Blackthorns of the Forgotten Read online

“No! Leave it!” he yelled as Sully tried to toss the papers into the flames.

  He was determined that Gillean should not feel obligated to him.

  Gillean threw his body on top of Sully’s. They crashed to the floor. Gillean held Sully’s wrist with surprising strength for a drunken man, preventing him from putting the papers in the fire.

  “I won’t let you do it. You still have a chance.”

  “Not this way. ‘Tis not the time!”

  Sully freed his hand from Gillean’ grip. Giving Gillean a shove Sully staggered up from the floor and cast both certificates into the blaze.

  Gillean was behind him, panting like a marathon runner, his hand on Sully’s back.

  “It’s not going to be so easy. Both of us are going to stay right here and face our fates like men. Do you hear me?”

  “Don’t be an idiot, Gillean. Do ya hear me?”

  Sully grabbed the half-full bottle of scotch from the desk, throwing it into the fire. Hunks of glass splintered into pieces, the alcohol slowly sliding down the brick and combusting into orange-blue flames, piercing as Gillean’s eyes on Sully.

  Gillean bent forward taking in more air. Sully’s arms ached to hold the man and tell him how much he loved him, ask for his forgiveness, and a chance for a life with him, the one person who felt like home to Sully. But he didn’t speak any of those words which would have been smooth and sweet like caramel on his tongue. Instead he raised his shoulders and spat out the necessary words.

  “Ya have a wife who has given ya her love, sacrificed for ya time and again. Ya better wake the hell up and put things right with her. If yer so keen on bein’ a man, that’s what ya need to do.” Sully stared at the fire, resolute. “My time with you is done.” His voice softened. “I know what me fate is, and I accept it. Yours is about to change for the better. Please, trust me.”

  “Trust you?” Gillean blinked back the tears. “Sully…” His eyes were the color of dark chocolate as they held Sully’s face in a most tender attitude.

  “God damn you, Sully,” Gillean whispered.

  Gillean was laid bare in his eyes that would not relinquish Sully. Lifetimes of himself and Gillean inhabited the sparks of gold.

  “Do ya see it, Gillean?” Sully breathed in awe of the exquisite feeling of oneness.

  Gillean’s lips answered, not with the kiss of a friend or brother, but of one true lover.

  Sully regretfully backed away. “I…I can’t”

  Gillean stood immobile looking as if a wrecking ball had smashed into the room. “Was I wrong?” his voice cracked. A look of realization crossed his clouded eyes. “You love Adara.”

  Sully’s right hand folded into a tight fist. “Yes, I love her.”

  Sully caught the look of surprise on Gillean’ face just as his fist made contact with the man’s jaw. It only took one hit to put Gillean out. Sully knelt down to place an open palm on the welt rising up on Gillean’s skin.

  “But I love you as no one else. Yer not ready for this. Ya have work to do. Yer place is here. And mine is out there, somewhere else.”

  Before leaving the study, Sully made sure Keelin’s letter and both certificates were nothing but ash, then he affectionately picked up the black leather jacket from the chair behind the desk and walked out into the night. He fondly regarded the spot he had literally run into Gillean's wife only the day before. It was inconceivable that he would never see Gillean or Adara again. What had begun as a journey of such optimism was ending in dashed hopes, taking to the wind, never to materialize.

  Sully looked once more to the majestic Faraday house. Perhaps, given time and Sully’s absence, Gillean and Adara would strive for their true selves. He turned from the house with fleeting trepidation of what would happen to him. He swallowed hard trying not to be afraid of the anomaly of his existence. He was a being with no past, nothing to justify or record his presence on earth, or in the heavens. Yet he was a living, breathing man with limitless potential and unfulfilled desires. He was also a marked man, singled out for an unknown destination because he had reached out in love. Arriving at the bottom of the grand driveway, he walked out into the road. The inky sky smothered the world like a black coverlet, muting all sound.

  Sully almost missed seeing the teenage boy meandering up the road, so thick was the darkness that sucked the air and light from the now moonless sky. With the blithe spirit of youth, the lad swung a small satchel in one hand, whistling as he walked. The boy stopped for a moment and stared. “Da?” he called out.

