The Slow Air of Ewan MacPherson

By Thomas Averill

Though it’s not quite the motherland, Glasglow, Kansas, makes a fine home for Scotsman Rob MacPherson and his son Ewan. As the elder MacPherson blows up whiskey stills in his attempts to make a single-malt Scotch, Ewan falls in loveat twelve years of agewith Shirley Porter. There’s no turning back for Ewan. From that moment on, his heart has set its course. Through adolescence and into adulthood, through becoming a high school teacher, bagpipe instructor, loyal son, and keeper of all Scottish traditions, Ewan has found his one true passionmuch like his father’s obsession with single malt Scotch. A passion thatthrough trial and errorwill teach him that love is an acquired taste . . .

• Language: English
• Publisher: Dzanc Books
• Release date: May 14, 2013
• ISBN: 9781937854553

Book preview

1. DISTILLING KANSAS

THEN LET US TOAST JOHN BARLEYCORN

TO THE TUNE OF

"THE MIST COVERED MOUNTAINS, CHI MI NA MÒRBHEANNA"—SLOW MARCH

In this strange land, this uncouth clime,

A land unknown to prose or rhyme;

Where words ne’er cros’t the Muse’s heckles,

Nor limpit in poetic shackles:

A land that Prose did never view it,

Except when drunk he stacher’t thro’ it:

Here, ambush’d by the chimla cheek,

Hid in an atmosphere of reek,

I’m dwindled down to mere existence.

—Burns, Epistle to Hugh Parker

When Rob Allen MacPherson arrived in Glasgow, Kansas, Ewan Burns MacPherson was but an infant in his arms. Rob’s one true love, his Grace, had died mid-ocean in the same bleeding sheets that gave Rob his only child. Though his wife’s body lay at the bottom of the sea, Rob purchased three cemetery lots. To make monument to my Grace and my heart, Rob told Ewan when he was older. Father and son made weekly visits to the Glasgow Presbyterian Church cemetery, where Ewan stared at his mother’s name, GRACE MACPHERSON, and her dates, 1933–1952, and her epitaph, from Robert Burns: Never to greet Old Scotland more!

The young widower missed his Scottish home. He remembered yet more Burns: FREEDOM and WHISKY gang thegither, and when he wasn’t enjoying a dram of freedom he was distilling his plans for making a Kansas Scotch. In his teens, he’d worked for a time in Dalmuir, at the northern edge of Glasgow, Scotland, where they made Auchentoshan. Rob had saved his paltry pay enough to tour distilleries in each of Scotland’s whisky-making districts.

He knew to soak barley in water until it sprouted, to dry the grain over a peat smoke fire, to add water and yeast to make the mash, to ferment until the rich smell of alcohol flared the nostrils, to separate the liquid from the brown wort, to distill it in the goose-neck gourd of copper and catch the precious drops of pure alcohol as they condensed in the thin, cooled neck of the goose.

The whisky drinkers in Glasgow, Kansas, told him, Scotch is from Scotland. Anything from Kansas we’ve spit out like cow piss, for that was the taste of it.

But Rob rented a barn on the edge of Glasgow from Bertram Campbell. He hired help, Campbell’s neighbor, Christopher Cork, one of a small community of black farmers whose families had come to Kansas around the same time as the first Scots—seventy-some years before—during the first great migration of former slaves out of the South. "Exodusters, my folks were called, Chris Cork told Rob. All of them come to Free State Kansas, the Abolitionist state, the home of old John Brown. When they got here, they were just as sure to be called niggers as in any Southern state. Can’t change white folks, is what I say. But you can change your own self. We wanted land. We got it, and ain’t nobody going to take it away."

The Exodusters had sent their sons to World War I. They’d outlasted the Great Depression and the dust bowl. They’d sent their grandsons to World War II. Chris Cork was one of the sons. He’d served in the Army in the First World War. He’d traveled in Europe and to England and Scotland. He liked Scotch. His own father, who’d been born in slavery, just before the Civil War, on the Cork plantation, was half-Scottish. The blacks on the Cork place had taken the Cork name. They’d grown up with Scotch whisky, bagpipes and the poetry of Robert Burns along with soul food and the AME Church.

