The Dig (11 page)

He hears again the parson speak, words that chiseled into his brain like into the gravestone slate about him.

He refused that. I don't think it is true. He looked down at her and spoke as if to her. I don't think it's true. I think a place can remember.

He walked through the gravestones to the church gate and looked out over the sweeping valley. Red kites lifted above him, scanning over the bursts of gorse and he walked out of the church and followed the bridleway along the wall. He touched as was his way the ancient stones with their atlas of lichen mapped across them, looked down at the wasting piles of grass cuttings tipped from the mown churchyard, the scattered sprays of plastic flowers lifted from their places, broke vases and tattered ribbons from long-decayed bouquets, strange colors that
were unnatural and minutely carnival there somehow. He hardly registered the van that passed. Did not look up. He was looking at the still-wet earth from the grave on his hands.

A place remembers, he thought. A place has to remember.

The big man saw Daniel there against the wall, clipped the verge briefly with his front wheel as he turned to look back at him. A thought came to him: The man was weak.

He watched the church recede in the mirror, slowed as he passed the farm lane, and let the thought fill out. He took the corner and pulled up upon the verge.

The big man was still uncomfortable. That policeman, he thought. Ag.

He'd taken the phone call that morning and there was not much time to decide things; the men were here tonight.

The first sett he had in mind was too close to outbuildings with men and dogs he did not know. This might be the place.

He's weak, the big man thought. He's weak and he is a farmer by himself. He will be occupied. News spread out here, soaked out, and he knew about the loss of Daniel's
wife and why he was at the graveyard. He's trying to get through on his own.

He knew the setts locally and knew that this sett was relatively distant from the house of the farm. It was walkable from his own place. It's the one, he said to himself. A man on his own, what can he do?

He got from the van and it lifted and relaxed. In the fields the lambs were bleating habitually and there was a green bolt of new growth in the bank. He crossed the narrow road and stood up into the hedge and looked over onto the field. After the rain, the upper field was fizzing with water. He studied it. He did not know if the badgers were at the sett.

He got back in the van and drove a little way on then parked by a gate and climbed over and cut back along the top of the field. Then he followed the farm lane down, and as he crossed over into a second field a rush of thrushes came off the ground. He walked on, looking at the bank.

Partway down the field there was a run in the bank. The blackthorn that capped it was like a tunnel and the earth was disturbed and excavated like a primitive road. There were dropped piles of bracken by the run as if they had been spilled.

He heard the gate clang the other side of the lane and then Daniel's weight land. He heard the bumps of footsteps approaching down the track.

He stayed very still.

When Daniel had passed, the big man looked at the gorse and at the thick-packed blackthorn and saw the stiff gray badger hair there.

That will do, he thought. He was decisive. That's enough of a sign.

He would take the risk that the badgers were there.

He knew the sett was in the woods at the far edge of the farm.

He'd have no reason to be down there, he said.

chapter three

W
HEN
D
ANIEL CAME
into the shed the ewe looked immediately incorrect. She was stretched out, camel-prone in the straw and her head was pushed out, the lips working wildly, strained as if trying to get away from the pain at the back of her body.

He swung over the hurdle into the pen of twins and went to her. There were flecks of froth about her mouth as she had been like this for some time, and he thought of the sea and the waves, and of walking into them and the hollow tiredness he felt.

The ewe was distended and her waters had broken but there seemed to be too much thick blood and fluid in the straw, as if it had sloughed out of her, and the other ewes were unsettled and circled well away from her. He swore over and over to himself, and this was his way of finding a grip on things, of bringing it to a dealable realm.

He put his hand into the ewe and she bucked so he had to lean on her and she glazed at him with crazy eyes as she felt him stretch her and try to get his hand in to her womb through the panicked muscles.

He found a head and with his thumb tried to follow its shape, to find the nose and the lobe of the skull and follow it back to the neck. He located a foreleg, bent over like an elbow, and drew it forward to lie against the neck like undoing a knot in the dark, feeling the extraordinary strength of the sheep's pelvis clamp on his arm.

The ewe panted and groaned and he closed his eyes and tried to see the shape of the lambs inside her with his hands. They are twins, he thought. They can often get crowded and bunched together and he gritted his teeth against the rejective, blunt, maw-like pressure of her pelvis as the ewe tried again to shift.

