The curate went back to the town in a taxi.
It was only midday when it was all done.
41 ∼ The Wanderer Reborn
I DID NOT SPEAK for a time. The silence was not disagreeable, it was a truthful silence, for there was nothing between Thomas and me in those days that grew into months, as the child grew in me.
Its first kick brought me back further into the land of the living, and it was only then that I realized how far, still, I was removed from it.
But this child was not one to lie in wait. This child wanted to walk into the middle of the world and let his presence be felt. He raced to this world with all the enthusiasm I had run away from it.
He grew big, so big, so quickly.
And with that child grew the love that had died. Then Jonah came in a dream and said: ‘It could be mine.’
I was afraid. I had been taken in the best of ways and the worst of ways in the one day. I woke and would not sleep again. The cards called to me to let me know what way it was to be. I had not touched them since the day I had found blood and fire and hair flowing. I knew their truth would not be hidden and I wished to hide. But the child within had no wish to hide. He wished to be known and he shifted endlessly, urging me on and, finally, I could only do as he wanted or he would not let me rest.
I picked them up and took the chair by the fire that Myrna had always used. I meant to throw them on the fire if they brought more sorrow and pain to me.
But they did not.
I asked, ‘Who’s is the child? Who is the father?’
And they showed me only the card of New Beginnings and a voice said, ‘It is the child who chooses this.’
‘Who does the child choose?’ I asked, and I turned the card and it was not the card of the One Who Watches, but of the Wanderer and I knew in my heart that all that was to happen from now on I should be thankful for.
‘Will the child love me?’ I asked.
The cards did not speak and I remembered, then, Myrna’s words.
‘Mine is the only fate they will not determine.’
And, since they were now mine, I knew it was the same for me.
I am glad for this. What I have known and felt and had these past twenty years was all experienced with the joy of not knowing it would come to me. I grew into my life. It was one of my own choosing.
In time I have come to realize that I am not one. I am a sum of many parts, all assembled in this room, this night. I have the strength of all of you in me. It has been a strength I have needed. It is a strength I am reminded of now, as this night is ending and this story is almost at an end.
It is coming, the alone time when you will depart and leave me.
More to tell. I am glad to tell it. Let me tell of clearing the way for the new life.
* * *
We put in a bathroom upstairs and we made a room into a nursery. I cleared the clothes of my loved ones. But I left all their possessions as they were about the place. It was still their home. I took Myrna’s few dresses and objects and put them into her suitcase. In her grey coat I felt lumps and pulled at one. I pulled out a diamond necklace. By the time I had unpicked the lining there was a lot more jewellery besides. What we did not need to sell, I kept to wear and think of her, Jonah had spent most of his father’s carefully earned money.
* * *
He came in autumn, my mother’s season. He was born on the first day of the new moon and was as curious to grow as Carmel. We called him Simon and we laid him in the crib that was made for the child Eddie and Carmel did not have. Simon was a name all his own. We wanted, above all, that he would have a life apart from us.
We had been walking all day, collecting wood for the coming winter. Thomas had made a cart with wheels for the job. His health was fully restored to him, the limbs were stiff only in the morning and when that stiffness eased he was thankful for each new day in which he could work on the place and make it ready for the new-born.
He had found some of his cameras in the pearl-blue Jaguar. But he had not taken one picture since the time when he had first been found by the postman of the year. He did not wish to photograph. He wished to live and he put his back into it. He took life on and it gave him a great force with which to complete each day.
He did all that had to be done in the town. I would not go there. I stayed with my growing belly and my shoreline and woods, as my mother had done before me. What need had I for strange looks on faces that bore no sign of friendship?
Thomas grew to talk to the townspeople, the formal talk that he had used all his life and many understand that. To him, now, as with me always, it had no meaning. But he could speak and was liked well enough for his courteous manner by the women and for his lack of curiosity on matters personal by the men.
He spent some hours there each day making purchases that would give this house its chance to welcome the new life. The townspeople did not forget how he had come to live among them, but did not choose to remember each time they came across him.
He made no friends and he made no enemies.
In Solas our love grew again, as all rooted things grow. It called out to the broken part of us and mended it.
The day the pains began the animals outside shifted and called to each other and to me. I was carried with the waves of Simon’s coming. I heard them call and travel with me and I did not feel alone.
Though Thomas was kind and loved by me when the pains began, I did not tell him, because I knew he would go to the town and bring a car and take me away from all I wanted to be near.
When I could no longer hide it, between the pains Thomas walked with me when I would not sit still and helped me into the fireside when I could walk no more. He had laid out blankets and sheets and it went on into the long night.
The new moon was at its height.