Chris Cork worked odd jobs. He had his son’s widow and baby—Elizabeth and Dillon Cork—to support. His first son, Daniel, had been in World War II. Army, like his father. Killed in some of the final action, by a German sniper, in France, in 1945, the same year Dillon was born. Dillon’s mother took in laundry, but had a harder time earning a living among the tightfisted Scots than Chris did. His second son, Joshua, had left long before. We got our land, Chris Cork told Rob, so I get by. Elizabeth got nothing but the color of her skin and a fatherless boy. So what if she works hard, when nobody gives her nothing to do. Land makes you your own boss. Land doesn’t care the color of your skin. Nor does a cow. Nor an apple.

When Rob and Cork worked together, Dillon watched the baby Ewan. For almost a year, until November of 1953, a couple of months after Ewan’s first birthday, they distilled and transferred the distillation into barrels to age for ten years.

You laying me off for ten years? joked Chris Cork. This whisky business is tough.

Rob promised other work. By that time he was postmaster of Glasgow. He hired out special deliveries to Chris Cork or Elizabeth. Glaswegians came to know the sound of their old jalopy—the oldest automobile still running in the county—bouncing down dusty rural roads, Dillon perched on the front seat beside his mother or grandfather.

For the ten years that Rob MacPherson aged his whisky, Ewan learned what he would later call, The catechism of single malt.

The names of Scotland’s whiskies were hard to read and impossible to pronounce: Tullibardine, Benriach, Pittyvaich, Clynelish, Caolila, Dailuaine. On the bottles were images of deer, casks, mountains, waterfalls, low-slung cottages, huge castles. When sent to his father’s whisky cabinet, Ewan had to decipher words, study labels, ask his father to repeat whatever he’d requested. Whenever he asked what whisky tasted like, his father said, Have a sniff. Ewan’s nose wrinkled.

One night, it might be, Let’s go near Loch Lomond, where pure water falls into a red sandstone hollow. Close by, Rob Roy McGregor hid in a fine old oak. Touch these fingers, lad,—Rob extended his thick hands—for they have touched that oaken bit of Scotland’s history. Ewan touched his father’s fingers, then went for the Glengoyne, made but fifteen miles from the Glasgow of his father’s youth, probably distilled when his father still lived there.

Another night, his father might range farther. Smoke, he said. Hebridean smoke. And the cool, moist sea and dark peat. Ewan ran for Bowmore, from Islay. His father poured a small glass and breathed the fumes, then took a small bit in his mouth. Son, he said, if your mouth was a cave, there’d be a fire in that cave. A Bowmore fire.

Ewan had no idea of the price of Scotch, nor how his father managed to purchase such a number and variety of bottles so far from Scotland. Later, he would learn of a buying club, rotating their purchases, each member paying in by the month.

One month the club might have ordered a Lowland. Rob would ask Ewan to find the Edinburgh Malt, From beside the Kinchi Burn. Ewan knew where the Glenkinchie bottle stood, fat and satisfied with itself.

Once, when Rob asked for Glenfiddich—Water of the Robbie Dubh Spring, from Fiddich, the valley of the deer—Ewan poured Glenmorangie instead. His father tasted it, raised his eyebrows. Very good, he said, but I wanted a Speyside whisky. This is a Highland.

How do you know? asked Ewan.

"How do you know, when you’re set down in front of your school, that it’s your school?" asked Rob.

I know what my school looks like, said Ewan.

I know what my country tastes like, said Rob. Each place has its smell, just as each particular woman has her scent. And each particular food its taste. If you asked for a carrot, and I gave you a radish, would you not know the difference?

All your bottles smell the same to me, Ewan said.

So you know your school, and your carrots and radishes, laughed Rob. In time you’ll know your whisky and your women. Come, lad, and he patted his knee. Ewan sat in his father’s lap. Close your eyes, said Rob. He put the Glenmorangie to Ewan’s nose. Breathe.

Ewan tried to smell what his father wanted him to smell.

Think of a hard water, like Kansas water, for this Tarlogie Springs water flowed through lime and sandstone. Think of our own tap water.

Ewan knew that almost metallic taste.

Now think of soft smoke, from light peat, the same smell that’s on your hands each spring when we plant our potatoes. Can you smell that?

Yes, Father, said Ewan.

Now, imagine a drop of honey on your tongue, but let it come to your nose with a drop of cough medicine. That’s Glenmorangie.

