Life, Love and Death Read online

  Life, Love and Death

  By

  Raymond Walker

  (A Tale of the “Faerie River”)

  Copyright year: 2016

  Copyright notice by Raymond Walker. All rights reserved.

  The above information forms this copyright notice;

  2016 by Raymond Walker.

  All rights reserved.

  This e-book is published by Amazon.com and is available on their website but rights are retained by the author, Raymond Walker.

  All of these tales have been published previously albeit in different forms.

  This reworking’s as well as the originals remain copyright: by Raymond Walker.

  All Rights reserved.

  Also Available from the same author;

  KilMartin.

  The secret inside

  A pale shadow creeps

  A shiver.

  The Miscast fate.

  Nut Brown Eyes

  Twisted sisters.

  Tales from this northern land.

  The Shed.

  A picture on the Wall

  River Tales.

  The river sprite

  Moonchild and other tales,

  The river Girl’s Torment.

  A river of Tears

  And Many others.

  Contents.

  Imagine.

  The River Weeps

  Imagine Ann.

  Primed

  Gethsemane

  Brine

  The tarnished wish.

  A river of tears.

  A picture upon the wall and the river sprite.

  Happy is the man who finds a true friend, and far happier is he who finds that true friend in his wife.

  Franz Schubert.

  A successful marriage requires falling in love many times, always with the same person.

  Mignon McLaughlin

  This is a difficult story, for me, to comment upon. I wrote it many years ago and at the time believed it.

  I would have sworn or attested to the nature of true love as a believable fact; It all seemed perfectly valid to me at the time in question.

  the catalyst for this tale came from the polar opposite of its content. I had been dumped by the love of my life, tossed away, cast off, discarded.

  I was in love, hopelessly, completely and convincingly with no escape in sight. I did not wish for escape, rather I wished to delve deeper, become more ensorcelled and enamoured and really wished for this to be my future

  It was not to be.

  And so I Imagined what would be the case if not only was I in love with her but that she had been in love with me. Although I pretended for a time that she loved me as I loved her. I was only fooling myself.

  Fooling myself I Imagined our future and this was what I wished it to be in an odd Fantastical way.

  Raymond Walker, June 2016.

  Eternal Love

  A “Faerie River” Tale

  By Raymond Walker

  The Sad Garden.

  “The garden looks really overgrown”, “full of flowers and vegetables each vying with the other for what little space lies within the confining walls of the property”, was his first thought.

  “It is only a small garden”, attached to a small cottage that sat below a cascading weir and above an ancient humpbacked bridge over the small but fast flowing river, was his second.

  “I really must make more of an effort to get it back into order, back to some semblance of the way she had it”, was his third.

  He knows that the garden is actually fine with all in its place and that were another, with a less critical eye, to look out upon It they would see a pleasant Highland garden.

  To his eyes, however, it is overgrown, mismatched, the flowers in the wrong places and he hates to think of it so; for there was never a weed to be seen when Ann was alive.

  He also knows perfectly well that such a thought is as stupid as his earlier one but he does not care, he knows it is not the way that Ann would have wanted it and he would have liked it to be kept in the way that she liked it, “a place for everything and everything in its place” she would mutter as she removed one flower and replaced it with another.

  He pretended not to hear her and she believed his pretence thinking that he was going a little deaf but unwilling to say anything. He could still hear perfectly, he heard all that she said or muttered and even heard her little quips about his way’s but he always pretended he had not heard. He pretended he did not hear most of what was said about her at her funeral as he was not sure that he could reply without his tears falling or his voice breaking as all he really wanted to do was cry. But he also remembered how they had all talked of her lovely garden and her love for it at her funeral.

  The garden was small, bordered on three sides with a low dry stone wall, on the other by the back of the cottage itself.

  The cottage was long, narrow and low, built of grey colourless stone that had been whitewashed to give it some semblance of brightness topped with a grey slate roof that had begun to sag a little between the stone buttresses.

  Such cottages could be seen here and there throughout Argyll each one similar to many others except that this cottage; Rob’s cottage was notable for the many hanging baskets that decorated all the outside walls.

  In the summer they bloomed with a verdance unmatched in any cottage nearby and probably not one in a hundred miles, or so Rob thought even though it had been many a long year now since he had travelled more than ten miles never mind a hundred.

