…After the first death there is no other. —Dylan Thomas
When the hawk slaked down into the garden and entered the chittering bud of linnets and sparrows feeding on the bread crumbs and stale cereal, you were telling me the story of how you took it upon yourself to bury, as you would in the weeks to come most of your own platoon, the young German—the first man you ever killed— shot on the concrete forecourt of a textile factory in Belgium. At close range. With a single bullet. I need to believe you spent the war safe from yourself, in reserve, your rifle clean and unfired; that you woke each morning alone and hard in your own hand. But the tautness of his skin dropped away like a sail losing the wind and the wet purse of his mouth went slack and eased open to reveal its neat, stained wreaths of change. After the first death there were many others and they all
rose up through this one. Out in the garden the hawk rowed up from the earth with its burden, leaving a panic the colour of ashes and bone. A slim warmth
was caught in the fabric of his battle dress, there were twigs and feathers of grass in his hair; and when you dragged him the dark palm of the earth snagged him by the heels and eased his boots off. But you were tired and the grave so shallow and small his knees rose up through the dirt. To shovel soil across his face, you said, dead as he was, to throw dirt into the gape of his mouth and over the pale noose of each iris was an act of infidelity against your own humanity far worse than squeezing the trigger. That night, laid out beneath the empty looms of the factory, you dreamt about that grave at the edge of the wood from which the knees of a dead man rose like breasts through the dirt and when dawn came you were ravenous for a woman. Not sex, but the easy kindness that stands in attendance whenever women are present. You are married, you said, to the first man you ever kill, and then you went outside to gather even the smallest feathers that had drifted and caught against the hedge. Still, after sixty years, the terrible competency of your hands. You spaced those small feathers widely, like seeds, in the wet soil and were down on your knees so long the mist and the sea fret stashed their silver among the fine hairs of your jacket. A man, however well he lives, never lives his life well enough to justify the harm he commits with his own hands: he bent at the knees so slowly, you said, then folded forward gently, with a sigh, like a woman’s dress.
