Fever Dream

"Some days, like rain on the doorstep,
she’ll cover me with grace in all she offers.
Sometimes, I'd like just to ask her,
what honest words she can’t afford to say, like:
I want your flowers like babies want God’s love,
or maybe as sure as tomorrow will come."
-- Iron & Wine, Fever Dream


I write
like,
like,
a hamster on a wheel:
weary-never-souldestroying-ending;
all heart - till it bursts - and no
resolution

?


FAITH
Chapter -

A life is – if one is foolish enough to begin making sweeping statements about ‘lives’ – only truly exotic to those who have not lived it. I have no doubt that, as fascinated as we are by the noble savage in his wilderness paradise, or the dark and earthy Feudal English peon in his hut, each of our varied and colourful subjects would wonder just what all the fuss was about. Perhaps it is their ignorance that is part of our wonder, for who can comprehend a life so removed from the normal seeing itself as just that – the norm.

I was an ordinary boy from the east coast of Ireland, spending his life between strangers in a London boarding school and foreigners abroad, alternating between lonely and lonely and never once feeling that loss. An unremarkable boy turned into an unremarkable teenager and should have turned into a wholly unnoticeable man. But, as all remarkable people do, I turned one unremarkable corner on one unremarkable day, and met the people who would turn the boy into the man into the legend.

It was not a corner I meant to turn; maybe it was not even a corner that, given the choice, I would turn again. But I am a remarkable man, a man who stands out in the company of remarkable men, and before they entirely butcher my history, I should like to have a stab at butchering it myself. The grubby fingers of historians and – worse! – biographers leave dirty stains of genius and nobility over the story of the boy who became the man who became so many things. But we are not born, not truly: we become.

Before you let them convince you that I was born of some modern-day miracle, then, before you let them tell you that I sprang fully-formed and divinely inspired from the mouth of God, let me tell you how an unremarkable boy turned a corner he had not intended to, and a wholly unremarkable life unravelled in an instant.

This is the story of the boy who became the tapestry of a legend; it is the story of the weavers; it is the story of Faith.

**

It is my firm belief – though she tells me it’s nonsense, she blushes when she thinks about it too long – that she was daydreaming about a boy. God knows there were enough to be thinking about, even in a sleepy little place like Bezons: Michael with his flashing white teeth and relentless French charm; Jean-Paul with his startlingly long, raven-black mane of hair; a tall, forgettably handsome young man whose name – predictably enough – eludes me. This was France! If a girl could not find a trim, dashing young Gallic stud to occupy her thoughts, well – she must not have been trying very hard.

Be that as it may, she obviously was not expecting a tall, sandy-haired Irish boy to walk around the corner and stab her with a pitchfork; as she joked later, always with with a slightly pained expression, “so few people ever are.”

There is very little defence for carrying a pitchfork like a jousting lance; I never attempted one. When my great uncle, amused and exasperated, asked how a simple delivery for his garden could go so badly wrong, daydreams of being a knight on horseback carving his way through enemy legions did not seem particularly… helpful. We were connected by an errant pitchfork and by our daydreams: one day, when she is not expecting it, I will ask her whether her daydream came true or not. For her, it should be a fairly easy answer; that mine did, and how – those are slightly more complicated.

At the time, however, all thoughts of knights and lances vanished remarkably quickly, as can happen when you are faced with a screaming girl, bleeding heavily from a hole in her thigh where you have just stabbed her. I caught her – more out of luck than skill – as she sank to the ground, sobbing and swearing violently in turn. Had she been entirely clear of what was going on, I think she would have punched me in the face; as it was, she accepted by guiltily solicitous arm while she held her leg and cursed magnificently.

By now a crowd has gathered, which in England would have terrified me. Here in the small and slightly more understanding world of Bezons, however, it was a gentle crowd, the kind that sent for doctors and parents and sympathised with good-natured clucks of worry. “Did you hear about Canon Richard’s daughter?” they would say later, the right notes of concern and laughter in their voices. “It looked painful, poor lamb; the boy’s face was a prize, though, he looked more afraid than she did!” It is not to say that small-town people are naturally kinder, but maybe that, away from the dull grind of the city, they have less demands on their kindness. Whatever the reason, I felt slightly calmed and enveloped by the ring of watchers, as if knowing that ugliness was as foreign to their spirits as snow to their gentle, rain-cleaned land.

The doctor, his practice only a few houses down, was on the scene shortly, muttering with worry and binding up the impressive gash on her leg with cloth and bandages.

“What,” he said sternly when the bleeding had slowed, “what exactly were you doing impaling yourself on a pitchfork?” The crowd laughed and began to disperse slowly, the show over; with a sigh, as if such children taxed his Hippocratic patience severely, the Doctor motioned me to follow. He was a very tall man, with enormous hands, but when he picked her up carefully to carry her back to his surgery, it seemed somehow to be the most consummately caring and gentle action I had ever seen. Much later, looking back on her petit body relaxing slowly into the broad expanse of his chest, it occurred to me that anyone, with enough study, can become a doctor, but being a physician, being a healer is a gift from God given only to a few; not all of them are doctors.