"A home filled with nothing but yourself. It's heavy, that lightness. It's crushing, that emptiness."
Margaret Atwood
Clark hears the news when he's walking to breakfast before dawn, through the mist and the sharp green scent of crushed grass.
He woke at the braying of the old donkey. Cass was tender with the sheep under her care, happy to nibble carrots from Clark's palm, and livid toward any wild thing preying upon her flock. Clark ran from his cottage, barefoot through the dew. There were only a few sleepy bleats from the sheep, huddled up in their pens with the spring lambs. Cass was pawing and stamping yet, and Clark had to shoulder her away from her quarry.
The badger still snarled weakly, yellow teeth bared, but its gulping breaths were thick with fluid, the reek of blood copper bright. Clark froze despite himself as the world narrowed to those bubbling inhalations, the thready whine of agony beneath. In a blink his vision shifted, involuntary, and he saw the trampled spine, the lung punctured by a rib. Once he saw Cass run off a fox, but it was fast, disappearing in a russet blur, unscathed. When Clark lowered his hand to the badger's ruff it whimpered, long claws scraping down his forearms and leaving no more than muddy streaks in their wake. The neck snapped like a green branch beneath his grip and Clark sobbed, once, hugging his knees. Buried his face in his arms until he could trust himself not to be selfish, not to commit the vanity of crying for his own crimes.
Out of sight, he heard the wolfhound pup stir in Mrs. McNamara's kitchen, his paws twitching against the tile. Clark's employer would wake if Duke kicked up a fuss, and Clark's lurching nausea at the thought of being seen, of sharing his guilt, was enough to drag him to his feet. He sucked in air, an uneasy rattle like wind through a broken window, a took up the badger's body gently. Its coarse fur smelled like musk and earth beneath the blood and acrid fear. Rising shifted the pitiable weight in his arms, the badger's head lolling heavily against Clark's chest, its eyes lidded, its nose as broad and soft as any dog. Clark stared until his eyes burned. Then he turned and trudged through the pasture, over the dilapidated fence, toward the fringe of shadowed trees. Amid the roots of a gnarled oak he discovered a sheltered hollow, a cradle large enough for a forty pound badger, and laid the body down for the other badgers, the foxes or the crows.
Clark returned to the spigot by the pens and pumped the groaning iron handle, flecks of rust catching on his skin. He held his hands under the icy gush until the rust was stripped away, the mud, the scent of badger. The mossy cottage in which he resided was far closer to the pens than the farmhouse, for the convenience of the shepherd. A ten by ten space, it demanded little of him and held a narrow bed, a dresser near empty, a kettle atop a single electric burner, a paperback novel with pages curling in the damp Irish air. The room was as he left it – boots forgotten at the door, blankets thrown off the bed in haste. The wind-up clock on the dresser read quarter to three and inspired in him no inclination to sleep. He peeled out of his pajamas, the hems sodden and knees stained. There was a faint smear of blood on his shirt that had escaped his notice – he balled the shirt up and shoved it beneath the rest of the laundry in his hamper.
When Clark had walked to the farm last December clutching Mrs. McNamara's advertisement, cut from the local paper, she had measured him in one keen glance and laughed. Fresh off a cargo ship full of textiles from Bangladesh, he wore woven sandals and linen pants which deterred the cutting wind with the approximate effectiveness of tissue paper. She seated him at her kitchen table and made him tea, questioned him expansively, and offered him an advance on his first month's pay so he could purchase warmer clothes, lest the neighbors fret that she was maltreating her hired help. She introduced him to her husband, Miles, when he came in from the snow with a sodden, enthused puppy. Told Clark that he would do just fine, a strapping lad like him, and didn't flinch upon adding that Miles would forget him by tomorrow, just like he would forget the year or the names of their grown sons, and Julie McNamara could tend her own husband just find – but if Clark ever saw him wandering from home and brought him back, she would be much obliged.
Clark cocked an ear, and detected no movement in the farmhouse. Duke was snoring again, and Miles and Julie breathed in the same rhythm like a single creature. He pulled on a scratchy, warm sweater and corduroys and trekked back to the pens. The sheep grumbled at his ministrations as he pet the ewes, gently cupped the bellies of the newborn lambs for fullness. Most were full, lambs drowsy and content. Number five, who Clark had silently named Caleb, was hungry and plaintive, too weak to lift his head. Upon inspection Clark found his mother with her udder full, teats too broad for Caleb to nurse. Once he milked her, filled a bottle, and allowed her to kick him, he settled against the plank wall with Caleb in his lap. Clark coaxed and murmured, rubbed a smear of milk over the lamb's mouth, and finally he latched onto the bottle's rubber tip and nursed, squirming closer to Clark's warmth. Clark closed his eyes and breathed with the flock.
