Claudia Casper - The Mercy Journals

If he looked at me with love, with quick affection, even just with welcome, I told myself I wouldn’t kill him. A deal with God, with fate, do this one thing. A wager made in a mirror, dealer’s eyes meeting player’s — twins winking.

I got within six or seven metres. Leo smiled, but he showed lots of teeth. It couldn’t be described as friendly.

I advanced, thinking, Leo’s feet must be as heavy as mine. But when I approached, I noticed that his pants were folded up and he was barefoot. He was going to be lighter and faster, though he’d have less traction. I stopped. Leo’s smile thinned to a sneer or a taunt, though not necessarily malicious, and he cocked his head slightly. Oh ho, so that’s how it is, his smirk could be saying, or For all your fine talk. It could also have meant, What do you want?

Speak, Leo, say my name. Let me hear warmth in your throat.

He bent back down to his work and drove the blade of the shovel into the ground, leaving me standing there, awkward, lumbering, off balance. The sound of stone and grit against metal made the enamel of my teeth hurt. Because of the high furrows and my position on the hill, I could not see what kind of hole he was digging.

I clumped forward a few more steps. My peripheral vision was snagged by something on the left, an unexpected brightness in the landscape. I looked away from Leo to see what it was. A chequered tablecloth floated just above the earth, held up, I guessed, by the stubble of the dried, cut wild grass.

A picnic? Here? Now?

Leo stood straight again, removed his sunglasses, and wiped the sweat from his brow. I saw a mark across his temple into his greying hair, a smear of red. Was it there before he wiped the sweat from his face?

The time for questions was now. If I failed to ask what he was doing it would either seem as though I already knew or didn’t care. The crow flew over again, this time followed by a gang of crows. A murder of men. Their flyby focused over Leo and where he was digging.

The shape of a body took form in my mind — bloody, heavy, lifeless, the tablecloth a shroud — the scrape of shovel blade against stones the sound of a grave being dug.

This was the moment. Were the figments of my mind bound to what was real, or were they nightmare visions thrown up by a psyche that had raced between horror and the mundane for far too long? Was it possible he would leave? Would he play nice? I faced my brother, wanting to ask what he was doing, but asking was a submissive act; it left you waiting for an answer, vulnerable to a lie. And as I stood I knew there was no point in asking because I could neither believe nor disbelieve his answer. I had to proceed without cover of words and see what my eyes saw.

What are you doing? I asked.

Leo looked down at his feet.

Trickery is so much better than murder, but trick tock, trick tock, I couldn’t think of any tricks. Minutes went by and the silence started to say too much. The more time passed, the more precise became the silence’s meaning. No need for the junk of speech.

What did the silence say to Leo? It was this uncertainty, this territory that I couldn’t quite see that allowed me to hesitate, that trapped me in a pause. I was the player in his play. I had to wait. Something would be revealed. No amount of patience would prevent that.

Leo looked me in the eye. I got her at the chickens, he said. He turned to indicate the body and I saw her in my mind’s eye, stretched out, a sacrifice on the altar, because he had no reason to live and could not die. Destruction spread out from him like blood from a cut jugular, and I felt the silent click of a switch turning on. I raised my walking stick in both hands, took it back, and swung it at the back of his head. His head snapped forward then bobbled back, but the tension leaked out of his body. He fell to his knees. I stepped back in preparation to strike him again, though by then I’d rather have killed myself. I struck two more times and heard the sound, like a thick eggshell, not on the edge of a glass but dropped on a floor.

I flung the stick away from me.

In the furrow behind the tablecloth, the long body of the cougar nestled in the milky-brown earth, her small flat head partly severed from her body. I stroked her head between the ears. Her body wasn’t cold yet. I touched the blood on her chest then licked my finger so that she could also travel in me as I had in her.

The pistol lay unused beside the tablecloth. I checked. The cartridge was full. Nothing had been revealed.

I screamed at the sky, at whatever had created me, at whatever had created this, because nothing seemed like Leo’s fault anymore. I screamed and screamed until my voice broke and I had no more strength.

I knelt down and lifted my brother’s broken head in my lap. I stroked his forehead and kissed him and wept and told him how sorry I was.

Then I went back to the cabin. I walked upstairs. Griffin was holding the baby. Parker was pale and sweaty, but blissful. I was covered in dirt and my brother’s blood.

This must be the last, I yelled. My eyes burned into her. Do you hear me? What I have done for you must be the last. It is on you to start something new.

A sob strangled my voice. I howled and the baby cried, but I didn’t care. That baby must know what it owed its life to. Griffin handed the howling baby to Parker and came toward me.

I looked at Parker and she met my gaze. She was all mother at that moment, which meant feral and ruthless. She couldn’t feel anything that wasn’t related to her baby. I willed her to tell him.

Leo assaulted Parker, I said. She flinched. And then he refused to leave.

Griffin turned to Parker.

I didn’t want the baby to get hurt.

I left. I could feel their belief in their goodness, in their good intentions, in each other’s good intentions, and that belief was too big a gulf. They believed they were separate from Leo, that they were made of different stuff from him. They’d never understand. They hadn’t been in the furrow, holding his head. They hadn’t heard his skull break. They hadn’t loved him. I belonged with him now.

I went down to the kitchen to clean my hands. I needed to be clean to think. A bowl of apples sat on the table, yellow ones, transparent, first of the season. Hours ago, those apples would have been for me, but they were no longer. I was in a state of Nirvana, conscious but free of desire. I was a piece of wood. I drank water, knowing the rivers owed me nothing, and drank anyway, because what I did didn’t matter anymore.

When Leo fell I glimpsed his profile, and what it telegraphed was so uncomplicated, so unjudging. So, it’s you after all, he might have said. It’s you who are the murderer. Not me. Or, You didn’t love me and I thought you did. Or, Oh well, it doesn’t matter. When he fell, one eye looked at dirt and the other at my ankle.

Upstairs there were murmurs and a kittenish cry. I decided to go back out to the field and join my brother in his feast of dirt. I wished I’d told him I’d be keeping him company.

The crows waited for me on the humps of the furrows, loosely gathered like a sidewalk audience after a talented busker starts packing up. They scattered reluctantly but alighted again a short distance away. Leo hadn’t left, which surprised me, weirdly. I looked up at the sky, the grey sky, that upside-down cup of a firmament, and it looked unhinged and unfirm, and I found it strange that I could not see past the light into the ocean of blackness beyond, found it strange that I was stuck in night’s opposite when I was so close to returning to those dark and soundless skirts.

I would go to ground between my companions. I’d put my arm around my brother’s shoulders and lay my head on the cat’s soft belly, raise the pistol to my head, and pull the trigger. I imagined the crows startling and flapping up, circling in alarm, ready to depart at a second shot but, hearing none, re-alighting amidst the stubble and being there to greet Griffin when he came to see what happened.