  Surprised by the greeting, Sully turned around to see who the boy was calling to. No one else was about.

  “Da, you’re home!”

  The boy, oblivious to the car rapidly gaining behind him, ran towards Sully. The vehicle swerved from one side of the road to other.

  “I missed ya, Da!” he persisted.

  Sully rushed towards the boy shouting, “Look out, lad! Behind ya!”

  The boy jerked his head at the sound of Sully’s warning. He tried to get out from the car’s erratic path.

  Sully’s movements were swift. The car came within a hair’s breath of the boy, just as Sully dove forward pushing the young man to the side of the road. He was out of harm’s way when the car made violent impact with Sully’s body.

  Ciar watched in delight as her adversary landed on the hood of her car, his blood spattering the windshield like tiny pellets of red rain from an enraged heaven. Her prized casualty clung to the hood as she continued to drive a few hundred yards, then braked hard. Sully’s body fell in a twisted heap in front of the dimpled fender.

  She quickly exited the car. Her time was short. Gillean’s son would surely be summing help. She could not over-indulge in her victory. The rapture of the moment could ruin her. Ciar knelt down beside him, reveling in his suffering.

  “Hello, dear Sully.” She seized hold of his cold hand.

  Through half-open eyes her face came to him. Tremendous pain shot through his body, like after a beating from his father. A glimmer of his past, a real image of the child he used to be, gradually came to him like a picture developing in a pan. She was the one who tempted his father, and transformed him from a frustrated working class man into a perverse beast. His father gorged himself on all she offered. So full and satisfied was he, when Ciar dictated he should rid himself of his one obligation—his child—her request was a mere pittance for all Sully’s father would receive.

  “So now you know how it ends,” she whispered into his ear. “You are ever the fool, Sully. Did you think I would actually hurt Gillean’s first born? That would leave a bad taste in his mouth to be sure.”

  “Ya can tell me nothin’ true.” He choked on the fluid in his mouth.

  “You are going to die here. You are going to die because no one loves you, no one trusts you enough to save your pathetic life. Certainly not Gillean.”

  The boy sprinted up the road, shouting for assistance. She leaned even closer to Sully, his blood catching in her golden hair. “You were always a worthless, abject, little being. Go on to the nothingness you deserve.”

  Sully summoned every ounce of his waning energy to speak to her. “The…lad, is…okay…”

  His resistance infuriated her.

  Pain splintered throughout his body. “And…I loved, I, loved…”

  Ciar tucked her chin against her chest. Saying nothing to the overwrought boy who was now inches from her and Sully, she retreated back to her car and drove away, leaving in her wake an expulsion of fumes and screeching tires.

  Gillean and Adara, hearing the dreadful sounds slicing through the quiet night, met at the front door of their house and raced into the street. Locating his son by the sound of his tormented cries, Gillean’s feet couldn’t move fast enough.

  “Arlen!” he shouted.

  Gillean and Adara came to the patch of grass where their son knelt next to a broken man.

  “Son, are you alright?” Gillean questioned, as he and his wife embraced the boy.

  A
rlen pulled away, trying to speak although in obvious shock. “I’m okay, but Da, I thought he was you!”

  Gillean looked at the man lying in the road. Blood clotted under his nose and in the corners of his mouth, blue-green bruises swelled his face. Before any glimmer of recognition, Gillean hurriedly turned his head away in revulsion.

  “He saved me. That man saved my life.” Arlen cried.

  “What do you mean?” Adara smoothed her child’s hair.

  “There…there was this sports car, a woman, she must have been drunk, I don’t know. She was driving all over the road. I, I thought I saw dad out walking.” The words came quicker than his breath.

  “Don’t try to explain it now, sweetheart,” Adara interrupted.

  He shook his head vehemently. He was insistent they know what transpired. “The man tried to warn me, shouted at me to get out of the way, but…He knocked me to the grass.” Arlen wiped at his nose, swallowing the tears. “The woman got out to check on him, I think, but then she just drove away. Why would she leave him to die?”

