Captain v. Cardinal

After waiting and seeing no one, the Captain begins cleaning. He rights the table. He wipes off the two revolvers. He picks up the carpet of scattered bullets and cleans them off one by one and, hands full of bullets, pours them all back into the table's small drawer. He closes the drawer.

Then he wipes off the contract (thumb print of dried blood on the bottom right corner). He wipes off the grossly maligned List of Dead ('Calligrapher' calligraphed neatly beneath Bhikkhuni). He straightens the cracked and drying bowl of blue clay. He puts all these on the table.

He regards the gore and small flecks of bone stuck to the trunk of the tree. This he cannot clean.

He waits.

The Cardinal arrives. Shortly after the arrival of the Cardinal, the two caretakers exit the hideous shack and walk across the field. The thin man resumes digging. The fat man begins snipping the wire between the posts of the northern fence, and in this way - after work of a day - removes the northern fence, save the posts.

The Cardinal regards the dead. His stance is grounded, sure. He looks to the Captain, and asks him to ask the caretakers for water. The Captain pauses. He regards the Cardinal. Then walks, four gold bands on each cuff swaying in 4-4 time, to the fat man by the fence.

Then the Cardinal prays thusly:

Have mercy on me, Lord, when it comes.
Shadow at morning striding behind me,
Or shadow at evening rising to meet me,
I feel it by me at all times.

And after the prayer a dog - a cur - limps from the forrest and walks to the Cardinal, and sits by the Cardinal. And the Cardinal regards the dog, and the dog regards the Cardinal.

The Captain returns without water. He says the fat man said, here is no water but only rock. Just rock and no water and the sandy road.

Poetic for a ditch-digger, says the Cardinal. The Captain agrees.

They raise their guns. Their guns go off.