Cough medicine? asked Ewan.

Be serious, said his father. Close your eyes now. Think only of water, smoke, peaty earth and honey medicine, blended to a vapor for you. He put the cup to Ewan’s lips. Ewan took a tiny drop into his mouth. For the first time in his life, he let the taste linger on his tongue, become complex, layered, many things at once. He was nine years old.

From then on, Rob allowed Ewan a small sip. You should know your father’s homeland, Rob said. Scotch went from harsh medicine to tonic. Ewan looked forward to his daily taste.

He liked the smoky Islays, though he couldn’t tell them apart: Ardberg, Laphroaig, Lagavulin and Bunnahabhain.

Rob pulled out his map of Scotland, and drew a line from Dundee to Greenock. The three mellow Lowland whiskies were produced south of that line. Ewan could tell the chalky dryness of Glenkinchie from the smoother Auchentoshan from the sour straw of Littlemill.

The four dozen Speysides, concentrated along the River Spey, all had specific character, because, Rob told Ewan, The water and air are like nowhere else on the globe. The individual characters within the character of Speyside confused Ewan. Rob could tell The Glenlivet, made of water that flowed over granite, from Tamdhu, with its Saladin Box maltings and water from the burn of Tamdhu, which means, in the Gaelic, little dark hill. His father claimed he could discern the water of Cardnach Spring—Knockando—from the water of Chapelton Springs—Benromach.

As for the Highlands, some three dozen, singling one out was as hard for Ewan as it would have been to find his mother in a crowd, were she alive. His father named them: Peachy Dalmore; Deanston, with its claim of a touch of honey on the tail; absolute Oban and Highland Park, which boasted a young, rooty, heathery character, aged in sherry casks. His father had visited the Highland Park distillery. The northernmost distillery in the world, Rob told Ewan. A good hideaway, that, up in the Orkney Islands. Where distillers could operate illegally all those years, as we do in Kansas. The whisky was stowed many different places, including the church pulpit. Now there’s a fine use for a pulpit. A true sermon might be possible, for once.

Around that time, Rob took a special fancy to Scapa, another Orcadian single malt. He’d visited the site in his travels, too, though the distillery had been in poor condition. Rob told Ewan about the Scapa Flow, the water linking the North Sea to the Atlantic Ocean. During the First World War, naval ships in the Flow saved the Scapa distillery from destruction by fire. In the Second, the Flow was as fine a hiding place for ships as it had been for whisky. Once refurbished after the war, the distillery began producing a twelve-year-old Single Orkney Malt. Imagine standing on a cliff top above the Scapa Flow, Rob instructed Ewan. The clean, sharp air, the heather at your feet, the sweetness in your heart. As far from the English and their gin as you might be. That’s what you want in a whisky.

We’ll be far from the British here, when our whisky is ready, said Ewan.

Sadly, we’ll be far from Scotland, as well, said Rob.

Why did we come here? asked Ewan.

Sometimes, lad, change is all that keeps you going.

Will we go back some day?

You can learn your whiskies in Kansas, said Rob. But you can’t know the land. You can’t walk, as my feet have, where Robert Burns walked. You have to see the humble cottage of his birth, in Alloway. You have to visit the last of Burns’ homes, in Dumfries, and read his name, scratched on the window glass in his own hand with a diamond. You have to touch the bed he died in. Ay, we’ll take you to Scotland and show you off, grown so fine as you are. Already with a taste for the whisky.

In mid-November 1963, Rob sent out invitations to a Kansas Scotch-tasting party. He promised, The tasting and bottling of what would be Kansas’ first-ever fine single malt.

The old Campbell barn was full of a dozen Scotsmen, all dressed in clan kilts. A Cameron—wide green stripes crosshatching a red background. A gold, charcoal and red Buchanan. Wallace, red and charcoal, the one that looks most like what Americans call a hunter’s plaid. The green Ross, squared with those thin red, cream and black lines. MacPherson, both clan and dress. Several Barclays, the hunting plaid, muted green and purple, like thistles growing on a Scottish hillside. Each tartan decorated a man whose tongue longed for a taste of home. Chris Cork came, too, with Dillon, who watched the tasting with Ewan from the barn loft.

