When Willie Jackson Broke His Promise
He was considering staying until after tea when the telephone rang.
It was a voice he thought he once knew well but didn’t recognise anymore, so
he stopped dallying. He left the house via the front door and started to make his way along the track, not pausing to look right at the freshly harvested field or left to where patient cattle were chewing the cud and swishing irksome flies with their tails. He didn’t once look back over his shoulder but carried on walking over track and field until he reached the rocks at Porter’s Head.
Afterwards, some said he was selfish to abandon his wife like that but Mrs Morgan and Mrs Ellingham said he was always pleasant and polite and very good to his mother. So generous whispers spread and his obituary acknowledged that he was a good and kind man who had time for everyone and who was very popular and respected by all who knew him. You know the sort of thing, the usual accolades attributed to members of a community, regardless of whether or not they are deserved. The vicar’s wife never had a kind thought or anything less than a spiteful tongue, but it seems she was a well respected citizen too.
Then one day Willie Jackson broke his promise and told his friends what his mum had revealed to him after reading a short report of the death in the local newspaper. Apparently, if the man who’d died hadn’t helped Willie’s Dad out when he lost his job at the cattle yard and couldn’t pay his rent, the family would have been turned out onto the streets.
So the story was out and with it came many more secrets, tales of extraordinary kindness. It seems he had taken many under each of his wings -wings that must have spanned wide.
I often wonder if he believed he could fly or if he thought for one moment there’d be no one there to catch him when he jumped. I wonder if he thought about anything at all.
© Christine Magee 2007
