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.
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.”
“Sheila’s a smart woman,” Mart says. The sun between the spruce branches streaks his face with brightness and shadows. It blurs away the wrinkles and makes him look younger and stronger, at ease. “It’s a feckin’ shame she ever took up with that eejit Johnny Reddy. There was a dozen fellas that woulda jumped at the chance to get in there, but would she look twice at them? Would she fuck. Sheila coulda had a good house and a farm and all her childer in university. And look at her now.”
“You tell her what happened?” Cal asks.
“She already knew the young fella wasn’t coming back. There was nothing else she needed to know. What you saw up there, would it do any good, her having that in her head?”
“I’m gonna go up to Sheila Reddy,” Cal says, “once I get the use of this arm back. Give her a hand fixing that roof.”
“Ah, now,” Mart says, with a flinch and a grimace. “Not one of your finest inspirations there, Sunny Jim, if you don’t mind me saying.”
“You think?”
“You don’t want to make a woman like Lena jealous. Next thing you know, there’s a full-on feud breaking out all round you, and I’d say you’ve caused enough trouble around here for a while, amn’t I right? Besides”—he grins at Cal—“who’s to say Sheila’d want you? Your reputation for mending roofs isn’t the greatest, now.”
Cal says nothing. His arm is cramping from carrying the spade.
“D’you know, though,” Mart says, struck by something, “you’re after putting an idea into my head. Sheila Reddy could do with a bitta looking after, all right. A few bob here and there, maybe, or a few sods of turf, or someone to mend that roof for her. I’ll have a chat with the lads and see what we can sort out.” He smiles at Cal. “Would you look at that, now. You’re after doing some good around here, after all. I don’t know why I never thought of it before.”
Cal says, “ ’Cause she mighta figured out why you were doing it. Now that she knows you were mixed up in this, it can’t do any harm, and it’ll help keep her quiet. One way or another.”
“Let me tell you something, Sunny Jim,” Mart says reprovingly. “You’ve a terrible habit of thinking the worst of people. D’you know what that is? That’s that job of yours. It’s after warping your mind. That attitude’s no use to you now. If you’d only relax a wee bit, look on the bright side, you’d get the good out of the aul’ retirement. Get yourself one of them apps that teach you to think positive.”
“Speaking of thinking the worst,” Cal says, “the kid is gonna keep coming round to my place. I don’t expect the townland to give either of us any shit about it.”
“I’ll have a word,” Mart says superbly, holding back branches for Cal as they come out of the spruces onto a trail. “Sure, you’ll do the child good. Women who haven’t had a dacent man around while they’re growing up, they end up marrying wasters. And the last thing this townland needs is whatever you get when you cross a Reddy with a McGrath.”