The Burial Read Free Page A

Houdini drinking from a part of the river she did not recognise and edged her way to it, put her mouth against it and drank the water until it revived her. She had enough energy then to peel off her sand-encrusted trousers and turn them over to the shallows. Red clouds bloomed out.
    My mother was not one to say Oh dear or Oh my. She was one to say Fuck. And often. It was a word she had finetuned in prison. Half naked by the river, looking down between her legs, that was what she said: Fuck, Houdini. I’ve gone and bled a trail.
    There is never a good day to die. And you’ll see my mother was not the quitting kind. But there is courage in blood and she had lost so much of it. She did not have the strength to get back on her horse.
    To the north of her were the shifting cliffs and ridges of the mountains. Even if she could have ridden solidly, just to get to the base of the first rise of the mountain range was a whole day’s ride. Beside her was the river. If she rolled herself into it and floated down, it would deliver her directly back to where she had come from, the place to which she could not return. Above her was the clearest, bluest sky with no cloud or apparition and it seemed to be sinking down upon her. She covered her face against it.
    Fuck, Houdini was the best assessment.

YOU MIGHT LIKE to think of your own mother knitting blankets expanding outwards in all colours while you were in her womb. Or at worst vomiting into buckets. On the eve of my birth, my mother concertinaed my father while I lay inside her. Six foot, eight inches. She brought him down with the blunt side of an axe.
    I was still two moons off by her measure. Already I was large and awkward enough inside her that I was breaking her sleep a couple of times in the night with my knee or my elbow wedged into her bladder.
    Eve of my birth I was wide awake, listening to a thrumming sound that I knew was not the sound of her heart. I stretched out and woke her. Hearing the peculiar sound for herself, she lit a lantern and wound up the cloth wick to cast more light. There were two moths attached end to end and they were beating their wings like a fast-rolling drum and making dust on her pillow.
    She picked up the moths by the edge of their wings and cupped them both in her palm. She manoeuvred a shawl around her shoulders with her spare hand and shifted us all out of bed. Tiptoeing past Fitz’s room she saw his door open and his empty bed and she relaxed, walked heavy on her heels.
    The moon was just a scrape in the sky and a fog rolled around the house so she could hardly see beyond it. She stood on the veranda and threw the moths into the air and she was surprised they did not fly but just dropped to the ground, stuck together, their wings still beating.
    Even with the fog, the air was warm with the turning season and she felt herself being drawn into it. She was barefoot but her feet were hardened and they were as warm in the dirt as they had been in bed. She ran her hand over the great mound that was me and she pulled up her nightgown and squatted and pissed.
    She preferred squatting on the ground to the humiliation of carrying the bedpan past Fitz in the morning. When he was not there, it was her small act of defiance; over the years she had encircled the whole house with her piss, one piss at a time, and she wondered if he would ever pay enough attention to his surrounds to actually smell it. Imagine what he would do then.
    Squatting down in the fog was like squatting in a cloud and the cloud stretched around her. She realised it was more comfortable for her to squat than to stand and she rested there for a while, rocking on her haunches. She felt a drop of water on her face and wondered if the fog was dissolving but then there were heavier drops on her arms and her legs and the far-off sound of a storm breaking.
    She pulled down her nightdress and reached the veranda just before the rain began to pour down. She looked for the moths on