The Searcher

TWENTY-ONE

The rain holds steady, day and night, for more than a week. Cal mostly stays indoors, letting his body heal. His collarbone appears to be only bruised or cracked or something along those lines, rather than broken outright; by the end of the week he can use that arm for small stuff without too much pain, as long as he doesn’t try to raise it above shoulder height. His knee, on the other hand, is banged up worse than he thought. The swelling takes its time going down. Cal straps it up with bandages and ices it regularly, which helps some.

The enforced idleness and the misty rain give that week a dreamy, suspended feel. At first Cal finds it strangely easeful. For the first time he can remember, he doesn’t have the option of doing anything, whether he wants to or not. All he can do is sit by his windows and look out. He gets accustomed to seeing the mountains soft and blurry with rain, like he could keep walking towards them forever and they would just keep shifting farther away. Tractors trudge back and forth across the fields, and the cows and sheep graze steadily; there’s no way to tell whether the rain doesn’t bother them, or whether they just endure. The wind has taken the last of the leaves; the rooks’ oak tree is bare, exposing the big straggly twig-balls of their nests in the crook of every branch. In the next tree over, there’s a lone nest to mark where, sometime along the way, some bird infringed on their mysterious laws and got taught a lesson.

The shaky feeling lingers on for a couple of days, rising up to pierce Cal at random things like a dead wren in his backyard or a nighttime squeal in the hedges. A few good nights’ rest gets rid of it. It came out of Cal’s body, mainly, not his mind. The beating didn’t shock his mind deeply. Men fight sometimes; it’s in the natural course of things. What was done to Trey is a different thing, and harder to leave behind.

He knows that his duty is to take what he’s learned to Officer Dennis. There are so many reasons why he won’t be doing this, all of them so inextricably tangled together, that Cal has no idea which one is the central one and which are just underbrush. The longer he’s stuck indoors and idle, the more this question prickles at him. He starts to wish he could spend his days walking, but he needs to rest his knee, so it can heal for the journey up the mountainside. He wishes Lena or Trey would pay him a visit, but he knows that would be a bad idea; right now everything needs to be left to settle. He almost wishes he had bought himself a TV.

Once his knee can handle it, he limps down through the rain to Noreen’s and explains, over her full range of high-pitched horrified noises, about his fall off the roof. While she’s listing home remedies and people who died by falling off things, Fergal O’Connor comes in for a giant bag of potatoes and a giant bottle of some fruit cordial. When Cal nods to him, he ducks his head awkwardly and comes up with a bashful half grin, and then pays for his stuff and leaves fast, before Cal can start asking him questions again.

Cal has thought about Fergal, over the past few days. Of all the people he talked to, sweet dumb loyal Fergal is the one who could have set him on the right track. Brendan may have lacked sense in plenty of ways, but he had enough of it to talk to Fergal, rather than Eugene, when he got the urge to show off his plans. Fergal knew what Brendan was setting up—maybe not in detail, but he knew the gist of things. He knew Brendan had been caught out and was running scared, and he knew that if Brendan wasn’t scared of the local guys as well as the boys from Dublin, he should be. The only part that hasn’t occurred to Fergal is that things could have gone bad. In Fergal’s mind, nature is what turns rogue; people are reliable, or at least reliably themselves. And Brendan, who always was skittish, got spooked at the thought of a beating and took off somewhere, and he’ll come back when things settle down.

Cal isn’t going to tell him different. He’ll come to it in his own time, or he won’t, or he doesn’t want to. Fergal needs to make his own terms with his home place.

He’s not going to tell Caroline, either. She does want to know, but even if he could do it without risk, Caroline can’t be his responsibility. She’ll have to make her own terms too. Cal would like to at least tell her that it was an accident, just so those terms aren’t harsher than need be. If she comes asking someday, he might find a way.

If he’s around. The other thing he’s thought about, stuck in his house watching the silhouettes of mountains that hold a dead boy folded away somewhere among their dreamy curves, is putting his place on the market and getting on a plane back to Chicago, or Seattle maybe. In a few more days he’ll have done what Trey needs from him; there’ll be no responsibilities left to hold him here. He could be packed and gone in less than an hour.

