“You’ll remember me when the west wind moves upon the fields of barley…”
The day they buried his father was sunny and warm. Paris didn’t know what would be more cliché: for it to have rained, gloomy and overcast, or the weather they had instead—clear skies, a bright sun, and a soft, gentle breeze, birds a-flight and flowers blooming. It seemed wrong somehow, that they should enjoy such a pleasant day when his father’s ashes were being lowered into the earth, but the rain would have been worse, he decided, because it would have been one more depressing element on top of everything else sad and lamentable about today.
It was a quiet, somber, tense and considerably awkward affair, nothing like anything Paris had ever been to before. It made him anxious and uncomfortable. He shifted on the grass, stood closer to his weeping mother, and tried not to make eye contact with any of the other guests.
He didn’t like that they were there. His father wouldn’t have liked that they were there, he was sure, and Paris certainly didn’t want to share his grief with them.
None of them seemed to feel any sense of compassion.
“You’ll forget the sun in his jealous sky, as we walk in fields of gold…”
If Paris’s parents had had a rough relationship, it was nothing compared to the rest of his family.
He’d gone much of his life without meeting most of them. His mother’s father was an absent figure; Paris didn’t even know where he was, or if his mother heard from him at all. He’d met his mother’s mother once when he’d been very little—a harsh, neglectful woman who’d wanted absolutely nothing to do with him. She’d cared more for other things than she had for her children. Grandchildren were even more meaningless to her. She hadn’t come to the funeral, though Paris hadn’t expected her to, and he had to wonder if she was even still alive.
His mother’s sister was little better, perhaps not as callous or inattentive with her own daughter, but she’d long run out of any fond feelings for him. She’d been kinder when he’d been young and “normal.” Now she did her best to pretend as if he didn’t exist. She attended only in support of his mother, standing off to the side where she could separate herself from the rest, frowning all the while. Her daughter, Paris’s cousin, stood with her, not nearly as severe, but a distant comfort nonetheless.
His mother’s older brother couldn’t make it, but that was just as well; Paris didn’t know him either.
“Will you stay with me? Will you be my love? Among the fields of barley…”
The LeFays were worse, because they were his father’s family and because they’d never cared to reconcile with him. Paris could barely look at them across the small plot of grassy land where the urn containing his father’s ashes would soon be buried. He’d never met them. His father had never even talked about them, though Paris had known they existed. He could look up their restaurant online if he wanted; he’d done so when he’d heard they were coming. Their names he knew only because he’d dared to ask his mother.
His grandparents, Arnaud and Mireille LeFay, had a dark, stern look about them, in their late seventies but spry and energetic still. His father had taken after Arnaud, Paris saw, when he plucked up the courage to shift his eyes in their direction, but the eyes—Paris’s eyes—came from Mireille. They wore designer clothes, his grandfather in a dark suit, his grandmother in a simple but elegant black dress, with rings on her wrinkled hands and a glittering necklace draped from her thin neck, her gray hair pulled back into a style that made her look too severe, tucked beneath a large, flowered hat.
She almost reminded Paris of his old dance instructor, with fire in her eyes and steel in her soul. She was, however, less kind. If she felt anything at all for the son she’d cast aside, or the grandson she’d never cared to speak to, she showed none of it in her austere features. They had come, it seemed, only for the sake of appearances.
There were two other men beside them, his father’s older brothers, Benard and Francois, both chefs, and another woman, Brigitte—their only sister. She used to be a model, or so he’d heard, and he thought it showed; she looked thirty instead of forty, tall and statuesque with his father’s wavy brown hair worn long. She had his eyes, too, unlike her brothers. He was sure they’d been captivating on the catwalk, or looking out from glossy photos in magazines full of equally beautiful people.
“We’ll forget the sun in his jealous sky, as we lie in fields of gold…”
It wasn’t fair, he thought, that his father’s life had been so ordinary and mundane compared to these people who knew success. It wasn’t fair that Henri had tried and failed and settled for something less than what he’d wanted, instead of fighting and proving himself in the eyes of a family that disapproved. They’d scorned his failure and he’d let them, taking their spite and their derision and immersing himself beneath it until the worthlessness and the bitterness set in to define the rest of his life.
Paris could almost understand. He felt small standing across from them, too short, too thin, too different, younger than eighteen and nowhere near adulthood—inadequate, like he could never measure up.
But there was a part of him that thought what he had was better, a little voice that sounded like his father’s that told him success wasn’t measured by wealth or fame, but by happiness. His father had been happy once, years and years ago when he’d been newly married to a lively woman with whom he’d shared a perfect newborn son, in a house that was small but comfortable, with a store that was humble but thriving. Maybe Paris couldn’t remember the happier times, but he knew they’d been there. He saw them in pictures, on video, in his mother’s fond, nostalgic smiles, and the way his father had pined, aching for things that used to be.