They diluted the pure spirits with water, then tested the proof of the whisky in the ancient way, combining gunpowder and whisky, then lighting it. As in the old days, the sudden flash proved there was alcohol enough to pass the standard.

The men tried drams from barrel after barrel, too polite to judge aloud, each taste bringing them closer to disappointment.

Kansas, the Wallace finally spat.

"Kansas does have a thin, dry, blasting, pestiferous air," said a Barclay.

It’s the water, said another Barclay. Like mud. Thick as mucus.

The grain, said the Cameron. The soil itself, rich though it is. Bland as porridge.

Maybe if you blended, said the Ross.

Damn it, no, sputtered Rob MacPherson. Blending was the trick of modern life, when people couldn’t stand strong flavors, strong personalities, strong opinions.

None would bottle or take any of Rob’s distillation home except Chris Cork. Better than some home hooch I tried, Cork said.

Only the one not a Scot can bear it, Rob railed. He threw a cask from the hayloft simply to watch it crash. Not the water of life. The water of disappointment, he ranted. The water of the Scot who has abandoned his homeland, to come to rest in a godforsaken country. The tasters filed out of the barn door. They were philosophical. Their experience had taught them not to expect fine results. Chris and Dillon Cork, with Ewan MacPherson’s help, cleaned up the smashed barrel while Rob voiced an epitaph from Burns: Dearest of Distillations last and best!—/ How art thou lost!

Given Rob’s maxim that the more he drank, the better it tasted, he began to drink. For two days, Ewan awoke by himself, went to school by himself, returned home by himself, cooked a small dinner by himself and went to bed. On the third morning, Rob woke Ewan early, a fiery look in his eyes. A third distillation, he said, excited. Scotland says two, but Kansas will want three, of the best of the casks. You’ll find me out at the barn for a couple of days. Cork will be helping me. Off he charged, full of drunken hope.

Ewan found his father and Cork sooner than he expected. School ended with the stunning news of the Kennedy assassination. Nobody quite believed what they were hearing, and only television, it seemed, could convince them of the truth. Cork had a framed picture of John Fitzgerald Kennedy in his living room. That’s where he returned, to listen to the sad reports from Texas, then Washington, D.C. Rob took Ewan home, where they watched the news. Ewan hoped his father would forget to return to the barn, but when the pipers followed President Kennedy’s horse-drawn hearse playing "The Mist Covered Mountains, Chi Mi Na Mòrbheanna," Rob’s eyes filled with tears. He grabbed his pipes and left.

Ewan found him at Bertram Campbell’s place. Cork’s jalopy was parked nearby. Ewan saw smoke leaking from under the still, but Rob was in the pasture playing The Mist Covered Mountains. No Scot could hear that tribute to Scotland without terrible longing. Chris and Dillon Cork stood, hats in hands, listening.

Rob’s pipes filled the air, but Ewan heard a shriek, high-pitched and slowly climbing, like starburst fireworks as they mount the air before exploding. He ran past the Corks to his father, screaming, The still! The still!

Rob nodded at his son and continued to play until Ewan jerked Rob’s bag from under his arm. The drones squawked into silence. Everyone heard the cause for Ewan’s alarm.

The still! yelled Chris Cork.

Goddamn it! yelled Rob.

The two men ran, the boys following them. Chris Cork was first there, then Ewan, then Rob, then Dillon Cork. Such was the order of their injuries. Cork was killed when a piece of flying copper embedded itself in his throat. Blood gushed from an artery. Ewan tried to cover a wound in his right knee. A piece of the still had ripped through his pants and gashed the tendon below his kneecap. His leg merely flopped like a book with a broken spine. Ewan bled through a huge gap in his pants and flesh. Pain overwhelmed him, and he fainted. Rob had taken a hard hit to his sporran, and thanked the leather for protection. When he moved forward to his son and to Chris Cork, he felt an excruciating pain in his groin. He lifted his kilt. Blood ran down his legs. Embedded in the kilt, next to the sporran, was a piece of copper shaped like a knife. With the lifting of the kilt, the knife had removed itself from his scrotum.

Only Dillon Cork registered a second explosion, this one up into the air instead of out. He ran, crying, to the old jalopy. He’d had his license for a year, and he drove for help to the only place he knew, Sheriff John Anderson’s office. His grandfather’s