April 15th 2008
This is my story for April 12th, 13th, 14th, and 15th -as it’s taken me four days to write and rough-edit thist…the word program crashing repeatedly didn’t help either!
It’s another brand new story, and no doubt in need of more editing, but part of this blog-a-day is the inner editor pushing me to get it out there rather than shoving it into a drawer.
Intro:
“The concept of the mythological animal in the form of a horse known in Scotland as the ‘kelpie’ or each-uisge, in Wales as ceffyl y dwr, is common to all the Celtic countries… He is identical with the kelpie of Scottish tradition and the phoocah (puca) of the Irish”
Folklore of Wales by Anne Ross, 2001, Tempus Publishing House
Looking at my guide to Welsh pronunciation I’ll hazard a guess that the ceffyl y dwr is pronounced kef-UL-ih- doo-ER… for f is v as in dove, a double ff means a ‘real’ f sound… I enjoy hearing Welsh and seeing Welsh, but I’m having a difficult time jamming the two separate components together. What does seem to fit for me is being inspired by Welsh myth and fairytale to come up with a new story about the old Water Horse.
…And All the Way Back Again…A Water Horse Tale
By Sarah Haxby
Part One
Having been away from my small home town for a year I was already in a strangely nostalgic frame of mind as I wandered up the road, narrow by Canadian standards, but not in terms of Welsh standards. I realized that I was viewing the place as a tourist might, or a less than prodigal daughter, having achieved little academically during a year abroad, but feeling much more accomplished and worldly, my horizons having been broadened, if not my intellect-expanded; at least not by the school. I believe the country itself had effected me in some un-measurable fashion. They say that Wales can get into your blood, and as some of my ancestors had been Welsh, perhaps that old blood had just been stirred.
At first I had been so homesick when I had left Canada I had only wanted to come home, but now, after leaving Wales to come home I had wanted just a little more time, to myself if I couldn’t stay in Wales, and so I had landed on the far-side of the Canada and spent a week taking the time to see my country, from sea to sea, for the first time. Now that I was home, surrounded by the familiar semi-rural wilderness, I missed my connection to the old folded Cambrian stones of Wales, the hills and the thicket hedgerows that had been sculpted and walked upon for so many centuries, every inch touched by human hands. Wales was so very different from the wild beauty of Canada.
The untended park on my left, which was really a stand of wild trees growing in a swamp, contrasted the houses hidden behind high fences and tall homogenous shrubbery on my right, which were all looking much the same as when I had left a year before. Looking up at the large-leafed maple trees just beginning to turn brown in the premature cold drizzle of rain, instead of seeing hoped-for-yellow that had tipped the leaves the day before on my arrival I reminded myself that a year before the leaves had been about to change colour when I had been packing to leave. Now that I was unpacking to stay I was as nervous about what I was to do now that I was back, and that perhaps I should laugh at myself because I am now more nervous about what I might accomplish by staying here at home as I had been about my original reasons for going.
Was I the same, or different? The black asphalt crumble that turned into compacted dirt shoulder was the same as ever. Cars drove past, the cars of home: larger than the cars abroad, producing just as much exhaust, and driving well-over the speed limit with as much abandon as in Wales, only there are no sheep to dodge in my hometown, only deer, and though less frequently on the road, the results are usually more dramatic… I sighed and thought of the lovely long walks that could be had in Wales climbing over stiles and fences marked with symbols that allowed ramblers passage. Walking carefully over the grates in the roads, carefully pushing through overgrown hedgerows, though there were few of those. The Welsh really know how to keep a good hedge row.
At the top of the road, before it turned sharply into a corner to run up the seven hills, the church parking lot was full of cars. Preparations for the funeral of Jimmy McTrael were in progress. All the old-timers in the community had turned up to say goodbye to Jimmy and to support his father, Dan, who was taking the loss of his seventeen year old son as hard as a body can imagine. Dan and Jimmy had been father and son, best friends and an ‘odd couple’ living together as bachelor kin since Jimmy’s mother ran off with that suit for a life in a glass and concrete tower in the city. Word had come back to the town how she liked her new concrete and marble-skinned foyer with the security cameras, the elevator up to the twenty-second floor and all the sense that she was more where she deserved to be than ever Dan McTrael could give her with his small house set in the woods, with the toilet that sometimes fussed up –delicate septic systems were common in town- and an electric heater that once started up with a dead mouse in it, as that’s where the neighbour’s cat had left its gift. The cat was only asking if it could move in with them, Dan knew that, but his wife didn’t think it was funny. Nothing was funny our small town, so she left; the cat moved in, and Dan and Jimmy learned the ways of being a family of two. They never said anything bad about Jimmy’s mother; they didn’t say much about her at all. The rest of the townsfolk had probably used up all the words.