Something wasn't making sense. He did not understand and neither did the ewe. He tried to map the bodies inside her, followed a slick throat down to the forelegs, skimmed his fingers out to find a back knee. One lamb. He drew his arm out a little then found the second head, thinking it strange shaped at first, then understanding the soft bones above the eyes, found the flap of an ear and as he moved his hand he understood and the understanding rolled up in him like vomit.

The sheep was livid now in her pain and constantly noisome and he could feel her trying to expel the thing of pain in her, could feel the monstrous lamb being forced into the ungiving bones inside her.

When he stood up he felt sick and spots shifted in front of his eyes like motes of hay dust. Like the momentary surprise of picking up an empty box you thought was full of weight.

He went over to the kettle and looked for the knife and went in amongst the tools in the crate beside the gate. The vet would take too long. He was calculating this, trying to harden himself against his own want to not see anyone, to not have to talk and work with the vet. But he would take too long. I am not choosing this wrongly, he thought.

He poured boiling water over the knife and the hacksaw in primitive sterilization and went back to the ewe, tried to settle her. All her energy went on trying to expel the lamb and she was too exhausted to move and now and again butted her head into the block wall in distracted, impossible pain.

The ewe was slathered and he dried his hands and arms on the straw, wiping off the thick grease of fluid and blood and lubricant so that he could get more purchase on the saw and then with his left hand he reached in to the sheep and found the smaller, malformed head.

He was brutal now. A brutalness descended on him of necessity so that he may do this thing, and he drew out the mouselike head.

The sheep screamed and he pulled the head as far as he could, feeling back to where the stubbed neck married the one dead body inside. Then he pulled on the head in his hand to taughten that neck and cut into it with the hacksaw, the loose skin rucking under the blade until it scythed in and bit and sunk down through the hardly acknowledgeable flesh into the bastard spine.

He broke through the bone and the head lolled and he made taut the apron of meat and veins to go through them until the head came off.

As he let go, the stump went back into her body and the ewe tried to get up in shock and he had to weigh brutally on her while she bucked and kicked. There was blood all over her and there was blood in the straw and it flicked into his face and mouth as he held her until he felt the energy go out of her.

He went back into her and felt a sharp pain as she resisted, pushing the split vertebrae of the severed head into his knuckle. The ewe kicked him once, catching him below the knee, the force unbelievable but somehow lost in the noise of adrenaline and blood of them.

He put in his other hand and drew up the forelegs and gripped them in the vees of his fingers and he eased the other head through her opening, the dead body moving behind it, will-less and without life, like paste in a tube.

He got the head and feet out and went back and steered the sharp misgrown stump out of her then wrenched out the lamb.

The ewe lay gurgling and blinking, and even in this she turned in some maternal programming to clean her offspring and looked down on it, its hindquarters ungrown and fishlike, as if it grew strangely out of the pool of blood and fluids that messed the straw.

He looked at the lamb with a sick solid feeling and got up to get a sack.

When he came back with it, the ewe was licking the severed head and he felt sick well up in him. He tried to fight off the image of the destroyed head, of her destroyed head.

He gathered into the sack the lamb and the separate head and gathered up the filthy straw before he cleaned the saw and then his hands under the tap and took great desperate gulps of water. He poured iodine on his knuckles and bit his lip against the sting and sat down with his back against the standpipe. He was shaking, and from somewhere, a great hopeless anger began in him.

He wanted the final hit. He had just a little of something left in him to keep him going and he felt this great want for it to be knocked out of him, to suffer some unpassable collision so that he could just lie down. It was a kind of
weak hopeless anger, and he felt calm now at the thought of failure. Like a boxer stumbling forward to welcome the punch that will put him finally down. Let him rest.

But God, he thought. There's this anger. It's the anger keeping me going. Gritting my teeth, pushing me on. It's like it is going to make me work it out, before I can stop.

She would not have liked that. She would not have liked this anger in me. I was not an angry man.

God, he thought, give me something to burn it out. He thought of a colossal car crash, of the huge finalizing impact. He put his palm against the upright and felt the rough wood there under his hand. The barn was full of her.

Then he thought of her with the cloth in her hair again. Of her smiling. I can do this, he thought. I can still do this. There was the huge responsibility of the farm and he would keep going because of it. He seemed to know though, that the need for the hit, the final crack, would come more and more.