Initially it was stark and open, but after a few hundred meters and a gently sloping hill, he arrived in the corridor of trees. At eye level, the trunks were more like muscled thighs—like giants standing around. On the ground there were knots of bark, and long streaks of shedding, crumbling beneath his feet. Clay stayed; he wouldn’t leave.
Beyond it, a car was parked, but still on this side:
A Holden, a long red box.
Further away, across the dry river, was a gate, in the light. And beyond the gate was a house; a hunchback, with sad eyes and a mouth.
Out amongst the tall bony weeds, there was life. Crouched in the heather and scrub and the Bernborough-like grass, the air was overrun. There was a teeming noise of insects, electric and erudite. A whole language in a single note. Effortless.
Clay, on the other hand, was laboring. He’d found in himself a fresh hemorrhage of fear and guilt, and doubt. It weaved through him, triple-tiered.
How many procrastinations could he work through?
How many times could he open the small wooden chest, and hold each item within?
Or rifle through the sports bag?
How many books could he reach for, and read?
How many letters to Carey could he formulate, but not yet write?
Once, his hand fell onto a long belt of late-afternoon sun.
“Go on.”
He said it.
It shocked him that the words came out.
Even more so a second time.
“Go on then, boy.”
Go on, Clay.
Go and tell him why you came. Look him in his weathered face and sunken murderous eyes. Let the world see you for what you are:
Ambitious. Stubborn. Traitorous.
Today, you’re not a brother, he thought.
Not a brother and not a son.
Do it, do it now.
And he did.
Yes, Clay walked out and on, but who exactly was he walking to that afternoon? Who was he really, and where did he come from, and what decisions and indecisions had he made to become the man he was, and wasn’t? If we imagine Clay’s past coming in on the tide, then the Murderer had traveled toward it from a constant, distant dry land, and he was never the strongest swimmer. Maybe it’s best summed up like this:
In the present, there was a boy walking toward what was so far only a wondrous, imagined bridge.
In the past, there was another boy, whose path—across longer distance and further years—had also ended here, but in adulthood.
Sometimes I have to remind myself.
The Murderer wasn’t always the Murderer.
* * *