in my fathers eyes

The Burning is a time in the Valley, when the skies turn grey and fog rolls in from the sea. Time is not marked there like it is here. There is no need, for when the tree’s change from green to fire and the wind blows cold over a fading sun, everyone in the Village changes.

Their minds become clouded. They rarely speak to one another and when they do it is of things or people long past. They speak of time in a dissimilar fashion, like people rummaging through remnants and dusty things found in the attic of their minds.

The burning takes control of them, leading most to do things they would never do any other time of the year. This leads me to the story I am about to tell:

It had been 3 years for my father in the Valley. He was born there, just like everyone else, he apprenticed as a carpenter in his youth, and journeymened his way through the mill. He married young; too young some would say and sired a large family.

My father was a hard man, the joys of his life strangled by the responsibility of fatherhood, matrimony and duty. My father and I are more alike than either of us wishes to witness and yet we were the most bitter of enemies.

He lost a son, for which I was a pale replacement. He lost his dreams, no one can blame him, it was a different time in the valley then. He lost his youth, which always drives men like pack mules early into ageing.

He had such talent for storytelling. He could draw, paint and in the earliest of memories I have of him, could sing with unparalleled wonder, remnants of a life that could have been.

With nine children and a spoiled wife, he was lost to the regimented style of the hunter gatherer. Providing for the seed that he had sewn and prospering in body.

This man never had enough. Money was short with all the mouths to feed and bodies to clothe. Education, with each new child became an exhausting expense. Each child wore what the other outgrew and many times our breakfast milk was coffee creamer dissolved in hot water with scraps of bread to hold it down.

He was a strong man. His siblings were out playing well into their middle age as he toiled under the yoke he himself fashioned in the likeness of conscientiousness. He never stopped, never rested. He toiled indefatigably in his quest to provide for and nourish the family he had created. The weight was crippling.

His spirit fell first to the rigors of his life. His soul lying in the husk of his frame rotting, decaying, a dusty thing in the darkness of his life. He was an irascible man. His temper short and insupportable of delay or fallibility, when his orders were not met to his satisfaction, would beet me without mercy. I took this to be jealousy for my disinclination towards profitable labor.

When I left the valley he and I swore it would be the last time I would look upon his face, or be welcomed in any way as a member of his family. It would be the end of our relationship in all ways, save for the bloodline we are bound to share.

He succumbed to the Cough, the one that comes with the use of pipe, twenty years after I left the valley. I would call to talk to him, to try and mend the broken ties, trying hard to find myself in his presence, to show him that I had succeeded in his dreams, that I had become all that he wished to become. That in my way I had tried to revive his soul in payment for its sacrifice to my well being, all on deaf ears.

I knew what he was doing. I knew the thing that terrified him the most and he would not flagon. The harder I tried to show him my light, the more it hurt his eyes. Never would he praise me. Never would he accept me, never would he call me son or say the words I longed so hard to hear from him. Never would he say he loved me

The procession took us above the fog on the western slopes of the valley. From there I lay a tired, bitter old man to his final rest, in the setting sun of Latter Year. His burden now laid down, his life finally over, he went to his grave a beaten, defeated husk of flesh.

I stood in the light of the setting sun, staring into the orange globe straining with every sense trying to hear the words I longed for him to say in the wind, in the tree’s anywhere. It was not to be.

I came down from the plot as night began to fall, my siblings were long gone, having ravaged his possessions and scattering like vermin into the night. I wanted only one thing from the man and that time had come and gone.

My mother had locked the house to me, but a single box sat on the stoop, my name written on it. I picked it up and left the valley, probably for the last time in my life, the box setting on the seat of my car the entire drive home.

Once there I sat with a bottle of spirits and my own tobacco staring at it. Wondering how small my box of life would be when my time came to a close. Slowly, I opened the box to find it filled with paper.

Writings, sketches, paper clipping of my meager victories. Remnants and dusty things, private corners of his mind preserved for decades to be given to me upon his death. The victory he held inside himself for all his years of servitude to a family that did not seem to care.

Everything he had ever done creatively now lay before me, with scraps of my own news worthy triumphs beside them.

Here in the dim light of my home, in the darkest hour my own personal Burning, I heard the words I needed to hear from my father in heap of paper. My inheritance, my unfulfilled dream come true, and no matter how hard I tried to fend them off the tears of many long shorn decades flowed hard and heavy.

My heart broke and mended filled and emptied as the realization of a lifetime came to an unmistakable close. All the things he would not say, he saved for the time I would need them most.

This year, I will observe Resurrection, for the first time in a very long time. This year I will transcribe my father’s notes and idea’s into the creations he wished them to be. This year I will be free from the Burning, a complete, intact human being.

I tried hard to put into prose this story; however it is far too personal for me to flourish.

He suffered enphazima to his last day. He never retied, never quit, much like Atlas and his task; my father drove himself headlong into the ground, to his final rest.

I wish I had profound things to say of him. I wish I could recount his noble deeds.

My father was a poor man, he died a pauper’s death. And only once in his life did he ever tell me he loved me, and he had to die for me to hear it.