End or Beginning?

         

         Eleanor stood at the grave side, her best dress, a thing of shreds and patches sprigged with forget-me-nots, silhouetted against the mound of soft loamy earth. What was she to do now? She had sat by her father’s bedside for a month past, ladling spoonfuls of hope and broth in to his weakening body every chance she got, but even the spoonful of sugar was not enough in the end. His breath had become ragged and his voice had croaked out its last blessing to her:

“Be happy, child. I will be with you at every sunrise.”

There were no neighbours here since the clearing. The community that had once been so vibrant was long gone. She had wept silent tears as she prepared his broken body for burial. It had taken three days for her to dig the grave and her hands were blistered and raw.

There was no preacher anymore, so she mimicked the ceremony she had heard  performed over her mother and her sisters many years before.

“God be with you, father, on your final journey. Ashes to ashes. Rust to dust. Rest at peace with our maker.”

She went inside and fortified her sorrow with a dram or two of his whiskey and then went out at the setting sun to raise a glass to her father. The cracked cart-wheel that had caused his injuries slumped against the side of the house cowering in an attitude of guilt. Sudden anger welled from the pit of her stomach until she could no longer contain it. She picked up flints from the ground and hurled them at the wheel, a new flint for each word.

“Aaaargh! Why! You..Useless…Broken!”

Eleanor slumped on the ground, utterly spent, planting the forget-me-nots at her knees in the mud. There would be no rescue. She must pull herself up and move on. A crofters life was hard, but nigh on impossible to manage alone. 

The next morning she bundled the few precious belongings they had owned into a sheepskin, picked up the fire irons and cooking pot, a knife, wooden bowl and spoon, and put them into the fishing boat. She put the half sack of oats and a hunk of cheese into a basket and put the two remaining chickens in a wicker cage. She pushed the boat off from the gravel sound into the deeper water, the cold water biting at her skin, then climbed in wondering what lay ahead.

She kept time with the oars as her father had taught her all those years ago.

“Row, row, row your boat, gently down the stream,” 

As she pulled further away from the shore she watched the contours of the only land she had ever known fold themselves into the mist of memory.