Susan Tichy

Heath IV

 

Heath is a meditation on the life of Alexander Magruder (or McGruder, MacChruiter, McGrowder, MacGregor,  etc.) a Scotsman transported to the Roya lColony of Maryland as a prisoner of war in 1652. Alexander was a member of Clan Gregor, who had lost their lands and been persecuted nearly to extinction by the more powerful Clan Campbell in the central Highlands of Scotland. The name MacGregor had been proscribed in 1603; those who would not renounce it were hunted down and killed.

 

Heath IV

 

n [ME hethe, fr OE haeth, akin to Ger heide, wasteland, fr IE base kaito‑, forested or uncultivated land] (before 12c) 1: a tract of open wasteland, esp. in the British Isles; moor 2: any plant of the heath family (esp. of genera Erica and Calluna) that grow upon heaths; heather—one's native heath the place of one's birth or childhood

 

Alexander sumtyme MacGregor, of Clan Landless, Nameless, robbed of election, possessed of employment, arrived a prisoner of war. After five years at hard labor, bondsmen might receive freedom and headright to fifty acres‑prisoners and emigrants, alike, indentured to the promise. New men were sold, then left to sea­son a few months in the lethal climate. And if he survived. Each man come out of his time had first to find his fifty acres, pay the surveyor and the clerk. Fifty acres, without labor‑worth less than a good cow. Tobacco, the only English crop, required three men to turn ten acres to use‑with one expected to die before the harvest. Debts payable in days of work, collectible from a dead man. To own labor‑that was wealth. Importers of men earned their own headrights, or a thou­sand pounds (tobacco), on each man or woman. But a seasoned hand brought twice as much, for he was less likely to die. Only one jail in the colony. For crim­inals; debtors; rescued defectors, brought back from refuge with the Indians; any accused of infraction: punishment was bondage: indenture could be extended into smoke.

 

elegance of conviction

indented document

He spake of the temple of his body

 

trafficke in human boundary

reddendurn

 

The largest harbor in the world, great navigable rivers, a whole continent behind—nothing done in anie one of them, but all is vanished into smoke. Laws required an acre of corn for so many acres tobacco, but who was counting? Servants who petitioned the court—too little food and too much work—sen­tenced to thirty lashes for their crime. Trafique is Earth's great Atlas, and leaf was, by then, the currant Coyn. Great protection against robbery. Nor to dirty their Fingers by telling of vast sums. Twenty‑five percent of British customs. Five percent of the Treasury. A seed smaller than mustard seed. Those who owned landing places, by which it reached ship and sea, owned everyone.

 

power at the level of a molecule

chain unseen storm to the currency

a fair trafficke       in sacred

 

Alexander arrived with a coiled serpent in his hand, power compressed to a goose's quill, that ancient resident in the temple of property. Unlikely, therefore, he ever touched a hoe. His indenture was perhaps one year, servant to two illiter­ate men, whose land grants to him were signed with the mark of X. It is possible [read: text corrupt] he purchased freedom‑with the gold chain Scots mercenar­ies wore in case of capture.

 

five hundred years

 

palisade only as good as its description

 

2

 

Gregor Aulin, Perfectly Handsome, son of He who Uprooted a Tree to Shield his King, was twelfth in the oral genealogy of the sermachies. With the burial of his son in 1390, at Dalmally, MacGregor chiefs entered the documents of history. He had five sons. And daughters (now) unnamed. The one died young. From the others descend the four principal branches of Clan Gregor, including the third­born, Gillespie, a Chruiter, whose sons elected to serve the Word.

 

scholars who can read this script

merchantable commoditie

becoming slightly drunk as the poem progresses

 

Alexander MacCruither/McGrowder/McGruder/Magruder/MacGregor was the son of Alexander, the same, second husband of Margaret Campbell Drummond, of Keithick and Balmaclone. Drummond by marriage. Campbell by birth, and act of legitimation: her grandfather was Cistercian Abbot of Coupar Angus, priest­ abbot until the Reformation‑sweet and plump with the Campbell gift to smell the winds of change. A member of the Convention of Estates, who on 17 August 1560 annulled the Pope's authority in Scotland. (Grandmother unpreserved as the moorhen's footstep.) His father was the MacCaillean Mor who first persewit MacGregor with fire and sword, but four MacGregors attended his son's wedding.

