Charity by Keath Fraser

Author:Keath Fraser
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Biblioasis
Published: 2020-12-17T00:00:00+00:00

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downhill, a workout for my thighs from holding back on the forest path. Across Marine Drive and around logs to low tide, stones sloping slickly into kelp, then plodding onward through mud to these rumpled salt flats stretching seaward a mile.

A trapped channel of saltwater, its wind-driven wrinkles lapping at the silos of my gumboots. A shock of cold in the left one before, squelching, I reach a sandbar. This association of a dry sock and a wet sock, otherwise identical, making me receptive to how memory can double-dip, how it can trick you into thinking the serpent has slipped out of a second cuff before you realize, as I would this morning, that you’ve seen it do so only once. Every memory you suppose being a magic trick, its construction a reconstruction of what has been, for the most part, lost in time. Like this chronic poppy, the same one pinned to the lapel of my peacoat, a duplicate for decades. I should be ashamed.

Tide pools shot by crabs no bigger than shrapnel. In my face, the November breeze, and as part of its molecular brininess, Rudy Redux, his ashes leaching deeper into the sand, and floating up from clam holes where they’ve drained since his reported dispersal. Herring gulls. A clamshell. Across the blue bay, lying in mist like an etherized patient, the island and our exiled daughter until recently resident in its bosky retreat. Getting cleaner by the week, we earnestly hoped, hungrier too. Physician, heal thyself—unfortunately, not an option for Greta without help from the island’s good people, caring people. A small white ferry tracking its coastline, headed to the gulf.

O bring back, bring back . . .

The breeze, yes. Rudy had lived by recycling hot air—returning it cooler, fresher—and died lying in some dusty back street of a searing country. Must have wondered why his sacrifice for “Grit’s” sake had come down in his final moment of exile to nothing more than madness, treachery. Or did he envision, in a second of stopped time, being borne back to a happy little kingdom of collectible cars and charitable acts on currents of air and ocean? His briefest memory of being murdered had to be his most vivid, bursting into death with an awareness that escaped him bursting from the womb. Ninety years recirculating in a single round to the temple.

A wet sensation extending upwards through my hips. Recollection of his trauma bearing me back to the time of my vulnerable self. His ashes making me think of the woman I, too, like our daughter, had wanted to become. “Self-love,” encouraged the therapist, “is recoverable.” We were interviewing her at The Orchard pending Greta’s admission. My own story, not just our daughter’s, part of the case to be made in accounting for Rudy’s exile.

My mother had been furious when she noticed my bedspread the next morning. It was not thought so much a crime when I was a child, or even talked about when it happened around

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