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
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
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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
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