PART ONE: THE HAUNTING
“The past is never dead. It’s not even past. All of us labor in webs spun long before we were born, webs of heredity and environment, of desire and consequence, of history and eternity. Haunted by wrong turns and roads not taken, we pursue images perceived as new but whose providence dates to the dim dramas of childhood, which are themselves but ripples of consequence echoing down the generations. The quotidian demands of life distract from this resonance of images and events, but some of us feel it always.”
—William Faulkner
1
TO BURY A GENTLE BOY
FRANCESCA
Four months ago
Inever would have imagined that my Sunday night would end with me burying my fiancé in the woods behind my cottage. Alas, here I am, listening to the muffled chatter of crows arguing over which part of him they’ll eat first if the soil refuses him. The wheelbarrow seeks out every pebble, for it jostles this way and that, prompting Gabriel’s covered head to knock against the steel tray with each push. His body doesn’t move, at least, not with a mind of its own.
Not anymore.
I watch the linen cloth, stained red with the memory of him, and wonder how a dead body can be so loud. Gabriel sings to me; with every step I take deeper down the fir-lined corridor, I hear his voice. Hear the memories seep into the cracks of my composure until I’m drowning in the thought of him.
In daylight, the walk doesn’t feel nearly as long. But the night presses in, tendrils of darkness snaking around my bare shoulders. From between the canopies cut pure silver threads of moonlight, illuminating the horrid state of my nightdress. Oncewhite, its silk is now crimson. The blood has stiffened the fabric, and every step causes it to crackle. I can smell him on me. Metallic, sweet and nauseating.
Remnants of the household’s supper awaken somewhere deep in my belly. A portion breaks away, crawls up my throat until I have to clamp a hand over my mouth to prevent bile from spewing out. Blood clings to my fingers, and it only worsens what my guilt tries to unearth.
Everything is spinning.Moving. Though logic fights against the encroaching panic, my mind whispers that my lungs are in the wrong spot. My heart shouldn’t be beating from its current position. I’m dying. I know I am. My body knows what I’ve done; thesetreesknow.
Why else would it be working against me? Why else would the pathway be neverending?
It seems God bestows a small mercy upon me in the form of my cousin’s voice.
“Easy, Chess,” murmurs Edmund, both hands wrapped around the wheelbarrow’s handles as he trudges forward.
He hasn’t glanced behind him thus far, believing that I’d follow obediently. And yet still he senses the turmoil bubbling beneath my skin. His hands are muddy, dirt stuck beneath his fingernails, and the reminder of what he’s done for me only has me choking on my next breath. He croons quietly, gentle words of reassurance in that polished accent, just like he did when we were children.
Except now he’s guiding me through the dark, towards the hole he dug for the man I killed.
The Cyclopean eye of Edmund’s headlight devours the shadows ahead, rolling across moss and overgrown roots. I stay behind him for that reason, thinking of Polyphemus groping blindly for intruders in his cave. That light can’t land on me. Itwould see too much. Forcemeto see what I’ve wrought. It would see me, and it wouldknow.
I don’t understand.
I can’t understand.
Gabriel has never frightened me. Not even once. Memories drag me farther back than I’d like, all the way to age sixteen when our families first arranged our engagement. A scrawny redhead whose voice cracked whenever he excitedly spoke of golf, Gabriel was always gentle. He would visit after school, apologising for the mud on his cuffs before asking permission to hold my hand, blushing a storm through his freckles.
I think of those days now, how I would ask him about the stains. The other boys would spill through the doors, muddy and bruised, yelling about their latest rugby win. Gabriel would pull me aside and whisper how he chased a golf ball into a ditch and slipped.
Goodness, I can smell him in that moment and yearn to pluck it from the past. To replace this foul smell with mint bubblegum and the aftershave he slapped on before he even had the first sprout of hair on his chin. Half of me still believes that if we were to walk any longer, the leaves would come alive in the presence of this man. He has that sort of gentleness that can bloom flowers and water roots.
Had. Had. Had.
Hehadthat gentleness.
Before I killed him.
I thought I might love him one day. Convinced myself of it, certainly. His nimble little fingers trembled when he officially proposed exactly two minutes after midnight on my twentieth birthday.
Poor thing stumbled through the words as he held out the emerald ring he claimed matched my eyes. I shut them against the image whilst Edmund hauls the wheelbarrow to a stop. Ishould help him. But I cannot. My cousin moves in silence. The fabric drags against metal, and a lump hits the ground as Edmund grunts.
Polyphemus’s light blinds me when I open my eyes, and I feel naked.
