Archive for the ‘Kat Beyer’ Category
Fair Warning
Monday, February 18th, 2008
We still haven’t found the grave of Alexander, but we believe that the Ark of the Covenant lies guarded in an Ethiopian church, and we have three possibilities for the location of Atlantis. My colleagues and I spend a great deal of time and grant money just turning down back roads on hunches.
For example, I once stopped in a village for gas and coffee at a place where one rather smelled like the other. In the course of a long smoke, while we waited for the owner’s cousin’s son to come fix the gas pump (you have to be willing to smoke and wait long hours if you want to get far in this profession), the owner told me about a cup at his cousin’s house, a cup no one must drink from.
“Most people die,” he said between drags.
“They just drink from it and die?” I asked.
“Just die. Like that. But not everyone. Every now and then somebody drinks from it, again and again, and that person lives a long time, long enough to get sick of living.”
“No really? Has it got poison in it? Why don’t they just destroy it?”
“Can’t. Old Joseph, when he brought it, he said, ‘Take care of this.’ Well, we give what is asked for, here, in this place.”
I decided to test this.
“May… may I see it?”
He took me up to his cousin’s house, where we were graciously shown into the garden, and where I saw the Grail in its little homemade shrine, set into the wall against the hillside.
Now, I have tenure and a reputation to keep up, and I did not want to violate my host’s hospitality, so I waited a week before I came back to steal the Grail.
When I climbed into the night garden, the shrine stood empty, except for a polite note in a copperplate hand that read: “Old Joseph warned us that people would try to take this, even fight over it. So we leave it in the open, because we’ve learned that that is the best way we can protect it. If you don’t want to die, please do us the courtesy of telling this story, but never say the name of our village or give any particulars that might help someone else find us. Thank you, and have a good night.”
The Lady or the Tide
Wednesday, February 6th, 2008
If I give it back to her, she will walk all the way down the shining valley to the sea. She will step into the water and never return, if I give it back.
She might not. But I think I know. I’ve heard the stories at closing time down the pub (no one tells them at the start of the night, before the dark and the rain). It might be modern times, we might park a Range Rover where my grandfather kept his cart, but I know—I’m not such a modern educated man that I can’t feel this truth under my skin and hers—it’s what drew me to her, after all.
And I will be left here, to mind our children until they mind themselves, mind themselves away to college and London no doubt, and I am left to grow old sitting in the same patch of sun my father sat in, pining and looking down the valley to the sea.
But if I never say anything, and I leave it hid in the thatch where I first put it, I will have kept a secret from her, my own wife, my heart outside myself.
I once thought to put it in a deposit box at the bank. People in the stories always leave things like this about to be found, it seems. I wanted to be wiser and safer. But the thatch seemed the right place. There is no explaining it, I suppose.
If I never say anything, I will know what she does not. It will be like the secrets some other men in here keep, about women in Oban or Glasgow. The wives who do not know make my heart ache. But then, some of the husbands don’t know either: they make my heart ache too.
I couldn’t have that kind of secret—how could I love anyone else but her? No house has been warmer, no children brighter eyed and sounder hearted. Sometimes with her, one glass of wine seems to last all summer.
She’s away today with the children, up the coast, and I’m standing here, looking down the valley to the water, holding this sealskin in my hand, waiting for the sea and my own heart to return the answer.