  “Steady now.” Gillean placed a reassuring hand on his son’s arm while fishing for his mobile in the pocket of his trousers. “We’ll need to get an ambulance.” He dialed the three numbers, eyes focused on the boy.

  Adara began to wail in horror. “Oh God, Gillean, it’s Sully!” She placed her head on Sully’s chest. “Please, Sully, please”

  “Best you take Arlen inside now. I’ll stay here to wait for the ambulance.” Gillean tried to pry her away.

  He couldn’t bring himself to look at the willful man who caused him to question every thing: his fears, his marriage, and his life. The man who managed to capture Gillean’s heart, only to abandon him, endear himself to Adara, and save his son.

  Adara raised her head to him, her eyes were the color of lavender fields set aflame. “He didn’t betray you, you know. He would never have done that.”

  Gillean choose to ignore the remark and keep to the task at hand. “Please, take Arlen to the house. I’ll stay with Sully.”

  Keeping her hand on Sully’s chest, Adara turned a deaf ear to Gillean’s request and her son’s insistent questions regarding the state of the man his parents obviously knew. She stayed silent until the sound of distant sirens penetrated the bubble of their shared disbelief. A voice came from her lips, but she was not connected to it. “Come with me, baby. Leave daddy here to deal with this.”

  She did not look down, or say goodbye. She took hold of her son as if he was the only real thing to hang on to.

  “I don’t know how you managed it, but she deeply cares for you, old chap.” Gillean spoke to Sully as if the dead man’s eyes also followed Adara and Arlen, arms encircled round each other, as they walked back to their home. The ambulance was only moments from arriving.

  “She’ll probably find some way to hold me accountable for this.” The sirens almost drowned his words. “Damn it, Sully! Why didn’t you stay?” His voice softened as he reached over to close Sully’s eyes, the once brilliant green windows of an intricate soul. “I would have given you a chance, or if you wanted her…”

  He rubbed the sore corner of his jaw where Sully had struck him in order to make his getaway. The impetuous action had spared his son. Flashing red-blue lights momentarily blinded Gillean. It was in the whirlwind of light and sound that Sully was swept away. As the rescue team approached, there was no body on the ground, no blood stained pavement, nothing to indicate that anything of a brutal nature had taken place. The paramedics found only Gillean kneeling in the grass, his arms gathered around himself, rocking back and fourth.

  Finding no trace of an accident, the men examined Arlen at Gillean’ request. The boy was uninjured. The two medics left the Faraday house sniggering to one another. They knew from years of experience that nights of a full or absent moon brought all the crazies out of the woodwork. This wasn’t the first time a celebrity had lost his senses to a lunar event. The medical men were anxious to share the story with their comrades about the eccentric musician alleging a bloody hit and run accident had taken place outside his spacious grounds. They joked he must be hard up for publicity.

  Epilogue

  For days after the accident, Gillean continued to root through the soot and ash for any scrap of Keelin’s letter, or the certificates. He could find nothing. It was as Keelin had written: Sully had never existed. When Gillean tried to speak to Adara and Arlen about the matter, he received only blank stares. They had no memory of Sully.

  But something surely afflicted Adara. She retreated into a world of silence. She was evening snow—cold, beautiful, drifting, scattered to the wind and night. She fashioned an airtight cocoon made of the hardiest threads, filaments of unresolved anger, disorientation, and a palpable solitude, allowing no one in.

  The mind’s eye is not always privy to what lies deep-seated in the heart. This was where the cord between Adara and Sully remained intact. It coiled inside a quiescent, hidden place. They stumbled upon each other in life, but the impact was lasting. Adara had trusted Sully, oddly enough, from the moment she no longer believed him to be her husband.

  Time had not allowed for Adara to save him, but what lay arrested in her was enough to keep him in the periphery of her heart. They forged a link that could not be erased by time or space, life or death. It waited, as she would for hours, huddled in a window box. Her vacant eyes searched the distance like a soldier’s lover, faithfully waiting for him to come home from battle. She closed and barred a door that Gillean had so freely entered and exited for over twenty years. When she did speak to him, she repeatedly expressed her single wish, like a sacred mantra, to be left alone with her children.

