Brother

At a time when you knew, you alone, that death was soon, sharing a second joint over the draughts, our game became progressively ludicrous and the music progressively profound. You smiled suddenly and said with unexpected intensity, “All knowledge is predictive.”

When you were young and I even younger you showed me the way through the wood to the hidden pool. Five yews pinned it round, then other smaller trees, and box. With its banked lips it was shielded from the wind, so that on a dry day it was to the bright sky a white reply, broken by branches, sun comprehending glass.

The yews were easy to climb. One had a wayward bough hanging over the pond like a muscular arm. You showed me how to sit quietly in the groove between the muscles and wait for animals. I preferred, however, to drop stones, bigger and bigger, and watch the ripples move outward and inward until the image was calm again. Friction existed even there.

Given my first watch, I recorded again and again the time between splash and second calm.

Now in church, as I write in the back of my hymn book, decades fall away with the turn of a page. Would you smile at this gathering to speed you on with music? Is there any sound on the other shore for men of destiny? You will send no sign. Would you laugh at the sentimentality — tomorrow I retrace the path to the pool — of this fool who thinks you and identity aloft and laughing?

J.S. Huntley Lecturer in Orthopaedics and Trauma University of Edinburgh Edinburgh, Scotland