Burning Down George Orwell's House (23 page)

Farkas pulled into the grounds of the distillery, which sat on a hill and took up a large chunk of downtown Craighouse. Not that Craighouse had much in the way of a downtown. The distillery compound contained two white plaster structures that stood three or four stories tall. They had been built on top of some old, painted-over ruins and were big enough to be seen all the way from the mainland. A warehouse of blue sheet metal loomed above them and the height of the smokestack dwarfed that. The hotel across the street was even larger. People were already gathering over there and Ray was eager to join them, but not before a free tour of a working distillery.

They got out and Farkas conjured a key ring the size of a basketball hoop and festooned with more keys than there were cars and houses on Jura. For decorative purposes, three
oak barrels stood in a pyramid next to the entrance. “I thought you didn't lock your doors here,” Ray said.

“Aye, I know you're teasing me, Ray, but you understand that our distillery, she's a different story—she must be locked or casks would be drained dry before you could blink.”

“By who, Mr. Fuller and those guys? They do seem like troublemakers.”

“By me. I can't even count the number of times I've awoken here after one of my new-moon escapades, my hands in the cookie jar, as it were. I cannot always control my own actions, Ray, and that's the sad truth. Besides, seeing as I'm still considered an outsider on Jura, I don't feel quite as obliged as some of the others to obey every little superstition.” Farkas found the light switches and revealed a reception area. “Now follow me,” he said. “We'll do the short tour now, and I'll show you around the whole works another time.”

Rooms were filled with a network of tanks and tubs and tubes: the equipment that produced all that delicious single-malt scotch. The distillery turned out to be a highly technical operation; this was no backyard still, but rather a modern facility that used computers and specialized, carefully calibrated machinery for maximal yield and quality. Farkas led him to a grimy room containing two huge wooden vats suspended up high on a catwalk. Their shoes clanked against the metal steps. The pungent stink reminded Ray of one of those extinct, old-timey bars in Chicago and Ray saw why: the tanks looked like swimming pools full of stale beer.

“Here put these on,” Farkas said and handed him a pair of sweaty rubber gloves and an oar from a rowboat. “I use only Scottish barley, though much of it comes in by ship. We let it germinate in one of the buildings out back for two or three weeks until it's ready to get dried in the kiln, which is where it picks up that peat flavor. After that, we grind it to a fine grist that we brew with hot water in the mash tun. What you're seeing here is the fermentation. We take the wort and add the yeast until we have what might in lesser hands form the basis of beer. We have machines to stir it during the wash, these blades that rotate automatically, but I prefer to do it by hand when I can. Watch me now. Skim the paddle across the top of it, like so.”

Farkas moved with more precision than his frame and usual level of intoxication led Ray to believe possible. He stretched over the railing and stirred the very top of the broth.

Ray followed his lead, but the sweeping motion was more challenging than it looked. “Is this the wort—is that what you called it?—that gets distilled?”

“Right you are! Now don't chop at it, Ray. Gently now, that's it. Once I have this where it needs to be, it follows through there to the stills.” He pointed to the pipes leading through the wall to another room. The door sat beneath the smaller of the two tanks. They climbed back down. A sign affixed to the low catwalk said
MIND YOUR HEAD
. Good advice.

Ray didn't grasp the nuances of the entire process, but Farkas appeared to be in a rush to get upstairs. He had come fully to life inside the distillery and moved like a man half
his age. The whisky-to-be flowed from the vats, through the walls and into the actual stills, eight containers shaped like big butt plugs that stretched to the ceiling. That was what they looked like. More tubes led at right angles from the tops of the stills to some holding tanks in another room.

“When the whisky's good and ready, and not a moment before, I store it in oak casks to put some years on it. And it might just interest you to know that some of those casks come from none other than your America. We buy them from the bourbon manufacturers as a matter of fact, so however much our Gavin wants to cry about outside influences—that's what he calls anything that didn't originate on Jura—the malt he's drinking relies on your people for its flavor. Try to keep up,” Farkas said.