 

ink very black      one can hardly resist

quill of swan     goose    crow

spiral and interlacement

intricate letters beyond all praise

pagan muscle of luxury

 

to search for other parts of their bodies

nearly concealed or passing into

a serpentine iconography

 

reference to representation

twisted, plaited, knotted limb

turn under path meet the lover

(that I beheld, and I a creature)

figure concealed by restlessness

 

honour foriver unto that fire

(some are exhibited merely

to confirm faith in the marvelous)

 

Margaret Campbell. She married, first, Andrew Drummond, cousin to the 3rd Lord. His death left her in lifetime possession of a Drummond farm in the lord­ship of Madertie, sheriffdome of Perth: a widow of some property, during cycles of famine and sword. Abduction of her person meant possession of her land.

 

rape     as     ambition

 

Better to yield to necessity, thing in this world that I best luf, and marry. She chose, second, Alexander, surntyme MacGregor, Chamberlain to James Drummond, Lord Commendator of Inchaffray Abbey. His procurator. Of land. In tile cere­mony of giving sassine, possession was transferred before witness of something sym­bolic, such as earth and stone.

 

Aye, he married it.

 

His clan had been nameless for two years. He? Warranted by the left wing of a goose.

 

Margaret was thirty‑four years old. She owned Balmaclone, now Belliclone. I was there. One wall she touched still stands. I was there. Near Comrie, on the old Perth Road. All interest in the farm belonged to her Drummond children. Thus, Alexander the Younger, her eighth surviving child, left, walking down that gravel road to encounter his.

 

peril of my gratitude

black umbilicus, affection

for to comfort us hereafter

bloody silence carried in you

or into

 

In the Highlands, Civil War took the shape of a struggle between the Grahame, Marquis of Montrose, and Clan Gregor's great persecutor: MacCailean Mor, the Campbell, Earl of Argyll. In the fastness of Rannoch, Balquidder, Glen Gyle; on the heights of Craig Chroistan, the shore at Portnellan: everywhere MacGregor was still spoken, men unburied their swords‑our harts war sae to vice inclynde­if not for the King and Montrose, then surely against MacCailean Mor.

 

oh innocence     restore my name

dread integer       redemption

 

Of the Drummond lords, now Earls of Perth, we know they received in August 1645, moneys due them for forty bolls of meal supplied to the Army of the Covenant. Or, rather, that James McGruther, Alexander's brother, now Chamberlain, received. Though a bare month after the King's beheading, James McGruder, with most of his countrymen, had turned against the regicides.

 

s'riogall mo dhream

lion's head

erased in metrical vow

 

from Banqueting House to the scaffold

forged dishonest instigator

change thy mirth to melancholy

ah!

 

And Alexander? He, great‑nephew to John Drummond‑ernoch, King's Forester at Glen Artney, murdered by MacGregors for enforcing the king's game laws. He who would have known that story and that sister, fox‑mad. Not through his mother's Drummond connections, but through that Margaret McGruder marrying into the families. He, that He, arrested for deer‑hunting, 1622.

 

clear view of what we came for

calligraphic pedestal    in trees

window now without its glass

expedient      elaborated

 

scholars at the altar cloth

consult in order to disregard

 

For twenty‑four years from that teen‑age arrest, Alexander appears nowhere in the kingdom of ink. He does not marry. He does not die. He does not give or receive in the name of his lord. He does not witness. He is not arrested. He is not cautioned to keep the peace. Minor clerk to the Drummonds? Perhaps. Student at Dunblaine? Perhaps. Name lost to English soldiers burning abbey records to keep warm through a long winter? Perhaps. Did bury himself, a scholar, in dust‑damp rooms? Or sell himself to the Continent's wars? Did he take back the name MacGregor and with it his word?

 

how track a deer slayer

out of kingdome's reach

 

for once our sources uncontaminated

fixity of symbol and

an unnatural interest in    restraint

 

If I was a blackbird could whistle and sing

Id follow the vessel my true love sails in

And in the top rigging I would there build my nest

how travel      through silence

 

check prisoner lists and ladings

study the operation of 17th c. [blank]

translate [blank]

ask archivist to check the date

 

[palisade in flames

no utterance

 

remark that the family retains a suspicion of Catholics

 

walk the perimeter

 

overcome fear of men encountered in darkness

 

___________

 

Encounters in darkness:

 

Gillawnene MacChruiter, James, John. Witness charter of 1447 by Patrick de Cumry to John de Cumry, for lands in Cumry, Kapaleany, Glenmayok. Page to Lord Drummond.. Scribe to Lord Drummond. Bands of caution, witness or named. Raid with Lord Ruthven and Protestant lords on Leith, 1547. Declared rebel for raid on Livingstones, 1580. Died at Craigneich, or was there. Born at Craigneich, or was there. Took John Makintalgart pris­ oner. Took 100 pounds Scots money, three milk cows, and house­

hold goods. Charged with Malcolme MacGregor and others. Born at Craigneich, or was there, Died at Craigneich, or was there. Fined for deer‑hunting at Spittalsfield, Capputh Parish. Records of the Privy Council, Registrum magni sigilli regurn Sc.

orurn jacket II.