Not with these people, who stood there stiffly, frowning their displeasure through the service, but with Paris and his mother on a sunlit beach of long ago.
“Many years have passed since those summer days among the fields of barley…”
The others were inadequate, Paris decided, and so he surrounded himself with people who mattered. He settled close into his mother’s side, her arm around his shoulders and his behind her back, seeking comfort and offering it in return. He held Momma Gallo’s warm, soft hand, let her brush her fingers through his hair and steady him with her compassion. Mr. Gallo stood next to her, handsome and tall, impressive in his naval uniform, silent in his support but standing there like a guard, protecting them in their grief from people who had no right to disregard it.
These were the people he looked to for approval—not his mother’s sister, not his father’s prideful relations, but Mom and Momma and Beau.
Christopher was there, too, his rock and anchor, singing and playing his guitar.
It took them days to decide on a song. Paris hadn’t wanted any hymns because they hadn’t meant anything to his father, but there weren’t many other songs that seemed appropriate enough for the occasion. He’d considered a few—Landslide, but it didn’t seem right, and he couldn’t help but think it somehow sounded as if he were implying that he no longer needed his father, which was far from true; or Over the Rainbow, which seemed like such a callous choice, mocking in its futility, given that his father had never reached far enough for his dreams.
In the end they’d chosen something simple, something he thought suited his father much better, because more than anything he had just been a normal man living a normal life. There was pain and disappointment in it, but that was okay. It didn’t have to be perfect. All that mattered was that there had been happiness once, and love that lingered on.
“See the children run as the sun goes down among the fields of gold…”
When he looked away from his relatives, Paris locked his eyes on Chris, avoiding the hole in the ground for the time being and focusing on other things. Chris sang with a softness and clarity and played with so much gentleness and reverence for the occasion that Paris wished his father could have had more time with him, with both of them. He liked that Henri had liked Chris, that Chris had respected Henri and made an effort to know him, because Chris was good and kind and meant so much to Paris. Chris let him be who he wanted and do what he needed and feel all the things he’d never let himself feel before.
Maybe it was dangerous or unhealthy to need someone so much. Maybe he was setting himself up for misery and disappointment. Maybe he was as naïve and blinded as he’d once accused Ladon of being, but now, when he could do nothing but mourn and wish and dream and hope, Paris couldn’t bring himself to care about the maybes or the what ifs, because even if he ended up like his father one day, at least he could say he’d once loved someone so thoroughly he felt it in the very depths of his soul.
He thought his father might have seen that, might have known that he felt love and joy and longed for something true and good; Paris knew he must have, because Henri had made the effort to know Chris, too, and he’d encouraged Paris to reach and reach and never, ever stop.
In the end, Henri had tried for Paris’s sake, and Paris owed it to him to keep trying in his place—to live and fight and not give up.
“You’ll remember me when the west wind moves upon the fields of barley…
And so he stepped closer to his mother. She wasn’t all he had left, he realized. He had Chris and Chris’s family, he had Ladon and his friends and others out there who trusted and depended on him. He had his youth and his passion and a future he worked for with every step and every pirouette.
But she was his mother, and she was still the last thing connecting him to his father and a childhood that had ended years ago.
His grandparents sneered at her, this girl who’d always been too young and too willful in their eyes, and maybe she was. Paris didn’t care. She might have left, but she always came back for him; his parents might have divorced, but he could see the love in her tears, felt it as her shoulders quacked, and he knew she felt something for his father that the others would never show.
Remorse.
Because she had been too young and too willful, just a silly college girl with desires she wasn’t ready to give up on. She’s sacrificed too much to follow them. The proof of it was just dust in an urn, gone where none of them could see or hear him, but where they may one day join him.
Sometimes, when he closed his eyes and let everything else fade away, Paris thought he could still feel him. Little things—quick brushes of the hand, a comforting weight on the top of his head, so swift and fleeting he could have easily imagined it, but when his tears dried and he could breathe through the pain and the desolation, Paris liked to believe his father was still with him, nestled somewhere inside close to his heart, as if to keep it safe.
Both he and his mother approached when the urn was placed into the ground, she to add his father’s wedding ring, a match to the one she wore on a thin chain around her neck, and Paris to accompany it with a single picture—his father on the beach, young and at peace, with Paris asleep on his lap.
“See you around, old man,” he whispered.
“You can tell the sun in his jealous sky, when we walked in fields of gold…”
