that weightlessness again, the bog losing its solidity under his knees as gravity lets go of him. When he looks up, Mart is watching him; steady-eyed, head cocked a little to one side; waiting.
Cal looks back and finds himself not giving much of a shit about Mart. He can make Mart take him back down this mountain, if he needs to. He can protect himself and Trey till he can get her placed in care; she would fight like a bobcat and hate his guts forevermore, but she’d be safe. And in no time flat he would be too far away for her, or anyone else, to put a brick through his window.
What comes into his mind is Alyssa, her voice close to his ear, earnest as when she was a little kid explaining some stuffed animal’s problems to him. Your neighbor girl, she really needs consistency right now. Like, the last thing she needs is someone else disappearing on her.
Cal can’t tell for the life of him what’s the right thing to do, or even whether there is one, but he knows what comes closest. He bends down and tucks Brendan back into the earth. He would like to lay him out properly, but even if he was sure he could manage that without causing more damage, he knows why Mart and the rest didn’t do it to begin with—if some rogue turf-cutter should happen to come across the boy, it needs to look like he wound up here by accident. Soon enough, the bog will have melted his bones till no one can read his injuries on them.
Instead he places Brendan’s arm carefully back across his chest and straightens the collar of his jacket. He scoops up the turf he scraped away and packs it around the contours of Brendan’s body and head, covering his face as gently as he can, until piece by piece it’s vanished back into the bog. Then he takes up the spade again and lays the cut chunks of turf over the boy. It takes a while; his good arm has started to shake from the strain. He saves the grassy sods for last. He nudges them into place and presses them down, so that the edges match up cleanly and the grass can grow to blur the scars.
“Say a prayer over him,” Mart says. “Since you’re after disturbing him.”
Cal stands up—it takes him a few seconds to get his back straight. He can’t remember any prayers. He tries to think what Trey would want said or done as her brother is laid down, but he has no idea. All he can think of to do, with what breath he’s got left, is sing the same song he did at his grandpa’s funeral.
I am a poor wayfaring stranger
Traveling through this world alone
But there’s no sickness, toil or danger
In that bright world to which I go.
I’m going there to see my loved ones
I’m going there, no more to roam
I’m only going over Jordan
I’m only going over home.
His voice evaporates quickly into the vast cold sky. “That’ll do,” Mart says. He pulls his beanie down more firmly over his ears and uproots his crook from the bog. “Come on, now. I don’t want to be up here when it gets dark.”
He takes them down the mountain by a different route, one that leads them through plantation after plantation of tall spruce trees, and down slopes steep enough that Cal sometimes finds himself breaking into a half jog that jars savagely in his knee. They pass fragments of old stone-wall field boundaries, and sheep’s hoofprints in muddy patches, but they don’t see another living creature anywhere on the way. The day has disoriented Cal enough that he finds himself wondering if Mart has somehow warned everyone and everything in the townland to stay hidden today, or if he and Mart have wandered into some time-free zone and they’ll come out into a world that’s moved on a hundred years without them. He can see how Bobby wound up going a little alien-crazy, if he spent too much time on this mountain.
“So, Sunny Jim,” Mart says, breaking a long silence. He hasn’t been singing. “You got what you were after.”
“Yeah,” Cal says. He wonders whether Mart is expecting him to say thank you.
“The child can show that to her mammy, if she likes, and tell her where it came from. No one else.”
Cal says, “ ’Cause Sheila’ll make damn sure the kid keeps her mouth shut.”