The Wake

W.B. Yeats writes his own death. Words in algorithms and sentences like polynomials, he crafts his poem “Under Ben Bulben” into a will. He forgets to mention who gets the mahogany dinner table or the bank account, and writes, rather, of where the ground should break for his final resting place. He writes of how, exactly, he would like his legacy to breathe and stretch and sigh and endure. He tells a reader: Bury me under this mountain Ben Bulben, here in the Drumcliff churchyard in County Sligo, Ireland. Right here. He is, of course, much more poetic.

The day I saw his gravestone, another Thanksgiving years before Normandy, only three colors existed: the green grass (only green, bright green like that color that immediately comes to your mind … that’s it), the gray headstone like a clean chalkboard, and the white clouds. The poet speaks through his epitaph, parting a Red Sea of decades with his words:
Cast a cold eye
On life, on death
Horseman, pass by!

I was 14, and I did not know what this meant. Mom was 40, and she didn’t know either. I visualized the trudge of a workhorse passing farm after farm towards home, carrying a weary rider and an empty red lunch pail. In my interpretation, the poet commanded the rider to carry on, please, don’t mind a dead poet. Yeats’s withered remains had transcended life, into death or into somewhere this drowsy farmer couldn’t feel. Mom, in my old blue windbreaker, nodded her head and said, “Yes, it’s something like that.”

A fuzzy rain started to fall and the rest of the family waded through the clouds into the museum. But Mom and I stood there, staring and reverent, as if at the grave of a hallowed relative. I could scrape a little evidence from this slate of limestone: the poet did not want to be remembered by his name or by his birthday (neither of which appear on his headstone) but only by the echo of his written words. He succeeded. Mom took a picture; I remained motionless before the grave.

Six years later, I learned what Yeats says to that horseman. He doesn’t urge the weary rider to pass by his resting place; he doesn’t even refer to a weary rider at all. He writes, rather, of the Sidhe, supernatural Irish horsemen. In Gaelic, they say it shee like silk. The Sidhe stand tall, swathed in the melted butter and pincushion tomatoes of luxury, and they survive through their own ancient legend. They look human, with the same greasy glow to their skin and the same soft rumble in their hungry stomachs, but they can change shape and provide protection and healing that a human cannot. Here at Ben Bulben, they keep watch over Sligo with each invisible breath.

Yeats wanted his gravestone across the road from this mountain because then, in the river-blue eyes of death, he could see like the Sidhe. Five days after he died in 1939, printing presses sputtered smooth black ink to publish “Under Ben Bulben.” Yeats became one of the lucky few who created and sustained his own legacy.

***
We must leave Normandy now, to continue our trek across France. Once the car crunches over the gravel parking lot and pulls out into the road, we’ll leave this place where we went back to 1944 all by ourselves. We don’t want to leave, but we know we’ll come back next year. Not here, exactly, but somewhere that also sings these ancient and fresh melodies of history. Because this is what we do. We travel to Europe every Thanksgiving because no one else does. We stay in buttercup-colored Austrian castles built in the 900s because no one else does. Smothering blueberries on crepes, we climb a French mountain trail and speak of Salvador Dali because no one else does. We hug our hands around mugs of hot chocolate in a cottage in Ireland, while sheep peer in the window and Dad throws another piece of peat into the fire. We own a Tuscan castle for a week, where we pick green olives. They are not in season, but we are—so we do.

Over Thanksgiving 2001, we drive inland and inland and inland in Ireland until we find an abandoned cave on an abandoned beach. The tide stays out, like it wants to pull its cold water closer to the sun, emerging from the horizon. Maybe if the ocean could stroke this sunlight, just once, it could warm up enough for us to shed our winter jackets and swim. Rocks rise on either side of me, stained like an overripe amethyst, and the beach boxes me in: mountains to my left and right, sand to my back, water before me, sky above me. I’m 16, but I still wonder, if I draw my name in the sand with a stick, if I scratch out a hello, will anyone find it? Will anyone say hello back? I try it anyway.

