Under Our Skin by Jethro Soutar

Author:Jethro Soutar
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The Unnamed Press

A dirt track leads up to the church behind the village on the hill. The building is painted white with blue borders at the base and around the windows, just like the houses. Four of the windows are long, vertical, and shuttered. A smaller window above the main door takes the form of a cross. The belfry is only a little taller than the building itself. Its door, like the main door, is locked. The three-foot weeds outside suggest the bell hasn’t tolled for some time.

The cemetery lies behind an adjoining white wall with an iron gate, padlocked and chained. I peek through the rails in the gate and see not a single laid flower. The dead here are doubly forsaken, denied even the noise of the shovel and the cadence of prayer. It looks like a pretend cemetery. Paradoxically, the place is full of life, home to numerous birds, rabbits, mice, and frogs.

I had hoped to find names that harked back to the slave era, but I’m blocked by an iron gate. Never mind the color of their skin, the dead here have been definitively forgotten, abandoned to rest in the peace of a secret garden. A family of birds comes chirping out from a row of cedar trees, and the air is pungent with the smell of wildflowers and figs. I feel a surge of happiness at being alive, the sort of physical joy that proximity to nature brings, and the view—over the village and across the river, the sun shining, cattle grazing in the fields—more than compensates for any frustration I might feel at not being able to poke around among the tombstones.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.