Black Feathers

41

They buried Brooke beside the tree.

The removal of the nails reopened her ruptured arteries. The blood leaked in meandering pulses as Gordon lay her on the earth.

She spoke for several minutes to both of them before falling silent.

“The pain isn’t so bad now.”

She was shaking so hard, every word came out juddered. Gordon wept because he knew how much pain he’d caused in trying to release her. The renewed bleeding was his fault too, but there’d been no choice – they couldn’t have left her hanging.

“It’s just the cold,” she said. “I can’t bear the cold.”

They’d placed a foam camping mat under her and two sleeping bags on top, tucking them tightly around her, leaving her arms untouched. Her blood leaked straight onto the leaves and into the earth. John Palmer ran to fetch the last sleeping bag. Gordon wanted to hold her hand. Instead he placed the palm of his hand over her heart and tried to send warmth and comfort into her body. Her shaking seemed to settle.

She looked at him, and he could tell Brooke knew she was dying. Something held the terror of that approaching darkness off, some strength she had that her father did not possess.

“I wish we’d had a little more time together, Gordon.”

“I wish we’d had a lot.”

She smiled.

“You’re a good person. Don’t ever think you’re not.” She was nodding, more to herself than him it seemed. “I know you’ll find him.” Her eyes closed for a moment. “Yes, you’ll find the Crowman. And he’s for the good, Gordon. I’m sure of it now.”

John Palmer returned with the blanket and rested it over her. She smiled at him, but he couldn’t look at her face.

“So cold,” she whispered.

John Palmer’s face creased further into grief.

“Hold her,” said Gordon.

John Palmer didn’t move.

Very gently, Gordon took the man’s hand and placed it on Brooke’s forehead.

“Just touch her,” he breathed.

John Palmer shuffled closer and placed his face beside Brooke’s. He cradled her head. Gordon watched the smile this elicited slipping from her face. And then it was peaceful. Gordon stood and left the man with his murdered child.

It was more than an hour later that John Palmer walked the few yards back into camp, his face pale and his hands still dirty with Brooke’s dried blood. It took Gordon a long time to convince him that they needed to bury her and even longer to persuade him that the tree she died beside should be her final resting place. Eventually, John Palmer gave in.

But Gordon was sincere in what he told the man:

Brooke needed to return to the land that had birthed her. Now that her spirit was flying and had no use for her body, it should be left to nourish the tree.

The burial took until dusk. By the failing light the blood on the beech tree’s bark became charcoal on grey. They didn’t try to remove it. John Palmer muttered some half-remembered Christian solemnities and fell once again to his knees beside the freshly-turned earth.

Gordon whispered:

“The crows will carry you home, Brooke.”

He felt stupid saying it, but on a level he couldn’t consciously access, he believed it.

Whatever had held John Palmer together since he’d lost his home and sent his wife away was now unravelling. What he’d run away from had caught up with him. It looked as though, at any moment, he might claw away the earth from his daughter’s body and try to pull her back from death.

“We’ve got to move the other bodies,” said Gordon.

He stepped away from her graveside towards the clearing, hoping he could draw John Palmer away. The man looked up at him, pale and sickened.

“I’m not burying those murderers. Those… raping, child-killers.” His words came out clogged with tears and fury. “They’ve taken… everything.”

Gordon stood silent for a few moments.

“I know,” he said. “And I’m sorry. We don’t have to bury them. But we have to move them. How far is the tunnel from here?”

Gordon hadn’t been back since they found him. John Palmer shrugged.

“Not far.”

“Can we carry them there before it gets dark?”

“We can drag them.”

Gordon didn’t wait for John Palmer or ask again. He walked to the nearest raider, the one with the machete, and grabbed hold of the man’s ankles. The trainers he wore were muddied and the laces had been replaced with garden twine. The soles were almost worn through. The man’s bones weren’t encased in much flesh. The attackers were starving. They may once have been respectable men with jobs and families and hobbies, but they’d become homeless marauders, thieving to stay alive. Gordon wondered how long it had taken for their moral codes to break down. Denied what they wanted or merely angry at their lot, violence would have come next. Perhaps with that violence came a certain reinstating of the illusion of power over otherwise unrelenting circumstances. And then taking not only goods and money but taking more precious things like dignity and chastity. Their own lives annihilated, they had become destroyers of other people’s existences; rapists and murderers, as John Palmer rightly stated. This was one of the ways evil spread, a disease of the will that anyone could contract. Gordon couldn’t condone what the men had done. There was no excuse.

And what of his own guilt? Violence against his family and against Brooke and John Palmer had given birth to violence in him. He had stabbed three men now and one of them lay dead a few paces away. Was there any way back from that? Would he become nothing more than a starving survivalist? He could only console himself with the knowledge that each aggressive act he’d committed had been in defence. Had he not fought with enough conviction, he could easily be dead. Surely he had the right to protect his own life.

All these things he thought as he dragged the machete man over the leafy forest floor. In a few minutes the sun would be beyond the horizon and this job would be impossible. He looked towards the place where John Palmer still knelt beside the grave of his daughter. The man didn’t move.

“Look,” he said. “Just show me where the tunnel is and I’ll move them. I want to get it done before it’s too dark.”

The John Palmer who stood up to help him was an old man, his hair suddenly greyer and thinner, his face slacker, his body weaker. For once, Gordon was glad of the silence that existed between them as they hauled the dead men from their clearing, through the quietly observant beech trees to the darkness in which Gordon himself had almost died.

Gordon moved the third body on his own, leaving John Palmer to sit once again beside Brooke’s grave. Once he’d reached the tunnel mouth he pulled each of the bodies as far inside as he could and laid them beside each other in the darkness. He knelt there with them for several minutes, praying in silence. He prayed that their spirits would travel to somewhere less terrible than the world they’d left behind. He prayed for their families. And he prayed for their forgiveness.