Thin Places

Home > Other > Thin Places > Page 8
Thin Places Page 8

by Lesley Choyce


  I had ever seen

  shifted forward in time

  and I watched the fisherman age

  and the little boy grow into a man

  turn against her

  leave.

  And the man

  the man she loved

  grew old and then sick

  and I watched him die

  in his bed

  with Rebecca there beside him.

  I felt what she had felt

  at the moment of his death

  a loss so debilitating

  that I wondered

  that she too

  did not die.

  But she lived on.

  And then I followed her

  as she left the old stone hut

  and moved from town to town.

  I watched as Ireland changed around her.

  But there was one constant:

  people suffered losses

  their hearts ached

  and Rebecca absorbed their pain

  tried to help

  but often failed.

  Many men fell in love with her

  but she kept a barrier in place

  around her emotions.

  She moved on when

  she knew she had to.

  And I even saw the scene

  saw every molecule of it

  of a young Seamus on the rocks

  at Mullaghmore

  the giant waves pounding the shore

  the stones in his pockets

  the pain in his heart

  and Rebecca walking up to him.

  And then it grew quiet.

  I saw Rebecca

  living alone

  first in a small cottage

  at the foot of Knocknarea

  and then beneath the shadow of Benbulben

  and then there was a deep longing to be back

  on the coast

  and finally

  I saw

  Rebecca alone.

  In this very cottage by the sea

  where she would walk

  almost daily to the ruins

  of the stone hut

  where I first met her.

  And then I finally saw

  myself.

  The Dreamer Awakes

  When I awoke

  the cottage was empty.

  The peat fire had gone out

  and the room was cold.

  I was convinced I was still in

  the drug-induced dream

  the journey she had sent me on.

  But now I could see that things

  were different:

  colours less vivid

  everything less intense.

  And I knew

  I was back.

  Emptiness swept over me

  like a cold dark wave.

  Rebecca was gone.

  And all I felt next

  was panic.

  I went outside into the grey mist of morning

  and began to run down the beach.

  I ran until my lungs ached.

  I screamed her name into

  the rising sea wind.

  When I couldn’t run anymore

  I stumbled on until I arrived

  exhausted and without hope

  at the remains of the stone hut

  where I found her clothes

  her dress and the scarf she had worn

  and a note

  a poem of sorts:

  Declan,

  Pain subsides

  love endures.

  Endings ensure beginnings.

  Memory survives.

  Remember me

  remember my voice

  and listen for it

  in the sea and in the wind

  and in your heart.

  Love,

  Rebecca

  Return to Knocknarea

  I asked Uncle Seamus to walk with me again to the top of Knocknarea. We picked a windless, cloudless day to find our way to the top and to the puzzling cairn, the tomb of Queen Maeve. I chose to not tell him anything more about my time with Rebecca. There was a haunting residual effect of the drug I had taken that made me doubt once again if I was fully capable of knowing what was real and what was imagined. It made me doubt myself and everything that had happened. Maybe the truth is what we believe it to be. I don’t know.

  From the top of the mountain, we looked west and north — out across to the expanse of sea in the distance and the beach of Streedagh somewhere out there.

  More than ever I felt that I belonged to another time. I would leave Ireland and return home only because I knew it was the thing I had to do for my parents. I owed them that much because they were good parents, not ready to fully lose their son to a larger world. But they would probably never understand how I had changed.

  Having lost Rebecca, I knew I must return home.

  But it would be a temporary return. Rebecca had left me with sorrow but also the realization that there was a thread to everything that connected the past to the present and the future and that some of us had connections to places and people that ran much deeper than we could ever imagine.

  And I’m sure Uncle Seamus was wondering what was going through my head as I stood there on the mountaintop staring off into the distance. Some things, he began to say. Some things, Declan … but his voice trailed off.

  And then the sky grew dark and a big storm cloud blew in from the Atlantic. The wind began to rise again as we started our trek back down the mountain.

  I listened, really listened to the song of the rising wind rushing at us from the distant sea and was certain I heard something. It was a voice.

  Her voice.

  At first I couldn’t make out what she was saying. It was not like before — this voice inside my head. There were no words I could recognize. And it was like singing but it was not singing. As I listened I began to realize I was feeling what was inside her heart.

  There is no single word of my own that I could possibly attach to that emotion, but there was sadness and there was love and longing as well. Both beauty and pain, and when I felt I could bear it no more, it faded.

  When Uncle Seamus asked me why I was crying I couldn’t begin to explain. So I said, “It’s just the wind, Uncle Seamus. Just the wind.”

  By the time we were down the mountain I had begun to hear the voice clearly again, and it was most certainly her voice. There were words this time but I couldn’t understand a single one. Yet that didn’t trouble me. Perhaps it was ancient Irish Gaelic, maybe something else.

  But I knew I would find a way to translate whatever language the wind was speaking. I yearned to learn it, to speak it, to make sense of all that had happened to me, and all that was yet to come.

  Lesley Choyce is the author of over ninety books of literary fiction, short stories, poetry, creative nonfiction, and young adult novels. He runs Pottersfield Press and has worked as editor with a wide range of Canadian authors. He has edited a number of literary anthologies and hosted several television shows over the years.

  Choyce has taught creative writing at Dalhousie and other universities for over thirty years and has acted as mentor to many emerging writers. He has won the Dartmouth Book Award, the Atlantic Poetry Prize, and the Ann Connor Brimer Award. He has also been shortlisted for the Stephen Leacock Medal, the White Pine Award, the Hackmatack Award, the Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy Award, and the Governor General’s Award. He was a founding member of the 1990s Spoken Word rock band, The SurfPoets. He surfs year round in the North Atlantic.

  www.lesleychoyce.com

  Copyright © Lesley Choyce, 2017

  All rights reserved. No part of this
publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise (except for brief passages for purpose of review) without the prior permission of Dundurn Press. Permission to photocopy should be requested from Access Copyright.

  All characters in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Cover image: Man standing in shaft of light: istockphoto.com/gremlin, Sky: istockphoto.com/Surovtseva

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Choyce, Lesley, 1951-, author

  Thin places / Lesley Choyce.

  Issued in print and electronic formats.

  ISBN 978-1-4597-3957-4 (softcover).--ISBN 978-1-4597-3958-1 (PDF).--

  ISBN 978-1-4597-3959-8 (EPUB)

  I. Title.

  PS8555.H668T45 2017 jC813’.54 C2016-907752-7

  C2016-907753-5

  We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, which last year invested $153 million to bring the arts to Canadians throughout the country, and the Ontario Arts Council for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Ontario Book Publishing Tax Credit and the Ontario Media Development Corporation, and the Government of Canada.

  Nous remercions le Conseil des arts du Canada de son soutien. L’an dernier, le Conseil a investi 153 millions de dollars pour mettre de l’art dans la vie des Canadiennes et des Canadiens de tout le pays.

  Care has been taken to trace the ownership of copyright material used in this book. The author and the publisher welcome any information enabling them to rectify any references or credits in subsequent editions.

  J. Kirk Howard, President

  The publisher is not responsible for websites or their content unless they are owned by the publisher.

 

 

 


‹ Prev