REGRETS

Sometimes we never get time to say we're sorry...

The old man, bearded and frail, leaned heavily on his staff.

"I must continue, he muttered. "There are people I must see, if only to bid them farewell, and there are words that must be said."

A tear formed itself in the corner of one eye.

"There are words that must be said," he repeated to himself.

The grey sky gazed down on him. A cloud, heavy and black like a foretaste of night, frowned.

"I should have spoken those words before this," he muttered.

He put one leg feebly in front of the other, and walked on. It was a slow and steady walk and, bearing in mind the length of the road that lay before him, seemed to be getting nowhere very slowly.

He approached a large boulder.

It lay across the road next to a crevasse, where it had fallen, and there didn't seem to be any way around it.

"I am stuffed!" he muttered, "for I cannot get round an obstacle such as this! I know my age only too well, and that I have all on raising one foot off the ground let alone climbing over a stone as huge as this! I must give in! I must leave unsaid those precious words I need to say! I must sit here and wait for my own inevitable end: that is my only choice."

He sat against the boulder, and sighed.

It was good to sit down. It took the weight of life from his weary frame. But there was a greater weight in his mind. It found its way along the byways of his thoughts. It oozed like treacle where no thoughts had gone for so long he'd forgotten those parts of his mind and memory existed.

One thought touched him, and he shook his head.

"I didn't mean it," he whispered. "When I said those things I was angry. I was troubled, and my words may have been sharp, acerbic even, but I didn't mean them!"

But the memory persisted. It was heavy like molasses and it hung behind his eyes, taking colour and light from his vision.

"Everyone says something that he doesn't mean sometime or other," he muttered. "It's part of life! It goes with living! It's all a component of being human! So when I said those dreadful things it was no more than anyone else might say! And when I snarled and marched off into the wilderness it was a snarling and a marching that anyone else might have done!"

"But it was me that did it," he replied to himself.

The tear that had formed in the corner of one eye grew into a great wet globule and trickled, slowly and wetly, down his face, past a deep and time-worn crevice to drip into the crevasse next to the boulder.

"And now, when I mean to return from my long wilderness, this boulder has come to block my way and stop me. It lies across my path like a gigantic thing, and I am lost!"

The boulder remained solid and silent. It didn't have the gift of thought so it couldn't even creak out words of sympathy. It was a boulder and it was there, that was all.

"I am silenced at this ending," he sobbed. "There are my kids, my little ones, though they'll have grown by now �" I want to say how much I regret the things I said and what happened �" and look! I am cut off from them by this huge obstacle and my words must remain forever in my throat, unsaid!"

The clouds that had been an ominous grey became solid black, and it started to rain. It fell on his pale face like a wash of paint with the colour sucked out of it, and it trickled down his body, making a pool of colourless moisture that soaked into the ground all too swiftly, and was gone.

But it was all too much for him.

He could manage with putting one foot in front of another, plod, plod, plod, but when it came to a good soaking it was all too much for him, and he fell into the kind of delirium from which few return to the broad ways of life.

With a shaking hand, like the dying might have in the rain, he reached for a twig and scratched, in the muddy earth, the two words "forgive me".

"That will let them know," his thoughts said. "I might have said more, but those two words will do."

He shivered, and the cold rain bit into him. He couldn't throw the freezing wet of it off, and he closed his eyes.

When you're cold and weak and the rains are washing over you with the unyielding power that rains can have it's very easy to close your eyes and die.

The old man closed his eyes and, yes, he died.

He lay against the boulder while the rains washed his corpse, and then, when the sun shone forgivingly much later that day he dried and looked once again like a living man resting on a long road, leaning on a boulder: yet he was lifeless and motionless and the birds in the air knew that he was dead and may well have pecked his eyes out had he been less old and worn and stringy.

A woman with her children came along.

“Why, it's your long-lost granddad, and he's dead!" she exclaimed as they gathered round looking at the tattered remnants of a life that had been lived. "Oh my oh my! This is the greatest sadness ever!"

"Why is he dead, mummy?" asked one of the children.

"He must have been coming home," she replied.

"Why was he away?" asked the second child.

She looked at both children and smiled. "Nobody knows," she murmured. "He rose up one day and said he was going for a paper from the shop, and never came back! We thought he must have died there and then for he was getting on in life even then, though it was years ago, but no, look, he's right here!"

"He's been writing with that stick," said the first child, pointing. "What has he put?"

"Let me see … it's been washed by the rains … it's hard to see… It looks like … maybe "give me" �" something like that," murmured the woman, staring. "Maybe he wants us to give him a good burial and a fine funeral, which we will, for he was a good man and deserved in life the very best!"

"And he ran away?" asked the second child, trying to reconcile goodness with running away.

The woman nodded. "Yes," she whispered, a far away look in her eyes as if she was remembering some mighty deed or great event. "He was indeed a good man, a truly good man, and I for one will weep that he returned to us a moment too late, and passed away out here in the wilds, alone and with no loved ones about him. I will weep for that, all right, and the lost days when he laughed with us, and chased us giggling kids, and was … was a good man."

© Peter Rogerson 06.11.08