THE RECKONING

I hitched a ride to Hitch’s house: there was a wake there. The dead man’s family, scattered across the land like an arc of grain tossed from a farmer’s fist, had been inexorably drawn to this cottage by the sea like pilgrims convening in kinship. Standing around the coffin with the other guests, I contemplated how an entire life could be narrowed down to such a slender point of focus: all of one’s deeds being considered by everyone one knows, at the same time, in the same place. That night we bedded down in the undercroft against the undulating hush of waves eroding rocks in the distance, and all through the early hours peppered the darkness with the good things he’d done, aware of his body resting in the room above, oblivious to our tributes - tributes he’d never heard when he was alive. The following morning, we bore him through drizzle down the twisting, wizened, lane to the tiny church overlooking the ocean, and silently honoured his slow lowering into the ground. After the service I walked out of the graveyard and over to the cliff’s edge, and watched gannets pierce through the bulbous bellies of granite-grey clouds and disappear into the sea.