The Burial Read Online Free PDF Page A

a chair in its place and sat and listened and waited. She was used to that.
    She knew every sound of him. The crashing as he rode through the forest, the thud as he struck through the paddock. All of it: the slapping, groaning, dragging, lurching sounds of him as he approached the house.
    And she knew, too, what she had never heard and longed to hear: the sucking sound of the earth as it clung to him and swallowed him up.

HALF NAKED, ENCRUSTED in sand, Jessie did not get back on her horse or roll herself into the river. She reached up, pulled a blanket from her saddlebag and wrapped herself in it. She writhed and cursed as pain seized her womb and she bit down on the edges of the blanket to contain it. Then, as three figures moved across the paddock directly towards her, she blacked out.
    Had she the strength or consciousness to mount her horse, she would have seen the figures first as shadows thrown across the yellow grass. And eventually she would have made them out: a woman, a man, a dog.
    As they approached, she would have seen the man was old, his mouth cragged like barbed wire across his face, his eyes deep sockets, like dents in the earth when you kick away a stone. Bits of him were missing. His teeth, a piece of his ear.
    The old woman was better put together, though she was surely as old as the old man. Her white hair streamed behind her like spider webs and she was towing a cart. In the cart was a dead lamb.
    The old woman and the old man were following the dog.
    The dog was a yellow stripe with yellow eyes, and he zigzagged out in front of them. He vanished in the long grass of the paddock and the old woman and the old man kept track of him by the splitting and crackling of the grass where he went. They were both eager and charged by the find of the lamb and they were confident the dog would sniff out any warm-blooded creature within a mile of them.
    The dog was a hunting dog and the old man had found it a year or so before tied up to a tree. He had heard the dog barking in the valley as clearly as if the dog had been barking in an amphitheatre. He followed the sound until he finally saw it in the distance, just a streak of a thing leaping up and down, barking a frenzy. As the old man rode in closer to it, the dog launched itself so far the rope around its neck snapped it back and its feet went skidding out from under it.
    The old man dismounted his horse and took a hessian sack out of his saddlebag. He walked slowly towards the dog and as he did the dog shook itself. Its skin flapped around its bony legs like a curtain. He goaded the dog, Come on, you wretch, smell that! and pushed the sack out in front of him. It was the same sack he used for rabbits and their scent was all over it. The dog latched on to it as quickly as anything. The old man wrapped the dog’s rope around its muzzle and sank the bag right over him.
    The dog thrashed in the old man’s arms and the feeling of it enlivened him. Walking around the tree, the old man could see the dog had worn a circular track and there were bones and the remains of the dog’s past owner scattered around it.
    The old man laughed then as he understood the dog to be a prize. Within the dog’s thrashing body was all that was fading in the old man. Wretched though the dog appeared, here was a creature whose senses were still primed, a creature so intent on life it ate its owner to survive.
    Weaving through the yellow grass the dog sniffed out my mother. It had caught the scent of her as surely as if she had dragged her bloodied trousers with a stick for a mile behind her.
    It tore across the sand and plunged its snout into her neck. She was in and out of consciousness still but she woke to it, to see teeth and saliva. The dog barked into her ear and her head rang with voices and the sound of other dogs barking. My mother was not a religious woman. She did not believe in heaven and hell, but at that moment she thought she had been wrong after all and that