Coronach, page 99
Stars now, and the faint, earthy chill of the ground, the sweetness of cut hay, the unbearable, unspeakable sweetness and desire of the past, and the name and the presence between them.
“Have you no kin, apart from....”
“No. After sixty years, there are none who would know me where I was born.” Then, “I will be writing to give her news of her father. It is right that she should know.”
He said, staring into the obscurity of twilight, “And shall you speak of me? And of this conversation?”
“If you wished it spoken of, you would speak of it yourself.”
Twice in eighteen years he had written to her. The letters had been returned unopened, the brief sentences unread, the anguished cry of her name unheard, disdained, held in contempt.
He said, “There must be a new minister, for the people’s good. But you may die in Glen Sian with my blessing.”
She said, still without moving or turning her face toward him, “What is a blessing from you but a curse from another man’s lips? And when have you cared for the good of the people, when the people are nothing to you?”
He said, “Even as I was nothing to them, and nothing to any of you.”
He lay with the girl in his dishevelled bed in the aftermath of sex, and she talked with knowledge and reminiscence of France, and the Fête de la Fédération which had taken place on July fourteenth in Paris, a hundred and fifty thousand citizens gathered, noble and pauper alike, for an ecstasy of celebration a year after the fall of the Bastille. Sing and weep tears of joy, for on this day France has been reborn. He half listened to her voice and to the rain, indifferent to both. The season had been unfavourable and the harvest seemed uncertain. He had abnegated his responsibility, and for the first time in his life as factor the potential for disaster did not concern him.
The revolution of 1789 was finished, its ideals established bloodlessly: liberty and equality were enshrined: it was the dawn of a new millennium.
She paused.
“But then, you don’t know Paris, or even France. Do you?” And then, as though his silence had spoken to her, “How well?”
“As well as I know you. The cunt first, the heart least of all.”
She sat up, ignoring this, the language of their intercourse.
“When did you go there? What did you do?”
“I shed blood. And I was very young.”
“Why did you come back? Do you love this place so much?”
“I don’t love it.”
“Then why do you strive for it?”
“Why do you do this?”
Silence, and rain.
She said, “I can’t resist the compulsion. I can’t think of anything else.”
The shadows deepened, the rain on the roof like the rhythm of the sea. He thought she slept, or was lost in introspection, or the planning of excuses for her absence. She spoke his surname: she had never, in all the years of their acquaintance, used his Christian name.
“Do you think I should marry for money?”
“You are Glen Sian’s heir, and that responsibility alone should determine your decision.”
“Then I think I must. If my father should die, I should need your advice. And I should heed it, unlike him.”
He said, “I am older than your father, and I am not immortal.”
She laughed, at the intimation that he would not live forever, that he could be defined by the limitations of other men. His humanity was not what she desired: like himself, she held it in contempt.
They coupled with increasing intensity, with little tenderness, in an ever more insatiable craving for sensation. She demanded intercourse even in Ardsian, in the dark red room which had been his, on her own bed in the mirror’s reflection, on the floor of what had been Ewen’s room... as though she would consume him utterly, and the territory of his ghosts. The outpouring of seed and self ceased to give him pleasure, and subterfuge, although to her erotic, did not appeal to him. He disengaged himself from the fervid dream of sex, and its sweetness and the immortality it offered, and ended it. She returned to Edinburgh in the bosom of an unsuspecting family, and wrote to him curtly in October with news of her impending marriage.
Now, in the house at the dying of the light, he arranged those icons to former gods which would not go with him now, the dried rose, the wedding ring, the rosary, on his desk where they would be found with those papers he allowed to remain. Others, and poetry, and the bridal gown with its stains of semen spilled in a profundity of grief, and other fetishes and detritus of his sexual life, he burned. The records in the estate office, for the consumption of others, had become terse, enigmatic: only in these last private entries in his journal were there allusions to cancer and to blindness, only here, for my eyes alone, an implication of intent. There was no valediction, no regret, no fear.
He wrote nothing else.
He closed the door on the house and the whispering dead at dawn on the thirty-first of October, the last great feast of the Celtic year, and his fifty-fifth birthday. The climb was punishing: the granite, the mountain’s essence, tore both the maimed and the dextrous hand, and was found later in particles beneath his nails. The rock is black here, seamed with water, scoured by winds from the Atlantic, from Iceland, and from Spain. And now there is nothing in the sky but light, and a pair of eagles in suspension in the aching clarity of that air.
The first shot, into the bowels, shattered the spinal cord and the granite against which he rested: the injury was hideous. Yet still death refused him. In a final act of will he summoned it, and took it into his mouth like a lover. The brain died, the visions and the voices and the torment and the complexity destroyed within an infinitesimal second; the sound of the shot, in that infinity of light, lost in the vast silence of the land.
Kimberley Jordan Reeman, Coronach