He pays for his groceries, and Noreen talks him out the door, promising to send Lena up to him with cabbage poultices and the number of a good roofer. Cal has no way of knowing whether she believes a word he said, but he understands that, as far as she’s concerned, that’s beside the point.

Finally the rain clears. Cal, who the day before would have sworn he was going to start chewing the woodwork if he couldn’t get out and get this job done, decides it would be only sensible to let some of the rainwater drain out of the mountainside before he goes digging around in it. He stays home that day, and then the next, to be on the safe side.

He’s not shying from Brendan. He doesn’t welcome the prospect, but whatever condition the body is in, he’s seen worse. He knows what he needs to do there, and he’s ready to do it. The part that offers him no such clarity is the part after that.

Any minute now, though, Trey is going to come looking for her proof. Cal has seen nothing of her since Lena took her home. He doesn’t like the thought of her up there on the mountainside with no one but Sheila to keep an eye on how she’s doing, but he did tell her to give him two weeks, and he figures it’s probably a good thing that she’s doing it: she needs this time to take in all that’s happened, and to ready herself for what comes next. But he also figures that around about now, with the two weeks ticking away and her face hopefully healed up enough that she doesn’t flinch from showing herself, she’s going to get restless.

It’s a Thursday, but late that night Cal sits out on his step and calls Alyssa anyway. He feels dumb doing it, but he’s planning to spend the next day heading miles up a deserted mountainside with a man who’s already helped kill one person and gotten away with it, and who might reasonably consider Cal to be an unacceptable risk. It would be naïve to ignore the situation’s potential, and Cal feels he’s been plenty naïve enough already.

She picks up fast. “Hey. Is everything OK?”

“All good,” Cal says. “Just felt like checking in. How’re you doing?”

“Good. Ben had a second interview for this really great job, so fingers crossed.” Her voice has got farther away, and Cal can hear running water and clinking noises. She’s put him on speakerphone while she goes back to loading the dishwasher. “What’ve you been up to?”

“Nothing much. It’s been raining all week, but it’s cleared up, so I’m planning on going for a walk up the mountains tomorrow. With my neighbor Mart.”

Alyssa says something muffled by her hand over the phone, presumably to Ben. “Oh, wow,” she says, back to Cal. “Sounds beautiful.”

“Yeah, it is. I’ll send you photos.”

“Yeah, do. It’s been raining here, too. Someone at work said it might snow, but I think she made that up.”

Cal drags a hand down his face hard enough to hurt his bruises. He remembers how he used to put Alyssa’s whole little baby foot in his mouth, and she would laugh till she gave herself hiccups. Above his garden, the sky is a mess of high sharp stars.

“You know what,” he says suddenly. “I’ve run into something you might be able to help me with. You got a minute?”

The noises stop. “Sure,” Alyssa says. “What’s up?”

“There’s a neighbor kid who’s been coming round to my place to learn some carpentry. She just found out her big brother died, and she doesn’t have what you’d call a good support system: her daddy’s run off, and her mama hasn’t got much to offer. I want to help her get through this without going off the rails, but I don’t know the best way to do it. I figure you might have some ideas.”

“OK,” Alyssa says. There’s a note in her voice like she’s rolling up her sleeves to get down to work. “How old is she?”

“Thirteen.”

“How did her brother die?”

“Got in a fight and hit his head. He was nineteen. They were pretty close.”

“All right,” Alyssa says. “So the main thing is to let her know that whatever she’s feeling is normal, but direct her away from any action that’s destructive or self-destructive. So for example, it’s natural for her to be angry at herself, her brother, the person he was fighting with, her parents for not protecting him, whoever—make sure she knows that’s fine and she doesn’t need to feel guilty about it. But if she’s lashing out at other kids, say, she needs to know she can’t do that. Help her find another outlet for the anger. Maybe get her into martial arts, or drama. Or running. Hey, you could go running with her.”

The mischievous grin in her voice makes Cal grin back, right across half the world. “Hey,” he says, mock-offended. “I could run. If I wanted to.”

“So do it. Worst case, you’ll give her something to laugh at, and she could probably use that. She’ll be looking for ways to feel like the world can still be normal. Laughing is good.”