  It had always been her garden. Ann’s garden, some would say but Rob just thought of it as her garden, and it was part of her being, her very essence was contained within the borders of her garden.

  “She always kept it so nice” everyone had said at her funeral and they were right, she had.

  Rob had never been a gardener, was never really interested in growing things, though he liked to eat the produce that Ann would cook for him when the harvest came.

  They had, however, spent most of their retirement in the garden. She weeding and hoeing and generally looking as fit as a fiddle.

  “As fit as a fiddle” was another phrase he had heard often at the after funeral tea and it was a phrase that he hated to hear now as how could someone who was “fit as a fiddle” die and leave him alone as she had?

  He spent his time in the garden, after her death and internment to be with her in the only way that he now could and he watched the river as it passed.

  It was something he had never grown bored of in all his years of retirement, listening to Ann humming along behind him as she weeded and planted and turned the earth making the garden grow whilst he sat on his bench and watched the peat brown river swirl past thirty or forty yards down the bank from him.

  He heard her muttering and talking to herself and her plants and when he did he would smile, pretend not to hear and think to himself, why do I love this woman? she is absolutely nuts and then a small smile would creep across his face as he thought nuts or not, I do love her.

  When she had died he had decided to keep up her garden as a kind of epitaph to her days for she had loved it so much. It was a kind of homage to her spirit, for putting up with him for so long and a penance for not really caring for the garden that she had loved so much.

  Religiously he pulled himself out of bed in the morning listening to all his joints protesting, creaking and groaning as he pulled on his old brown corduroy trousers and wellington boots and with nothing more than a cup of tea flung himself into daily gardening.

  He hated it, hated the dirt beneath his fingernails, they were filthy and no matter how he seemed to scrub them with nail brush and soap he could not dislodge the dirt or smell. The gravel pierced his boot soles, maki
ng his already protesting feet hurt even more, the smell of rotting vegetation, the noises his back made when he tried to straighten, the miasma of the blooms, all of it; he hated.

  There was nothing about gardening he liked. All he had ever liked about it, was her love of it, watching Ann tend her garden as he sat on the bench and watched the river wash by. The smell of cut flowers in the house he admitted to himself, was pleasant, the taste of Ann’s freshly harvested garden vegetables when it came to dinnertime were the only things that he did not hate about gardening, that and he could see the river from the corner of his eye.

  He, for his efforts, allowed himself one respite, for an hour at lunchtime he would sit on his bench at the edge of the garden staring over the low dry stone dyke at the river passing beneath him. He watched the peaty brown water with its eddy’s and false currents, seeing the occasional fin of the small brown trout that inhabited it, fascinated and mesmerised by it.

  And that made him happy. It was the highlight of his day.

  At night he lay awake in the empty wide bed and listened to the river gurgling and rushing and liked his time alone for a minute or two. But then he remembered that once he had listened to the gurgling and rushing, and the noises of the river had been echoed in her soft snore and the warm smells of her garden had been in the cheek that she rested upon his shoulder.

  The susurration that her breath expelled had sounded like the rivers noises, the smell of soil a little like the peat the river carried to the sea and watching her work in her garden still supple and well despite the tolls that age took, reminded him of the winding sinuous currents that carried his river to the sea.

  It was then, missing her beside him that he would start to cry.

  His sobs he hoped reached the heavens and she would know that he missed her. She would finally know just how much she had meant to him as he had never really told her.

  He always fell asleep crying.

  The River Weeps.

  And then he would cry for while until the sounds of his sobs were like to him the noises of the river and the soft susurrus snores of Ann’s sleep and there he would sleep until rough morning sunlight drew him again into her garden. The work that he said he would never do in his retirement for he had worked hard his long life.

  *

  The spirit of the river stirs and notices, feels his pain and longing and has known such herself and so understands in her own strange way the workings of the human mind and of human feelings.

  Feelings, seem strange to her yet she has grown to encompass them as she had too when she first knew love which was only a few years ago.

  She knows of all that goes on in her River and knows of some things around and close to it. She does not know the world or the way it works except in the most general sense, her knowledge is provincial, limited to her river and its environs. The humpbacked bridge crosses her province, the weir lies upon it and the cottage that lies above it holds a place in her heart. She weeps with Rob for his lost spouse but there is little that she can do as she is the River and the River is her.

  She is not a god even though she is immortal or as close to it as a being can become without actually being so, she is the River, born with the River and she will die when it no longer flows to the sea.

