Moy fought for breath. He looked back at the house but couldn’t see anyone. He turned over, managed to get onto all fours, then sat back on his sore arse. Felt for his pistol, but it wasn’t there. Looked around and saw it in the stubble in the distance. Just my luck. He looked back at the shotgun. Humphris could make for it, but wouldn’t.
He was done, Moy could tell just by looking at him.
He studied the farmer’s fat cheeks, and the little capillaries on his nose.
Humphris said, ‘Why couldn’t you a left me alone?’
Moy didn’t respond.
‘It woulda …’ He stopped and met Moy’s eyes. As if that might do as an explanation.
Procedure, Moy thought. He crawled towards the shotgun, picked it up and opened it. Removed the cartridges; placed them carefully in the stubble. Closed the breech and rested the gun on his knee, pointing it at Humphris.
‘Go on,’ Humphris said. ‘Two more minutes, I woulda done it.’
Yes, he would have, thought Moy. He watched Humphris, the way he fought for breath, clawed at the dirt, the delicate finger trails on the worked earth. He wondered if the farmer was about to have his own heart attack. He said, ‘Where’s the other one?’
‘The older kid? What, you don’t know?’ Not making anything of it. Humphris had arrived at some place where he didn’t care anymore.
Moy stared. ‘Tom. That was his name. And you’ve dumped him in a hole like a sack of shit, haven’t you, and poured the slab for your new shed—’
‘It wasn’t me.’ Old anguish, worked like chewing gum, stretched across the defeated grey face.
Moy looked back at the house. Still no one. But he could see figures in the tractor shed, searching.
‘My stupid fuckin’ nephew,’ Humphris gasped. ‘None of it was me.’
Moy placed the gun on the ground. Humphris studied it, his tongue moving over his lips.
‘What did he do?’ Moy asked.
‘All I ever did was tell him to move ’em on. He fucked that up like he fucked everything up…next thing I got two kids in my shed. And I said, take ’em back.’
It rang true. Moy knew, he could see, Humphris had spent these last days and weeks looking for a way out of the mess Naismith had made.
‘When the little one got away, he went and got the other one and…’ Humphris looked down, ashamed of his own words, his voice, everything. ‘I tried to stop him.’ He dared to look up.
Moy could see his father’s eyes. The hundred times George had manufactured his own disasters. The hundred times, like all farmers, all country people, he’d devised his own solutions.
‘None of it!’ Humphris said again.
Moy knew he was right.
‘But I stopped him, before he got the other one…he was gonna. I stopped him, Detective.’
Moy sensed Humphris had worked out the easiest fix for the current disaster. You couldn’t continue the killing. Or take people away from the ones they loved. Make them do as you wanted, or even think as you did. Sometimes you just didn’t get rain. All you could do was stand and watch your crop perish. He wanted to say something, offer some consolation. Something like, I know how you feel but you just gotta carry on, don’t you? He knew this was the sort of phrase you taped on the back of the toilet door, not the sort of phrase you uttered to another human being. Instead, he said, ‘They weren’t hurtin’ you, were they?’
Humphris didn’t reply.
‘They had nowhere else to go.’
Humphris bowed his head, and waited. Moy thought about the mess, and the shame. And the harm. Past a certain point, he thought, life was just clinging to the few things you’d got right. George had taught him this. And Charlie.
Moy stood up, looked at Humphris, and decided there was nothing to say. He turned and walked away. He was aware that this was stupid, but it was the only thing he could do. Waiting, as he moved closer to the house, for the sound of the gun-shot. It didn’t come until he was in the laundry, and it didn’t surprise him, or persuade him to turn and look back.
He walked through the house and back out to the compound. Patrick was sitting in the front of one of the cars.
‘Was that a shotgun?’ Gary asked.
Moy shook his head. ‘Where did it come from?’
‘Ossie went to look.’
Moy approached Patrick and knelt beside him. ‘We can stop for dim sims on the way home.’ And looked up at Gary. ‘No…what time do they open?’
Gary checked his watch. ‘’Bout now. Don’t know if they’d have the fryer goin’ for a while yet.’
Moy took a deep breath. For the first time in a long time he felt that the life going on around him everywhere might somehow be relevant. He could even taste the stale oil. He looked at Gary and said, ‘I’ll take him home…to Dad. I’ll be back later.’