All her confidence and competence blow Cal clean away. His baby girl is, somehow, a grown adult who knows how to get shit done and done well; who knows things, and has skills, that he doesn’t. Here he was fretting about her like a mama hen, listening every minute for her to fall to pieces, and all the while she was just tired out from the hard work it’s taken to grow into this. He listens to her talk about regressive behaviors and modeling healthy emotional expression, and pictures her sitting at ease next to some American equivalent of Trey, deftly and calmly transforming all these words into solid action. It seems to him that he can’t have fucked up too badly, if Alyssa turned out like this.

“All of that sounds pretty great,” he says, when she finishes up.

“Well, I’ve had practice. An awful lot of the kids at work, they’ve lost someone, one way or another.”

“They’re lucky to have you around.”

Alyssa laughs her big wonderful laugh. “Yeah, mostly they think so too. Not always. Is any of that going to be useful?”

“Oh yeah. I’m gonna keep every bit of it in mind. Except maybe the running.”

“I can put it in an email, if you want. And if anything specific comes up, like if she starts engaging in risky behaviors or whatever, let me know and I’ll give you whatever strategies I’ve got.”

“That’d be great. Thanks, kiddo. I mean it.”

“Anytime. You’ll be fine. Better than fine. Remember when Puffle got hit by the car? You drove us all the way out to that forest because I wanted to bury her there. And you carved her a gravestone and everything.”

“I remember,” Cal says. He wishes he could call Donna and tell her that he thinks he might get what she was talking about, at least some of the time.

“That was exactly what I needed. You’ll be fine. Just, Dad . . .”

“Yeah?”

“Your neighbor girl, she really needs consistency right now. Like, the last thing she needs is someone else disappearing on her. So, I mean, if you were planning on coming home any time soon . . . probably you should point her to someone else she can talk to, instead. Maybe another neighbor you trust, or—”

“Yeah,” Cal says. “I know.” He almost asks her whether she wants him to come back. He stops himself in time; it wouldn’t be right to put that on her.

“Yeah, I figured you did. Just checking.” In the background, Ben’s voice says something. “Dad, I’ve got to go, we’re meeting people for dinner—”

“Go ahead,” Cal says. “Say hi to Ben from me. And tell your mama I sent my best. I don’t want to hassle her, but I’d like her to know that I’m wishing her well.”

“Will do. Talk soon.”

“Hey,” Cal says, before she can hang up. “I picked up this little toy sheep in town. It reminded me of all those toys you used to have when you were little, the raccoon and all. Can I send it to you? Or don’t you want fluffy toys any more, now that you’re all grown up?”

“I would totally love a toy sheep,” Alyssa says. He can hear her smiling. “He’ll get along great with the raccoon. Night.”

“Night, sweet pea. You have a good dinner. Don’t get to bed too late.”

“Dad,” she says, laughing, and she’s gone. Cal sits on the step for another while, drinking his beer and watching the stars, waiting for the morning.

The weather holds; the morning comes in with harsh winter sunshine sliding low across the fields and in at Cal’s window. The air of the house has a new, icy edge that the heaters only partly dispel. Cal eats breakfast, re-straps his knee and puts on most of the clothes he owns. When it comes time for Mart’s tea break, he heads up that way.

The land has left its luring autumn self behind and put on a new, aloof beauty. The greens and golds have thinned to watercolor; the sky is one scoured sweep of pale blue, and the mountains are so clear it seems like Cal can see each distant clump of browning heather, sharp and distinct. The verges are still soft from the rain, with puddles in the ruts. Cal’s breath smokes and spreads. He takes the walk slowly, sparing his knee. He knows he’s walking into a hard day, in a hard place.

Kojak is rooting around a corner of Mart’s garden, digging for something too interesting to be left. Mart comes to the door. “Long time no see, bucko,” he says, smiling up at Cal. “I was starting to wonder should we send in a search party to see were you still with us. But you’re looking in fine fettle altogether.”

“Doing OK,” Cal says. “Well enough to go out digging, now that the rain’s stopped.”

Mart, peering at Cal’s face from various angles, ignores that. “I’d say that nose is just about back to its former glory,” he says. “Lena must be pleased, is she? Or is she after ditching you? I haven’t seen her car around our way.”

“Guess she’s been busy,” Cal says. “Would you be free to take me for that walk?”

The mischief falls away from Mart’s face. He says, “Didja talk to the child?”

