“You,” said Camper’s wife, “do you remember him?”
For answer his head bowed over the gravel.
“He’d be forty years old now,” a brisk voice started, “and not liked near so well.”
“Lady, don’t ask us any more.”
Before men who paused long in the quarters of the moon and hid possessions quietly in their rolled shirts, she thought of the small dog returned to the forgotten bush and the small town scratching for its son.
“In those days you could have followed him down the street.”
“That’s right,” a moment later, “in any place but Clare.”
The night was loaded distantly with the smell of old shell cases and powder already shot. The welders, unlike hog men or men of the hills, were unable to keep silent in front of her, their mouths were not stunned shut and awry. And now and then, to break the stare of the silken woman, they mentioned him, a brief description of wet wash as telltale as his small footprints in the mud, the sound of their voices through larynx and nose still pinched and awed with the knell of the one death. There was no flood but of light, and in the light no clash of cocks or bodies, only the lime glass garden and woman whose whispering relations with any one of the sitting men could have sacked as little and exposed as much as the accident which, with a clap of land, had rocked the little purgatory.
“And if he stopped, you could have touched him.”
“If you caught his eye, and if he’d heard your name.”