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Autumn Eve

K.R. Helms

Nothing lasts forever.
Not love, not life, not faith;
except the past, a wraith in wait.
Eventually, all I have is lost.

-Eulogies for the living

    Such pain.

    It ran in red rivers from his ragged fingers. But the blood that flowed so freely, that had rendered the steel strings of his guitar sticky to the touch, took nothing away from the mastery in which he played.

    Intermingled in the cold Autumn evening was a dirge of grief and an aria of love as none had ever before witnessed .
    He had always been a musician, at least from his sixth year. A child prodigy, renowned throughout the region, that had grown into an adult master. But he had never been able to compose a song that exactly matched his emotions to his art.
    But tonight, this dismal evening he did. And his pain was beautiful.
    The October wind moaned it’s accompaniment through the skeletal trees that framed the cemetery, the sound of his lover lulling him to her box shaped bed. It blew his long brown hair in flowing waves behind him. The wind in his hair, once, a primal pleasure, now a mockery from God. As a child he had loved the sound of the wind. Through the trees, and through the eaves of his parents house. A sound like gods whispering a lullaby secretly to him.
    But in that same wind, all he could hear now was a tormented wail that mirrored the pain echoing through his empty soul.

    Tears poured from his red rimmed eyes. Eyes that had witnessed a beauty, undiluted. The same eyes that had helplessly watched as that precious blossom was crushed to powder beneath the unrelenting steel boot heel of fate. Simple because God had decided that it was time.
    Fate. She had once asked him if he had believed, once... so many years ago. She had asked with a certain urgency in her tone, and he had lied to her and said yes in fear of losing her interest. But now, he believed. He believed with all of his heart. If only it could bring her back to him and rescue him from his pain.

    But his private despair did not diminish the mastery in which he played. Instead, it empowered him with the gift that only grief can give.
    His anthem rang through the lonely midnight cemetery. He played for her. Autumn Eve. His one love. A love that had promised forever. But forever had turned out to be a very short time, indeed.
    Words were not needed for this song. They would have only been lost amidst it’s power, or overshadowed in comparison to the longing, the love and the loss from it’s exquisite chords.
    No birds sang on this night. They nested in leafless tree limbs and pine boughs listening in awe to the music that they could never mimic. Even the haunting coos of mourning doves were silent, in reverence to his requiem.

    The moonlight seemed to make the marble and granite tombstones seem to glow in a ghastly blue, almost ethereal light. The same upon the pale flesh of his hands and face. His tears, highlighted by the moon, looked like quicksilver running down his cheeks.
    He sat across from his love’s grave. A small unimpressive stone bearing only her sweet name and the cold calculation of numbers marking her time spent on this once beautiful Eden.
    The stone upon which he sat was a grand work. A masterpiece. A large platform base of octagonal shape held a towering obelisk, adorned with Celtic knot work relief, signifying eternity. Perched atop this was a human sized angel. An angel, hauntingly beautiful, looking toward the heavens. Her flawless face masked in sad longing as her outstretched arms reached to embrace (God?) something beyond her grasp. Her wings draped down the sides of the obelisk. The craftsmanship was incomparable in it’s elegance. So fine the lines and intricate the form, that the tiny end feathers carved in her wings seemed to flutter ever so slightly in the chilling Fall breeze.
    Strangely, there was no name or even a date to honor the dead that rotted beneath it; perhaps it was a cenotaph to the forgotten who no longer have a name.
    It was reminiscent of countless other monuments in countless other cemeteries. Lined in immaculate rows, angels and obelisks standing silent in their sorrow.
    But the man took no notice of the nameless grave or the beauty adorning it. He saw only the beautiful face of his Autumn Eve that was burning in his mind’s eye.
    He paid no heed to the chill that enveloped him. He didn’t notice the blood forming a pool between his leather boots, drop by crimson drop, that stained the gray marble black.

    That was not pain.

    Pain was knowing he would never again see his own smile reflected in her shining brown eyes.
    The man had loved her devoutly. He felt so alive, almost childlike, all his days with his precious Autumn Eve, He had never tasted a love so sweet. He had felt as if his heart would burst for all the love he held in it’s crimson cage.
    Again, for the thousandth time since her death, he pictured the beauty of her dark face. It’s soft contours. Her eyes, that always made him feel like he was falling when he gazed into them, and of course, her smile. Ahhhh, her smile. So genuine, so alive, so pure. How her smile formed those tiny, perfect little lines at the corners of her eyes. And how her eyes sparkled, how her eyes, they sometimes danced with mischief when they were alone.
    He could see her long brown body, naked beneath his. He remembered teasing her about being able to count all her ribs, so slender was she. He could see the small birthmark below her navel. A mark she considered a flaw, but to him it was the signature of God Himself upon his greatest work of art.
    He squeezed his eyes tightly shut, forcing out the welled up tears and thought about the feline way she stretched when he would kiss the nape of her neck. How she moaned and quietly whispered his name. No one said his name quite like she did. It was as if the name itself was a taste that she savored as it rolled off her tongue.
    He could see her black hair fanned out over her pillow as she smiled at him and gestured him closer to her with her fingers. How she would giggle and say something corny to make him feel a little less nervous. How sweet those kisses from her soft lips. She seemed to always have a certain scent of the earth to her, the earth before it’s fall, when it had but one season and thrived. She smelled like living. And in his bittersweet memories he saw how she used to lay on his chest, as light as angel’s sighs, feeling her heart thundering in unison to his own.
    He saw how she used to curl her body around his side as she slept, clinging to him even in her somnolence. He had spent countless hours studying her still form as she slept, watching the steady rhythm of her breathing with that slight smile playing at the corners of her mouth that told him in it’s sweet silence that she was where she belonged. How he would stroke her silken hair, as he wondered if he held her in her dreams. How strong he felt with his arms wrapped around her fragile little body.
    A strength that died with her.
    He didn’t wonder what death was like. He knew all too well.
    This was death. This miserable lonely existence.
    His bed was vast in it’s emptiness. These past two months an eternity. The sleepless nights since, he imagined he held her still, with his arms clutching a cold lifeless pillow in quiet desperation.
    But it was a joyless facsimile.

