When he returned from walking the day in, Thomas Cave still had a warmth about him, which had been missing for a while. I put my hand on him and I knew the death heat, it had flowed through Myrna in her last moments.
I served him a breakfast and he ate it gladly. The appetite, which had been missing, had also returned.
‘What does the day hold for you?’ I asked him.
‘I would like to spend it with Simon,’ he answered.
I knew if the day was our son’s, the night would be for us. He would give the day to the fair-haired child of dreams and the night to the dark woman on the edge of life.
I saw, then, his agitated look at the clock and I knew he felt the remaining hours to be short and too much to do in them. So I went to Simon’s room and found him, not sleeping, but looking from his bed out at the sea as if it would contain some answers.
But it was calm as a mirror, and like a mirror, would only allow Simon’s blue-green eyes to glide over its surface.
I kissed the top of his head and he looked at me and did not smile.
‘Your father wants you,’ I said.
This, on any other day, would have seen Simon spring up. But on this day he followed me and stood behind me when we came into the kitchen. One smile from Thomas took away his fear. Simon saw no change in the man he loved.
‘Will we go out?’ he asked with all the eagerness we had come to expect from him.
‘We will not,’ Thomas said. ‘We will wash and shave first.’
Simon had grown soft and downy hair on his chin that did not need shaving. But Thomas wished to do this with him. In the bathroom, he lathered soap and put it on Simon’s skin and he said softly, ‘The first shave makes you a man.’
And the old man brought the blade along the young man’s chin and took the soft hair of youth away from him and the first sting of air on freshly scraped skin brought a gasp from Simon, ‘I don’t want to be a man!’
But, when he was done, Thomas put his hands on the young shoulders, so thin then, so broad now and said, ‘You know, in other lands, you would have been a man long before now. But in this land, today is the time for you. It is a good thing to be, Simon, do not be afraid of it.’
And Simon knew that his father knew the way and had pointed it out for him.
His breath was deep and his courage came with it. He brought a laugh out of himself, ‘My voice,’ he said. ‘It’s gone down into my toes. But sometimes I still squeak like a mouse. It’s embarrassing.’
‘Don’t be embarrassed,’ Thomas said as he scraped at his own chin, closely, finely. ‘Your mouse did well enough for fourteen years, it has to give way to the lion and that is not easy.’
Simon asked, ‘Are all men lions?’
Thomas shook his head.
‘Very few.’
* * *
When they were washed and dressed, Thomas and Simon went out to the work that had to be done.
Though Simon knew it all and had done it before, he did not mention this to his father. He watched and nodded and tried what he was told to try. He saw the correct way to cut the wood on the block, the way to hold a screw in place before drilling, the way a paint brush should be left after use, washed out and ready for the next job, not discarded and left to harden.
‘Waste nothing and you will have everything you want,’ Thomas said.
Simon stopped his father from showing him how the animals must be fed.
‘I know this, I do it more than you!’
They laughed and Thomas went quiet then, they sat on the ground and watched the trace paths of the darting birds and then Thomas spoke once more.
‘You don’t have to do everything well around the place, you just do your best. It will be good enough for your mother. In fact she does not notice the need for repairs. Her mind is on other things and places, we must give her that time, always.’
They walked off then, the pair of them. The son thin, but filling, in the middle of the growth spurt that would leave him a tall and broad man in two more years. A tall and broad man his father would not see. But Thomas could see the shape of him breaking through and it was that shape he spoke to, the Simon of the future, in this long day where they walked to all the places they knew together and loved to be together in.
When they came back it was just before the sunset and it was a sunset we all watched from the yard and when it went behind the hills we three were gripped by a sudden fear that it would happen then, in the creeping darkness. But none of us said it and it was not time yet.
We went in and ate the meal I had spent the day preparing and we had good food and the best of what had been a good summer inside us. We rose from the table only when it was night. And night brought a mist with it over the hills behind which the sun had disappeared. A mist took the shape of the land and swallowed it.
All was soon darkness and the darkness took away all words. We went into the fire that had been lit only to give brightness, so warm was the night. Simon sat with us until its last glow went. He went to his father then and sat by his knees. Thomas pulled his head on to his lap and stroked the strong fair hair that grew so wild if he did not visit the town barber each fortnight to have it sheared. His father took him and they both laughed at my few tears each time Simon came back from one of those visits. I hated his hair shorn.
The man and the boy sat now, opposite me. Each known to each other, each sure of each other. Simon felt his newly shaved chin and smiled up at his father. Thomas then felt the chin and nodded his approval.
‘A man now,’ he whispered.
The words took the stillness out of the air and put movement into Simon. He reached out to his father and his father to him and they clasped each other. I left them that way, tied.
In the bedroom I pulled back the spread and pushed open the window to let the summer air take hold. I told the night that Thomas’s death was not a death I would stand in the way of. I had learned too much from the times before.
I undressed. The door opened then and it brought in no light. Thomas had turned them all out and he and Simon had held each other long in the dark.
