The Spirit at Drumcree
2000 words (Background)
. . . It's summer in Drumcree and the year is 1970. I am twelve years old and sitting on a grave beside an ancient church that glistens white in the July sun. July's sun is prettier than August's. August is a fuller month. Nature ripens under a sky that hangs heavy and sultry over the fields, sexy like a woman with full and shapely breasts dipping provocatively as she leans down to caress a smitten lover. July is a younger woman, a teaser, a playful thing. July is a bright month, a dangerous month.
The grave I sit on has a fascinating headstone. It's small and grey and covered with moss and on it are the names of a family, father, mother and two children, who all died on the same day nearly eighty years ago. I don't know why I picked this spot, but I keep returning to it to read my books.
I am not a solitary child. I play with others, by the river not far away, near the Orange Hall at Corcrain where the old railway lines once reached to Dungannon and Donegal beyond. Did I dream the puffing of steam engines late at night when I was younger? They frightened me because the line closed long before and diesel trains are the only ones I have ever seen. My mother says it's a dream. I am willing to be convinced.
The other kids are playing down there today, far enough away so I can't hear the cries and shouts of their games. I've found a new friend and he is here with me, in my mind that is willing to believe something is a dream when it is not and something is real when it is only imagination.
The stillness tells me he is here. The tree above my head, which swayed all morning in the arms of a breeze and threw down patterns upon my book as I read, has ceased now to move and when I look up he is there and smiling.
"I knew you'd come."
He grins as only a boy can and throws himself down on the grass at my feet. "I always come," he says, and that is all there is.
For days he will be with me and no one will see him. We speak in a way that has no words, and we live in our dreams together and meet in quiet corners of fields by hedgerows and under trees.
*
Half a world away to the east I see the altar by the tree and wonder why it is there. Yet I know without asking.
"This banyan tree you see refused to be cut down." The guide is telling the story in her sing-song accent which grates on the ear at first, but when she tells her stories it rivets your mind to a past that is present in a way I cannot describe.
"The banyan," she continues, "is the tree under which the Buddha gained enlightenment. You see," her hand stretches out and she points authoritatively towards the tangle of fronds and trunks that are anchored into the soil, "many roots, many branches, many trunks, but all are one tree. We are all one tree," she adds and looks directly at me.
My imagination is rampant again and I find it hard to accept the European looks that smirk at the quaintness of her story or, even worse, the bewildered looks of people who are struck just then by the sense of her words, realizing in the same instant that they understand the meaning, that they have also lost the meaning. Their minds can't grasp it and I despise them, because they have forgotten and are leaving me alone to remember.
The radio is on in the car as we return to town, passing streets that remind me of a place I still call home. Cavenagh Road by the president's palace and Killiney just across the way. All around I see the evidence of spirits that are not neglected with altars of offerings and temples to the souls of loved ones, giving love to the long-dead and nurturing the living with the hope that such prayers bring.
. . . Orangemen are massing at Drumcree . . .
It's July again and I listen as the woman with an English accent describes what is happening on the hill from where the spirit surveys his land. The long sweep down to the river is masked by the trees that have grown up in the intervening years. Houses now block the rising mist, unveiling his anger at last and manifesting itself in the actions of terrorizing.
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Copyright ) 1999 Rosemary Lim and Singapore National Printers. All rights reserved.