    He had alienated himself from his friends and his family. They had tried valiantly to comfort him and to pull him from the labyrinth of his troubled mind. But it was all in vain.
    They could not save him from himself. His waking moments were spent staring at her portrait that hung in the unkempt living room, reading and re-reading old love letters until they were too torn, tattered, and the ink too smeared from his tears to read anymore.
    Sleep was rare. A Godsend to some, but hell for him. When it did occasionally overwhelm him, it was haunted by her face. Her voice beckoning him to join her.
    To be with her again.
    Like it had been before.
    When they had walked hand in hand through the woods listening to the birds sing their Springtime sonnets. When they would lay on their backs side by side on a hilltop, looking up at the clouds, telling each other the shapes they saw in them and laughing like children.
    His heart was so heavy, carrying the burden of her memory. Yes, it still beat, but it had no purpose. He felt as cold and lifeless as the stones that surrounded him. His pain was relentless and inescapable.
    But still, he played, and he bled, for her.

    Lost in his private symphony of grief, he was startled from his song by a faint feminine voice.
    “Child.”
    He whipped his head around to see the source, but he saw no one.
    He shook his head and assured himself that it had been the wind playing tricks on him.
    After a moment more of listening and hearing nothing out of the ordinary he began, once more, to strike the chords. As he did so, again came that hushed voice, almost a whisper, like the brown, dead leaves that danced in the breeze.
    “Child.” it said again, this time slightly more audible.
    Looking around him, squinting his eyes and peering into the moonlit night more closely, still he saw no one.
    In that frustration and tempest of emotion, he flung his guitar to the ground. It landed with a hollow twang in the grass beside the grave of a six year old girl. He shot to his feet, balled his hands into white knuckled fists, raising them to the sky, his head tilted back and his eyes wide and angry.
    “God! Why do you haunt me with these voices?” his voice echoed and cut through the silence
    After the echoes of his scream had faded to silence, came the woman’s voice again.
    “Do not flatter me with Divinity, child.” The sound of her voice came from above and behind him.
    He whirled around and stared up at the angel that was looking down upon him from her lofty perch atop the towering obelisk.
    Though startled at the phenomenon of a statue animating before his very eyes, there was no fear in his heart. He had immediately dismissed it as a hallucination drawn from his grief and lack of sleep.
    The angel ruffed her wings and with two strong, graceful beats, she settled lightly on the ground beside him. With a sad smile she said. “You doubt my reality.”
    At this he knew that this was no figment of his imagination. She was too vivid to not have substance. He felt his pulse racing and quickly assured himself that he had not gone mad. He could smell her breath, it smelled like spices and flora. The fragrance of a forgotten funeral, still lingering.
    His expression softened. “Angel. Are you sent from God?” he asked.
    The angel stretched her wings, then folded them behind her as she crouched, her gray gown billowing around her lithe form. Although her coloring was still camouflaged as stone, her movements were effortless and graceful. Her countenance as soft as a wedding night pillow.
    “You called me, child. Not God.” she answered with a sadness in her voice that maybe wished He had.
    “I called only for Autumn.” he corrected.
    She nodded. “But so sorrowful was your song, that I was roused from my slumber.”
    “Are you the only to awaken?” he asked anxiously, his hopes soaring with the faintest possibility of resurrection.
    The angel diverted his question. “Why do you grieve so?” she asked in place of an answer.
    “My grief is mine alone to bear. I will not share what is left of my woman with any soul. Not even an angel.”
    She looked at her graceful gray hands then down to Autumn Eve’s marker in the ground and said “You have already shared your grief with me. Just not the story that spawned it.”
    “Why would I tell anyone a story of my private despair?”
    “Who would I tell?” she asked, her expression wounded “If you are worried about your secrecy, then who better to tell? I will not tell a soul. Your secret will be forever sealed, as tight as the sepulcher beneath us.” she said gesturing to the graves around her with her willowy arms.
    He considered this, then sighed in resignation and reluctantly recounted his story to her. His voice choked with emotion. His fists balled so tightly that his fingernails dug small crescents into his palms. Fresh blood covered the blood that had dried already from his lacerated finger tips as the pain was re-lived.
    He told the angel everything. Things that even his closest friends and family members hadn’t been told. Once he had begun to tell the story, all the things he had kept inside for so long seemed to flow faster than the blood from his hands.
