Chapter Seven
Her sorrow was deep,
Her anguish great,
And I, sorrowing,
Called upon my God,
“Lord,” I cried,
“Release her from her suffering.”
With the full moon now well past and Sarah’s next scheduled appearance being another twenty six days away, things returned to normal between Florence and me. Whatever her ‘other arrangements’ were, they were not immediately apparent. I even toyed with the idea that she had given up.
After the lambing, things on the farm were pretty quiet. Mr. Brown and I went back to our normal short conversations and much longer silences. Each day we would take some extra hay around to the mother ewes and their lambs but that didn’t take too long. My studies were also winding down now as the long summer break approached. I had hoped that some of my old friends would come down from the city over the summer but they didn’t seem that keen. Florence blamed me and maybe she was right. I think that, maybe, my tales of sheep’s blood and afterbirth had put them off. On the other hand, it may well be that we were just drifting apart and, increasingly, had little to say to each other.
All of this meant that I spent a lot of time in the garden; pruning fruit trees and trying to get the vegetable and herb gardens back into production. I don’t really know why. It just seemed like the thing to do. All of this also meant that I spent a lot of time alone and that I would still get caught up in great waves of grief, imagining broken bodies lying on the side of the road, bleeding and in pain. It was something I couldn’t shake. It was just something I had no control over.
Strangely, often when the sadness had washed over me and was gone; when the tears had played themselves out and the anger had passed; I felt a weird closeness to my parents. I knew they were gone on to wherever they were meant to go and I knew they were good and loving people, so I wasn’t really worried about them. In fact, it was more likely that they were worried about me. I felt, at those times, that they were still with me, that death couldn’t, in fact, separate us. I know some of you will think that’s crazy but it was how I felt, how I still feel, and the feeling is precious to me.
I felt this closeness one morning, kneeling in one of the garden’s vegetable beds. I had been trying to plant some basil and I had remembered that Mum had grown some fresh herbs in a small flower pot on our apartment balcony. It was strange. All of a sudden, I missed her acutely, almost painfully, and at the same time I felt her close about me, closer, really, than she ever was when she was alive.
“Mum,” I whispered. Then I just started talking to her as if she were kneeling there beside me. “Mum, I don’t know what to do about Sarah. She needs help but I don’t know how to help her.” One by one, I planted the basil seedlings in the moist earth. “How can the living help the dead?” I sat back on my heels to rest and closed my eyes against the morning sun. A memory came to me then, clear and vivid; a memory from my early childhood. I was kneeling beside my bed in my old bedroom with my favourite stuffed toy lying against the pillow.
Mum was leading me in my prayers: “God bless Daddy,” she said. I repeated the words after her. “And God bless Mum…”
I opened my eyes. “And God bless Sarah,” I whispered to the garden earth.
It was hot all that week. Unusually hot for this early in the summer. We were caught in the tail end of a large blocking high which was sending hot, northerly winds from the desert our way. This couldn’t last. By the end of the week, a strong cold front slowly pushed the stubborn high eastwards, the wind strengthened, even as the low behind the front deepened. The coming storm would be as powerful as it was inevitable. Tall towers of cloud could be seen building on the horizon as the high slowly gave way.
The hot, north wind was gale force by late Friday afternoon. Then, in the early evening, it died away and the first rumblings of thunder could be heard. The whole of the west was a mass of cloud, still gleaming white and gold with the light of a sun that had already slipped below the horizon. The sky beneath them, however, was black and the thunder grew until it was like a constant, rolling, barrage of artillery.
The storm proper hit just after I had got into bed. The lightening bathed the house in sudden, electric brightness and the thunder shook even the stone walls of the old house. The rain cascaded from the sky as if it were a tropical downpour and the night dissolved into a sequence of brilliant light and deepest dark, of thunderous roar and momentary silence. It was in one of those moments of stillness that I heard it; the faint, distant sound of a piano.
I fell in my eagerness to get out of bed and ran through the storm shaken house to the drawing room, stumbling and colliding in the uncertain lighting.
It was dark when I got to the drawing room, so dark that I could only just make out the outline of the windows. The piano was, however, filling the room with music, with the deep roar of the thunder adding a wild and powerful baseline. Then there was a flash of lightning and the room was filled with an almost unbearable brightness. She was there at the piano, her hands chasing frantically across the keyboard. The music was different now, no longer weeping with sorrow. That night it was a scream of loss and pain, angry chords that matched the wildness of the storm. Sarah was different too: as wild and violent as the music she played.
I knew that music, not as a sound, but as a wound deep in my heart. I recognised it. I had felt nothing else in the days after my parents’ death. The room was again plunged into profound darkness. In that darkness I understood and understood completely: not just with my mind but with every part of my soul. It was in that pain that Sarah now had her being. She had died unable to let go of her terrible grief and now that grief bound her soul. I remembered my own grief, my own parents, and I remembered my prayer in the garden.
There, in the dark, with the storm raging about me, with the wild music of thunder and loss filling my ears, I did what I had not been able to do for a long, long time. I fell on my knees and I prayed.
“Lord, have mercy on her,” I cried into the violent night. The music stopped and in the next lightening flash I saw her; still sitting at the piano but now turned and looking at me. “Lord,” I said, “she must’ve loved greatly or she would not be in such pain. For the love that she had…” I paused. Then, looking directly at her, I took a deep breath and continued, “For the love that I have for her, from your own heart of love, Lord, have mercy on her. Let her go free.”
There was something like half a beat when the world seemed to shift. Then the storm was silent and the room was filled, impossibly, with moonlight. Sarah stood in front of me and held out her hand to help me up from my knees. Only it was a Sarah whose skin was fair but not deathly pale, whose hair was blonde rather than silver, and whose eyes were bright blue. A smile played around her lips as I stood up and she placed her finger to my lips to stop my questions.
“Hush,” she said. “Just accept this as a gift. It is a moment out of time, given to me to say thank you. I was dead and I couldn’t help myself but you, you saw my pain and your prayers have set me free.
“But you’re not dead now,” I said, looking with wonder at the warm and breathing young woman in front of me.
“No, not any longer,” she said. “I have to go now John, but I want you to know that I will pray for you, just as you prayed for me. Know that death has no power over human love or friendship. I will always be close to you John. But you already know that, don’t you. You know that because you have felt your parents close to you and you must know that they pray for you. Goodbye, John, and thank you.”
Again, that strange half beat. I blinked and the room was plunged into darkness. The only sounds were the rain and the thunder. When next the lightening flashed, I was alone. I stood there for a long time, unsure of the reality that surrounded me. I stood there until the storm passed into the east, until the lightening no longer set the world ablaze, until the thunder growled away into the distance. The night was no longer black, but a deep grey, as I felt
my way back to my bed. I didn’t turn on any lights, even when I could’ve. The artificial light would have been an intrusion into something sacred and precious. Sleep came quickly and dreamlessly. It was over. It was accomplished.
The Haunting of Sarah Carew Page 7
