Stillbird
Page 9
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Abel laughed and laughed as the geese skidded onto the lake making large noisy splashes, rainbow waves in the sun. He sat high on his father’s shoulders and could look up at the bellies of the birds as they arrowed in for their spectacular water landings, barking and screeching with prideful challenge and delight. The geese were not afraid of them. Abel’s father brought him often to the spot to watch the geese, but after Jamie was born everything changed. Abel remembered the spot by the lake as the scene of his happiest memories.
Later when he was a grown man but still a child inside his heart, he followed his mother to that selfsame spot and watched her sit and stare at the birds. Finally he revealed himself and sat next to her and spoke to her. Abel told his mother all about the happiest moment of his life, the last time his father brought him to the lake to laugh at the geese and he laughed to remember it, until he realized that Alwyn was not listening, had not heard a word, did not care. And Abel knew that she was thinking of other different scenes, remembering how the man beat them after Jamie was born. Abel never understood why and knew better than to ask his mother. She couldn’t explain it. She was simply glad when the man left.
Year after year she avoided suitors as drunk and foolish and cruel as her husband had been by invoking his name and the belief that he would return, and she didn’t mind that they laughed at her. Better that derision than resentment, she thought, and would have been right, but in time the derision turned into resentment when it finally dawned on them, the bachelors of the village, that it was the woman who was laughing at them. And then weren’t they only too glad to believe that she had worked some evil spell on young Margaret MacFarland, depriving her husband not only of that child but a good wife and more children to come? Hadn’t she been heard to say that men didn’t know any better but to beat the women and children they professed to love and want so much? One brief but unforgettable moment of angry truth telling that would haunt them until her death; be the death of her in fact. And did her sons understand any of it? All Abel knew was that Alwyn hid Jamie in a cupboard when his father came home, and he, the older child, had to hide himself. And then those times his father found him, he made it clear enough he was angry, because his own beloved son was hiding from him, and wasn’t it his mother who told him to do it? Able didn’t understand that anything would have infuriated his father, that his father was already infuriated before he took even the first shot of whiskey. Abel never understood it and neither did Alwyn. She tried to tell Abel it was not his fault. He was so sad when his father left. He’d been thinking that the anger would subside and that one day he and his father would go once again to the lake to laugh at the geese, and he never really lost hope of that until his father went away for days, then months, then years, and his mother was glad. Abel blamed her for that so they could not speak of it, and not speaking of what they thought the most about, they could not speak of anything else either.
Alwyn talked of many things with Jamie but Abel never inquired as to their conversations, being proud and feeling left out. And yet he loved her and when she died her terrible, mysterious death, he missed her more than he had ever missed his father. He was upset with himself but didn’t know why. He didn’t reproach himself for failing to tell his mother he loved her, because he never knew he was supposed to do that. Her death was so sudden, and then they were gone to another world, and the old world seemed to have sunk into the sea with the father, the mother, the laughter, and all the love he could vaguely remember. Until he saw Rosie the first time and dreamt that he was looking up at the bellies of noisy geese who splashed down into a lake of rainbows and reflections so beautiful that he woke himself up with his own choked cries. All Abel knew of life was loss.