Free Death of a River Guide by Richard Flanagan

first time since she was a wean, and then cried all the more from the shame and the fear of it all.
    One day, playing near the sand dunes a few hundred yards from the vegetable garden, Rose found a strange piece of bone, too big to be a sheep and unlike any cattle bone she had ever seen. The children took it home and Mr Costello took the bone to the police constable at Nubeena. At first it was thought that the bone belonged to an unfortunate convict who had perished attempting escape decades earlier. But when they came to excavate the sand dune, they discovered not one but many skeletons, all in the same position, with the knees pulled up underneath the chin. Scientists came down from the Hobart museum and concluded that it was an Aboriginal burial ground. Rose’s nightmares found a recurrent form in the shape of the sand dune skeletons unfolding and standing up and then chasing her all the way back to Lil and George’s in Hobart. As she ran they screamed, and their scream was that of the Tasmanian devils in the dark.
    The case of who should have possession of Rose was only days away from being heard when Eileen’s prayers seemed to finally have some effect and George’s lawyer was found with his brains blown out. It was said to be suicide. Even Tronce was impressed, and to the end of his days said that you should never push Eileen too far because she could pray so powerful she could kill you. Soon after there was a scandal when Lil ran off with a horse trainer to Kalgoorlie in Western Australia. George didn’t have the money to pursue the matter any further, drank even more, and some months later he too left Tasmania, bound, he said, for Sydney. Not that Rose was aware of any of this down at the Neck. Nobody thought it fit or proper to fill her in on such goings on. Even with George gone, Tronce and Eileen kept Rose hidden at the Neck for another year before they dared bring her home. So until the day that Tronce returned with his dray, she continued going to the small school on the far side of the Neck, playing on the vast, empty white beach with the few other kids who lived local, and listening to the ocean ebbing and rising, wondering if her own life had any more reason to it than the gentle rise and sudden crash of the ocean waves, wondering if it was her destiny to spend the rest of her life at the Neck, far from her brothers and sisters.
    Harry never met Tronce, who died some years before Harry was born. His memories of Eileen were of a tiny sparrowlike woman with a large, bright pink nose, off which hung peels of skin, the parchment-yellow colour of toenails. These memories arose from Rose’s yearly holiday in Richmond with Eileen, which came to an end with Eileen’s death in Harry’s sixth year. Eileen’s house was dark and smelt of carbolic soap and stale bread, for Eileen, who had grown hard and mean in the manner of the women of her family, ate little. She had also grown, if anything, even more religious in her old age, and for most of those holidays Harry remembered being upon his knees chanting the rosary with other old biddies Eileen gathered in to help her beseech the Lord above for forgiveness.
    Eileen’s funeral was a grand affair in the Hobart cathedral. Half of Richmond seemed to be there. As the Scriptures were being read it began to rain so heavily that the sound of the rain on the roof above, amplified in the cavernous space of the cathedral’s interior, drowned out the reader. Harry looked up at the ceiling and noticed something moving at the top of the walls. Droplets of crimson fluid. Harry reached up and tugged Rose’s coat arm. ‘The walls, Mum,’ he whispered, ‘the walls are bleeding.’ Rose looked down at Harry, rather than up at the walls, but even as she scolded him, others who had overheard Harry looked up and saw the walls now bleeding in thick heavy runs and droplets. Even the priests, dressed in their finest mufti, looked up