At lunchtime, we haul brown paper bags of bread, cheese, and apples onto the beach. Peeking into the surrounding caverns, we find one with slabs of rock we can make into tables. With paper plates and a carton of milk, we picnic on the sand. We picnic in what will be, in an hour, the middle of the ocean. When Dad finally pulls out the carton of cookies (we try new kinds at every store, for every lunch), the tide starts to creep back into the cave. A pool of water forms in the crevasse of every footprint we make, so we run out of the cave. Stuffing plastic forks and chocolate bars into the bags, I fear suffocation by saltwater. In minutes, the ocean erases our secret grotto.

***
When we traveled to Europe for the first time, I had not quite completed half of seventh-grade. Dad, while skimming over the airfares on the Internet one midnight, found that Icelandair would fly us to another world for only $100 apiece. What a deal, I suppose he said. When we arrived, I cried because the London estate we rented had dripping gardens and limestone sweating with fog. It had a wooden door chipped and peeling like a sunburn that bore a lion’s head knocker and opened into a foyer of soggy stone. With its brown blankets on the beds and a heater that only came to life a couple hours a day, I hadn’t expected something so old. Through tears I said, “Dad, why can’t we stay where everyone else does? In a hotel?” He just smiled and bounded down the steps, on his way to buy train tickets. Before the heater clicked off, Mom made a bed for me on the couch (Ryan and Britney claimed the twin beds in the next room). “This is how we’ll always see it here,” she said of Europe. “Because this is how Dad knows we should see it. You’ll be glad you see it this way.”

After we returned home, people asked, “Wherever did your dad find a place like that?” He kept finding these cottages and castles, year after year. People began to know this was what we did—celebrate Thanksgiving on another continent. I lost track of how many Thanksgivings we missed and the new food that replaced turkey and pumpkin pie: chicken curry in County Clare, Ireland; Yorkshire pudding in a darkened London carvery, chandelier swinging above the table; bread and strawberry jam in the stone kitchen of our Austrian castle (while playing Uno, against a backdrop of oily paintings that followed us with their eyes, we forgot that the stores there closed in mid-afternoon). We do what everyone else does not do, like sleep in old castles on top of snowy mountains with no one else around. We touch Europe, and somewhat unconsciously shape our own idiosyncrasies, ones that make people stop and say, “You spend Thanksgiving where? Don’t you miss the mashed potatoes?” These travels once rung damp, bizarre even, to a seventh grader; now, they chime, distinctly and forever, ours.

***
Before we leave Normandy, Dad pulls the car to the roadside in St. Mere Eglise, the town just miles from the beaches. Surely someone lives here, despite the shuttered windows and the heavy air. We, however, see no one. Ryan’s finger points to the steeple of the yellow stone church, sharp and nudging the clouds. All the buildings, the brick homes faded with mist and the yellow patisseries, encircle it. Dad says, “I bet the Nazis captured it for a headquarters. It would be a good lookout.” I only envision an American paratrooper, wisped by the wind a few feet too far when he jumped, skewered on the steeple.

Tearing pieces of bread from a loaf and passing around a knife heavy with peanut butter, we sit in the car for a while with the doors opened. Britney flips through a magazine, Dad pulls off his glasses to examine the map, and Mom ruffles through the luggage for a deck of cards. Still no one walks these streets. After ten minutes, we close the doors and exit Normandy. Dad decides to take the back roads, the ones that will take us through the little towns. We take these paths because we can’t see anything from the highways.

They flicker by like a slideshow, the white-shuttered cottages, the towns of twenty people, and the graying remains of snow on cobblestones. Just like that, people appear from the milky tea of haze, reminders that this backdrop we see in our speeding car sets the stage for lives living. Dad turns on the radio because he can understand the French. I can’t, so I just look out the window. I see new people in every town, miles of muddy roads apart.

You become an omniscient god while riding in a car on a sunless November day. You see all the faces, house after house and mountain after mountain, all the while each separate person doesn’t know the person in the next town, or the next block, even exists. Their images now take up space in your head, your neurons recording these people you do not know.

Do you stay in their minds? Do they stay in yours? Somewhere nestled in the folds of pinkish brain?

After miles and miles of watching these people as if they are little clay lives molded by the heat of your hands, you stop. The car swerves or your sister screams, “Look, a creperie!” or you just can’t take it all in anymore. Then you just have to make something of those people you see in your memory.