‘One day I will go,’ he whispered into the thick hair. ‘This is what it will be like when I am gone. I will hold you like this, be with you like this, in the dark moments. You are a boy I have loved and you will be a man I am proud of.’
Simon spoke then.
‘How will we get on without you? How will it be for us?’ Fear in his voice.
‘As it has always been,’ Thomas answered. ‘I am always here. I will always be here. I am not going far away.’
It was enough for the son to take his father’s words to his heart and they remained there and gave sustenance for the time ahead. That is how Simon came to be strong beyond his own years and reckoning. It was a strength that did not make him old. It was not a burden. If anything he grew a new zest for life on top of the old. The man-strength said it was time to let his father go to his mother and to let them have each other for the last moments.
* * *
My Beloved sits across from me now and in his eyes all the love he has ever had for me. I long for your hand now, Thomas. I long for your hands on me, as they were that night. Hands that spoke of all that you wished to put into me before you left. No need of words, no words could match them.
It was not love-making, it was life-making. A life given, a life received. I took the life from Thomas because it was offered as his parting gift to me. I took it through his loving and he lay beside me, after, in the halfway place between life and death and the soft wind beckoned him and the night called after the soft wind: ‘Bring him to us and he will have the whole night.’
And all he wanted was the night in my eyes, so life clung on as death advanced.
But it was not a warring time. It was a peaceful going, the only noise that of our breathing. Even the wind was no more than a whisper.
I did not want to sleep, but sleep took me all the same. I would wake with a start to find him, still
breathing, still watching. I was filled with the heaviness of life, he was light now, as death wished him to be.
Sleep was death’s way of parting us. If I had not slept I would not have had the power of letting him go on to where I could not go.
His hand had held mine all the while, and the grip loosened and the hands parted.
All that have died are contained in me. Thomas the same.
* * *
When I woke it was the new day and my Beloved was not part of it.
He lay in the last sleep and it was not one I would have deprived him of, I knew, for it sat well on him. He was cold to the touch and that cold went into me and did not leave for a long while.
I cried ice tears and then the whispers took up and said my Beloved was not present, my Beloved was not cold. He was in a warm place and this cold body was a shell on the strand, no longer used, ready to wear down and join the earth once more.
The body of Thomas was hollow and filled with the echoes a shell carries of the great rushing past it has shared with the sea. His heart was gone and so it was not Thomas but his memory the wretch in me clung to. I could not let it go until the young hand pulsing with life prised me away from the old and cold and dead thing my Beloved had become. I clasped and it was Simon’s life I clasped and his need to go on and his urging me to go on with him.
My son and I held each other over the left body of Thomas Cave and wept our loss through the open window and the world about was filled with the full cries of our grief and the world went strangely silent on hearing them. All animals, all wind, all sea, all trees and grasses, still and silent and listening.
‘They all go,’ I cried to my son and to the still world. ‘They all leave me in the end.’
‘I am not gone,’ Simon’s voice soothed liked fresh mint. ‘I am here.’
And I remembered I was a mother.
I did not speak aloud that one day he would be gone too. I did not tell him it was life’s way and that already I had begun to prepare for it. I knew he believed he would stay with me always. I did not want him to feel the guilt of going along with grieving for his father. I wanted him to reach beyond this sadness and go on with his young time, which should be filled only with possibilities.
* * *
Simon would have nothing else but that he dig his father’s grave. I watched the muscles in his back twitch and shine with the exertion. But he would not have me help him. This was his way of making a place for his father.
‘I am a man now,’ he told me, and he shovelled the soil to the side. ‘I am to do a man’s work.’
It was his way of goodbye. Mine was to prepare the body with the love I gave it in living.
The curate came from the town when Simon called for him. He was soon to leave the priesthood and so did not object when I told him that there would be no church visit. Thomas was a man of the open air. There would be no leaving our Thomas to rest for a single night in a cold and cavernous place not of his own choosing. He was to be kept close to us and this was to continue even after burial. He would lie beside Carmel and Eddie and Myrna in their clearing and I will lie beside you all when my time comes.
I placed Thomas in the ground under the now ex-curate’s spoken words and silent ones of my own. I thought of Jonah Cave with my arm around my son whose shoulders sloped with the weight of weeping.
I thought of the anonymous place in which those who took him away from this house had put Jonah Cave. I felt pity.
Thomas had spoken to me of what he wished to be done for his burial and his wishes had been followed. He died in a place where he belonged, he had not gone the way of his son, Jonah.
He had often asked to buried in the same manner as Carmel and Eddie, in the same place. He could not, he said, imagine a better heaven than the dappled sunlight of spring and summer falling through the trees on to his grave.
‘And do not tend it,’ he had asked me one day when we had spoken of these things. ‘I want the brambles and dock leaves to grow over me – I want nature’s covering and no other. I want no flowers but those that grow around me.
