M. Wren - A Gift Upon the Shore

But the dark fountain has stopped.

None of us has moved through those endless seconds while Isaac died. We all watched stupefied, none of us believing one drop of that child’s blood, none of us understanding it.

Now Jerry moves. Like a man transformed into stone, he moves ponderously toward Miriam and Isaac. He speaks, and his voice is the crack of boulders falling. “What have you done ?”

I think he might have killed her, crushed her like an avalanche, but it is then that Miriam looks up, and he stops.

Her face is in full light, alabaster white. She doesn’t see Jerry. Her eyes are dead with a fathomless despair that echoes in her voice as she cries out her son’s name in a keening ululation that vibrates within me as if I were a tuning fork for that one terrible note.

Miriam understands everything at this moment.

When that cry dies into silence, her head falls forward, but that is her only movement.

Jerry leans down and takes Isaac’s frail body out of her arms. He looks at me, finally forces the words out, and perhaps the questions are addressed to me.

“Who will forgive her? Who will forgive me?”

There is no answer to that. He knows there is no answer. He turns, carries Isaac away, down the long, moon-silvered slope. Jonathan follows him, his face nearly as lifeless as his brother’s.

And I hear someone weeping. Stephen’s head rests on my shoulder as if he were a sleepy child, but these aren’t the easy tears of childhood. These are the labored tears of an adult. I press my cheek against his thick, curling hair, remember a day when I asked him if he’d do the same for me.

And he answered: Yes, I’d do it for you, Mary .

Esther and Bernadette come to help me find the lost key, help me free myself from my self-imposed bondage, help me make my way down from the Knob; I can’t walk without their support. Stephen follows us, carrying Shadow. When we’re halfway down the slope, I ask them to stop.

I look back, look for Miriam.

She had not once moved since her final cry of despair. Like Lot’s wife, she seemed fixed in that one place, kneeling in the grass in her white gown blackened with blood.

But now, as I look back, I can’t see her.

Stephen asks, “Where is she?”

The weight of the pain has made it too difficult to breathe. I can’t answer that, even if I knew the answer.

The sun is moving south now as the summer wanes. Another August almost gone, another summer. At my age each season vanished is something precious lost.

Yet today I feel almost youthful with the golden seed heads of the grass rising around me, enveloping me in their piquant, dusty scents. I can forget, as I sit with my legs stretched out, one arm back to prop me, face turned up to the sun, that I will have to ask Jeremiah to help me when I decide to rise. But he’ll offer his strong hand. He’d carry me if I asked. I won’t. I’m still quite capable of walking with no other assistance than my cane, and I walk every day. It keeps me strong. But it’s gratifying to know I can depend on Jeremiah. I have at times no choice but to depend on him and the family since that night on the Knob, since Bernadette told me I had suffered a heart attack.

Jeremiah sits a few feet away near a mound of earth sparsely covered with grass. We are in the cemetery east of the orchard. Before May we didn’t think of it as a cemetery. It was simply the place where Rebecca was buried. Now there are two graves, two wooden markers with names and dates carved on them. They remind me of all the poignant little cemeteries Rachel and I found after the End.

Every day when the children gather for school, I feel Isaac’s absence. This grief was inevitable; he was too fey, too frail to survive many more years. But the manner of his death has given a trenchant edge to the inevitable.

I lean forward, stroke Shadow’s head. She still limps a little, but I think I notice it more than she does. And I’m grateful I still have her.

I’m grateful for many things today. Grateful for the sun, grateful for my life, grateful for Jeremiah and the accepting silence between us. He sits cross-legged, looking down the long slope toward the barn and house. He has a book in his lap. It isn’t a Bible. It is the collected poems of Emily Dickinson.

And all of us are especially grateful today. I attended the sabbath service this morning. I haven’t altered my habits and convictions when it comes to the religious life of the family, and in the past four months I had set foot in the church only once. That was for Isaac’s funeral. I made another exception today because on this sabbath Jeremiah baptized Esther’s baby. Daniel. Healthy and strong, and that’s the miracle I celebrated. I’m not concerned with his soul. Only his body now. Later I’ll be concerned with his mind. No. Stephen will probably be the one concerned with Daniel’s mind.

And so will Jeremiah, who is beginning to understand the value of the human mind, who has become in a way another student. Rather, he has become a son. He has let me be the mother he wanted me to be.

I hear distant voices. Esther and Miriam are coming out of the henhouse, Esther with Daniel in a sling on her back, Miriam carrying a basket filled with eggs in her right hand. She has no left hand.

Our Astarte’s perfect beauty is blemished. Like old Nehemiah, her arm has been amputated a few inches above the elbow.

I hear Jeremiah’s hissing intake of breath. He’s looking at Miriam, bewilderment and grief resurrected in his eyes. Part of the grief is for the sister he has, in a sense, lost. I wonder if he’ll ever resolve that loss in his mind. He asked who would forgive her and forgive him. He’s the only one who can.

And I wonder if I will ever look on this young woman laughing in the sun, her hair gilded with its light, without fear. Not for what she is now: for what she was, for what she could be again.

We thought she was dead.

For three days after she killed her son, Jeremiah and the others searched for her, and finally decided she had in her despair leapt off the Knob into the rock-strewn sea below. But I didn’t believe that. I didn’t believe Miriam would, however compelling her despair, defy the essential taboo against suicide encoded in her religion.

Yet in one sense I was wrong.

On the sixth day after that confrontation on the Knob, I had recovered enough for a walk to the tree, and Shadow had recovered enough to go with me. I wanted no human company; I was feeling smothered by solicitude. But I didn’t get to the tree. Just past the east gate, Shadow stopped me with her barking. She stood sniffing the air, then limped off south down the road toward Shiloh, and all my calling and whistling wouldn’t deter her. I followed her around the curve and saw something lying at the side of the road, tattered white and brown cloth nested in green fronds of bracken. Shadow’s barking turned vicious, and I knew then what she had found.

Miriam. She hadn’t fled her despair over the cliff at the Knob, but into the forest. She lay with her hair dull and tangled, her moonlight white gown stained with her son’s blood, torn by branches and thorns. On her monstrously swollen left arm, I saw the gashes from Shadow’s teeth. I remembered that purplish bronze color, that sweetly foul odor.