  This she knows even though she has no idea why this should be so. She may not be extant, but she feels and so suspects that she lives. God’s, she imagines, are made in the image of man; sprites, therefore must be the same, dryads also and all the creatures that came before she gained cognizance, understanding and gained her place in the world.

  There was no one to tell her what she should think or feel, she had no teacher but time and experience. Her river would always be “her river” and she enjoyed the slight changes in perception that heralded her becoming aware.

  She loved the cows and sheep that grazed her banks, the people that walked their dogs those that fished and those that just wished a quiet night by the river, she welcomed them all. And she saw those that lived in her environs and grew enamoured of their joint life. She herself had known such love and wished to make it good, for them. Rob and Ann, she knew their names their ideas and thoughts and she wished to help if of course she could.

  She was not a god, her power poor and limited to her River and at times the valley that contained it.

  Imagine Ann.

  She gazed Out over the garden wall down to the muddy river below and thought of him as she always did though her hands itched to be digging again.

  She did not know why she still did the garden; she gave away all her vegetables now that she had no one to feed them to. She still cut flowers in the spring and summer and placed them in the glass vases she had dotted all over the small cottage. But what use was there in doing such things now that he was gone? There was no one to see them anymore, no one to smell their scents, no one to know that they were a small message of her love, given to him.

  She liked the flowers in the garden and had only cut them and brought them inside for Rob, she had only placed her vases here and there, she had only made sure that she cultivated and kept flowers as she thought Rob liked their smell.

  She seemed to remember that he had once remarked upon a flower arrangements aroma when they were much younger.

  That had been enough for her, to cultivate and make sure that when it was possible to have cut flowers, she would, for it was not her thing. Ann was a farmer’s daughter; she knew animal husbandry and agriculture. Ann would grow potatoes, corn, wheat and staples for him to enjoy them, the aroma, the colour but she knew that he liked flowers or at least hoped that he did.

  She loved her garden but was from farming stock and so flowers were a hopeful addition to her real business of arable farming; growing vegetables and fruits and making food available to their table when they were hungry. Ann did that so well, cultivating fruit trees and vegetables whilst making sure Rob had the flowers that he loved.

  Rob provided for them and he did it well giving her a home in this lovely house and they never grew short of food even in times where it was in rare supply and so she, knowing that he liked it, hesitantly, and over time had given parts of her garden over to the growing of flowers.

  Ann thought it a waste of good growing space, a waste of soil and dirt that could feed and nourish more vegetable’s and had once talked to Rob about buying more land around the river that she could farm and gain a return from. She knew that they could afford it even though it would have been difficult but he had refused saying that neither of them would be able to find the time to work the land to the extent where they would have made money from it. Ann thought that what Rob really meant was that a woman could not do it and to make a profit it needed a man’s effort. She loved that land around the river as much as he loved the river. She loved the river valley.

  *

  She hated that dirty brown river with its endless noise, its endless swish and swirl and dirty brown, muddy sides but still she took time out each day to gaze into its depths for she knew that’s what he had loved most. She knew he pretended not to hear her so he could gaze down at the dirty brown river below, watching for, she knew not what, she knew that he was annoyed with her gardening but it was in her blood, she was raised to sift the soil and toil for food and he rarely complained even when they had first met, and less so as they grew older and older.

  She had decided soon after his death that understanding the river that he had loved so much was to be her epitaph to him as she knew that he had loved the river so. In fact, she found herself watching it more now everyday though she was desperate to turn and run her hands through the rich brown, peaty earth that made up her garden, she longed to grow things and draw things from the earth.

  But what was the use.

  There was no one to see the glories of the cut flowers that she once gathered in the morning and put in vases around the house other than her and she knew every colour and hue of each of them, could picture them in her own mind, could recall every aroma and
hue, she had grown them for him, she had no use for them but still placed them every day in his honour.

  She remembered his funeral all to well and that all his old friends, well the ones that were still living, were giving r their condolences and they told her some of the words he had said to them, of her. Words, like “steadfast” and “true”, “beautiful”, “loving” and she thought that she wished that she would have wished for him to have said some of those words to her. Other things that they said of him were; he was a true fisherman, a true fisherman, again and again, he could read the water and tell where the fish were, and steadfast and true was what she now remembered; That he always had been.