The Burial Read Free

watched as Mrs Peel disappeared and returned again, her arms full of candles and lanterns. She set them all around Aoife’s feet, exclaiming, None of God’s creatures shall be born in the dark! She went about lighting them like a zealot.
    Aoife had begun writhing and screaming, Get it out! Get it out! And as she writhed a wave of water spilt out of the tub and collected the candles and the lanterns and put them all out.
    Mrs Peel tried to hold down Aoife’s legs but they were splitting around her like scissors in the dark. Aoife did not want the child inside of her and she did not want it out. Septimus clutched his heart and cast his eyes skyward. He saw Centaurus there, marking his bow, and the Southern Cross sparkling like some talisman around an upturned neck. He thought at least the beauty of it augured well.
    In no time, as this was Aoife’s fourth, Septimus heard a trembling wail.
    He jumped up, ran to his furnace, thought to put the fire out, changed his mind, caught his shirt on the tin of the door, freed himself, then sprinted across the lawn. He took the child in his arms and Mrs Peel cut the umbilical cord and then they wrapped my mother in a cloth.
    A daughter , said Septimus, leaning down to Aoife to show her.
    You take care of her , said Aoife . I just want to sleep.
    Mrs Peel helped Aoife inside and Septimus stepped out onto the lawn, my mother curled against his chest. He kissed her damp head and held her above him. She cried and then her little face, still crinkled by the passage of birth, opened up. Septimus saw it as he felt it then: Centaurus drawing his bow among other constellations and firing an arrow straight into his heart. He held my mother and he knew he could never, in all the world, love another trembling creature so much.
    Years later, when my mother asked him what stars he saw on the morning of her birth, he could not describe them. He would only say, Darling, there were constellations wrapped in the visible sky and the sky below the horizon, and they were all spinning by some force and design. There was a carnival, a parade, on the day you were born and it was spinning around the poles of the universe.
    And although Septimus did know what he saw in the visible sky (an archer, a bow sent forth), with his own passage through life he had begun to believe more that there was no design in it at all—that the stars themselves were just nebulae visible but indistinct to each other, silhouettes shifting against other luminous matter.
    But he did not want to tell that to his daughter.

WITH HER GAZE fixed on the mountains, my mother rode all day. Her eyes grew hot and her neck felt too weak to hold her head. Yellow grass streamed endlessly beneath her and she did all she could not to slip sideways into it.
    She was losing blood. It soaked into her trousers and the thick skin of her saddle. On the brink of passing out, she lay against the neck of her horse. He was a dam of hot and cold and the feeling was not like riding, it was like sinking and sinking was her fear. She fixed her back like a steel beam and faced the distance.
    There was so much distance.
    The mountains seemed further away now than ever and as she tried to focus on the sharp edges of the cliffs where they cut into the sky, they shifted like an unsteady backdrop, one way then another. The sun was full and bleaching and nothing was solid.
    She rode on.
    She held herself upright for as long as she could. But even her determination was not enough. Soon she fell against her horse’s back and dropped the reins completely.
    Houdini, a stallion, a Waler, moved easily from a gallop to a long-striding walk, and the weight of my mother across his back was enough to balance her. He turned east towards the thin arc of river and did not falter from his even step until he reached its bank. Then he shook her from his back and she fell onto the sand.
    Hitting the sand she came to. She did not know where she was. She could see