Ray followed him downstairs and outside, through a courtyard and to a barn topped with a pagoda-shaped cupola. A bank of clouds approached from the seaside.

“We have one more stop. Once the malt has been casked, we store it in here. Three years is the absolute minimum, and even that is a disgrace. A good whisky doesn't even know its own name before the age of twelve, and that's the problem with that cack you're carrying around in your pocket tonight, I might add. It has no years on it yet. Again, like your America. Now feast your eyes upon this.”

He pulled open the doors and Ray beheld the kingdom of heaven. The warehouse contained hundreds of casks of single-malt scotch stacked to the rafters. A row of open-air windows
near the top welcomed in the evening mist. “It's beautiful,” he said.

“Aye, that it is. We house the whisky here for decades in many cases, and you'll notice that the casks get exposed to the elements, to the rain and the sea air. See those wee little ones? Those are called pins and contain four and a half gallons. The next one up, a firkin, holds twice that. Most of these are barrels, which hold thirty-six gallons of liquid gold. While I'm sad to report that we don't have one on the premises, the biggest cask of all is called a butt and it contains one hundred and eight gallons. The size of the cask and the location, that's how every malt gets its distinct flavors. And from the geographical location of the distillery and the tiniest variations of coastline and altitude too. Is it made inland, as in the Highlands? Or perhaps near the water in a small bight such as we are in Craighouse. Over on Islay, you have Bowmore sheltered in a deep bay, but also Ardbeg or Lagavulin smack on the quay and exposed to the full teeth of the sea. Over there they will rotate their casks for consistency—for uniformity—until the entire bottling tastes the same. Bah! With my malt, I can tell you from appearance how long it has aged and, from the taste, where in my warehouse it slept. So if you ask me if the change in our atmosphere is all bad, if the pollution and the rising temperature of the globe and the deforestation is all bad, I say aye. Aye! Because it means the end not just of this bottle”—he took a small pull from his own flask, closed his eyes—“but the end of an era. I'm
a historian, if you will. The bottle of single malt is a time capsule. A record of the natural life of Jura.”

“You're making me very thirsty,” Ray said.

“To tell you the truth, all this talking has given me quite a thirst too. Now, technically, I'm not supposed to do this, but we have some experimental batches over here. What the marketing people call our boutique barrels. These don't often travel far beyond Craighouse.” Farkas extracted the cork from a cask. “Sometimes I'll fill a barrel with madeira or dessert wine or whatever comes to mind, simply to see how the malt takes to the treated wood. That's a fairly common practice these days, but I've had the idea of setting the insides of a cask on fire and aging some malt in the charred remains. Let's see how she looks!” Ray followed him over to another cask. “Here we are,” Farkas said. He used a thin hose to extract two drams of black, opaque whisky. “Now that's something! Slàinte!”

“Thank you, cheers!”

The scotch tasted like a forest fire, all smoky and ashy. It made Ray thirsty and quenched the thirst at the same time. It was unique, and kind of gross.

“Not quite ready yet, is it?”

“It's pretty interesting.”

“Aye, that it is. We'll try her again another day and see if she behaves a bit better. Now let's get you to the hotel. I imagine you've already missed supper.”

“That's all right, I'm not very hungry.” Not for Fuller's
stew, anyway. “I really appreciate your showing me around. You're like a mad scientist.”

“You're wrong on both counts. I'm neither mad, contrary to what everybody believes, and I'm certainly no scientist, just a humble man charged with recording Jura's natural history one bottle at a time. Now I know what you're thinking, Ray,” Farkas said. They stopped at the road to take in the sights. The fog had swallowed the water and was coming for the hotel next. Cars, trucks, motorbikes, and the odd horse or two filled the parking lot. People had gathered together from all over the island to hunt down a wild animal and far more importantly, Ray now surmised, to maintain the vestiges of Jura's traditions. They were here out of a sense of shared responsibility, but also to celebrate themselves. “You're a smart man. A man who can see beyond the trappings of his present circumstances. And that's why I'm so glad you've come to stay with us. You're a man of vision. You're thinking that the natural life of the present is equally worthy of recording, am I right? Certainly it is. Here you go. Slàinte.”

