He talked some more as he dug, poking at the earth with a length of iron from the Moonbird—it turned out we carried no shovel—then scooping with a cooking pot. He said his brother had tried to make an honest living. He’d been an ostler, even dug graves one year. Sure, he’d committed many misdeeds in his efforts to get by, but according to his brother he’d never crossed a decent man nor dishonoured a woman. Except a schoolmaster, whose name escaped Declan, who was probably honourable but who’d invited a flogging for his loads of pious shite. There were, of course, other words he used: his graveside profanities were so wildly out of place that they even elicited a tiny smile from the master, who swung at the ground with a sand anchor from the jolly-boat.

According to Declan, the judge who sent his brother down had a face like an arse full of carbuncles. The first mate on the transport was a turd with nostrils. Their overseer in Parramatta stank like the farts of an undertaker’s wife. I looked at the shape of the poor boy, wrapped in his hammock, half-expecting his chest to start rocking with mirth. But his brother wept steadily as he tried to eulogise him, and the rest of us had not the faintest idea what to do or where to look.

‘He loved sleepin out on the boat,’ he said unexpectedly. ‘Said there were no nights in summer up at Stromness. He loved the dark. Things ye take for granted, eh.’

When we were done, the men lifted him into the hole and his brother began to scoop soil over him as the master read from his bible. Seventeen years old, and he would not have recalled a day of freedom. The peculiar bond with his brother aside, had he ever experienced love? Did he imagine a future? Why did the Almighty create such a man, only to end his life thus? Now his bones would moulder under the windswept tussocks of a hillside on a sad island in an obscure sea, thousands of miles from whatever he considered home.

The birds called overhead and a dull band of drizzle swept through. I was shocked and numb: the lad had been so irresistibly alive, and now his mouth was stopped with this desolate soil. The granite boulders shone with a slick of new damp.

There we left Angus Connolly; his eternal rest proclaimed by a timber board.

~

Evening bore down upon us, an end to the cruel day.