The Bright Ring of the Day, Part 2 of 2

Part 2 of 2

‘I do believe that is the elusive Greater Seidenberg Plumed Goshawk.’ David pointed at the small bird pecking at the flagstones in the small yard behind our house in Dunfanaghy. We had decided to spend the vacation between terms in Ireland. Since his uncle’s house had more amenities, we were sleeping and eating there. But we frequently stopped by my parents’ house and opened the shutters and camped out there for the day. That afternoon was warm for the time of year, and I had pulled one of the canvas garden chairs from the garage and set it up so that I could read outside. David had wandered down to the beach to make some sketches. From time to time, I stood up and looked over the stone wall and watched him as he ambled about, stopping every few feet to examine the pools of water along the shore. Occasionally he would open his sketchbook and draw something. Even from the distance, I could see the wind ruffling his hair. The light caught at it and turned it russet. When he returned, he stopped beside me and ran his thumb along the line of my jaw.

‘I’m almost certain it’s a sparrow,’ I said.

‘Not a Goshawk?’

The two of us examined the bird closely. In turn, it tilted its head and eyed us suspiciously, appraising us for any possible danger to itself before it returned to its hunt for seeds. ‘Now that I look more closely, I think it may be a Spitzenberg Plumed Goshawk. In fact, I’m sure it is. It’s a close relative of the Greater Seidenberg Plumed Goshawk and is often mistaken for it.’ The bird decided it had enough of our speculations and flew away.

David laughed and then leaned against the wall and looked out over the bay. ‘This place is so wonderful. I wish we didn’t have to leave on Wednesday and go back. I could stay here forever.’

‘You will have your sketches to remember it by. How did they turn out by the way? May I see them?’

David picked up the pad of drawing paper from the top of the wall. It was held together by a spiral of wire at the top. He flipped back the bright yellow cover and paged through the sheets until he found the one he wanted and then handed the open booklet to me. I examined the meticulous pencil drawings filling the page. He had recorded a tuft of sea grass blowing in the breeze, an outcropping of shale, a chipped and broken shell half buried in the sand. The village was rendered in an abstract panorama of lines that somehow captured its hazy look better than a more realistic drawing might have. ‘I envy you this ability.’ I held a finger over an image of the backside of a wave and, without touching the paper, traced its outline in the air. Because of the shape of Sheephaven Bay, the waves sweep in from the North Atlantic. On most days, they pass almost perpendicular to anyone standing on the long sides of the bay. Looking southward from our house, you can see the backs of the waves rolling away from you and then cresting on the beach to the east of Dunfanaghy.

‘Those waves are so magnificent. The way they stretch across the bay and only break along the ends until they hit that beach there. It’s as if there is this tremendous energy in the sea, and every hundred feet or so, it rolls through the water.’

‘Those are the swells.’ He lifted an eyebrow to query me. ‘The little waves are called the seas. They’re formed locally. The swells are the long-distance waves. They travel across the ocean.’

‘God moving over the face of the waters.’

‘What’s that?’

‘Ah, at last I have found something I know and you don’t. In the Bible, before the creation, it is written that the breath of god moved over the face of the waters. You can see how those waves, those “swells” as you would have it, could serve as an image of the power of god. It’s an ancient mystery, the force in the waters.’

‘My grandfather once told me that the waves come all the way from the North Pole and that Donegal is the first land they encounter. They become so large because the wind has so much distance to work on them and build them up.’

‘Mr Kennaleigh, you are the most unpoetic Irishman I have ever met. You are determined to be rational. I offer you a gift of poetry and you hand me prose. “Mad Ireland” will apparently never “hurt you into poetry”.’ He faced the bay and, arms flung wide, declaimed, ‘Say rather that the waves are fortunate to break on the shores of Ireland. But none so fortunate as I to have found this blessed land and a man who knows the difference between a swell and a sea.’ He embraced the entire scene before us and hugged it to himself. Then he turned to smile at me.

‘Argh, what a tongue yon daft laddie has on him. It’s enough to addle a man’s heart.’ I started to hand the tablet back to him when a puff of wind briefly lifted the topmost sheet. I could see that the next sheet held another drawing. I turned the page and found a picture of myself sitting in the garden chair reading, with a few faint lines suggesting the wall of the house behind me. ‘When did you do this?’ I was filled with a sudden great fierce overwhelming joy at the discovery that David had drawn a picture of me.

‘Just now. When I was walking along the beach.’

‘But you couldn’t see me. How could you draw a picture of me?’

‘When I started down the hill, I turned back to look at you. And when I was walking, I thought about you, and the image of you sitting here reading came to me. I had to draw it. It was so strong in my mind. I felt I had to record it.’

‘May I have it? Please.’

‘But it’s just a sketch. You can see a more accurate image of yourself in the mirror.’

‘It isn’t that. It’s, it’s that it’s something by you. Will you sign it for me?’

David found a pencil in a pocket and took the tablet from me. He set it atop the stone wall and began writing.

‘What are you writing? It shouldn’t take this long to sign your name.’ I sat up higher in the chair in an attempt to see what David was doing. He turned the pad away from me so that I couldn’t watch him write.

