Moses sat shaking his head to himself for a few moments, then drank deeply from his jar and put it back down again, the action seeming to signal time for his mood to return from self-pity to sly prankster. He made a small sniggering sound and booted Wayne to watch him again as he picked up a small black shovel by the stove, slid the hot dollar onto it and into an empty tobacco tin on the floor by his chair. He grinned, his eyes on Calvin as he called out.

‘Sam. Get in here.’

The boy appeared in the doorway behind his father, sullen and expectant.

‘Got somethin’ for you, boy. Get in here.’

Sam came round to his chair.

In the half-light of that room, the evening approaching fast, Sam looked so handsome and vulnerable that Calvin, man as he was, had wanted to kiss those tight pink lips. It was the light on his face, the way it glanced off smooth high cheekbones and shone in his straight black hair. And the set of those broad shoulders with a boy’s lean body hanging below them was sculptural.

It was a strange feeling, all the more aberrant for the absence of shame he had experiencing it. Calvin had never felt it for a man or boy before. But it was there. Sexual perhaps, but at the time it was not his crotch on fire, but his heart.

‘You want dollars to spoil? Have mine. Jesus knows I owe ya.’

Moses chuckled like an indulgent father and picked up the tin, offering it out to Sam to show him the contents.

Sam looked at his father and then at the dollar, suspicious but seeing no trick. He went to pluck it from the tin, when Moses pulled it back.

‘Ah ah! Hold yer hand out and say thank you, Pappy!’

Humiliated and yet scared to detonate this drunken time-bomb, Sam did as he was ordered. ‘Thank you.’ A pause and a small tight mouth. ‘Pappy.’

Moses kept his grinning eyes on Sam and tipped the searing hot metal disc into his son’s palm. There was a fraction of a second before Sam’s skin got the message to his brain and he dropped it and grabbed the wrist of his burned hand, his teeth bared like a fighting dog. No sound, no cry, no yell. Just teeth clenching in agony, eyes screwed up, fighting for control.

Calvin was digging hard at the ground now, gulping to fight off the face of that boy in the room and the sound of those two drunken men laughing at his pain.

The shovel split a last clod of hard earth apart with a thud like a blade splitting a skull. His hand was a fist round the shaft of the shovel.

The hole was big enough. It would take the stones.

Calvin straightened up, and massaged the small of his back with his knuckles to relieve the aching.