After I fly back
from my Scots clan's reunion, held near our lost glens, my
brother sends me an unexpected gift: a box of Airlie
Red-Fleshed Apples. They're small ones, extras from his Oregon
tree nursery. The skins look like other apples: but cut one
open, and its flesh is shades of luscious roseate hues.
Sometimes the rosy flush is all the way through; sometimes in
rosy shapes like those of snow-angels, framed by ordinary
greenish white apple flesh. I had never heard of, never seen,
such colors inside an apple--were they bruised?
dyed?
*****
An Airlie Red Apple
Not so, the websites said: Red-Fleshed Apples are heirloom
breeds, 30 or 40-some varieties of dessert apple. Most have
interiors of red, bright as blood, or dark as older blood. Few
are so rosy as my brother's are. But why are his called
Airlies?
***** Thirty-some miles as the
crow flies from my brother's farm, forty-some as he might
drive, but never does, there lies the presently unincorporated
community of Airlie, Oregon. A failed small town, named for
the tenth Earl of Airlie, investor and President of the
short-lived, narrow-gauge Oregonian Railway that ended there.
His railway opened in 1881, was sold to Southern Pacific in
1890, abandoned 1927. The town died later, in stages, losing
its post office forever in 1943, its army camp in
1947.
***** My brother, a McCombs of
the MacThomas Clan, grows Airlie Apples.
***** Long ago, in the Scots
Highlands, in the 1600s, I tell my brother, the Airlies were
the powerful, three-castled clan that broke our little clan.
We like these stories of a past our parents never knew. Clan
MacThomas fought alongside the Airlies under Royalist Montrose
in Scotland's 1640s War. But when Montrose lost, our Chief
changed sides, and prospered under Cromwell. When Cromwell
died, and Charles II came back, the Royalist Airlies regained
the Canlochan Woods they'd sold us, and instigated a feud with
the Farquarsons that broke our clan. Landless, leaderless, we
dispersed before 1700 - well before Culloden and clearances
broke the old clan life forever, and the Scots diaspora
swelled.
***** There is suddenly so much
of the past that we can call up now on our ever-changing
websites: families, images, legends, assertions--things
overlapping, challenging, evanescing. But Oregon's Historic
Society did not show, a day ago, if the tenth Lord Airlie ever
bred apples. Did he as Railway President even set foot in
Oregon? A Scots Earl who invested in a friend's overseas
railroad, Airlie was at home a Deputy Lieutenant,
representative peer in the House of Lords, cavalry Captain,
Knight, Lord High Commissioner, and so on. He would have lived
inside Scotland's old stories, as my family did not - stories
our kind lost long ago, as we moved west and farther
west.
***** What did the tenth Earl
of Airlie think of the generations of Scots migration, across
the oceans, across a continent? He died in Denver, Colorado,
25 September 1881, the year his railroad opened. I like to
think he was heading west, confident in anticipation -or,
better yet, returning, pleased at heart with his newly
celebrated Airlie Station.
The author, Judith McCombs, is a member of the Clan MacThomas
Society and regularly attends Gatherings in Scotland. She was
the winner of Shenandoah‘s 2012 Graybeal-Gowen Prize for
Virginia Poets. Her work has appeared in Poetry, Measure,
Poetry Northwest and Prairie Schooner, as well as five of her
own collections, most recently The Habit of Fire: Poems
Selected & New. She teaches at workshops in Bethesda and
arranges a reading series in Kensington, Maryland,
USA.
