him lead again. Sometimes he and the melody even let the singing crickets lead and for a little while an owl. You may be sure that it was marvelous. You may be sure, although he did not dance, it was a dance.

And then at length, in the kingdom of clocks, the hour eleven-seventeen came round. John saw the fiddler then at last, across the grass up in the branches of a tree, sawing furiously upon a glowing nut-brown instrument that he held the old way in the crook of his arm. He was tall, young, gently swaying with the night's gentle breeze as though a tree branch himself, tapping his foot – and he looked right at John and grinned. John suddenly and certainly knew, and yet did not believe, who this boy fiddler was. Joy, hope, gratitude, regret and fear wrestled one another in his breast. It was his son.

The two of them kept playing. The rhythm changed, though, and the laddie by some trick now seemed to focus differently. I mean, it was no longer just a jolly dance they played but a coaxing conjuration too and just as they had been playing toward each other now they played toward others somewhere else. By glances and posture and somehow by the music too, the laddie drew the human man's attention to a spot below him and his hawthorn tree, a spot on the open lawn before the trees. There was some strange phenomenon happening there. Something strange was opening or unfolding inside the air. With his heart risen up and firmly stuck inside his throat, John played a skirl upon his small tin flute, a whirl of notes to liven whatever it may be and beckon, then another skirl and another.

If he had known no better John might well have thought that something was arriving from the distant stars above – or equally that something was emerging from the earth – for some kind of dark yet brilliant dazzle glowed all round about in a way that seemed to shine both up and down. And there was a whirling movement. This was all totally new to Johnny McGrath. When the woman of his dreams had come to the little room in the little cottage long ago it was always done with his back turned. She would speak to him first and tell him turn his back and then appear but there had always been this same fantastic glow washing the whitewashed walls.

Then it struck him what the strange opening whirling movement was. It was a heartbeat. His mind's eye all at once focused within. He whirled in a surging current through the tough muscular chambers of his own heart. Then it struck him how truly tired and strained that muscle was. Then he was struck with the lonely heartache of all these years. Then he was struck and struck again by a pulse of overwhelming light. Then all was still.

A number of them stood there in the fairy ring before the hawthorn tree. One of them was she herself, another was their son, but there were more.

Johnny stood up, lightly now, stepped down lightly from the porch but then just stood. To her he said, "I'm sorry to have left you."

"Aye, and ye've been gone long enough!" she retorted with some vehemence. "But yer little voyage is done. Ye know that don't ye?"

He hung his head in deep despair. He did manage to look across into her flaming eyes but did not speak a single word.

So then she softened. And she stepped out toward him lightly over the grass, her filmy glowing gown swirling around her youthful form. "Look, look," she said, stopping within arm's reach but still not touching. "I've brought the whole family! There's the aunts and uncles. There's me mum. They want to dance with you."

Still he stared, but now with a dawning of astonished hope. "Fair lady," he whispered, gazing deep in her eyes, "can it ever be as it was?"

And so she touched his arm. Her fingers laid upon his forearm for a moment then caressed his hungry skin more gently than human fingers can. "Oh, aye, aye;" she answered with a sigh, "it's just ye tried me patience. Dear one, I doubted what was in yer heart."

"Oh, Lovey, Lovey," he replied, embracing her at last, "I was just a cowardly youth and I was afraid but if you truly love me all is right!"

And so the fiddler started once again, slowly but then fast. With their feet and bodies already dancing, she drew him by their clasping hands across the grass into the ring and only one time did he glance back to the other world, the lonely house, the empty form upon the threadbare chair.

Of course we cannot follow any farther – Johnny McGrath has left our realm – but let me just assure you friends that our hero's fate is good. If you would doubt a man could live and love and prosper in the finest ways in such a land where he has gone to dwell, then kindly calm your fears. He is just a man but still a man is much. Indeed, just realize: we humans have lived a great variety of lives, done a great many different deeds in different ways, envisioned countless visions, thought many thoughts, played many tunes.