Sydney Lea

More than Fact

I’ve kicked all the way through this unkempt yard to find the stone for my uncle’s housemaid, hidden by tall grass and weeds. At last I’ve found it. 

I can’t, though, find a counterpart to that touchy uncle’s bachelor for Mary Griffin. Spinster? I’d choke on that one, though she surely knew worse injustice in Belfast, Catholic girl in her mostly Protestant nation.

I hadn’t planned to start these reflections by censuring the inequities that left her harassed, unpraised, and in the end forgotten. I only meant to discover this modest marker. After all, the abuse she encountered, followed by virtual disappearance, is all too sadly common. As Shelly has famously reminded us in “Ozymandias,” even memories and relics of the great and empowered crumble with astonishing speed.

I’ve never come to this cemetery before, I’m ashamed to say. I’ve been that ungrateful. And, truth be told, I visit now as much to fetch back scenes that comforted me as I do to pay homage. I’m a blessed man by almost any standard, but, over the sixty and some years that Mary’s been gone, like all of us I’ve seen my share of death and grief. So it still soothes me that I can picture her, say, as she rocks in a chair, having tended to her volatile boss’s end-of-day demands. And to mine.

I catch the faintest hum as she embroiders things she’ll send to relatives in Ireland, children she’s never seen and won’t. I’m astonished to recall how such gentle magnanimity could actually make me jealous. It was only that, come the weekend, I didn’t want to share any part of her sustaining warmth, which was too often lacking at home. That’s a fact, though I’m well past blaming anyone, including myself, for those circumstances.

I’d later also understand Mary’s goodness in keeping me ignorant of how those rabid neighbors bullied her childhood. At least they did so by my best guess. I have no other recourse than assumption: she never allowed herself to reminisce out loud about any personal trials, and when I complained about what I construed as my own, she indulged me, consoled me. 

I hope that a boy’s callow self-pity was less than sinful.

Another instance: I can all but hear the machine that separated the cow’s milk from the sweet cream I’ll sample after its rattling quits and after I’ve finished the supper she’ll make for us two.

Then off to sleep. As darkness nears, I summon the bedtime songs she sang to me in Gaelic, whose meanings were obscure, or so I thought—like the bits of prayer and chant that steal from the church over there, where she knelt at five each morning while I lay snug beneath my eiderdown.

Like the more important meanings of those old songs, I choose to believe that those muffled sounds I hear as I pause in the graveyard offer a greater truth for being hazy, for containing more than fact.

I want to believe they imply a notion, imprecise but lively, that I still cling to, however naïvely: that beside the world of grief and bigotry that’s so overwhelmingly familiar, there may be another where selfless love can thrive.

A former Pulitzer finalist in poetry, Sydney Lea served as founding editor of New England Review and was Vermont’s Poet Laureate from 2011 to 2015.  In 2021, he was presented with his home state’s highest distinction of its kind, The Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts. He has published twenty-four books: two novels, six volumes of personal and three of critical essays, and sixteen poetry collections, most recently What Shines (Four Way Books, NYC, 2023). His latest book of personal essays, Such Dancing as We Can, is now available from The Humble Essayist Press, and his second novel, Now Look, has just been published by Downeast Books.