The Burial by Courtney Collins Page B

the boarding house. A couple of weeks later he received a letter from Fitz in return containing a hand-drawn map and instructions on how to find his property.
    Jack Brown was nineteen years old, and aside from serving in the army and the stock work he had grown up doing on the property where his mother cooked and cleaned, this was his first real offer of employment.
    After meeting my mother near the fence line of Fitz’s forest he made his way again along the track. Soon, she came bolting past. She rode bareback and slipshod, like a man. She was all bones and her hair whipped up and she raised her arm, a wave and a salute at the same time, and Jack Brown could not have guessed how familiar that sight would become, and how often he would find himself trailing behind her.

BEFORE JACK BROWN appeared at the window of the station hut, Sergeant Andrew Barlow had been standing in the washroom naked except for his coat.
    The rain and wind had passed but the hut seemed to hold on to the cold and it shot through Barlow’s feet like darts. He had been angling his jaw to the broken mirror, inspecting his shave between the reflection of the mirror and the reflection of the blade. It was as good as he had looked since he arrived there.
    When his father proposed the country posting, Barlow had imagined a hut stark on a hill and the station had proved to be not much more than that. On first actual sighting, Barlow wanted to turn back, and if it had not been his father riding beside him, himself a senior sergeant, Barlow would have felt no shame in admitting that of all the challenges of life he did not feel fit for this one in particular and returning to the city as swiftly as his horse could carry him.
    But his father had a grip on him. It was the firm grip of guilt and Barlow wanted to redeem himself.
    Barlow was an opium addict and his father knew it. The country air and the isolation was thought to be the solution and even Barlow believed that if he could see it through and find something in it to occupy his mind if not his soul, somehow the experience would make the best of him.
    As yet, he had no idea what the best of him was.
    His father hung around for a week to settle him in. Together they cleaned the place up and restored a garden that was eaten out by rabbits and overgrown with weeds. Mostly the purpose of his father’s staying was to keep an eye on Barlow, to make sure that he did not fall back into his old ways. The day before his departure, he told Barlow he was doing him a favour when he searched through his bags and packs and supplies. Finding a stash of vials and syringes in a silver tin, he made Barlow smash them in front of him with a hammer.
    It was not that Barlow did not want to be clean, but he had found no surer way to relieve the back pain that plagued him, that came upon him without warning and lasted for days.
    By habit and by design, Barlow’s mind was nothing if not expansive. He was open to alternatives. He sought them out, and before he left the city for his new posting he met a supple woman from India with a red dot on her forehead who was gathering recruits in an opium den. After Barlow described the particular pain he was in, the woman taught him a series of stretches. Before they fell asleep like a couple of cats on large cushions, they practised the postures together and she assured him they would bring him relief, immediately and in the future.
    Barlow took up the routine with enthusiasm but when he demonstrated the series to his father one evening, he was surprised to find that his father became infuriated. He said, Son, it is undignified for a man to be bending and stretching in that way, and dressed in his pyjamas. If you have to do it, for God’s sake do it in private.
    When his father finally left Barlow to his own devices at the station hut, Barlow again took up the routine. He performed it every day as the sun came up and again as the sun went down. If he felt any twinge of pain