Miss Ranskill Comes Home

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Miss Ranskill sat back on her heels; even that movement was an agony, driving the sand into her sweat-softened skin, but it was the torment of her hands that had forced her to stop digging. The grave was nearly deep enough. It would have to be deep enough because for two hours now she had been fighting the shale. She had tugged at it with frayed fingertips, twisting great flakes from their beds while the pinkish-grey edges of other flakes deepened in colour as they bit into her knees.

She pushed back her hair with one hand, while the other sought the comforting softness of her mouth. She was terribly thirsty, and the sand, gritting from the cracks of her torn fingernails, tasted salty. Yet before she could reach the stream she would have to pass the Carpenter. There was only one stream on the island.

Her left-hand fingers found, in their turn, the solace of her mouth and tongue. It was a child’s attitude she had taken, squatting back on her haunches, her cut fingers in her mouth. She had done to the Carpenter all the things that were necessary. Had done them reverently because she revered him, practically because of what she had once heard, lovingly because she had loved him, though that fact had only come to her while she was digging his grave and after she had dealt with the now inert and helpless body that had never presumed to display more vigour before her than dragging of timber, lifting of stones and thrusting through waves demanded.

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