It didn’t rain in the end. Or it hardly rained at all. Not so that they would have got wet. They might just have taken their walk, and not got wet, and got back home, and everything would have been fine. But she thought that it was going to rain and she made him come with her under the trees. The clouds grew dark, the spinney darker, and then there were big drops of rain falling on the leaves, and sometimes single drops that touched them, a sound like rain beginning, and just the beginning of that smell that the ground has when the rain touches it, but the shower stopped almost as soon as it began, and instead there was the smell of nettles crushed, a peppery salady smell, and she saw that he had picked up a stick and was thrashing at a clump of nettles, by where the branch had fallen, bashing them all down. Then he was kneeling in the nettles.
What’s that?
It looks like a cross.
Why? Was someone buried here?
No. Not buried.
He saw just the tip of it at first. As if there was a grave there, two pieces of smooth wood neatly joined and set upright in the ground. So they had marked it, he thought. How strange, that someone had marked it.
If only it had rained, she would think, afterwards. If it had rained, they would have stood close, and sheltered. And when enough rain had fallen they would have got wet even there beneath the tree, or running out from the trees, and noticed nothing but their wet selves with the rain falling about them.
This was where they had used to come. Where he had stood beside his father, with the dog. With Richard too, waiting for the birds to come in. Late on a winter’s afternoon. His fingers chilling in woollen mittens. Getting cold, wanting to go in, but Richard was not going in, Richard was staying, and he had to do whatever Richard did, he would not have come out if Richard had not come out and now he had to stay and watch as Richard did, although he was so much younger and not ready to learn to shoot himself for some years yet; he stood still and chill beside his brother and his father and the dog, and felt the cold seep into him until it hurt and yet he didn’t move an inch. And at last his father would raise the gun at the oncoming birds. Or on himself. Hard to believe, in this little wood, so very green and humming, with the rooks overhead, how bare it had been that day he saw him lying there. It was all covered over now, so many years’ leaves fallen beneath the tree, layer upon layer, and grass, nettles impinging, spreading, tall, reaching for the light. There should have been no sign of what had occurred. No evidence. Any chance-scattered shot from that day also long covered over within the tree, so many rings deep.
That’s not right, he said. It says ‘Rosie’. That’s not right.
Who’s Rosie?
It’s not right.
What’s not right?
Rosie was a dog, he said. Rosie was Billy’s dog.
His hands and knees stung as he knelt to push aside the last of the nettles. Stung almost to numbness. He traced the letters that were amateurishly carved into the wood.
What could Billy have been thinking, to do that? Billy, the one who found him, that day. It was Billy who had brought the news home. Billy had come with the news, and their dog Jess, and Rosie too, he must have had Rosie with him, only Jess on the lead he had to put her on to bring her away. He had trusted Billy. Of all of them he had trusted Billy the most. So how could Billy have buried the dog here? And his mother, too? How could they do something so very – he looked for the word, holding himself back, holding emotion in check, choosing the plainest, the least expressive word that came to him – so puzzling, so very – inappropriate?
There had been no nettles then, in November. The nettles at that time of year had died back to ghostly stalks and the ground was brown with fallen leaves. Grey sky above the bare trees. Fog low across the fields.
This is where he was, you see. My father, I told you about my father. Well, this is where it happened.
They
