Free Absolution by Patrick Flanery

endangerment, but at the time he thought he was instructing me in the ways of our country. He was a man of the law, not of the land. How was he to know the harm he was doing? Of course he should have known.
    ‘Did my sister kill anything? I cannot remember. She was not inclined to shoot. It is better not to imagine my sister armed.But after witnessing the appalling execution of my cousin’s horse (where was my cousin in all of this? this, too, I have unremembered) my sister put down guns forever and, one might say, bided her time, waiting for the gun to come back, to find her, to answer her rebuke.’

Clare
    There is the struggle between what I know – what was reported officially, what was reported to me in the last letter from you, the notebooks you kept before you disappeared completely, Laura – and what I imagine. I feel towards the place where the line between the reported and the imagined must lie. But how do I know when and where my own mind pushes that line in one direction or the other, questioning reported fact as possible imagination, crediting fantasy with the reliability of fact? Can you imagine the force of my desire to know the truth from you, who can no longer tell it or else refuses to do so?
    No more demurrals, no more waiting or delay or hesitation over what it is possible to know. This must and can only be my own version of your last days, culled from what you chose to tell me, and from what I can piece together from the official record. There will necessarily be other versions, perhaps more complete, less subjective in their way – versions not so far removed from events as this fractured narrative of longing and lamentation that is all I can muster.
    It was quiet at first, a radio to fill the gap in conversation, a woman wailing a country ballad. Bernard glanced at the route on his map, and Sam fell asleep against your arm, his breath coming heavy and warm. You squirmed under the heat of the child’s body, hard and trusting, smelling sulphurous and unwashed, a small insect crawling in his hair.
    You checked your watch. It was after three in the morning, and you knew how long it had been since you emerged from the trees, crossed the broken fence and skidded down onto the road. You could not sleep.
    When you left the old house a month before, neither one of us can have imagined it would be the last time, the last meeting, the first and only final farewell. I nearly write final failure , because there were so many between us – farewells that were failures, shortcomings that were also, in some abstract way, incremental steps away from each other, so that we were always saying goodbye, and failing to do so in ways that did neither of us justice. I cannot count the number of times I failed, have failed, continue to fail you. Perhaps you alone can make that tally.
    It was only in the previous few days, through the strange felicities of chance , as I once wrote, that you threw yourself into what you must have realized was the inevitability of exile. At our final meeting, when we sat in my garden, the shabby cottage garden of the decaying old house on Canigou Avenue (the garden I loved rather than the garden that now intimidates me with its meticulous beauty), my home-grown beets mixing with soured cream and paprika bleeding on a plate, I wore a smug grin at seeing you dishevelled again. You’re allowed to hate me for that, for my smugness, for so much else. Know at least that I never hated you. You said, This is just the first in a new cycle of meetings, and we’ll go on meeting like this, for many years, until one of us dies . It was not much of a beginning for a reunion. It was your decision to meet again. I suppose you were finally able to stomach me, even on my terrible terms, to bear my smugness, my judgement, and my failure to judge, too.
    In that last letter to me you wrote, For your sake, I hope you are okay . Is it true? Would you really have been worried about my feelings, my well-being, in