    When he was finished with his tale he wiped the tears from his eyes with the sleeve of his leather jacket. “She was everything to me. Without her, I am nothing.” then rested his weary head in his bloody hands, exhausted and drained.
    The angel waited patiently until after he had regained his composure, then she asked “Her death has been a muse to you, child. Is that nothing as well?”
    “Her memory is my muse.” he said and looked at her bitterly. “My muse is not even tangible. Eventually that memory will be gone as it slowly fades in time.”
    “We are all forgotten eventually. It is inevitable.” she said again gesturing toward the stones around them. “Just as most of these are forgotten already. Some have not been visited in over a century.”
    “A beauty such as hers should never be forgotten. It would not be right.”
    “Time is constant and cannot be stilled. So to is death. Your story is tragic, but it is not the first of it’s kind and will not be the last.” she replied in a solemn voice.
    “How could a mere statue possibly understand the vastness of a loss such as mine?” he demanded.
    She ignored his slander and focused upon the pain behind his anger.
    “I have rested here for over three centuries. I was here when there were no stones, only mounds. I have heard a cacophony of cries, pleas and whimpers. I have seen a deluge of tears. I watched as the g raves have absorbed and accepted all of those small sacrifices. Mourning is the most beautiful gift a human can bestow upon another, because of it’s purity. Gifts given in secret, gifts given in private, these are not contrived. Yes. This cemetery has seen more sorrow than even you can imagine. Every stone has a story to tell and most of them have been long forgotten by man.
    “But I have not forgotten, child. I am the keeper of their secrets as well. No one but I know if the names on the aged stones were eroded by time or by tears.”
    “But stones do not feel! They do not bleed! They do not cry. I do not care about their tragic fairy tales, only for my Autumn Eve, who I can no longer touch or look upon or hold close to me. I would trade everything to be with her again.” he said, his voice rising to the last.
    “You would give away your song?” she asked .
    “Without hesitation, yes.”
    “You would give away your life?”
    “There is no life left to give.”
    “You would give away your life?” she repeated patiently.
    “Yes!” he answered equally as impatiently.
    “And what if giving all would still not reunite you with her?”
    “Then it changes nothing! All is lost to me already and I would rather lie in my own casket than to lie alone in our bed another damned night.”
    “You are still young. Could you not find another to fill your bed?”
    “My bed, yes. But not the empty chambers of my heart.”
    “In time your heart will mend and you will love again.”
    “If God cannot resurrect my woman, than He cannot breath new life into this heart. For both are equally as dead.”
    “She is never truly gone as long as your song keeps her memory alive.”
    “Memory? Ha! Can you touch a memory? Can you hold a memory? Can you talk to a memory?” he cracked his knuckles in brutal finality and glared accusingly at her. “Memories are for the old who have nothing left to look forward to but the anticipation of death to bestow her kiss upon them. I do not want to wait for that moment. As you said, I am young and that is a long wait that I do not want.”
    “If you still did not feel her presence close to you then you would not have awakened me. I have never heard a more haunting chorus, child. It is a good tribute.”
    “It is her lack of presence that is close to me, it is that...that nothingness, angel!” he voice lowered, sardonic in it’s tone, defeated. “As for the song, it is mere chords from a broken man. That is almost nothing in and of itself. She deserves more than a simple tune that will never be heard or appreciated as a tribute to her.” he said.
    The angel sat silently, pondering his dilemma. Then she stood and looked at his face, as if studying his sincerity and said in her sweet, sad voice “There is a tribute you could pay her.” Hers was a tone of infinite regret.
    “Anything, angel. Anything!”
    “First, let me once more, hear your song.” she said in quiet reverence.
    The man retrieved his guitar from where it lay in the grass and found that it was intact. He seemed to have regained some strength in that glimmer of hope within that shined like Fate had so many years before.
    He picked the dead leaves from it’s clotted steel strings. He strummed the strings and heard that it was still in tune. And once more, he began to play his pain for his Autumn Eve.
    Standing and looking down upon his beloved’s headstone, he loved her the only way he was able.
    The notes soared to the heavens, swept upward by the wind, and slowly smothered in the dying distance.
    He heard the angel sigh, a whisper in the wind. It sounded far away.
    Then not another note was heard.
    Only the wind moaning through the skeletal trees and the brown October leaves rustling against the stone monuments. The moon shining pale and blue, a ghastly blue upon the tombstones.
    A blue that shone almost ethereal upon the angel and his now stone figure.
    Forever a tribute. Looking upon the grave of his Autumn Eve.

    Autumn Eve Christianson

     Oct. 12, 1973 - Oct. 31, 1993

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