  Gillean was tired of fighting something he could not see, an adversary with no name, form, or face. But somehow he could not escape the idea that each time he looked in the mirror, he beheld the answer. He was the only one to maintain a deliberate memory of Sully. At first he believed he had cracked under the pressure of the recent happenings in his life, and his vivid recollections of time spent with the spirit-man were a figment of a disturbed mind. But Sully’s words wrapped tightly around Gillean’s heart, squeezing with each beat. Sully was an inextricable part of Gillean. Sully’s earthly absence was a constant reminder of Gillean’s failure to recognize the great gift he had been given. He had allowed his fears and ego to overshadow the light. He felt abandoned and rejected. He could find no refuge from what he had been so quick to extinguish. Sully was not the only one to receive a grave sentence for his refusal to heed the warnings.

  Gillean requested his manager arrange an extended European tour as soon as possible. He hoped his music, the hectic pace of life on the road, and the noise of the crowds, would subdue the echoes inside. When he returned, he would speak to Adara about how to share their children in what would be their new and separate lives.

  Driving to the airport, he noticed an unkempt field. Flowers shot up like rebellious children, their colors rich and luxuriant. The heather, spurge laurels, periwinkles, thistle, wild madders, and daffodils, possessed his faculties like a fine wine. He wanted to savor the vision. His driver navigated the car around a particularly complicated bend, bringing into view a haunting sentinel at the far end of the field. It stood alone and resolute. A Blackthorn tree.

  Part 2

  'Twas that friends, the belov'd of my bosom were near

  Who made every scene of enchantment more dear

  And who felt how the best charms of nature improve

  When we see them reflected from looks that we love

  When we see them reflected from looks that we love

  Sweet vale of Avoca! How calm could I rest

  In thy bosom of shade, with the friends I love best

  Where the storms that we feel in this cold world should cease

  And our hearts, like thy waters, be mingled in peace

  And our hearts, like thy waters, be mingled in peace

  Thomas Moore

  The Teach na si`

>   Ireland, 2000

  Edges

  Rain lashed the trembling glass of the window, driven on by a ferocious easterly gale; the first of the spring storms. The first of many that began untold years ago, and would continue long after the last whisper of human breath circled the earth—the restoration cycle of the forty shades of green.

  Adara’s fingers wound around the once steaming cup of tea her husband had brought her. Although the contents had long gone cold she took no notice. The sheets of liquid that streamed down the window appeared like phantoms grasping helplessly for a point of contact, but lacking solidity, slid away, leaving a trail of regretful tears for what they could never be.

  She spoke little, only when necessary, floating further and deeper into her silent world. Gillean, upon returning from a six month tour brought his taciturn wife to the Teach na si`, believing the familiar setting, and all the affable memories of the place, would make the necessary and unpleasant business between them easier to contend with. It made no difference to Adara. She allowed herself to be swept up in the embrace of her doting mother-in-law, suffered the well meaning visitations of family and friends, seeing and hearing them through one end of a lengthy, unlit tunnel. Not even her children could reach the place where she curled up inside herself.

  This was her most treasured time, alone, near a faint source of light. There she could savor the taste of words as they found expression within a safe corner of her mind.

  “Break, break, break, On thy cold gray stones, O Sea! And I would that my tongue could utter the thoughts that arise in me.”

  The words of Tennyson lingered on her tongue with all the sweetness of summer strawberries.

  A fervent hand pulled at her, the persistent presence of someone outside the room disturbing her peace. This was the one and only thing she could defend. She set the cup on the windowsill, unfolded her legs from beneath her, and stepped into the hallway.

  She saw no one, but the presence was unmistakable. An excruciating pain took hold of her—that of the heartache of being in the midst of something exquisite yet devoid of recognizable identity. Whatever was surrounding her was simply beyond her grasp. She turned her head to the sound of water splashing against glass—the shower in the bathroom at the end of the hall. Gillean, yes, it would be him, but the entity she yearned for was not her husband.