Location

That morning, as others, he knelt between the rows and scraped pebbles and stones out of the earth with his fingers and a fork. Although mid-June the night had been cold and a thin layer of frost still marked the ground. He raised himself slowly, pushing a clenched fist into the soil for support and he stared, without expression, at the earth he had turned up, at the small pile of pebbles beside the hole. Slowly, he knelt once more and, after a moment, he continued to scrape and to dig.
It was a small garden, front and back, flanking a house that stood alone on a country road, five miles from town. Apart from maintaining the lawn, he had done very little with the front. He preferred to work out back, in privacy, away from the craning heads of occasional motorists. He believed in the morbid curiosity of others and in the power of the tongue.
The back garden was more impressive. Fenced off on either side, a small stone wall at the end gave way to a farmer’s field where horses sometimes galloped and grazed. Near his shed and a tall oak tree he now kept a vegetable patch of potatoes, carrots, lettuce and onions, which saw the light but was sheltered from the wind. His bushes and flowers had been sowed and planted in keeping with a strict plan. To the untrained eye - which rarely had the privilege - this garden was orderly, restrained and well-kept. In his own mind, there wasn’t a leaf out of place.
His wife had passed away the previous Christmas - St Stephen’s Day to be precise. She had complained of a pain during lunch, went upstairs, lay on the bed and died of a heart attack. The Wren Boys arrived before the ambulance. He had suffered their crude fiddle-playing and their painted faces in silence before giving them a fiver and closing the door. He sat on a chair in the kitchen. He couldn’t stop his hands from shaking. He gripped one in the other and watched them tremble. Then, from away down the road that he could imagine so well, from beyond the bend and the small...