“That sham was a city lad,” Mart says. “Either he couldn’t tell dry bog from wet, or he thought the Blessed Virgin would haul his arse outa it. I was cutting turf on this mountain before you were born or thought of, and I’m telling you there’s good solid bog from here to that spot. How d’you think we got the lad in there without drowning ourselves?”
Cal can see exactly how this will read, if he’s misjudged Mart. A dumbass Yank, out playing back-to-nature in country he didn’t understand, put a foot wrong. Maybe Alyssa will remember that he was supposed to go walking with his neighbor; but then, half a dozen men will have spent the whole of today hanging out with Mart.
“If you want to turn around and go home,” Mart says, “I’ll chalk this up to a nice bitta exercise.”
“I was never much of a believer in exercise for its own sake,” Cal says. “Too lazy for that. If I’ve come all the way up here, there might as well be a point to it.” He shifts the spade to a less painful position on his shoulder and steps off the path. He hears Mart following behind him, but he doesn’t turn round.
The bog gives and rebounds under his feet, as his weight reverberates through the layers deep below, but it holds him. “Step left,” Mart says. “Now straight.” Far out in front of them, a small bird rises in alarm and vanishes into the sky, its high zipping call coming down to them faintly through all that cold space.
“There,” Mart says.
In front of Cal’s feet, a man-sized rectangle of the bog is rough-edged and lumpy, against the smooth sweep of grass all around.
“He’s not as deep as he should be,” Mart says. “But, sure, the government’s banned cutting turf on this bitta mountain. He’ll be left in peace, once you’re done with him.”
Cal burrows the edge of the spade into the peat, at the rough line where it’s been disturbed, and sinks it with his good foot. The blade goes in smoothly; the peat feels thick and clayey under it. “Cut in around the edges first,” Mart says. “Then you can lift out the sod.”
Cal jabs the spade down again and again till he’s made a rectangle, then levers it up and drops it to one side. It comes out easily, neat-edged. In the gash he’s left, the peat is dark and smooth. A deep rich smell comes up to him, bringing back the scent of chimney smoke as he walks to the pub on cold evenings.
“Like you were born to it,” Mart says. He pulls out his tobacco packet and starts rolling himself a cigarette.
It takes a long time. Cal can’t use his injured arm with any force; all it can do is steady the spade as he drives it down. Within a few minutes his good arm is aching. Mart roots the base of his crook in the bog and rests his free forearm on its head while he smokes.
The heap of cut turf grows, and the hole widens and deepens. Sweat turns cold on Cal’s face and neck. He leans on the spade to catch his breath, and for one dizzying second he feels the full tornado force of the strangeness of it, that he should find himself on this mountainside half the world from home, digging for a dead boy.
At first he thinks the reddish tuft sprouting where the blade has been is moss or roots. It takes him a second to realize that the peat has darkened, that the smell coming from the hole has thickened into something rancid, and to understand that what he’s seeing is hair.
He lays down the spade. In his coat pocket he has a pair of latex gloves that he bought for working on the house. He puts them on, kneels down at the edge of the hole and leans in to work with his hands.
Brendan’s face rises out of the bog scrap by scrap. Whatever strange alchemy the bog has worked on him, he looks like no dead body Cal has ever seen. He’s all there, flesh and skin intact, lashes lying on his cheeks like he’s sleeping. After almost seven months, he still has enough of himself left that Cal would have recognized the smiling boy in the Facebook shot. But his skin is a strange leathery reddish-brown, and the weight of the bog on top of him has begun to misshape him like soft wax, sliding his face sideways, squashing his features out of true. It gives him an intent, secretive frown, as if he’s concentrating on something only he can see. Trey, frowning unconsciously over her sandpapering, comes to Cal’s mind.
The line of his jaw is uneven. Cal puts his fingers to it and probes. The flesh feels thickened and condensed and the bone has a dreadful rubbery give, but Cal can still find the break where the punch hit home. Gently he pulls down Brendan’s bottom lip. Two of his teeth on that side are broken.
Cal clears a space around Brendan’s head till he can see the back of it. He works slowly and with care; he doesn’t know how tightly the body is holding together, what parts of it might come away under his hands if he’s rough. Even through the gloves, he can feel the texture of the hair between his fingers, a rough tangle like a network of fine roots spreading. At the base of the skull, a great dent is nothing but give, shards shifting. When Cal parts the hair, he can still see the deep jagged gape of the cut.
“You see, now,” Mart says, behind him. “Just like I told you.”
Cal doesn’t answer him. He starts to scoop away the peat that covers Brendan’s torso.
“What would you have done if it wasn’t?”
Gradually Brendan’s jacket surfaces, a black bomber with an orange patch still bold on the sleeve, unzipped to show a hoodie that might have been gray before the bog dyed it rust-red. Brendan is lying tilted, half on his back and half on his side, his head twisted at an unnatural angle. The sun lies ruthlessly bright on him.
His arm has fallen across his chest. Cal works his way along its line, deeper into the ground. The peat close to the body has a different feel, wetter. That ripe, clotted smell fills up Cal’s nose.
“He’s not alone,” Mart says. “My daddo found a man in this bog, when he was a young lad, a hundred years ago maybe. He said the man musta been there since before Saint Patrick ran off the snakes. Flat as a pancake, so he was, and sticks twisted all around his neck. My daddo covered him back up and never said a word to the police or anyone. He let the man lie in peace.”
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.