When he wakes again the sky is shading black to indigo, and Mrs. McNamara has the kettle on. If Clark focuses on the rustling sounds, he can smell the coffee grounds, the sizzling tomatoes in the skillet. Caleb curls easily against his mother in the hay when Clark lays him down. He plays a tired old guessing game with himself as he ambles up to the farmhouse, listening to his host and her tuneless humming, wondering when a human would start to hear her. This close? No, too far away. The leaning porch comes into view, and he hears the click and crackle of the radio coming to life. News from abroad. Duke is on the porch, lifting his head at Clark's approach, tail whistling through the air.
News from Bhutan, of Bruce Wayne, missing for three years. Clark's joints have locked – unseeing, he hears Duke whine at him in concern. Bruce Wayne, shot by militants, falling into a mountain river, body not recovered. Presumed dead. Photographs. Proof. Dead.
Clark still can't see, but now the world is a blur of starlight and cloud. Can't hear, for once, can't hear anything over the screaming wind. It must be how a bullet would feel, piercing the air just like the howl on his lips when his feet left the ground. The wind is trying to strip him out of his skin, peel him apart like some dead thing, pull his limbs out of joint. Wind against bare skin, his clothes are gone, sweater ripped away like it never was.
When Bruce couldn't sleep, when he was too stubborn to wake Clark, he would pull on their father's sweaters. Pace the halls with cashmere sleeves hanging down to his knees.
It starts as a shudder. Convulses along his limbs, and then Clark is falling. Hurtling through cloud, and he can't think how to stop. Can't think. The chill only feels like Bruce's icy feet, when he would climb under Clark's blankets and hide against his shoulder. Shake and never make a sound.
Then he hits the barn, and everything stops.
...
Clark is too heavy to lift. Or so the woman tells him. Tells him again, when he flinches. There are mud-spattered boots protruding from beneath her nightgown, cotton flannel worn pale at the seams. A man beside her, hand at her elbow. There's hay and earth in Clark's mouth, in his nose. He chokes it out before he feels the weight of the blanket laid across his back. She's speaking, words that roll over him unheard. There's an electric lamp in her hand. When the moon slips past the clouds, through the yawning hole in the roof, it catches silver on the barrels of the shotgun hanging lax at the man's side.
The hands that pull the blanket around him belong to a stranger, though they affix to his own wrists, his own arms. He fails to rise past his knees, shuddering for all the stars to see. Minutes ago – minutes ago? - he was on the farm, near Cork, with the sheep. Now there's mud drool down his chin, and he's making himself small under the blanket. Maybe he can compress himself into nothingness. He's never tried.
The man is inscrutable as river-washed stone. But he grips Clark's shoulder, anchors him to the earth. Clark follows the strength in that hand. Follows on numb legs to warm light, to creaking stairs. They fold him down into a soft chair. A damp cloth touches his face. He doesn't see the shotgun again – never saw it leave the man's hand. His eyes are dry. The wind stole his tears, swallowed his grief in its roar. A faucet drips. An animal grinds its great flat teeth. Crickets sing shrill as violins. The woman wrings out her cloth over the sink, water slapping against steel. Clark watches her lips move, and swims toward her through the din.
"-happened to you, you don't have to say."
"My brother is dead." And that's his own voice, that hoarse, rusted thing.
The woman wipes his brow and puts a bowl of steaming broth in his hands, nudges his elbow until he drinks. There in the kitchen, looks pass between her and her husband that Clark can't begin to read. She tilts her head and the man grunts once before shuffling to brew coffee. The smell blooms earthy and sharp until a strange house, creaking around him, begins to seem familiar.
"I'm sorry," he says. He holds an empty bowl and it occurs to him to pass it back.
"Ain't no sorry," the man says. He holds a chipped mug to his chest. After a moment, he lays a hand on Clark's shoulder. "You can sleep here. We'll run you a bath first. Get all the mud and – splinters off."
"My name is Martha," the woman says. "This is Jonathan." The cloth is warm against Clark's cheek, the clean skin in its wake shivering with evaporation. "What's your name, dear?" She speaks slowly, bent at the waist like one comforting a lost child.
"Clark," he says.
"Clark," she says. Nods once. "Let's see about that bath."
"I- your barn."
"Plenty of time for that in the morning," she says.
tbc