He handed Ray his flask one last time. The whisky tasted different yet again, as if Farkas had been secretly switching them. The flavors—licorice, sour cherry, honey—came one after the other and were followed by a burst of laughter and the squawk of bagpipes. The party was in full swing. There were maybe fifty people in all, with more stragglers pulling in every few minutes.

“And here's what I want you to try to understand,” Farkas
said. “You have already affected the natural life of Jura, we all have, and I would not want for it to be any other way. Unlike our Gavin here”—Pitcairn had appeared, coughing into a handkerchief, on the hotel's porch—“I recognize that change is unavoidable and I appreciate the likes of you who try to affect things for the better. Even your visit today will have an effect.” He took his flask back and drained the final, precious drops.

“I find it tragic,” Ray said, “that that scotch is gone now and it'll never exist again.”

“Now I'm not prone to excessive philosophizing, not even about such important topics as malt whisky, but that particular batch was made to be drunk and enjoyed, and it was. It's gone, aye, but that's the way of all things. And that's one reason we'll continue to make more this year and next year and the year after that and every year until the seas rise and reclaim our little island. The batch you had a small hand in today will tell some lucky sod in the future a great deal about who we were and where we lived, just like this one has done. Even your three minutes of stirring will make a difference down the road in one bottle or another.”

Ray looked around. It was a glorious night: damp and so misty that he couldn't see more than a few feet in front of him. The fog demanded a certain presence of mind, a being here that did not come easily otherwise, like everything that mattered in the entire world was contained in his immediate vicinity. The party was raging, and he couldn't wait to join in.

He had watched enough overblown PBS costume dramas with Helen to expect the full foxhunting circus. Buglers and beagles, tweed waistcoats and whinnying steeds snorting their oat-breath into the mist. The reality wasn't all that far off. Cigarette smoke and the salty stench of whisky hung in the air. A pack of braying dogs was tied up someplace behind the hotel. The assembled men ranged in age from young teenagers to the antiquated ferryman, Singer, and taken together they resembled a good, old-fashioned mob. Many wore kilts in the tartans of their proud, if dwindling, clans. They sang crude songs and told familiar jokes and spat in the dirt. They carried hunting rifles, pitchforks, torches that fought off the encroaching night. Bagpipers wheezed out nationalistic hymns and drunken-sailor ditties. The mist made it difficult to see from one side of the parking lot to the other, but he recognized a few faces from his first night on the island. Was that already three months ago? Even the dour Mr. Harris was sulking around. Pitcairn's phlegmatic chortle rose above the commotion. The periodic discharge of a rifle cracked through the conversations and songs and they silenced the men and hounds alike for an instant, only to have them resume their boasts and oaths and threats and wagers. Bottles of scotch better than what Ray had brought got passed around freely and he availed himself of a swig from each and every last one. A ten-year-old and then another, and another. A sixteen came by—rich caramel and brine and seaweed and cotton candy—and
another ten or maybe one he had already sampled. He felt loose, and ready for the evening's spectacle. He was going to shoot a werewolf! Only he hadn't brought a gun; maybe that was okay.

The ferryman ambled over. He brandished a rifle even older than himself. It might as well have been a musket and should have been in a museum.

“Hello, Mr. Singer,” Ray said.

“If it isn't our Orwell aficionado!” He was so far along in his booze that he couldn't stand straight. He held the rifle by its iron barrel and leaned on it like a cane.

“Farkas tells me that you knew him?”

“Who's that?” Singer asked. “Farkas?”

“Orwell.”

“George Orwell?” He took a long swig from a bottle of whisky and made faces like he was chewing it without teeth. Some of it dribbled down his white-bristled chin and glistened in the lamplight.

“The very same.”

“I spoke to him on several occasions, aye.” He looked around to be sure no one was eavesdropping and lowered his voice to a whisper. “I can let you in on a little-known fact about our George Orwell.”

“What is it?” Ray asked.