I bore down, my arms around the neck of my lover and I did not cry out, and the animals cried for me, their cries reached a great crescendo, and all the way through, movement and noise and rushing and fierce agony. When I could bear it no longer it bore me and my son’s head came and his shoulders turned inside me and he was then whole in the world. In the place where he had been inside me was born the greatest love I have ever known.
It was for Thomas to cut the tie that bound us and he did so without taking the child from me. And he bathed and held us both and the animals rested easy and we two lost souls who had formed this new one between us, knew that we had found the way into a new life for all of us.
That was Simon’s first gift to us. There were many more.
We slept by the fire all of us, that night. In the morning I woke and found the first magic of my child was waiting for me. Thomas woke soon after and shifted and looked at us looking at each other.
‘His eyes – they’re open.’
Our son wanted to know all of life, all at once. His hair was fair, his skin was dark, though fairer than mine. It would welcome the sun on it. I held the fair-haired child of my dreams in my arms. And in all my dreams he had said the same thing without words: ‘You are the one who will give me life. So you must live.’
42 ∼ Mothering Years
WHAT CAN I TELL YOU of my years as mother? None will match them.
Simon would not stop each day until each new thing set in front of him was learned. He loved me as the warm place he came to when it was cold and he loved me for the comfort I offered and the kind words. He grew sure under them.
He loved his father for the man in him and it was his father he reached to when the weaning was done and the walking was mastered. He watched the unbent nature of his father and he wanted to reach tall like him, he watched his father about the place, always doing, and he would want to be beside him, doing.
I loved my two men well.
From the first day of Simon’s life, Thomas took out a camera and began to picture it. The pictures had a beauty, as all his life’s work, now destroyed, had had. But these were different. They were filled with a feeling that even now is v
isible.
These carried the heart of the taker into them, showed the love and the days of rearing that went into our child to be the happiest of both our lives. We were complete in our world and it was a small one. It saw nothing of the outside until the boy Simon wished for beyond us and I was, at first, afraid to give it to him, because I did not know a world beyond that did not harm. But his father was the one to put my hand in his big hand and he said, ‘We must get used to this. We will have the pictures to remind us.’
So I learned about the held breath of a mother. I learned about keeping hands by my side that longed to hold him and push cruel words and world away from him. He grew so fast; I could not catch my breath or hold on to a day.
When he held up a shell for me, when he traced the lines of my palm with his fat fingers, he looked with the eyes I had only grown into on Myrna’s teaching. A child sees wonder in all things. When he tasted a new food he would look for me, surprised, and smile. A child tastes joy in all things.
When he heard the cock crow and the bitch’s high whine he would laugh delightedly as if all life was contained in those sounds. When the thunder came he did not shrink from it, he shrieked and came to be held by me and he watched the lightning flashes with wonder. A child hears all the sounds of the world as the world’s voice and adds their own sound to it.
When he picked flowers for me he would bury his nose into them and close his eyes and be lost in the scent. When he picked an unscented flower he would look at me with sad eyes as if something had been stolen.
He would stroke the ears of the dogs and cats for hours, and trace the shape of a leaf with his fingertips and rub the pebbles from the beach along his cheek and his palms along his father’s unshaved chin in the mornings when he joined us in our bed.
With his clothes off on summer days he would roll around in the grass as the dogs did to scratch their backs and he would scratch and groan like the dogs did and sigh with pleasure. Touch was how he came to learn and love the world and to trust it. Touch was how I came to learn to love the world and to trust it. When he fed from me at night I stroked his forehead and his eyes closed and he would find sleep in that way.
Simon was the one who brought me back into the world.
It was for him and because of him that I went into the town for the first time, five years after the deaths.
I went, him leading me by the hand, him talking to me about the colourful people to be found there. Simon saw colour where we would see grey, he had a manner that brought out the colour in people. He had easiness about him, a ready smile and energy.
Thomas had woken me and said he was not in his health and I would have to be the one to deliver our son to the outside world. Simon came into our room and asked when it would be time to go. It was many hours before the time. The sun had not even come up. We begged for more sleep from our little child and he did not give into our pleas. He had his own purpose on that day.
By the time we were ready to leave, after we had fed the animals, and ourselves, Simon had lost all patience and pulled on my hand all the way along the coast road into the town. Thomas watching us walk down the laneway.
And our son caught the fresh wind that had taken up on this early autumn day and chattered to it more than to me because I was lost in the world of my own fear.
In town there were lines of mothers with lines of children tugging at them, all walking in the same direction. We took our place among them and this was the first time I walked the ways of others.
I recalled the days when Noreen had dragged me towards school.
At the moment when we reached the gates Simon’s hand left mine. This was the day he had been waiting for and he grasped it.
I was the one left behind then, as I am today. I caught other eyes on me, travelling the length of the woman they knew only by stories. I looked at them and they looked away.