“Yeah. She’s not gonna do anything.”

“You’re sure.”

“Yeah,” Cal says. “I’m sure.”

“Your call, Sunny Jim,” Mart says. “I hope you’re right.” He whistles for Kojak. Kojak comes bounding happily over to exchange pleasantries with Cal, but Mart motions him into the house. “We don’t want him along for this. Wait there a moment, now; I’ll be back to you.”

He shuts the door behind him. Cal watches a flock of starlings billow like a genie against the sky until Mart comes back, wearing his wax jacket and a thick knitted beanie in a startling shade of neon yellow. For an instant Cal has the urge to make some crack about it, call him DJ Cookie Crumble or some such, before he remembers they’re no longer on those terms. It catches him with a twist of loneliness. He liked Mart.

Mart is carrying his crook and a straight-edged spade. “That’s for you,” he says, holding out the spade to Cal. “Will you be able to use it, with that collarbone?”

“I’ll figure something out,” Cal says. He balances the spade over his good shoulder.

“How about that knee? It’s a long aul’ walk, and half of it’s not on roads. If that knee lets you down on the mountainside, there’s nothing I’ll be able to do for you.”

“Call in P.J. and Francie. They can carry me down.”

“I haven’t brought them up to speed on this wee expedition,” Mart says. “They wouldn’t approve. They don’t know you as well as I do, sure. You can’t hold it against them.”

“My knee’s fine,” Cal says. “Let’s go.”

The walk is a long one. They start up the same mountain road that Cal took to the Reddy place, but half a mile up Mart points his crook at a side trail, too narrow for them to walk abreast, its entrance almost hidden by scrubby trees and long grass. “You wouldn’t have spotted this, now,” he says, smiling at Cal. “This mountain’s fulla tricks, so it is.”

“You know ’em,” Cal says. “You go ahead.” He doesn’t want Mart at his back.

The trail runs over rises and between boulders, among thorny flares of yellow gorse and stretches of leggy heather whose purple bells are fading to brown paper. “All this here,” Mart says, stirring a clump of heather with his crook as he passes, “that’s ling heather. You’d get the finest honey in the world from that. A fella called Peadar Ruadh that lived up here, he usedta keep bees, when I was a child. My granny’d send us up for a jar of his honey. She did swear by it for the aul’ kidney troubles. A spoonful of that morning and evening, and you’d be right as rain in no time.”

Cal doesn’t answer. He’s been keeping an eye out for anyone following them—apart from anything else, he wouldn’t put it past Trey to have been watching him again—but nothing moves, anywhere around them. The wet earth of the trail gives under their feet. Mart whistles to himself, a low lonesome tune with a strange cadence to it. Sometimes he sings a line or two, in Irish. In that language his voice takes on a different tone, a husky, absent crooning.

“That’s a song about a man who goes to the fair and sells his cow,” he informs Cal, over his shoulder, “for five pounds in silver and a yellow guinea of gold. And he says, ‘If I drink all the silver and squander the gold, why should any man care, when it’s nothing to him?’”

He sings again. The trail slopes upwards. On the flat grassland below, the fields spread out shorn and pale in the sharp sunlight, divided by walls that lie along reasons that were forgotten centuries ago.

“He says, ‘If I go to the woods picking berries or nuts, taking apples off branches or herding the cows, and I lie under a tree to take my ease, why should any man care, when it’s nothing to him?’”

Cal takes out his phone, turns on the camera and holds it up to the view. “Turn that off,” Mart says, breaking off the song in mid-line.

“I told my daughter I was going walking up the mountains,” Cal says. “She asked for pictures. She likes the look of the scenery around here.”

Mart says, “Tell her you forgot your phone.”

He stands on the trail, leaning on his crook, looking at Cal and waiting. After a minute Cal turns the phone off and puts it back in his pocket. Mart nods and turns back to walking. In a little bit he starts his song again.

Ferny plants, like nothing Cal’s seen in the grasslands, reach from the verges to brush at his boots. Mart’s crook makes a small, rhythmic crunching on the path, underscoring the song. “The man says,” he tells Cal, “‘People say I’m a useless waster, with no goods or fine clothes, no cattle or wealth. If I’m happy enough to live in a shack, why should any man care, when it’s nothing to him?’”

