kentucky rain
Immortal sorrow
Not so long ago, as I walked along a mountain lake, I came across a curious cabin. It was very old and overgrown. Liken covered the roof and trees had begun to spring up around it as if clutching and pulling it into the forest. Vines tangled across the rafters of the porch, a natural spider web of leaves and flowers.
I stood enthralled by it for a moment and soon a childlike curiosity overtook me as I walked up three stone steps to the front door. I stood in wonder before the entry. The door was plain streaked in black and grey patina as if an artist’s hand streaked across it with a wide brush stroke. Carved into it were simply two letters A and E, gouged rough and childlike.
My hand trembled as I reached for the knob and with the slightest turn the door opened creaking, groaning as if to add to the age of this little shack on the shores of a my mountain lake.
I stepped inside and found myself dumbfounded for inside this little hovel was a great expanse, that of a cathedral. Rainbows of light danced in the open hall illuminating the darkness in bands of brilliant reds, yellows and greens.
I walked further in to find, as far back as I could go, an altar. On the altar was a great golden throne laced by yellow roses and covered in a thick dust. The light that broke the darkness seemed to focus on the throne and reflected out from it.
Just in front of the throne sat a man. What was left of him anyway. He was spindly and broken, his head bald and he wore a beard on his chin, white and long enough to touch the floor. He sat weeping softly, his face twisted in the most horrifying of agony.
“Who is there?” his voice cracked like ancient floorboards.
“I am just a passerby. I don’t want any trouble.” I tried to reassure him.
“I saw the cabin and thought it was deserted.”
Slowly his mangled flesh turned in my direction and I saw that he had no eyes, plucked out long ago and his left leg had been amputated just below the knee. He was a pitiful thing to look at. He was dirty and covered in dust. Bent nearly to the breaking point, he looked as though one strong gust of wind would turn him to ash.
“Do you need help? Water or food?” I asked.
“I need nothing you can offer.” He sighed.
“How did you come to this condition?” I inquired.
“That is a long tale.” He replied.
He told me a story of how in his youth he skipped along indulging in everything he could. Childishly burning through youth and time as if he would never die, how he plotted and schemed his way to every victory his inner gluttony could ever ask for.
How the world was indeed his oyster and he pillaged his way though it until he could Have no more. He reveled in all the petty things and selfish dreams a man could have until one day…
His demeanor changed at that point. He seemed bolstered by the chapter yet to come. It was as though the thought of it fed him, made him stronger.
He met a woman in a land far away. She was a most compelling creature. In the sun her hair flowed golden down her shoulders, rivers of honey cascading and tossed in the summer breeze. Her eyes as grey as summer storms, filled with a fire that could burn your soul and yet soft and welcoming begging you to look into them until you were lost in time.
She took from him the life he had before her and together they made a new life, his only life. He forgot all that he had done before. There was nothing of him from the time before her. She made him a clean slate.
As time passed he began to realize he was not good enough for the young lady and she knew it as well. She would leave him from time to time enjoying the fruits of other men who fell to her spell and when she would tire of them, she would return to rest, regroup and start again.
This went on for many years and when she would leave, he would pick up the pieces and try to rebuild, try to find peace in the pain of loving this girl. But he loved her and could never let go completely. So every time she would come back he would take her in dust her off and nurse her back to health asking only that she would no longer seek the company of men.
Decades passed and nothing changed. His tolerance turned to anger and anger to indifference until the day that she died. He stood in the room looking at the body of his love, pale and hollow; her eyes once so filled with the fury of lust now skewed and muted twisted things looking without seeing.
Her broken body lay on a slab of cold steel, a useless lump of meat that once was the greatest beauty of mankind. He covered her in blankets to keep her warm, she hated to be cold. From her finger he took the wedding ring. He kissed her on her forehead as he had done so many times before and with a reluctant last look he walked away.
As he finished his tale I could see him shrink, back into his frailty that I had found him in. Back to the piteous thing that sat before the golden throne.
“They took her eyes.” He said his voice cracking.
“Somewhere in the world, there is someone seeing the world through her eyes. Eyes that I will never see again.”
“Was this a church? Was it where you got married?”
“This is the home I built for her. It was a glorious place and I would set here at the foot of her throne, worshiping her, loving her, being her oldest and most loyal fool.”
“And your eyes?”
“I begged for god to give her mine so that she could be complete. He took my leg to give to her. He took my guts, my heart, everything she would need to spend eternity whole and happy.”
“Why do you stay if she is gone?”
He turned his face to mine; the black sockets seemed to look straight through me. I could almost taste the solitude and misery that boiled in them.
“Everyone I have ever known has left. Everyone I have ever known has died. I am the last of my people, my family and the last of my world. Where am I to go? What am I to do? Who am I to be?
“I am where it all began. Setting at the feet of my beloved wife felling the tears of an immortal sorrow until the last of my flesh has melted away and world has turn this temple to sand and I am in this worlds memory, no more. No more.”
I could feel the joy in his torment. The nourishment it gave this poor creature to continue his lament for another day. It was a terrible truth that he should prefer to suffer in this place, rather than try one last time to flourish without her. His time was done, his purpose was over and his place in the great stage was set.
Any comfort offered would only bring him pain. Any succor would prove to be bitter dregs. His only joy, his only happiness spoils of memories would be the pain that joy brings.
So I left the man in his dying palace of wood and vine. I went on my way along the path of the mountain lake. My mind was bent on him, how he fell so low at the loss of love. I wondered that in my life I thought myself lost several times when the bloom fell off the rose and yet never to the extent of that pitiful thing I had left behind.
And as I lay down beside my beautiful wife, cozy in our bed. As I smelled the scent of her hair and felt the softness of her skin I began in my mind to build a cabin of our own, on the shores of that lake, knowing full well in the passage of time that our house would stand the test of time. Until I heard in the back of my mind, the simple sobbing of an old broken man…