Lake of Sorrows

There was a lot of work to be done this evening, and it was already getting on for six o’clock. It wasn’t that he resented the work, exactly; he enjoyed the time he spent with the bees. But the farm work, though there was much less since they’d let most of the fields to neighbors when his father became ill, was still too much for one person alone. The constant grind was beginning to wear on him. If things stayed as they were, he’d end up just like his father, old before his time, and he wasn’t going to let that happen. He remembered how hard his father had labored when he was a child, and look what those years of work had brought the old man: decrepitude and early death, from breathing in all that black peat. Charlie could feel the same thing for himself, in the constant wind out on the bog. That was why he wore the mask. He knew they all laughed at him, but he didn’t care. They’d stop laughing when it hurt just to breathe.

He wondered what his mother had been thinking when he told her about the body. He knew she was intelligent; he caught the glimmer of it in her eyes, in the way she turned and looked at him when he asked her a question. But then the doors would shut again. She must once have had a desire for more than she had—endless days of labor beside a sullen ditcher driver of a husband who came home in the evening and had to put in another shift working the farm. She must have had dreams and ideas when she was young. What had happened? Charlie thought he knew the answer: his father, Dominic Brazil. Her family had never questioned the match. To them he was a good few acres, not bad to look at. What more could a girl in her position expect? He’d heard it often enough in their voices—what was life but a grim penance to be borne?

How his parents had come together in the first place had always been an unfathomable mystery to him. The only photograph he had of them was a blurry snapshot he’d found and now kept in the box under his bed: it showed his father looking defiant, even a little dangerous, as he leaned back against a wall, cigarette in his mouth, conscious of the camera. Teresa was leaning toward him, but half turned away, the side of her face a blur. Charlie thought he understood why she had turned away, even then. The one thing he’d always known was that Dominic Brazil loved his packet of fags and his pint of Guinness far more than he had ever loved any other human being. And yet she still washed his socks and made his bed, cooked his food, waited on him. And now hooked up a new oxygen tank when he needed it.

Charlie had spent a good deal of his childhood wondering what he’d done to earn his father’s animosity. It was never an anger that expressed itself in physical violence, but the looks he received had done as much damage as blows. He’d sometimes watched other fathers with their sons, and he knew that his face had been a portrait of naked envy when he saw a bout of mock sparring, or when the sight of a man’s hand on a son’s shoulder would squeeze his heart into a cinder. Such things didn’t hurt him the same way anymore, not really, but he wondered about them still.

He’d overheard his mother talking to her sister once, about his own difficult birth. From what he could understand, his entry into this world had very nearly killed his mother. “The doctor said I wasn’t to consider having any more children,” she’d said. He remembered wondering what that meant, whether it was anything to do with the fact that his parents kept separate rooms. From that point onward, the suspicion that he bore the dreadful responsibility for the rift between them had lurked in the nether regions of his consciousness. If he ever had a wife, he told himself, they would sleep and wake together. But what hope had he of ever finding someone? He’d always regarded girls as otherworldly creatures, as unapproachable as they were unattainable, on another plane of reality entirely from him, whose ears and face turned seven shades of crimson at the mere possibility of eye contact. He never thought of any specific woman when he gave in to temptation and touched himself, late at night, feeling the aching pleasure, the joy and shame at the moment of release. What hope, indeed?