He strikes off the trail and clambers through a gap in a crumbling, lichened stone wall. Cal follows. They cross a patch of land that looks like it was cleared, a long time ago, before being abandoned for tufts of tall fine grass to reclaim. In one corner are the tumbledown remains of a stone cottage, much older than Brendan’s. Mart doesn’t turn his head to look at it. A wisp of wind shivers the seed-heads on the grass.

As they climb higher the cold sharpens, slicing through Cal’s layers and pressing its edge into his skin. Cal knows their route is circling and meandering, doubling back on itself, but one gorse bush or patch of moor grass looks too much like the next for him to be sure exactly how. He glances regularly at the sun and the view, trying to keep his bearings, but he knows he could spend a year looking and never find his way here again. He catches Mart’s wry eye on him.

Without his phone, Cal can’t be sure how long they’ve been walking; more than an hour, maybe an hour and a half. The sun is high. He thinks of the four men trudging their slow steady way up these trails, the body in its sheet swaying between them.

Mart takes them through a thick stand of spruce, down into a dip, and out onto another single-file trail where the ridge spreads out into a plateau on either side. Glints of water show among the peat and heather.

“Stay on this path, now,” he advises Cal. “Every year there’s a sheep or two that steps into one of them bogs and can’t get out again. And twenty-five or thirty year back there was a fella that usedta come down from Galway city—mad as a bag of cats, so he was. He’d walk up and down the mountain barefoot every Good Friday, saying the rosary all the way. He said the Blessed Virgin had told him that some year or other, if he kept at it, she’d appear to him along the way. Maybe she did and she picked a bad spot for it, I couldn’t tell you, but one year he didn’t come back. The men went looking and found him dead in a bitta bog. Only eight foot from the path, with his arm still stretched out towards the dry ground.”

The spade is biting into Cal’s shoulder, and his knee throbs at every step. He wonders if Mart is planning to walk him in circles till it gives out, and then leave him to find his own way home. The sun has started to slide down the sky.

“There,” Mart says, stopping. He points his crook at a spot in the bog, about twenty feet off the path.

“You sure?” Cal asks.

“I am, of course. Would I bring you all the way up here if I wasn’t sure?”

All around them the plateau lies flat and wide. Long grass and heather bend, autumn-bleached. Small shadows drift across them, from wisps of cloud.

Cal says, “Looks a lot like about a dozen other places we’ve passed.”

“To you, maybe. If you want Brendan Reddy, that’s where you’ll find him.”

“And his watch is on him.”

“We took nothing off him. If he had his watch on that day, then it’s on him now.”

They stand side by side, looking at the bog. Patches of water shine here and there with reflected blue. “You told me not to go off the path,” Cal says. “If I go in there, what’s to stop me from ending up like the rosary guy?”

“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.

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.”

“I’d put him in that bog first,” Cal says, before he can stop himself.

Mart bursts out laughing. It’s a big, free, happy sound that spreads out, almost shockingly, across the hillside. “I believe you,” he says. “You’d be straight back up there with that spade, on the double. Jaysus, man, it’s a mad world we live in, hah? You’d never know where it’d take you.”

“No shit,” Cal says. “Anyway, I thought you thought the kid was gay.”

“Well, will you look at that,” Mart says, grinning. “We’re back on conversational terms. I’m only delighted. And the child can marry a waster whether she’s gay or not, can’t she? That’s what we voted for: the gays can make fools of themselves, same as the rest of us, and no one can stop them.”

Cal says, “That kid’s no fool.”

“We all are, when we’re young. The Indians do have it right: it’s the parents that oughta arrange the marriages. They’d make a better job of it than a buncha young people that’s only thinking with their wild bits.”

“And you’d have been married off to some skinny girl who’d want a poodle and a chandelier,” Cal points out.

“I would not,” Mart says with an air of victory. “My daddy and mammy never agreed on anything in their lives; there’s no chance they’d have agreed on a woman for me. I’d be where I am now, free and single, and without the consequences of Sheila Reddy’s foolishness to deal with.”

“You’d just find something else to get mixed up in,” Cal says. “You’d get bored.”

