The Secret Scripture

by Sebastian Barry

My father’s happiness. It was a precious gift in itself, as perhaps my mother’s anxiety was a perpetual spanner thrown into her works. For my mother never made miniature legends of her life, and was singularly without stories, though I am sure there were things there to tell as good as my father’s. It is funny, but it strikes me that a person without anecdotes that they nurse while they live, and that survive them, are more likely to be utterly lost not only to history but the family following them. Of course this is the fate of most souls, reducing entire lives, no matter how vivid and wonderful, to those sad black names on withering family trees, with half a date dangling after and a question mark. My father’s happiness not only redeemed him, but drove him to stories, and keeps him even now alive in me,