 

lie in wait

return arrayed

in perilous

 

thou

unsaid

my gratitude

extractive industry foresworn

 

 

1646, three years before the regicide: King Charles is back in the cold embrace of Scotland's Presbyterians. Lord Calvert, struggling to keep his colony. Alexander MacGruther a traveler not found on any map. Nor any deed. Nor any regiment. Nor any bill of lading. At Preston, 1648, Dunbar, 1650, W(‑‑)rcester, 1651: Scots prisoners in large numbers. And not to be idle burdens to their captors: one hun­dred fifty Scots prisoners transported, via Barbados. 1652: Alexander Macruder, my servant. 1654: Alexander MacGregor takes oath to receive. Land. In the Royal colony.

 

Of sundrie slauchteris done by clangregoure     this

 

In the 1650's, survivors among the Mattapanients, Aquintanacks, and Patuxents signed a treaty and moved together to a Mattapanient townsite up‑river from the English. [So much say now the histories. In the lexicon of the ethnohistorian: Scotsman spelled Englishman.] Alexander Magruder surveyed Good Luck in 1670: 500 acres upstream from the reservation. Three adjoining plantations were added within two years. He already owned an Assamocomaco cornfield, a strip of price­less alluvial soil he called Magruder Landing. He already owned Itichaffray/Anchovray/Anchovic Hills, the height above. lie had taken the oath. And signed his name. In twenty‑one variant spellings.

 

That no contest should arise

Inscribe     refugium

 

100 acres Magruder's Beginning

500 acres Good Luck

200 acres Alexander's Hope

250 Dunblaine

500 Magruder Landing

 

200 misspelled Craignight

400 acres Anchovie Hills

in the Freshes of Aquasco Creek

 

Surveyed for him from a point of speech: marvellously wasted

From thence through the woods as far

 

A great part of the people of Accomacke

Not the sixth Savage in two hundred miles

Not then as many hundreds as they had been thousands

In no place but where we had been

 

In some townes about twentie, in some fortie, in one sixe score

That they neither knew what it was nor how to cure it

 

Stratigraphy

Metaphysicks

Ten thousand years of inhabitation

 

An indenture in which the one hundred and fifty

Half so which were widow

 

Alexander owned his land outright, but the Indian Reserve was feudal: seven hun­dred acres belonging to a Colonel Billingsley, low‑lying land at the mouth of the Western Branch. Good wintering ground for Canada geese. Plenty of malaria. Not one description of their life there. What kind of houses, how many fields. Oyster shells on the middens now no larger than thumbs. Pipe stone in the shape of desire. Very proper and tall, painting themselves with colours in oile a darke read, as blue from the nose downward, sometimes contrary. They all wear beade about their neckes, men and women, with otherwhiles a haukes bill or the talents of an eagle or the teeth of bestes. Their apparell is deere skins and otherfurrs, which keep them from offence. Admit the light, let forth the smoke: there is small passion amongst them..

After a studdie to answere in few words, and stand most constant to their resolution. As for religion, we neither have language yet to finde it out.

 

breathe for the simple

leap so whispered

no romance in the perishing

 

erase‑sketch‑bird

tutelage of ebb

 

this horrifying tenancy

to wander in the America      and untraveled parts of Truth

 

sometimes wake at night to the sound of bees

crouched in the full catastrophe

plenitude     as the measure of force

 

I arrived with a warrant

I execute

churring   itinerant    remorse

 

 

1654: Quiet in England, Cromwell installed. In Maryland, the first hysteria of Peace: Puritan repeal of the Act Concerning Religion: an open season. On Catholics, Jews, Quakers, and all dissenters, including moderate Protestants, who did not fancy whippings any more than drunkenness. March 25, 1655: Battle of the Severn, unprecedented malignity. a Sunday: Pro‑Calvert Protestant Governor Stone fought old Calvert enemy William Claiborne. October 3, 1655: Alexander Magrudder claimes of the estate of John Crabtree 170 pounds Tobacco. 1660: the Restoration, of Charles 11 and a new Lord Calvert, of order and the Toleration Act. Beginning of the end of the beginning. 1661: Alexander Magruder becomes pos­sessed of a tract of land, a landing.