“I might, all right,” Mart acknowledges. “How about yourself?” He squints at Cal, evaluating. “I’d say your mammy would have found you a nice cheerful young one with a good steady job. A nurse, maybe, or a teacher; no eejit for you. We’re not looking at any Elle Macpherson—she wouldn’t want you having the hassle of that—but pretty enough. A girl that was up for a few laughs, but no nonsense about her; no wild streak. And your daddy wouldn’t have given a shite one way or another. Am I right or am I right?”

Cal can’t help a half smile. “Pretty much,” he says.

“And you might be better off. You wouldn’t be halfway up a mountain with a banjaxed knee, anyway.”

“Who knows,” Cal says. “Like you say, it’s a mad world.” He realizes that Mart is leaning hard on his crook. His steps are jerkier and more lopsided than they were on the way up, or even at the start of the way down, and the lines of his face have tightened up with pain. His joints have paid for the journey.

The path gradually levels off. The heather and moor grass give way to tangles of weeds pushing in from the verges. Birds begin to chirp and rattle.

“There you go,” Mart says, stopping where the path leads between hedges into a paved road. “D’you know where you are?”

“Not a clue,” Cal says.

Mart laughs. “Head down that way about half a mile,” he says, pointing with his crook, “and you’ll come to the boreen that goes round the back of Francie Gannon’s land. Don’t worry if you see Francie; he won’t go telling tales on you this time. Just blow him a kiss and he’ll be happy.”

“You’re not heading home?”

“Ah, God, no. I’m off to Seán Óg’s for a pint or two or three. I’ve earned it.”

Cal nods. He could use a drink himself, but neither of them has any desire for the other’s company right now. “You did the right thing, taking me up there,” he says.

“We’ll find out, sure,” Mart says. “Give Lena an extra squeeze for me.” He lifts his crook in a salute and hobbles off, with the low winter sunlight laying his shadow a long way down the road behind him.

The house is cold. In spite of all his layers and all the exercise, Cal is chilled to the marrow; the mountain has burrowed deep inside him. He showers till his hot water runs out, but he can still feel the cold spreading outwards from his bones, and it seems to him that he’s still soaked inside and out with the rich smell of peat tainted with death.

That evening he stays indoors and leaves the lights off. He doesn’t want Trey to come calling. His mind hasn’t come all the way back inside his body yet; he doesn’t want her to see him until today has had time to wear off him a little. He puts everything he was wearing in the washing machine and sits in his armchair, looking out the window as the fields dim towards a frosty blue twilight and the mountains lose their detail to become one dark sweep at rest. He thinks about Brendan and Trey somewhere within that unchanging outline, Brendan with the bog slowly working its will on him, Trey with the sweet air healing her wounds. He thinks about how things will grow where his own blood soaked into the soil outside, and about his hands in the earth today, what he harvested and what he sowed.

Trey comes the next day. Cal is doing his ironing on the table when she knocks. Just from that tight tap, he can feel what it’s taken for her to stay away this long. Mostly she thumps that door like the whole point is to enjoy the noise.

“Come in,” he calls, unplugging the iron.

Trey closes the door carefully behind her and holds out a loaf of fruitcake. She looks a whole lot better. There’s still a big scab running down from her lip, but the black eye has cleared to a faint yellowish shadow, and she’s not moving like the rib catches her. She looks like she might have grown another half inch.

“Thanks,” Cal says. “How’re you doing?”

“Grand. Your nose looks better.”

“Getting there.” Cal puts the cake on the counter and takes the watch from a drawer. “I got you what you need.”

He holds the watch out to Trey. It’s clean; he put it in boiling water for a while and then left it to dry out on the heater overnight. He knows that probably fucked it up beyond repair, even if the bog hadn’t managed that already, but it needed doing.

Trey turns the watch over and looks at the inscription on the back. There are little marks on her hands, pink and shiny, where the scabs have fallen away.

“That’s your brother’s watch,” Cal says. “Right?”

Trey nods. She’s breathing like it takes an effort. Her skinny chest rises and falls.

Cal waits, in case there’s something she wants to say or ask, but she just stands there, looking at the watch. “I cleaned it,” he says. “It’s not working, but I’ll find a good watch-repair store somewhere and see if they can get it running for you. If you want to wear it, though, you gotta make sure to tell people Brendan left it behind.”

Trey nods. Cal isn’t sure how much of that she heard.