I’d only arrived the night before, so I was excused from attending the funeral, but now, as I walked towards the church, I wondered if I was going to be going in or not. I didn’t want to shift the event towards being about me coming home, because everyone would want to welcome me home and ask me how I was, and I didn’t want to become the centre of attention at Jimmy’s funereal, but nor did I want to be disrespectful by staying away. I’d never really been friends with Jimmy. He never said much unless you knew how to take apart a chainsaw with him, or some-such guy-domain thing. But I knew Jimmy, had gone to school with him, though he was several years younger than me. He was part of the community. He was part of the town, and that made him part of me. I might not have much faith in the church, but if I ever lose the knowing of the importance of community, then I will be lost. Maybe that’s why I’m so unsettled today. I’ve been root-bound, wrapped in burlap, afraid I might root in the new place, feeling my hometown roots nibble away at, in the being away for a year; not knowing if I should root in Wales or not. Maybe I am just suffering some sort of transplant-shock. Like plants odd, and that explained why I felt all wilted. They say it’s a good thing, to travel, and I suppose it is. But I’m still not certain it’s made me a better person than I would have been had I stayed at home…what have I gained? Perspective? The ability to look at the unfamiliar and to navigate through the unknown, and then to look back on the familiar and find it overlaid with a strangeness? To come home and not know if I should go to a funereal, whereas if I’d stayed I would know my place, and be at home getting ready, instead of wandering over in the early grey drizzle to moon about in wonderment and indecision.
Poor Jimmy, he’ll never have a chance to go abroad now. His life is too-soon over, and though I’ve heard some of the rumours as to how it happened, the why will remain a mystery. I look at my wrist watch, and figure I still have an hour to decide.
The new wing on the church looks strange to me: dreamlike, as though I was imagining it, because it was the only new thing I had seen since arriving home. The new part of the building had been constructed during the year I was gone, to accommodate community events. The original church, where the services were held was old and small, the new wing was like an tacked-on extra arm, running at a right angle from the top of the church, larger by twice than the actual church, this new addition had so many windows, the top half of the walls being all window. I’d be able to see right through it when the curtains were open. Only a little bit of curtain was open, and I could see people placing chairs, carrying white flowers, trays of food, boxes, ribbons, signs, boards that probably had collages of photos of Jimmy’s life stuck all over them. The light inside looked too bright, and too yellow in contrast to the greyness of the day. Fog lingered at the tops of trees and cottoned the church’s modest bell tower. Attenuated hanks of cloud drifted on the ground, damply settling in the grass, uncertain whether to rise or fall; unnameable as being somewhere between fallen cloud and lingering fog.
I looked at the shoes I was wearing, they were sensible enough, waterproof walking shoes I had purchased at one of the many 70% off ‘going out of business again’ sales in the UK. These shoes had now walked in two countries. Back in the old world of Wales, on the slate sidewalks where a paving stone really is a large slab of stone, and now here, where sidewalks are reconstituted poured concrete if you’re in the city, but are more likely to be a mix of gravel and mud, or just a path through the grass around these parts. I turn to the left and wander away from the asphault -perhaps I should say tarmac- road to the narrow gravel trail that led through the old apple orchard trees to the small farm behind the church. Once it had been a real farm, but these days, after generations of division and the city growing closer to the town, it had been whittled down to a hobby farm, and a subdivision of land with a bit left-over for a horse paddock. There isn’t even a real barn, just a shelter and a couple of fenced in green areas for a few rich-girls’ ponies to hang out with some llamas that a local artist owned. Standing in the centre of the field was Jimmy’s killer.
A tall, beautiful blue-grey roan horse without a name who had turned up in the field, uninvited, a few weeks before, dripping of water and seaweed as though he’d been swimming in the ocean and then followed the river upstream until the stream turned into more of a trickle that ran behind the church lands. Someone had put the horse in the paddock, not knowing what else to do with him. There were no other horses nearby, all the old farms had been converted into animal-less developments except for a few chickens which the new residents always complained about. No one had any idea who the horse belonged to, and the ocean was a good distance away. The river was just a small stream running through a corner of the paddock, and it was a mile or two before it turned into the river that met the sea. People had made their guesses, but neither the Good Samaritan who had presumably led the lost horse into the paddock, or the owner, came forward to tell their part of the story. The owners of the ponies fretted over the extra expense of the roan, but the locals snorted with derision at their cheapness, and the locals raised some funds from amongst the most generous, which were usually those with the smallest annual incomes, to feed the horse. The mystery horse didn’t seem to need food. He wouldn’t let anyone near him, but he wouldn’t leave, either. And then Jimmy had gotten into the plot the wrong-way.
Jimmy’s house was an old cabin up in the woods behind the horse fields. He told his Dad he wanted to ride the horse. His father said it wasn’t a good idea until they knew who the horse belonged to. Jimmy said he’d wait, but the longing grew inside him. Jimmy drove his small truck past the field every day, he told all his friends what he had told his Dad, and mostly they repeated the wisdom of what his father had said, except for the few who had said that they too wished they could ride the horse. One day Jimmy must have decided to ride the horse, for one of the little girls who was looking after her pony in the far field said she saw the horse and Jimmy fly straight up into the air, above the tree-tops, and then Jimmy had fallen and she had run to get her mummy. The horse, presumably, had come back down to earth of its own accord. When Jimmy had fallen, he had broken his back and died, according to the doctor’s, quite instantly, possibly before he had even hit the ground as he had been thrown so violently.
It was a shame, people were saying, that the horse that killed Jimmy was still standing in the field behind the church, but that’s just the way of how things were.
