BackwaterBlog

I’m a famous watcher of Braveheart, because it feeds something in me and exerts dark things, at times.  It was on the tube again tonight and Ally and I sat, once more, to soak in it and ponder.  Seeing the green and gray hills.

It is the face so much like that of the daughter who has recently left here, and gone on to the man, and that should be a good thing. But there is a shining there, in that picture, when William Wallace tells her “I love ye, I always have”, and presses the flower into her hand that he’s saved since he was a lad, the one she gave him at the grave of his father.

I’ve never seen that shining of Maggie, and it sticks to me. I watched that glow from Murron and the scene faded, and Ally coughed. I found a lump in my throat and snatched an empty beer from the side table, took it to the kitchen. I moved to the fridge to grab another but found myself with hand to face, and a wetness to the eyes because I heard Maggie from somewhere.  And wondered, would she ever have that, really have that and how it should be and it was a just and right thing to have, that shining.

So I stood in the kitchen and talked with the Maggie who wasn’t there and wished for her a future with a wonder, and a fire from deep.  Something to light her eyes and sweep ’round a gray hill in a shining, to the end of days.

~~~~~

Since a long while ago I’ve had this  . . . what to call.  Dream? perhaps, or walking imprint, and it comes to me at times.  Since I was very young.  And since I’ve grown.  Happens with the sort of startled nowness that wakes me in the night, or flashes without any cause in the middle  of the day.

I’m staring down the barrel of a long gun, a cheek to the warmth of walnut and a hand light on the cool of steel.  There is a gentle slope underneath me, a grassland, and it is a strange thing because there is no cover or concealment.  Not a tree, or a hedgerow or wall.  It is a foolhardy thing to be aiming a long gun out in the open.

But it’s there, a picture in my mind that comes back again and again.  For years it has come to me.  The few other such pictures I’ve ever had have already come to pass.  The woman, the small place in the woods, they were equally clear.  The children, not so much so, but how can you imagine such things, really.  Maybe Ally saw them at times, in her own mind.

But the rifle thing.  It is a dream of a cold rage, the always with a hint that this is the last day.  That the aiming is a righteous one.  That an enemy draws nigh, one who will seek out that place and those close.

I get right up to the point of that soft sigh, the proper breath that purges as I draw the trigger back, soft as a flicker.  Unseen the target, unknown.  The finger, the sensation of the dream, it is so real I feel the micro-striations on the metal edge of the trigger and feel the sweat from my cheek on the wood.

But I never hear the shot.

I’ve awoke in this rage, and I’ve known a different plane, seen different things.  I don’t know what it means, or why it has persisited since I was small.

But I watch this Braveheart movie, and there is this sense in there of things close to this.  The old warrior, speaking to the red haired son.

“I’ve lived long enough to have lived free. And see you grow to become the man you are. I’m a happy man.” And he drew his last, and just . . . . Died.  Lacerated, and made still.

To live to that day, whatever that day and dream might bring, and to say that to my son.

It is the thing beyond the picture that I’m not seeing just yet.  That I have lived free, with the woman of a dream, and stopped rage and told daughters and sons that I love them, and are proud of their day.

Without regret.  Not ever once.

What madness we live with, some summer days.  Murron, and warriors.  And daughters in kitchens, far away.