You never knew I found the note our father left for Edmund. I didn’t tell you. It wasn’t like the short apology letters he left for you and me. Mum burned hers in the fireplace. I don’t know what he wrote to her. But I found Edmund’s, opened but abandoned, in the attic after you both had gone out west. All it said was: The world is too much with us, late and soon.

The air was cool and smelled like pine trees and sea salt on the November afternoon we buried our older brother. It was late in the day and a thin band of low red sun cut through the darkening sky. Nate’s father officiated at Edmund’s graveside liturgy, as he had at Dad’s. Nate pulled me aside before his father began addressing the small group assembled. Nate said in a quiet voice how our father had come to sit in the graveyard, in those days before he died. We’d thought Dad was at work in the office at the plant. But he had been laid off and hadn’t told us, getting ready for work every day and then driving his car to the graveyard. He parked in the back behind the church where no one could see him. But Nate had watched him from his bedroom window in the parsonage while he got ready for school, our father in his suit and holding his briefcase as he sat by the tombstones on the small bluff, looking out at the dramatic view of the mountain and water. Nate was just a boy. He couldn’t have known what our father was thinking on the old marble bench by the wrought-iron gate, looking out at a horizon which for our father held only sunsets.

Our father’s grave is in the corner, near the edge of the small bluff. The world is too much with us carved so elegantly into the grey marble. I remember staring at his tombstone as we waited for Edmund’s funeral ceremony to start. Mum stood beside me with her head down and her gloved hands clasped together like two black doves.

You arrived at the last minute, standing there by the gate when they lowered Edmund into the earth. The leaves were spiralling down, stark oranges, vivid reds and yellows.

You, beside the closed gate and behind the gate, a childhood once alive with possibility, where the future soared like far-off mountains. The shovel hit the dirt. I looked up and it was the same man who had filled in our father’s grave but his hair was silver now. I did not know his name. Another man took a shovel and dug into the earth. And then you, you ran forward and cried, “Just a minute, just a minute,” as though one more moment could somehow make a difference. But the dirt was already falling in, leaves tumbling down like so many wings dried and turning to dust.

Back Fat

Being in a sailboat is like being in love. On a good day, it’s the coziest, safest, and most exciting thing to be in — on a bad day it’s like a coffin with standing room.