The note stuck on the stick was a piece of bark with grand protoelfin sacred carvings written partly backwards and partly upside down. At first, I thought my brother Thymian was its author because this is a language he and I invented to use between us. Nobody else knows of it. Or knew, to my knowledge. But it was signed at the very center instead of the end with a little rain cloud instead of a sprig of thyme. Translated, it read:
“Arley, you ought to know that a human wants to leave you a legacy. She’s still living, but that won’t be for long. You should go see the lady with the garage that houses the Rolls Royce you used to sleep in when you feared you might be human. We don’t recommend consorting with humans, but in this case, she won’t be one anymore any minute now and I think you should do it and do it quickly.”
I began to move. As I moved, I ate the note. As soon as I bit into the bark, it turned into a crisp brown wafer that was quite easy to eat.The stick I carried with me. I headed for the human city where she lived, the woman in whose car I had been able to sleep without having nightmares. Though I felt I was moving slowly, I arrived at her house as fast as I could.
She wasn’t in the garden, she wasn’t in the garage. When I entered the house, I saw she wasn’t in the parlour either. And then I heard a strange noise. It turned out to be the lady singing.
“I’m dyin’ to see the Lord! I’m dyin’ to see the Lord! I’m not dyin’ ´cos I’m dyin’! I’m dyin’ ´c0s I´m dyin’ to see the Lord!”
I followed the deeply cracked voice – it was like bits of a shattered vinyl disk - up the staircase and entered what had to be her bedroom. She was lying on the bed, singing as loudly as she could for someone whose heart was about to stop. I had heard her sing herself to sleep before, when I was nodding off myself in the Rolls. But it had never sounded as awful and at the same time as heart-rending as it did now. She had always been a woman of a proud bearing, but never did she look as proud as she did now, dying all by herself against the pillows that held her up in her king-sized bed. She did not stop singing when she saw me, but she nodded in recognition and tried to smile. It had always been that way. She had never spoken to me with her mouth, but she had smiled and nodded and I knew she was allowing me leave to sleep in her car. As I read her mind then I now did too and she was saying, “Take the car and go. It’s yours. I can’t give you my house. It’s not mine. It’s rented.”
I can't explain how I felt when I saw that she was thinking of me at such a moment. She had been so kind letting me sleep there, never asking if I was human or not or why I was there. And I hadn’t visited in such a long time, or even thought of doing it. As my eyes filled with tears, the white ceiling opened, the roof opened too and a great shaft of golden light that was not blinding, and a blast of trumpets that not everyone can hear dropped into the room. I saw her soul leap out of her body. It stood there fore a second at the foot of the bed, its eyes wide with amazement and then she took her bearings and flew up a pearly staircase without touching it with her feet. She was trying out a new pair of feathery golden wings.
I went to the telephone and called emergencies and was able to say she had died so they would come for her body. Gulping, my throat full of sobs, my eyes full of tears, I went to the garage and shrank the car and put it in my pocket. I made myself invisible and waited for humans to appear. This did not take long. First, an ambulance parked before the garden gate and a doctor and a nurse came in. They were immediately followed by the next door neighbour, who phoned another woman who arrived in a flash. The first woman peered closely over the doctor’s shoulder to make sure her neighbour was dead and as soon as the doctor said she was, went off in search of a sewing basket. There were a pair of reading glasses in it she wanted, as a memento, she said, but it was clear she had been coveting them for a long while. How happy she looked when she hanged them round her neck by the purple cord they were attached to. Upon witnessing this, the other neighbour decided she would not leave without a token herself and hurried off to the kitchen to see if she could find a prize recipe for pear tart my landlady had guarded zealously. And then a man from a church nearby arrived and said that all things that had belonged to this lady must go to charity before the landlord stole them or the state confiscated them, and the neighbours vanished without returning what they had filched. Next came the people from the funeral parlour, and I rode with them and my friend to where they prepared her for burial. I hovered around her body while it was on display for 24 hours at the funeral parlour, and I watched at the fore of the three people that saw her buried. The nosey, thieving neigbours did not attend. They had excused themselves saying they had things to do, apparently imperiously. The man from the church was one of the three present. The other two were the gravediggers.
“Eternal rest, eternal rest grant unto her, O Lord. And let perpetual light shine upon her. May her soul rest in peace,” the churchman chanted something like that, as I recall.
“I sure hope it does,” said one of the two gravediggers, “because it’s going to rain.” He lived in a cottage on the grounds and hated having trouble on rainy nights.
“Another one that goes without a soul to see hers off. Except for you, Sam,” said the second gravedigger.
“And you both,” replied the churchman.
“Yeah, better than nothing, eh?”
I was tempted to show myself when I heard that. But I knew both she and I knew better, and what they thought mattered much less to her than the shortest of the blades of grass the spade had overthrown.
I sat on the branch of a tree near the fresh grave for hours and when night fell and cloaked all there was to see there, I descended to plant lilies on her grave, of the kind that never fade. “They’ll wonder how this can be when it’s winter and they stand firm as snowmen soldiers on guard in the snow, but they will never have an explanation for it and that’s that. They’ll say it’s one of those graveyard things and it could become a legend, but I doubt anyone will notice much. I know you aren’t here, but I want to do this for you anyway,” I said to Ma'am. And I added, “I do hope to see your ghost again one day.”
And so I said goodbye to the earthly remains of Ma'am. Yes, that was what I had always called her. I had never heard anyone say her name, and there was no headstone to identify her on her grave yet. And I began to walk away from the cemetery. And not knowing where else to go, I headed for the Dullahan home.
No comments:
Post a Comment