‘Patience, Mr Kennaleigh, patience. I have a very long name. It took ever so long to christen me.’ He finished with a flourish and handed the pad back to me so that I could read the inscription.

‘To a constant reader from his constant lover, John Michael David Lionel FitzHugh Kennaleigh Saint-John.’

‘Kennaleigh?’

‘It is a recent addition. It is a name I have chosen for myself. “Kennaleigh Saint-John” has a pleasing rhythm, don’t you think? But perhaps you prefer “Saint-John Kennaleigh”?’

I couldn’t speak. We stared at each other. After a minute David said, ‘You’re crying.’

I suddenly became aware that tears were running down my face. They felt both hot and cold in the wind as they furrowed my face. I nodded my head yes and started to wipe them away. David reached over and grasped my hand to stop me.

‘Don’t. Let them be. They are beautiful. You are beautiful.’

I finally found my voice although my throat was closed tight with emotion. ‘You make me feel beautiful.’

******

That conversation took place forty-two years ago. David died two years ago last month. In the measured words of his obituary in the papers, he ‘passed away after a long and valiant struggle’, the customary euphemism of his tribe for a death from cancer or some other debilitating disease. A record of his accomplishments and honours followed. The only departure from the conventions came in the listing of the names of his survivors. At his mother’s insistence, the first person named was ‘his long-time and much-loved partner, Ross Kennaleigh.’

I was with David when he died. The hospital had tried to exclude me because I wasn’t ‘family’ only to be met with an imperious ‘Don’t be ridiculous’ from his older brother. ‘Of course, Ross is family.’ David’s last words to me were ‘thank you’. I had performed some trifling service for him as he lay in the hospital bed, and he grasped my hand in his and squeezed it briefly. He had to manoeuvre his arm through all the tubes attached to him to reach me.

I can still feel the touch of his fingers. He was so weak by that point, and his hand was dry and thin. The touch of the husk of someone I loved, the touch of someone I wanted desperately to be a stranger. I try to remember him as he looked that day when he stood where I am standing now, leaning against the wall behind the house in Dunfanaghy. When he was young and alive and vibrant and I first knew that he was as in love with me as I was with him. But that memory is often overwritten by the old man he became in hospital, his face drawn taut, the shiny too-pink scalp with large spots of brown showing through his sparse and brittle hair, the brightness falling from his eyes.

And I mourned.

David’s death made me a stranger even to myself. An automaton took over my body and went through the motions of life. It attended his funeral and spoke one of the eulogies. It helped David’s family sort through his things. After a week, it returned to work. It endured and accepted with as much dignity as it could muster the inarticulate expressions of regret that were hurriedly cast toward it, the swiftly spoken and embarrassed reactions of those who felt they had to say something but didn’t quite know what form of sympathy to offer the ‘long-time partner’.

But nothing anyone says can ever help. No words could fill the enormous blank vacant emptiness at the middle of my life. Nor did I want them to. I cherished my soundless grief and held it to myself. It was as if my sorrow were the only thing left to me of David.

Inside, silence, complete and total silence. The ancient poetry ended, prose splintered, words floundered, stripped of the possibility of meaning. Time stopped in anguish and regret at the futility of it all. Sorrow became my close friend. I feared that if I let it go, nothing of me would remain. If I let my grief go, David and I would disappear and no one would remember us.

But once the inadequate words of consolation have been spoken, one is expected to move on and not burden others with the necessity of sympathising. The proprieties had been observed, and the survivor was supposed to get on with his life and restore our common pretence that there is no death. And the person who inhabited my body when I was with others mastered my emotions and kept them locked inside. I quickly relearned the amiable habits of sociability. In public, David became someone I could speak of again and refer to in the past tense, without the threat of unsettling tears. But I would awake alone in the middle of the night raging with mindless anger, at David’s death, at his betrayal, at his desertion. Everything reminded me of his absence. Better never to have loved than to have loved like this.

And then David healed me, as he had so many times during our life together. Last Wednesday, for the first time since his death, I awoke feeling calm and, if not content, at least aware that contentment was again a possibility. I lay there in my bed in Brighton watching the wind stir the curtains in the open window. I could smell the ocean. It was such a strange feeling, something that I hadn’t felt in so long, that I was at a loss to account for it. And then came the memory, vague at first but growing stronger and stronger, that I had been dreaming of David, David standing against a wall overlooking the sea and stopping me from wiping away my tears. And I knew I had to return to Dunfanaghy once more and finally bury David. Not to forget him, but to let go and let him be dead. To remember him, and to honour those memories, all of them, both good and bad. But to stop disfiguring his memory with my wanton, selfish grief. He deserves more, much more, from me. He deserves someone brave enough to tell him ‘thank you’ for everything he gave and to, at last, cease wanting more.

And so I stand by an ancient stone wall, as waves that began with a wind blowing over distant waters roll past me and break upon the land. And I do not grieve. The joy that I was privileged to share for so many years swells inside me and lifts me up, into the bright ring of the day, into the uncreated light.