The setting sun made a fire deep in the amber of its eye, unblinking and somehow changed. Blood shone like tree sap inside a dark nostril. The body lay on its side. The older of the two boys grabbed one leg and the younger the other, and with heels digging and slipping in the red earth, they dragged it to a crop of mallee near the fence line of the paddock. The older boy gathered what he could find to cover it and did so with the gentlest of care.
Inside the beat-up Ford they drove home, much slower, over the fallow. Cain, five years younger than his brother, sat bug-eyed, neck strained, craning to see over the dash. Joel would not look at him. All excitement from before – the spinning wheels, arses bouncing off the bench seat – had now been replaced by a sobering dread. Joel, though tall for his fourteen years, sat on the edge of his seat and drove intently with his chest to the steering wheel. Cain focused on his reflection in the glass and did not recognise the look that he saw. Bodies memorised the impact. And the sound. It appeared in front of them like a cut-out in a pop-up book when the tab was yanked.
Outside the back gate that led to their yard, Joel pressed his face up against the access hole and eyed the light of the kitchen window that glowed yellow in the cool light around it. He watched their mother moving about the kitchen, from the stove to the sink and back again. They lingered. Their father would arrive home soon, and they would have to go in to eat when their mother called.
‘Can’t we just go in?’ Cain thought about the sandwich in his lunchbox, buried in the bag on his floor. Joel came down like a clanking drawbridge.
‘That is what you get.’ He picked up a stone and hurled it down the dirt driveway toward the corrugated iron carport where they had parked the old Ford.
‘She’ll know.’ Joel simmered.
It was wrong of him to have asked Joel to go faster, Cain thought. And now he should starve. He watched his older brother squat in the middle of the dirt road and thought Joel might be looking for another stone, but there were plenty. After a moment, Joel turned from Cain and pulled the front of his shirt up over his face, dragging it back down over stained cheeks. Joel stood and snorted back tears.
‘He’ll never let us take it out again.’ Joel steeled himself, spat into the dirt the unpleasantness of vulnerability, and turned to the house. He had only cracked the gate an inch to enter the yard when the yawn from it made their mother pause at the window, looking out.
They found sanctuary in the coop, in shadows, surrounded by dark gnarled branches and dense fruit trees charged with insect hum. They squatted in the stillness and waning light, their boots noiseless in the muck and feathers. There were whispers of mice in the wheat bin; one of the dogs barked, then the other, and another someplace far off.
‘That one is looking at us like it knows.’ Cain stared at one of the hens.
Joel had had enough. He scratched at his scalp to release what was building up in him, prickling, burning him there. He snatched up a brush and began scrubbing algae from the chicken’s clay water basin. Joel nodded toward the hens.
‘You better get them eggs.’
Cain reached under one of the birds but, with a start, pulled back an empty hand at the sound of their mother’s voice.
‘Boys!’
She stood outside the coop with the scrap bucket, and the resounding crack it made when she dropped it to the concrete sent Cain bolt upright.
He went to her obediently to fetch the bucket. Joel attempted to get a hold of his brother’s shirt, but was too late. He watched him from the coop. Their mother wore a look of disapproval. Cain could think of few things she approved of.
‘What time do you call this?’
The arms of her youngest son hung down at his sides, and his hands opened and closed as though he might find the right words in the air there. He looked to the coop where he knew his brother hid behind shadows. His mother studied him as though he were in pieces. Her eyes drifted to his hair, much coarser and darker than Joel’s, barrel-chested and stocky, with dirty legs covered in golden down. Cain fidgeted under her gaze. An eternity passed as he waited for some instruction. Her hand shot out.
‘And this?’
Cain readied himself for a scolding, but he was not prepared for her tenderness. She held his face up out of the shadows to inspect his chin. A fleshy egg was forming there. He remembered connecting with the dashboard when his brother had hit the brake. And the sound. Immediately, his mother’s eyes went to Joel, who crouched behind the wire.
Undone by her gentleness, her thumb caressing where it stung to see if it were indeed a blackening bruise or smudge, Cain emitted a tiny sound, the mewl of a kitten. Then, in great gasps, he fell into her, sobbing, breathing in the smell of his dinner on her hands. She looked to Joel, and the sound of his name was a warning.
A calamity of cockatoos and car wheels sounded up the long dirt driveway. Cain shook with a type of relief. He turned from his mother and found Joel beside him with the look of someone who knows what is coming.
At the back gate, their father appeared like some apparition, pale in the last light and dust from the harvester, a shovel in his white fist, and just visible in the back of the Ute was the silken, still hide of the calf.