T. Boyle - When the Killing's Done

Her legs are carrying her up the wash, going higher and higher till the banks begin to narrow and there’s a trickle of water running in and out beneath the rocks as if trying to hide itself. There’s a place up ahead, a grove of trees on the opposite bank where one of the hundred runlets that feeds the creek in winter chews its way down into the canyon, and she realizes now that she’s heading for it. There’s peace there, she knows there is, and though things would have changed over the course of the years, trees gone and trees come up, cliffs sheared and great blinding caravans of boulders flung down, she thinks she can find it still. And she has her legs under her and her legs know the way.

She’s sweated through, even to her underwear, by the time she gets there, and her breath isn’t what it once was. But the place — a high seep where the sheep liked to come to lick at the rock, both for the water and the minerals — looks pretty much the same as she remembered it. A clutch of oaks, bigger now, thick around as her shoulders, and a slow easy drip of water that falls away from the rock face and into a shadowed pool alive to the dance of water striders and the other things, the smaller ones, the boatmen. The boatmen are there. And a single frog, disappearing with a soft musical plop under a hover of electric-blue damselflies.

The ashes are in a metal canister, with a screw top, not an urn. Or not a clay urn anyway, which is how she thinks of the term, something in it that speaks of antiquity and continuance. But this isn’t an urn, it’s a canister. And she settles down by the shaded dark pool no bigger than a washbasin, extracts it from her daypack and sets it beside her. Then she unhooks the guitar from her shoulder, cradles it in her lap and begins to strum, listening, pausing to tune it, getting it right. The first song she sings is one she used to do with Toby, a blues lament, key of E-flat, so sad she can barely get the words out, then her fingers find the chords of “Carrickfergus,” a tune Anise made her play again and again when she was a girl—“Carry me over where, Ma?” she used to say. “Carry me over where?” And then the songs for Anise, just for Anise, the ones she made her own and the ones she wrote herself. The songs. The sun. The island. And she won’t scatter the ashes till dark, till they’re all on the boat and gone away, and the only sounds are the sounds of the night.

Somewhere there’s a fox, its eyes stealing the light. This isn’t one of the foxes that’s been caged or collared or even captured. He’s a survivor, a fighter, the flange of his nose torn in a forgotten dispute over territory and healed and torn and healed again. There’s movement in the nighttime grass — crickets will be out, scorpions, things with the juice of life in them. He’s alert and listening. And somewhere, in the deepest shadow of the hacked yellow grass, something else moves in a slow sure friction of scale and grasping vertebrae — a colonist, a rafter, a survivor of a different kind altogether. Picture the stripped-back slink of muscle, the flick of the tongue, the cold fixed eyes that don’t need to see a thing. And hush. The grass stirs, the moon sinks into the water. Night on Santa Cruz Island, night immemorial.