He wakes in the landscape of his childhood, the karst. The house is surrounded by stone that dissolves in water, limestone that becomes fissured and hazardous because of its own weakness. The clints are the parts left standing. Grykes are the absences between. It is in the grykes you find life: hart’s tongue fern, butterfly orchid, primrose. Sheltering in the sinkholes.
This is a place of constant change. Changing stone. Changing light. As a child, he would go out at morning and all around him the light would be shifting, glowing, shaking, darkening. In the hedgerows, he’d find blackberries that he ate green and sour in case someone else got them before they ripened. Ma would be home in the kitchen, peeling potatoes. No need to ask where’s Ma.
After her stroke, he and his sisters had decided to keep her in familiar surroundings, this house overlooking a turlough that fills with rain in winter. They would do that for her, after all she had done for them, after all she did for their father while he was on his way out. Sacrifices easily accepted because willingly made. Each of her children takes four days a month: that makes twenty days. They hire a nurse for the rest. So he is here, blinking in the morning sun, listening to the bright call of the curlews, in the Burren, County Clare, among the endless gray hills of weather-scored limestone.
He has woken because she has woken. They are sharing a bed. His mother, who was never one for kisses and cuddles, often asks him to get under the covers with her now. A body against the cold. It has been a year, coming home, four days at a time, reading to her from books she half remembers, cleaning loose water from her eyes with a handkerchief, feeling her papery skin in his hand as they walk from room to room. And then, when his time is up, passing his sisters at the door. They are glad to share this trial together. And it is a trial. They smile at each other wearily.
Evidently, Ma has been watching the ceiling for some time, and he feels a lurch of guilt as he helps her out of bed and into her dressing gown. They pause at the window and look out at the rounded hilltops and ragged incisions of the limestone pavement, carved by mere rainwater. He can’t help feeling proud that they have kept her at home, this space that meant so much to her: its acanthus leaf wallpaper and musty brown carpet, her enormous bed—far too large for the room—and the sliding doors that had been purposely jammed shut since he caught his finger in them as a child. He glances at his mother, who is still staring at the hills. Her voice is fickle these days, often betraying her, but now she speaks clearly.
“What a desolate place,” she says.
The words take him aback. He stands for a moment, wanting to ask what she meant, then he pulls her arm, guiding her to the dining room table. He sits her down with a view of the kitchen. While he makes breakfast, she averts her eyes, muttering sharply. He can tell that she is having a violent argument with herself in a language she can’t express. He watches from a distance.
By the time he sits down, she has forgotten that he was there. She is glad to see him. She is tranquil, back to herself.
Later, when she is gone, those words come back to him. “What a desolate place.” He had thought, in some imprecise way, that after she died she would remain a physical thing: firm, substantial, knowable. He had thought he would be able to hold her so close that the heart would burst out of his chest. But while he lies in bed at his house in Dublin, ruminating, those words spread over his memories like floodwater, pouring into gaps he had not known existed, and his head will become heavy, and he will hardly be able to bear how little he had known her.
Ben Jackson’s writing has appeared in the London Review of Books, West Branch, and The Guardian, among others. He received an MFA in fiction from Boston University, and he’s finishing a novel set in Ireland and California. Find him online at www.bhjackson.com.