 

And the golden rod he has cast in

To see what the lake might yield

 

His second son was born that year. Second we know of, second who lived. Not counting children in Scotland, gotten on a loved wife. Or soldier's whore. Or ser­vant, farm‑girl, tinker, daughter of some wealthy man he dared not face. Fifty‑one years old, and a reckoning cut by water. So let us look back dispassionately. Let us look back statistically, erect new trees as he fells them: of freedmen who survived, three out of four got land. Of freedmen who survived, three out of four had a chance to govern themselves: as juror, constable, sergeant, councilor, JP, sheriff, militia officer. The King was restored. The price of tobacco was down but ship­ping was up. (He owned a landing.) The river there half a mile wide, deep enough for ocean‑going ships, and backed by Indian old‑ fields, flooded each spring so the soil did not die. His sons did not die. In a country of young immigrants, he was an old man. Had he been twenty‑two, he could have expected to die at forty‑four. He was fifty‑one. Fredome all solace. The ax in his hands. He was woo'd and mar­ried and a, man. Money and land and no debt, as fast as he could, for his sons.

 

sgian dhu   black knife

 

he forme of binding a servant

 

in the stranger's land are plenty of wealth and wailing

 

Each man to produce one thousand pounds (tobacco) in a year, five to six thou­sand plants, and learn. To pack in hogsheads, not in bales. Freight charged by number, not by weight, so pack it well. Access to the landing charged in kind. Taxables tripled in twenty years, and every one of them had to ship. Hold a pinch of tobacco above eye level. Offer it to the four winds. More ground cleared but most woods wet: don't live there. Look for high ground, such as it is, and still call your­self a Highlander.

 

build a hill, knee high, two minutes

 

Houselot 1/2 acre: garden, and milking pen, I acre for orchard, 6 for corn. Law required 2 acres of corn to be cultivated per man that worked tobacco. Yield: 3‑4 barrels shelled corn per acre. Legal ration: three barrels per man, including seed for next year. Store food and later garbage in the pits dug under your floor. Let rotting heat the long damp nights. One decade of your life what now they call jarm‑building. Watch it kill your neighbors, your servants, your wife. Get up each day to prepare the hills, transplant seedlings. Dream nights of smoke, of worm­ing, topping, succering, cutting, pearing, hanging, stripping, curing, bundling, and prizing‑into hogsheads‑rolled to the landing.

 

don't bruise the fragile leaf

 

By the 1660s, up to fifteen‑hundred pounds per acre and man. Or stoop down here and examine the dirt. Ceramics, scissors, straight brass pins, butter mold. There were women here. There was life, not measured in pounds. An iron pad­lock: something of value. Wooden earthfast: house to survive no longer than a man. Throw garbage out the window. Root pit near the fire. Welch chimney: mud and wood. Time plotted by the change in pipes: the clay, the shape, a maker's name. And scraps of flint, from strike‑a‑lights, gunflints. Wine‑bottle glass, hearth ash, a coin, the DNA of human shit. Cow hooves, fish scales, crab claws, fruit pits, the bones of rabbit, deer, pig, grouse, duck, chicken, turtle, raccoon, squirrel, and dove. A finger ring, Love the Giver, brass buckle, thimble fragment, kettle fragment, bit and spur. Ceramics, some with brown salt glaze, some Indian and some imported, marked with the initials of the King.

 

but when I woke out of my dream

echo mocks the corncrake

 

discontent and carry yourself

Ifound my bosom empty

 

Anchovie Hills gone back to forest, rumor of a graveyard. Boat‑launch at the landing, new houses on Dunblaine: a strip mall and a theater. Marlboros for sale at the Quick Stop on Mattapanient Parkway. Goose preserve on the old Reserve at the mouth of the Western Branch.

 

beggarly and incident

signifies a frantique spirit

 

Waste intervening to the nearest enemy

element ground    of passing

 

she's bound his wound with a golden rod

 

Came he landless   subtle savage

Killed and reborn by the Ancyent Men

 

_________

 

landing places for goods

 

unmaned wild country

 

codicil made in extremis