Stone Yard Devotional

by Charlotte Wood

later letter, less furious but worse, because her pain was closer to the surface: it wasn’t just leaving that was destructive, she wrote, it was the contagion of it, the contempt it showed for her and everyone else at the centre, making fools of them all for keeping at it. Most especially the young ones, she said, whom we owed. Some of them wrote too, with more rage even than Deb. I think she encouraged them to do so.

But I’ve never heard a word to express what I felt and what my body knew, which was that I had a need, an animal need, to find a place I had never been but which was still, in some undeniable way, my home.

But it was at ten years old I first became confused about the nature of forgiveness, and of

atonement, and the conditions under which they could each take place.

but the lift and descent of that sheet, the air inside it, the peace when it settled, showed me what I wanted. I knew it in that moment, but it took years to find it.

At night, just before sleep, is when I am closest to reaching it. In the morning, when the birds start, belief is as thin as the light.

She brings into our home, without apology, everything we so painstakingly left behind.

‘And yet. Those are my two favourite words, applicable to every situation, be it happy or bleak. The sun is rising? And yet it will set. A night of anguish? And yet it too, will pass.’ Elie Wiesel.

A bad dream, of which I have only a dark weedy sense: an old friend, looming catastrophe, dread. The nights are still cool, even in January, and I woke with the thin blanket pulled up to my chin for protection, against the cold and from the dream. The sticky cobweb of it clung to me through Vigils, through showering, through breakfast.

We all make saints of the dead, I said. It’s the only way we can bear it.

Nobody knows the subterranean lives of families.

May our trespasses be forgiven, may we forgive them. I do not look for Helen, but I know she knows I ask it; and I know too that she has other, deeper forgivenesses to consider, or to decide against.