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now snug and sealed in her box. Father signalled with a nod. Gregory took his end of the ropes across the grave – Oops! Watch your step; it’s slippery – and pulled them as though in a tug-of-war. The coffin moved towards the hole. Father steered from the other side. Together, they wrestled Granny Hazel into the grave.
    His task complete, brushing his hands, Gregory returned to Mother’s side breathing heavily. Breathless too, from effort and emotion, and glistening with sweat, Father took his place at the head of the grave, wiped his nose with a sleeve, and gestured with both hands for us to bow our heads for yet more prayer. I did. Then I looked up, to my right where the crumbling outhouses were.
    Sophia appeared to be poking something with a stick.
    Father’s prayer would go on and on and turn into a sermon.
    No one would miss me.
    I found I had slipped away from the graveside before I had time to realize that doing so counted as more than an error of judgement – a sin. Like a thief stealing someone else’s time, I tiptoed to my sister’s side, my other half, my second skin. We shared a heart. Sophia was indeed poking something with a stick: the big, black dog. Dead.
    Out of Father’s earshot, wind blowing her voice across Hollow Heath, she sang, ‘I fell in to a burning ring of fi-re. I went down, down, down …’ She stopped singing and glanced at me, then turned her attention back to the animal. ‘And it burned, burned, burned …’
    ‘Stop singing. Father will hear you!’ I whispered loudly.
    She stopped. If one thing in the universe made us stop whatever we were doing, it was Father knowing we were doing it.
    ‘You’re supposed to be watching Granny Hazel getting buried.’
    ‘So are you,’ she argued.
    ‘I came to see what you’re doing.’ Since she ignored me, I asked, ‘What are you doing?’
    ‘I found the dog, and it’s dead.’
    ‘It isn’t ours,’ I said, needlessly. ‘We have chickens.’
    Father must have shut them in the coop until after the burial.
    ‘Can we keep it?’
    ‘What for? If you throw the stick, it won’t fetch.’
    More a baton than a stick … ‘What did it come off?’ I asked, keeping my voice quieter than the prayer in the background.
    Sophia shrugged.
    The stick looked new. Was it a table leg? All the table and chair legs in the Manse were age-worn. It must have arrived here from outside. Small enough for Sophia’s little fist, big enough to beat something with, a greater mystery than the dog. One leg of a table can’t walk. Neither can two, three or four, but it must have got there – wherever Sophia picked it up – somehow. The dog had legs, so its presence posed no mystery. Then I felt highly pleased with myself because I realized the dog could have carried the stick in its mouth from wherever it came from to here, walked around for a couple of days looking for its master, the bearded stranger, then died – probably from exhaustion after carrying the stick so far.
    ‘Why are you smiling?’ Sophia asked.
    ‘Nothing,’ I replied, stopping smiling.
    If you smile at nothing, people think you’re daft, Father liked to say when he felt like a joke. This was as humorous as he got: a hint of sarcasm and a touch of insult. He had a smile like Lot’s as he watched his wife turning into a pillar of salt.
    Sophia bared the dog’s fangs with the stick. ‘Shall I ask Father if we can bury it with Granny Hazel? She likes dogs.’
    ‘Animals and humans have separate graves, silly.’ Immediately, I wanted to bite my tongue. Knowing I had hurt her feelings, I apologized. ‘Sorry. You aren’t silly; it slipped out.’
    ‘That’s all right,’ she said, although I could tell it wasn’t. For a while, we stood in silence.
    The dog, a formidable beast if alive, had started going grey. Hair continues to grow after death; I knew that much from an overheard snip on the radio, but I had no idea whether it continued turning grey. Sophia lifted one of the