He stood at the dark door, brandishing the whip before him. From inside came the familiar meaty aromas as well as a slightly pestilential smell he hadn’t noticed before. He leaned blindly into the black room and felt the weight of what had happened in that place. The dense atmosphere of an old sacristy, where the ceremonial robes had been woven at the very beginning of time and where the walls had for centuries absorbed the cries of altar boys, orphans and foundlings. Pain and charity. Death relegated to a corner. Putrefaction now worming its way through unspeakable sins.
He retched and almost vomited. Then he turned and met the eyes of the old man sitting by the well. He took a deep breath, shook his head to clear his mind and, finally, went in, feeling his way along the walls with the whip as his only defence. Dragging his feet so that he didn’t step on anything, he reached the place where the meat was hanging. He took half a dozen of the remaining sausages and strung them over his arm.
Having established a route, he brought the donkey to the porch, tethered it to the iron ring on the wall and went back and forth until he had filled all the available space in the panniers with sausages, flour, salt, beans and coffee. When there was no more room, he returned to the well with the donkey and tethered it there. He spent a long time hauling up water and pouring it carefully into the narrow mouths of the flasks. He spilled quite a lot, drenching the panniers and the sides of the donkey which, now and then, reached round to try and lick away this new irritant. Meanwhile, the dog and the goats competed for every trickle.
During all this coming and going, the goatherd had remained leaning against the wall, his head drooping on his chest. When the boy had secured the load with the straps, he covered the whole thing with the blanket, so that the old man could still ride on the donkey’s back. He then squatted down beside the goatherd and said:
‘I’ve finished loading the donkey. We can go now.’
The goatherd said nothing, didn’t even move, and the boy feared that he was dead. He put his ear to his mouth, but heard nothing. Frightened, he felt the old man’s motionless arm. ‘Sir,’ he said, and the goatherd moved, wearily shaking his grimy head. His eyes opened, and they resembled the dull, worn edges of ancient coins. He murmured something. The boy moved closer, almost pressed his head against the old man’s chest and heard those same murmured words.
‘Sorry, I didn’t understand.’
‘You must bury the bodies.’
‘What?’
‘Bury the bodies.’
The boy stood up and looked around him. The village street was lined with shadows and crumbling walls. The sky kept its usual distance. The boy threw his head back and gave a long outbreath. He felt close to exhaustion and all he wanted at that moment was to return to his hole in the ground, to that warm, damp pit where he had drowsed and slept on the first night of his escape. The primordial hole dug out of our one true mother, the earth. The place where the temperature never changes and where the sun never penetrates and where the roots drill into the clay and hold the soil together against wind and rain. He looked at his trembling hands and sighed. The donkey laden and ready to go, and, beside him, like a troubling reflection, the old man telling him to do something that went entirely against his instincts: burying those bastards, providing them with a safe haven from wild beasts, where they could wait for the final judgement.
The boy again crouched down next to the old man.
‘I can’t do it alone.’
‘You’ll have to.’
‘There’s no spade, no pickaxe.’
‘If you don’t bury them, the birds will eat them.’
‘What does that matter now?’
‘It matters.’
‘Those men don’t deserve it.’
‘That’s why you must do it.’
They agreed that they wouldn’t bury the bodies, but would put them somewhere out of reach of dogs and crows. The goatherd explained to the boy where to find the deputy’s body and how he should drag him over to join the other two bodies.
‘Go to the inn and bring the sack of chestnuts here. And don’t look at the bailiff.’
The boy did as the old man asked and emerged from the inn dragging a sack half filled with chestnuts. Following the goatherd’s instructions, he took it over to the donkey, untied the string and, lifting up the blanket, poured part of the contents of the sack into the panniers, with most of the chestnuts slipping into any available gaps among the food, flasks and tools.
With the sack in one hand and the halter in the other, the boy led the donkey over to where the deputy’s body was lying on a bench at the back of a derelict house. On the ground, on its side, lay the flask of wine he had taken from the inn. His horse was tethered to a post supporting a withered vine trellis. It pawed the ground nervously when it heard them approach. The boy tried to reassure it by patting its cheek. Thinking that the horse must be thirsty, the boy untethered it in order to take it over to the well, but the horse took fright and galloped off towards the south. The boy regretfully watched it disappear up the hill to the wood. They could have done with a horse like that.
The light from the moon did not reach the place where the body was lying, and the boy could only make out its general shape. The goatherd had told him not to look at the man’s head. ‘Now that he’s dead, you have nothing to fear from him,’ he had said, but standing there before the body, the boy felt incapable of doing what he had to do. He imagined the goatherd looming out of the darkness with a stone in his hand.
What the old man did not tell him was that the deputy had been awake when he’d found him. That he was wandering drunkenly around a dusty corral, stumbling over feeding troughs and baskets. That he was singing and praying, his tongue inflamed with drink, and that his face was already the face of a condemned man. Nor did he tell him that, in his drunken delirium, the deputy had confessed everything: the motorbike, the trophy room, the boy’s father, the blanket, the silo, the taxes, the Dobermann, the boy. The boys.
Nor did he explain how, after listening to what the deputy had to say, he had led him over to the bench and helped him lie down on the hard stone surface. Not a word about his own subsequent rage, not a word about the expiation of sins on a sacrificial altar.
The old man had merely said to the boy that, before he dragged the man’s body over to the inn, he must put the sack over his head, like a hood tied around the neck. ‘Don’t look at the man’s face. It will only upset you.’
At first, he resisted approaching the corpse and struggled to manoeuvre the sack. Face averted, he patted the man’s lifeless chest, trying to locate the head. He touched something wet on the man’s shirt and drew back for a few seconds. Still with eyes averted, he rolled up the mouth of the sack, placed it over the deputy’s head and pulled the sack down until it touched the surface on which the body was lying. He then slipped the sack over the man’s head until he thought the whole head was inside, then unrolled the sack and tied it around the man’s neck with a piece of string. When he was sure the hood would not come off, he pulled hard at the man’s legs until the body fell to the ground. On the bench were large gobbets of blackened blood, fragments of brain matter and bleeding remnants of scalp.
He tied the deputy’s ankles together and attached the rope to the donkey’s halter, as the old man had told him to do. It took a long time to reach the inn, because he had to force the already heavily laden donkey to walk backwards. When they reached the inn, the boy tried to get the donkey to reverse through the door, but the animal refused, unable to see what lay in the thick darkness behind him.
Outside the door, the boy detached the man’s ankles from the donkey’s halter and let his feet fall to the ground. He then grabbed his trouser legs and pulled as hard as he could, but he couldn’t get the body to move so much as an inch. He tried again several times, but each time he fell back, exhausted, unable to shift it.