‘Nothing but the simplest of crosses for me. Driftwood, like Carmel and Myrna and Eddie. And no name but Thomas. The name of Cave dies with me and I do not wish to carry it on to my grave. Simon must have your name, Moriarty, and all the possibility that you can offer him. He cannot be part of the miserable family I made. Let him be part of you and this.’
It was his last wish and I carried it out as best I could. But I did not take away the name Cave, because I knew to do that would be to make Thomas and Jonah and Patricia Cave as if they never existed. And they had existed, if only in the most painful of ways.
I let our son keep his father’s name and he was glad to have it.
With Simon Cave I put Thomas Cave into the ground with no box around him, under the tree in the clearing that offered the best view of the sea and I knew it was the tree that suited the man’s nature best. It was a tall elm, which grew apart from the others as if to observe them better and also to contain its secrets more easily. It was a tree that held itself upright and its branches did not reach out to touch others, but it shielded a younger ash from the harsh salt winds which blew in frequently from the sea.
This cover helped the young ash to grow tall beside its companion.
My son covered the coffin and stamped the soil down, again, alone, because he wanted alone.
The night Thomas went into the ground the cards called to me for the first time since I had read the birth of the fair-haired child of dreams from them.
I knew, then, that they had been waiting. It had not just been me leaving them, they had left me while I had made my family and lived it. Widowhood brought a coldness with it that would not be relieved. The warmth of Thomas’s body had brought a surety to mine, now gone.
The days bound themselves tightly around me and with each day that passed I moved less and grew colder. Soon I could do nothing but sit and turn the cards, endlessly, reaching for the stories of each one. But the stories were no more than faint whispers in my ears. Whispers I could not hear and the more I strained the further away they sounded, so lost was I in my own misery.
I did not want the truth and so it could not make itself known to me. Each time I came to the card of a single figure walking through white emptiness I saw it as myself, the widow, walking alone again through the world. Then the figure turned and it bore Simon’s face.
I turned my face away from the cards and towards a young man, slope shouldered, head down, sitting close to me. When I called him, he raised his head and it was my son, Simon, and his face was cut to pieces.
‘What happened to you?’
‘The razor,’ his voice had grown rougher with the weeks that had passed.
Though he spoke softly there was the grain and knot of pain in it.
‘I cannot use the razor. He did not show me how to use it properly. I can’t make it follow the shape of my face, I can’t do that without him showing me again what to do.’
The claws of grief cut into him to take the joy he had been born with and had carried even before birth. My son had come to me in a time of grief and saved me. It was for me to do the same. I took the mother’s promise to put the child’s pain and joy before my own and it is a promise I have kept.
I held my arms out to Simon and he came into them and we cried joined tears for the one we had lost and when we could cry no more, we laughed for the times he had given us. When we could laugh no more we slept a sleep his spirit brought to us and it was one without the dreams of his loss.
And when we woke we were ready to live without him.
44 ∼ The Years Go By
THE CARD OF the Leave Takers falls again.
You will go and I am left with the last of the night in which a new moon rose and heard a story and watched us all through a thin, narrow slit, a cautious eye that said all stories must come to an end. The years in which Simon grew went too quickly. I want to linger on them and make your time
with me last but I know that you are fading, all of you, fading for me and from me. The years go by, Simon grown as tall as the man he chose to father him, tall and away from me.
My fire grows weak and the daylight stretches her long grey fingers and curls them round my throat and stems the talk that I would use to keep all that I love in this room and keep night with us always and day forgotten.
I could begin the story again. And I would tell it in the company of no one.
My loved ones prepare to leave. Carmel and Eddie shift on the couch that was theirs, Thomas stirs in the chair, my baby in his crib wails, Myrna stands.
* * *
The story is at an end. My throat dry from the telling. The moon has gone and may well have grown from new to full in one night. All lifetimes told. Day cannot be prevented.
How will you leave me? One by one.
I cannot watch it. I study the card of the Leave Takers and close my eyes, feel your going, each one a whisper down my spine. I am left only with Thomas. When I open my eyes, he is still here.
He takes my hand. The touch, all its warmth and the warmth of our time brought back to me. The opening of arms and I go into them. Then the words he once said to Simon: ‘I am not far away.’
I leave the room of telling, the cards in my hands, and step out into the early morning. I watch the grey stir of a heron across the sky.
Myrna’s words come to me through the thin film between life and death, ‘Each beginning means an end, each end a beginning. All the dead and gone are contained in you.’
The lost souls have left the way they arrived. From my heart they came and into it they travel again. I have no need to pass through doors to visit with them. Their company is to be had. I will have the cards in my hands and eyes. Old friends for new times.
New times are upon us, and my heart, though sore, listens. The cards are my constant. I learned not to be afraid of them and always to respect their truth.
I learned truth in these years and will learn more from those that follow.
The years go by, people pass with them. The crib rocks, empty and ready to be filled again – we are all that is left of the lost souls who have come this way and gone. Life has all the answers and death takes them away.
The Lost Souls' Reunion Page 27
