The red-haired boy with half a left ear cocks the hammer on the revolver and breathes deep as he brings the barrel to his temple. He closes his eyes and his right forefinger slips cautiously over the trigger. He weeps, and the tears squeeze through his closed eyelids. His mouth is closed and he screams through gritted teeth. A guttural howl, a lunatic wail, death-frenzied, life-crazed. But confused, mostly.
The finger on the trigger. Pull it, he tells himself. Be brave like George, he tells himself. He breathes deep again but he can’t pull the trigger and he opens his eyes and is met by the face of a man looking down at him.
‘Almost there,’ the man says.
The boy screams in fear and raises the gun. ‘Get away,’ he spits. ‘I’ll do you in, I will. I’ll shoot your face right in.’
The man nods casually and steps away and the boy watches him move to the campfire as he aims at his back.
‘I mean you no harm,’ the man says.
The man is tall and lean. A bushy black moustache over his lips. A white shirt covered in dirt and blood. Black pants and boots and a large black hat with a wide brim that shadows his face.
‘Who are you?’ Shane spits.
‘I’m the gravedigger,’ the man says, smelling the tea inside a cup he’s found by the campfire logs. He slurps that tea down like it was made for him.
‘Have you come to bury the bodies?’ the boy asks, because his mind moves slow, and the man with the tea knows this already.
‘No, I’m not here for these bodies,’ he says, now sipping the tea. ‘But bodies are what I’m looking for.’
‘Are you one of them?’ the boy asks.
‘Who’s them?’
‘Them what done all this?’ the boy replies, casting his eyes over his dead friends in the human line. The man turns his eyes to the bodies.
‘What happened here, boy?’
The boy speaks through tears. ‘There was two girls, one younger and one older,’ he says. ‘I saw them by the creek and I ran back here and told my boss, George, about them and then they came on through and we gave ’em some tea and . . . and . . .’
The boy weeps.
‘And?’ the man prompts, running his fingers across his left shoulder where a bloodstain has seeped through his shirt.
‘And the boys were gonna have their way with the blonde woman, and my boss, George, he sent me down to the hut but I didn’t go all the way down. I hid behind them shrubs because I wanted to see them have their way and . . . and . . . then he came out of the forest.’
‘Who came out of the forest, boy?’
‘The ghost,’ the boy says. ‘He moved like a ghost and crept up behind McDougall and cut his throat open before I had a chance to say a word of warnin’ and I froze a bit but my pecker didn’t because it pissed in my pants and I looked down and saw my wet pants and when I looked up again that ghost had stuck a sword inside George.’
‘A sword?’ echoes the man, intrigued.
The boy cries hard now, the events rising together in a great wave of chilling reality.
‘What did this ghost man look like?’
‘He was a Japanese,’ the boy says.
The man with the moustache shakes his head. ‘Extraordinary,’ he says.
He nods at the boy’s left ear, where blood is pooling in the worn rag dressing.
‘What happened to your ear?’
‘The younger girl was carrying a shovel and she swung it at me and cut my ear fair in half,’ the boy says.
The man smiles beneath his moustache. ‘And why would she do a thing like that?’
The boy shakes his head. ‘I was trying to grab hold of her.’
‘Why were you grabbing hold of her?’
‘We were gonna keep her here,’ the boy says.
The man nods. Then his eyes turn to the log by the campfire and find the bottle of moonshine the boy was just swigging from. The man’s eyes light up as he throws his teacup in the fire. He picks up the bottle of moonshine and the very touch of it makes him exhale with relief. The bottle has humbled him somehow.
The boy watches the man sit on the large fireside log closest to him and remove his hat with what looks like exaltation.
The man smiles and holds the bottle up to the boy. ‘You mind if I have a splash?’
‘Go ahead, mister.’
The boy could only sip that moonshine because it burned like liquid fire inside him, but the man puts that bottle to his dry and blistered lips and glugs down half of it in a single blast, his cheeks puffing like a bullfrog, his throat working hard like he’s sucking on a water hose after a day’s work in a wheat field.
The man brings the bottle down and closes his eyes, breathing slow and deep. ‘What’s your name, boy?’
‘Shane.’
He opens his eyes again, turns to the boy. ‘What were you gonna do to the girl, Shane?’
The boy shakes his head. ‘No, no, I’m not gonna tell you that.’
‘You can tell me,’ the man says. ‘Go ahead, Shane. I promise you no analysis and I promise you no harm.’
‘Anala . . . what?’
‘Analysis, Shane,’ the man says. ‘Thinking on an event then considering the meaning and the making of it.’
The boy thinks on this for a moment. He turns to George beside him. Then he speaks softly. ‘George said she was gonna be my first.’
The man nods. ‘You were gonna have your way with the girl?’
The boy drops his eyes, nodding.
The man swigs from the bottle again. ‘Tell me, Shane, what stopped you from pulling the trigger just now when you had that gun at the side of your head?’
Shane rests the gun in his lap now, sits up with his legs crossed.
‘I couldn’t do it,’ he says. ‘I kept thinkin’ God was up
