The Searcher(134)
Cal takes Brendan’s hand from the bog. He’s afraid it might rip away from the body when he lifts it, but it holds. It has the same red-brown stain as the face, and it folds and wavers as if it’s almost boneless. The bog is transmuting Brendan into something new.
The wrist bends like a twig under its own weight. It’s the one Cal needs: when he moves back the water-heavy layers of sleeves, the watch is there. The strap is leather and has fused to the skin. Cal unbuckles it and starts to peel it away as delicately as he can, but the flesh slides and breaks apart into something unthinkable, a slimy whitish mass.
Cal’s mind moves outside him. His gloved hands look like things that belong to someone else as they busy themselves with the watch, carefully detaching it and wiping away sodden peat and worse things on the grass, as best they can. He notices very clearly that the grass up here has a harsher texture than the grass in the fields below, and that the shins of his pants are soaked from kneeling.
The watch is an old one, with heft and dignity to it: a gold-rimmed cream face, with slim gold ticks for numbers and slim gold hands. The bog has toughened the leather, but it hasn’t changed the gold; that still has its pale, serene luster. There are letters inscribed on the back: BPB, in worn, curly lettering; under that, fresh and upright, BJR.
Cal cleans his gloves on the grass and gets a Ziploc bag out of his pocket. He would like not to take any scrap of the bog away with him, but for all his cleaning, little shreds and dabbles smear the inside of the bag. He puts it away in his pocket.
He looks down at Brendan and can’t imagine how to lay those sods back over him. It goes against every instinct he has, right down to his muscles and bones. His hands want to keep working, clear away the peat and lay the boy bare to the cold sunlight. His throat is full up with the words to say into the phone to set that powerful familiar machine in motion, cameras clicking and evidence bags opening and questions firing, until every truth has been spoken out loud and everyone has been placed where they belong.
He’s pretty sure he could drop his phone without Mart noticing. GPS tracking would lead them close enough.
Cal feels 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.