Patrick Flanery - Absolution

I remind myself that there is the other source, as yet untapped; given the chance, Sam might tell a quite different story.

*

You watched him suck at a bottle of brown-looking water, his hair flashing, dirty, dark and unlovable. You could hear his tongue cleave to the roof of his mouth. ‘Do you have any bread?’ he asked. You did not reply, trying to resist being drawn into responsibility. He said it again. ‘In your bag? Do you have another peach maybe? Or an apple?’

‘No. I have dates.’

‘Can I have some?’ he asked, foot twisting against the ground.

‘Don’t you have any food?’

‘Not like yours,’ whining, beseeching, toe digging a cavity, ‘not anything like that.’

‘Then no. You can’t have any of my fruit. I have a long journey ahead of me. My food has to last.’

You had come to desolation, a monochrome world, the bright colours of childhood disappeared, scarlet dresses lost and burned, or given to the maid to give to her own children, who might now have given them to their own children.

(Did you ever have scarlet dresses? Did I ever put you in a dress? I go to the albums to search for a picture, my little red-cap daughter, and can find you only in green or yellow, no red, no dress, a skirt at most, a stern blouse, khaki and white, brown and black, a brief surge of blue and orange. You must have had a red dress at some point; every girl in my family has always had at least one red dress. Did I fail you in this, too?)

You marched away from Sam, down into a ravine, where you hid yourself in the brush, lowered your shorts, and pushed until your bowels and bladder were empty. There were rolls of paper in your rucksack, sanitary napkins, too, which you had packed knowing that days might pass like this, that you would travel to your fate at the speed of contemplation; you did not want to be stuck without the few props that still separated you from the animals, who stared dumbly through the bush at your performance, furry faces sniffing your waste and unease, watching with bemusement as you buried your soil in the hard-packed earth.

By noon the winds began to rise and the cloud of black smoke appeared high above you, shearing the sky in half.

‘It will be fine,’ you said to Sam, who looked up, eyes wary, ‘as long as the winds keep blowing. We worry when the winds drop, or if it starts to rain. You must not be afraid.’

‘What is it?’ he asked, staring at the growing weight of the sky, and back at you, and to the truck.

‘Many things.’

Tiger jumped out of the cab, showing a stained tooth. He growled and nudged at Sam’s leg. The boy stepped back and turned the tap on the standpipe for the dog to drink. Where it fell, the water cut a muddy red pool, and Tiger drank from this, too.

‘Do you go to school?’ you asked.

‘It’s the school holidays.’

‘Of course.’ It was January. He twisted his mouth and stood, hands on his tiny hips, staring at you.

‘Why were you waiting by the road?’ he asked, in such a tone of accusation it startled you into thinking he might be dangerous.

‘Why shouldn’t I?’

‘Because people like us don’t wait by roads,’ he said, ‘not in the middle of the night. That’s what Bernard said.’

‘Maybe I had no choice. Maybe the lift I expected didn’t turn up and I had no choice but to hitchhike. Did you ever think of that?’

Sam appeared to accept this and turned off the tap, which dripped with maddening persistence. He put his fingers into the hole, letting the drips run over them, turning the soil on his hands into bright red scars.

‘Do you do this every day?’ you asked.

‘Do what?’

‘Sit at picnic sites while Bernard sleeps.’

‘For a while now. Not so long. Maybe for not so long now.’ And then he nodded his head, as if that were the real answer.

‘If he’s not your father, then where are your parents?’

‘Dead.’ The boy looked at you, his face sour, puzzling, head still nodding, edging into a compulsive rhythm. He had little control over his body, it did things he did not expect it to, misbehaved even when he thought it was being still. ‘Bernard took me when they died.’

‘Was he a friend of your parents?’

‘An uncle maybe. An uncle or cousin. I’m your uncle or cousin maybe . That’s what he said.’

‘Does he have a house?’

‘Yes. We stayed there once. I slept on a couch. There was only one bedroom in the house, and that was his bedroom. So I slept on a couch. And then he said he had to go on a job. So we left his house the next day. After I slept on the couch. And then we started driving,’ he said, a rehearsed speech, words he struggled to remember. Perhaps he knew there was something wrong with the order or the content. He shook his head.

‘How long ago was that?’

‘A while.’ Sam stared at you, nothing but blank confusion in his face. He was lost, almost witless. He would illuminate nothing. His presence must have more material relevance. ‘I want to go home. Do you know how to get there?’ he asked.

‘I don’t know where your home is.’

‘No?’ he said, sounding surprised. ‘I thought maybe you did.’

Making no noise at all, three women appeared out of the bush coming from the direction of the ravine. They each carried two plastic petrol jugs, variously coloured red, green, and blue. The women nodded at you and Sam, and went to collect water at the standpipe. You and the women exchanged words that Sam did not understand. Tiger growled at the boy’s side as the women finished filling the jugs. There were a few more words between you and the women, and courteous nods, a language and a form you learned as a child on visits to the farm, before the women slipped away from the site and back down into the ravine. The black clouds had covered the sun, and though your watch said it was only 12.15 it was as dark as dusk. Many hours of day remained before the abrupt sunset, the quick darkening that spreads from the north-eastern sky, drawing a lid over the land.

‘Should we pray?’ Sam asked.

‘Why?’

‘For God to make the clouds go away.’

‘It won’t make any difference,’ trying not to sound impatient.

‘What do you mean?’

‘What I say.’

‘I think I’m going to pray.’ The boy knelt in the dirt next to the dog, clasping his hands together, and looked up at the clouds, then dipped his head, closed his eyes, and mumbled for a long time. His face was fixed, intense in its devotion, head nodding in time to his prayer.

‘It won’t do any good,’ you snapped. ‘Either the winds will carry the clouds away from us, or the rains will come. There is nothing we can do. Praying will change nothing. All we can do is take cover if it starts to rain, so you might as well stop praying. That’s just nonsense. Stop it now.’

But Sam continued his mumbling, and it worked at you until you walked over to him and shook him with such violence that he fell over in the dirt. As you did this, Tiger’s teeth pierced your leg, enamel cracking against bone. With your free leg, you kicked the dog in the head until his jaws released. And then you kicked again, breaking the dog’s back, and with a hissing whimper Tiger sprawled on the ground, immobile but still alive. You dragged him by the legs under a bush, where you finished him with a rock to the skull.

The boy stood up, tears popping in dusty boils on his cheeks. It would have been logical to leave the boy and man. To walk away would have been the best choice, following the women into the bush, taking back roads, escaping the country at some remote point. By killing the dog you had done something that would have consequences, as if starting a chain reaction.

‘We could go. Before he wakes up,’ Sam said, looking towards the truck and then to the bush. At first you thought he didn’t understand about Tiger, but then you saw it clearly. He was electing you as rescuer. But you could not take this child and walk into the bush. You could not raise him in a cave, a hermit. You had only enough for one, and Bernard would follow you, or send people to follow you, and that would be the end of everything — not just your life but also the lives of many others. Before killing you they would burn the names from your mouth, pull syllables from your fingernails, soak vowels and consonants from your nostrils, remind you of their authority with steel and wire, electricity and fire.