The Redemption of Galen Pike by Carys Davies

Author:Carys Davies
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Biblioasis
Published: 2016-12-16T19:08:09+00:00

Miracle at Hawk’s Bay

Matthew High. We knew it would be him. Even before Hannah turned him over, we just knew it.

It was Annie who saw him from the road. ‘Look,’ she said, and when she pointed at the dark shape out there in the shallow water, there was only one thought in all our heads—please God, let it not be him. Let it be any of the others but not him, not Matthew High.

At the beginning of the marshes we took off our boots and our stockings and hitched up our skirts and ran along the high grassy mounds above the channels, hopping over the gaps where you could hear the creep of the tide trickling in and filling them up. He was out on the sand, and even though we all knew it would be Matthew, when we were quite close Annie said, ‘Who is it?’ because the truth was we couldn’t tell for sure. Even then, from the look and shape of him, all blobby and blown-up, it might have been someone else. He was lying on his front in just a shirt which was up over his head in a sodden lump of cloth. We went towards him through the shallow water and stood around him like a kind of crescent moon with our backs to the sea, and I remember feeling the water lapping at my heels, thinking that if we all stood aside now and went back the way we’d come the water would rise and cover him again and take him back and Bella High would never have to know. I looked at Annie and Hannah to see if they were thinking the same thing but I couldn’t tell. Their eyes were down, looking at the dark and swollen body of Matthew High.

Hannah stepped forward and took hold of the soggy mound of cloth at his head and squeezed it. She wrung it out and smoothed it down a little way and when Annie helped her turn him over the two of them pulled smartly at the filthy hem to cover his naked parts. His face was the colour of a thunder cloud, and one of his eyes was gone. There was a wound in the ugly swelling of his ankles, a slice of his soft flesh beginning to uncurl from around the bone, like the peel from an orange. White sea-lice crawled in the open seam. Hannah knelt beside him and put her arm behind his neck and tried to raise him but she couldn’t move him. He was half sunk down in the wet sand and even when we lifted the hanks of his long hair so there was nothing holding him down, we couldn’t shift his weight, only roll him to and fro. So Hannah took his arms and Annie and I took his feet and we tried again but we still couldn’t move him. It was like trying to drag a hammock full of stones. I wondered if we

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