The women moved off and in one or two of their remarks, which my ears caught on the same fresh wind that had travelled with Simon this morning, I heard revelations of my past, as told by strangers.
‘… All murdered…’
‘… Mother went with black men…’
‘… Haunted…’
‘… old enough to be her grandfather…’
‘… poor child…’
Some of it was wrong and more of it was right and soon I was the one left by the gates with the mother of the last girl to enter the school gates this morning.
‘You can’t stay here all day,’ she said softly.
I looked at her.
‘What do I do now?’
‘You go home, wait until three, and come back for him. You have a good cry for yourself. That’s what I’m going to do. I’ve only got the one, too.’
I walked.
When I came into the house Thomas was waiting, with hot tea for us.
‘I am not used to the world, Thomas,’ I said. ‘I will have to learn more about it.’
‘Plenty of time,’ he smiled.
‘What can I do to see all of it?’
He knew then I was not to be kept waiting, which is the one difference our ages brought to us.
‘Would you like to come with me?’ he asked.
That is how it happened. We walked all over the town and he took pictures and when he had one taken he would hand me the camera and say, ‘Look, what do you see?’
I saw that all life could be captured on a camera. This was Thomas Cave’s way of holding time dear and he gave it to me on that day that I lost the first part of my son to the world.
Later he would give me books to read. I learned of places through my reading, places Thomas had been and which he could tell me more of. I learned that women wore clothes to please themselves and others. It was to please myself that I went into the town and bought cloth and it was with a book and the mother who had stood at the school gate with me that I learned to sew, brought the world to me with my colour and movement and fabric song. I made the green velvet in those days. I made it to wear the green earth about me.
All the while I learned, my son Simon learned in the school and all the while I grew and my son Simon grew in the world. We did not notice that Thomas was growing down as we made our way into ourselves.
He had done what he had set out to do, give the child and the mother a start and feet in the world. He was ready to go on his last wandering. The preparation for that journey was to take many years. But he did not wait for it with longing, as he had done in St Manis Home. He waited for it with a prayer that he be given longer, since the world had taken on so much meaning for him. He prayed that he be spared until his son showed the first signs of being a man.
He was granted his wish.
43 ∼ All That Have Died Are Contained in Me
THE DEATH OF Thomas Cave came when he had taught his son all he knew about being a man.
Simon was fourteen years old.
Thomas had woken early on this summer morning. He turned to me and I was sleeping. He left me to walk Killeadan headland for the last sunrise of his life. He had taken to spending his time here, in the last of the summer. But he found the warmth did not reach him and the beauty pained him. There was something overwrought about the late butterflies and last flowers, something so nostalgic and painful. Beauty is best remembered, than witnessed in its departure.
Thomas felt the chill of his going in the air. The darting swallow knew what Thomas knew. The time had come for movements to quicken and flee. The swallow would elect to leave until it no longer had strength. Thomas had the strength to elect to stay. It was almost spent.
I had opened my eyes as soon as he left the room and in each of my opened eyes the unshed tears swam and shimmered. I felt his going as much as he did. He had grown into a silence that was not restful.
I recalled Myrna’s words: ‘The old have the greatest of adventures.’
I knew my Beloved to be unafraid. I knew his only regret to be leaving us. But he had provided well for us, through the town solicitor. In
these late days he had asked me not only to take photographs with him, but also to come with him to the darkroom and watch images emerge.
‘It is for you to do this now, with Simon,’ he advised as the forms of his intention swam into being. ‘You must learn all this too, so that you can bring it alive for him.’
And I learned it and it was more fascinating to me to develop than to capture the moments. The camera tells no lies, it tells more truth than most dare see.
Thomas knew it and he taught it to me.
‘Watch the lips, watch the curve of the mouth, the holding of one shoulder higher than the other, the turn of a neck and the placing of a hand. These say what the person will not say,’ Thomas said. ‘It will help our son to watch this. It will help him to make his way in the world, alone, if he can know the true nature of those he meets.’
Even Simon sensed the going, though he did not know it. He had taken to spending all his waking hours in his father’s shadow, refusing school and friends who came to call and talking only to Thomas. Thomas and he would often go off for days.
* * *
The last sunrise rewarded Thomas Cave with a vibrancy, which celebrated his going. It brought him warmth that had escaped him in recent days. He had felt cold like he had never felt, even in the world’s frozen reaches. He wished to sit by the fire and he wished even to climb into it. His only relief was at night when I lay close to him and put all my heat into him.
We would spend long hours looking at each other, no words or touching, just the look that spoke all and said enough for us.
Thomas had been troubled by a dream, in which a woman with a large and overbearing sunflower hat came and put her finger to his lips. It was a movement that stopped his breath. He would wake, gasping in the air she took from him. He would reach for my warmth and find it willing.
I knew in those moments before daylight that he felt great loss.
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