“You can tell your mama the real story,” he says. No matter what Sheila’s done, she deserves that much. “No one else.”

She nods again. She rubs the back of the watch with her thumb, like if she rubs hard enough the inscription might have mercy and disappear.

“Whoever gave you this,” she says. “They could still have been bullshitting you. About what happened.”

“I saw his body, kid,” Cal says gently. “The injuries were consistent with the statement I was given.”

He hears the hiss of Trey catching a breath. “You sound like a Guard,” she says.

“I know.”

“Is that where you got this? Off his body?”

“Yeah,” Cal says. He has no idea what he ought to do if she asks about the body.

She doesn’t. Instead she says, “Where is he?”

“He’s buried up in the mountains,” Cal says. “I couldn’t find the place again if I tried all year. But it’s a good place. Peaceful. I never saw a graveyard that was more peaceful.”

Trey stands there looking down at the watch in her hands. Then she turns around and walks out the door.

Cal watches her through the windows as she goes around behind the house and down the garden. She climbs over the gate into his back field and keeps walking. He watches till he sees her sit down at the edge of his woods, with her back against a tree. Her parka blends in with the underbrush; the only way he can pick her out is by the red flash of her hoodie.

He finds his phone and texts Lena. Any chance you still have a pup looking for a home? The kid could do with a dog. She’d take good care of it.

There’s a pause of a few minutes before Lena gets back to him. Two of them are sorted. Trey can take her pick of the rest.

Cal texts her, Could me and her come over sometime and see them? If that runt is still free I should get to know him better before I take him home.

This time his phone buzzes straightaway. He’s no runt now. He’s eating me out of house and home. I hope you’re a rich man. Come tomorrow afternoon. I’ll be home by 3.

Cal gives Trey half an hour out by the woods. Then he starts bringing his desk equipment out to the back garden, piece by piece: the drop sheet, the desk, his tool kit, wood filler, scrap wood and brushes and three little cans of wood stain that he picked up in town. He brings out the cake, too: when he was a kid, shouldering the weight of heavy emotions always left him hungry. It’s another beautiful wintry day, with wispy brushstrokes of cloud in a thin blue sky. The afternoon sun lies lightly on the fields.

He upends the desk and takes a good look at the broken side. It’s not in as bad shape as he thought. He figured he was looking at disassembling the whole thing and replacing the side panel, but while a few pieces of the splintered wood are beyond repair, plenty of it can be slotted back into place and glued. The gaps should be small enough for wood filler. Carefully, kneeling on the drop sheet, he starts picking away the unsalvageable shards. He cleans the dust off the others with a paintbrush and then starts painting glue onto them, one by one, and delicately easing them back where they belong. He keeps his shoulder turned to the woods.

He’s clamping a long shard into place when he hears the swish of feet in the grass. “Check this out,” he says, without looking up. “Seems to me it’s working OK.”

“Thought we were going to take it apart and put in a new side,” Trey says. Her voice comes out rough around the edges.

“Doesn’t look like we’ll need to,” Cal says. “We can find something else to take apart, if you want. I could use another chair.”

Trey squats to take a closer look at the desk. She’s stashed the watch away in some pocket. Or maybe she’s thrown it away somewhere in the woods, or buried it, but Cal doesn’t think so. “Looks good,” she says.

“Here,” Cal says. He points at the cans of wood stain. “You try these out on some scrap wood, see which one’s the best match. You might have to do some mixing to get it right.”

“Need a plate or something,” Trey says. “For mixing.”

“Get that old tin one.”

Trey lopes off to the house and comes back with the plate and a mug of water. She arranges herself cross-legged on the drop sheet, lays out her equipment around her and sets to work.

In their tree the rooks are peaceful, tossing scraps of conversation back and forth, occasionally soaring across to a neighboring nest to pay a visit. One skinny young one is hanging upside down from a branch to see what the world looks like that way. Trey mixes stain colors on the plate, paints a neat square of each mixture onto a stray piece of two-by-four and labels it in pencil, in some code of her own. Cal coaxes splinters of wood into place and clamps them there. After a while he opens the cake, and they break off a chunk each and sit on the grass to eat it, listening to the rooks exchange views and watching the shadows of clouds drift across the mountainsides.