The Secret Scripture

by Sebastian Barry

Perhaps his happiness was curiously unfounded. But cannot a man make himself as happy as he can in the strange long reaches of a life? I think it is legitimate. After all the world is indeed beautiful and if we were any other creature than man we might be continuously happy in it.

It is all love, that not knowing, that not seeing. I am standing there, eternally, straining to see, a crick in the back of my neck, peering and straining, if for no other reason than for love of him. The feathers are drifting away, drifting, swirling away. My father is calling and calling. My heart is beating back to him. The hammers are falling still.

He was merely floating there in the room, insubstantial, a living man in the midst of life, dying imperceptibly on his feet, like all of us.

What would I give to put them back in that church, back in that Christmas time, put everything back that time soon took away, as time must, the shillings back in the pockets of the people, the bodies back in the long johns and the mittens, everything, everything back, so we might be balanced there, kneeling and sitting on the mahogany planks, if not eternally then again for those moments, that very inch of the material of time, the lines of my father’s face accepting the glimmering light, his face slowly slowly turning to both my mother and me, and smiling, smiling in easy, ordinary kindness.

And when they could do no better, and had no hope of any other sort of rescue, they jumped from the ledge in little groups and single, their clothes burning and burning, the flames blown up from the pinnies till they dragged above them like veritable wings, and these burning girls fell the height of that grand old mansion, and struck the cobbles. A continuous wave of them, a wave of mere girls pouring abundantly from the windows, burning and screaming and dying before our eyes.

Anyway for my sanity I am writing here. I am sixty-five years old. Past the Beatles song. By some accounts this is young. But when a man wakes on his fortieth birthday he may safely say he has no youth ahead of him. I suppose this is infinitely petty and ridiculous. A healthy person might be content with life as a quality in itself, and look to the passing of the years, and the gaining of age, and then great age, with interest. But I am miserable before the task. When Bet died I looked in the mirror for the first time in many years. I mean, I had glanced every morning in the mirror, trimmed my beard and the like, but had not looked in it at myself. I was amazed at what I saw.