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the long night he rolled over and grabbed my ears with both his hands that smelt like rue and dirt.
    ‘Tell my sister they don’t stay dead,’ mouthed my brother as close to my ear as he could get.

Chapter Four
Wake
    ON HIS SECOND DAY DEAD and laid out, Moo spread the food and I was sent to fetch the Slevins. To fetch Scully Slevin really, as Pa was set on doing the whole thing right with a paid-for fiddler and strong brew, but Moo said in her now-fading sort of voice that we couldn’t invite Scully and cut Ma. So before dawn on the day of my brother’s wake I dragged myself along the Eastward, cursing all such mornings.
    The dry summer had turned the moaney talkative. Everywhere the mire shrunk into itself and the vapours rose disgustful. It was like all the waters were earwigging about our goings-on behind my back as I went.
    ‘Kop!’ said the rising gases.
    ‘Puh-puh-puh,’ said a set of bubbles.
    But the dawn rose pearly and the path was lightened by cool-morning sunshine, and I couldn’t stay cursing no matter how mizzled I felt. I was walking the crown of the world.
    The sunlight was just a slim silver ring rising all around the bog rim. The still-dark ground and all its rush and wort glittered under a spread of dew-gem, each blade with its fat drop gleaming and each drop reflecting its neighbours until the whole world looked to be caught up in a silver net. Spidersilk between the grasses gleamed with dewdrops and I remembered that when I was a child I wanted to take them up and wear them just as they were.
    Of a sudden the world was shining and not just because of the dew. I didn’t commonly remember anything about my childhood, and the memory of that girl and her dew-gems inspirited me. It was good to remember something from before.
    ‘Pip, pip, pip,’ said the bog.
    Just over the lip of the moaney I stopped. There were the Slevins already, coming along the Skyward, Ma almost folded in half under her weight of baskets, and the boy ahead, fiddling. I didn’t know how they knew they were wanted. I didn’t know how Scully Slevin could walk so deft when he had as much sight as a stump. I didn’t know why Mrs Slevin was waving at me with such gusto, friend-like.
    I lifted my hand in return, but not so’s you’d call it a wave.
    Ma heaved herself up onto the shoulder of the bog.
    ‘Well, here we are,’ she said, in a muck of sweat and spittle. She gave me two of her baskets and turned to the green below. ‘Look at that. Beeee-oo-ti-ful,’ she sighed, one hand on her middle and the other fanning at her bunched-up face.
    ‘Yes,’ I said.
    Scully stood by her now, rocking on his heels and smiling out into the sky like a real fool. I led the way back along the Eastward.
    ‘Seen the whale-mam, have you?’ Mrs Slevin asked me, out of nowhere. I shook my head. ‘Her calf’s beached itself round at Marrey Cove.’ I made no reply. Pa had said I had to fetch them, not that I had to be pleasant.
    ‘That’s what happens when they lose their pilot,’ she said, shuffling alongside me and gasping somewhat. I tried to get ahead so that I wouldn’t have to talk but that Scully kept up with me on his goat-feet as his mam dropped back on her old, hobbled ones. I kept my mouth shut and my eyes on the path so as to discourage him, but it didn’t work. He just strode out along the narrow path beside me.
    How did he know which way to walk when he couldn’t see his way? It was unnatural. In my mind-eye I saw him in the boghole instead of Boson.
    ‘Well,’ he said. ‘We’re to see him off, then?’
    I made an agreeing sort of noise and walked a little faster.
    ‘How’s your mother taking it?’ he asked.
    I felt the clouds shift a little closer. I felt myself tilt to the sky. All I had to do was let myself go and I’d be there.
    Faraway, nobody talked about the death of brothers.
    Faraway, they never asked folk how they felt about it.
    Faraway, they just knew.
    ‘She’s all right,’ I said.
    I didn’t