The Long Dry
Authors: Cynan Jones
Cynan Jones
For Charm and Mum,
and in memory of D.LL.W.
He tastes to her of coffee. In the morning, when he comes to wake her up.
‘The cow’s gone,’ he says. ‘The roan with the heavy bag. She’s gone. I’m going to look for her.’
He walks out and though it’s early there’s a promise of heat in the sun. It’s been like this for weeks.
She thinks of him walking down the lane, along the hedgerow, into the long field, the flies buzzing and ticking as he walks quickly over the dried ground, scuffing the loose stones.
He climbs over the first gate and she hears it clang gently through the open window of the room. She imagines him stopping; watching and listening, and all he hears are the flies and the flat moans of the sheep when they look up at him.
She looks at the watch on the table by the bed and it’s just gone six.
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He’d woken earlier and gone out to check the cows. The night had been still and again he could not sleep with all the thoughts filling the silence of the un-moving night; so he had got up and gone into the clear, still morning. For very long it had been very still. It was before the light came up.
With the light of the torch he found the stillborn calf dead in the straw of the barn. He rubbed the stump of his missing finger. He could see the cows’ breath in the morning air – which even then was cold – and a warm steam off some of their bodies. The mother of the stillborn calf was kneeling beside the calf lowing sadly and gently. The other animals hissed and puffed and chewed straw.
He took the dead calf by its ankles and lifted it from the straw that was bloodied by birth, not by the calf’s death. It was strange because the mother had licked the calf clean. He thought of the mother cow licking her calf and not
understanding why it would not stand clumsily to its feet, its legs out of proportion, its eyes wide. Why the incredible tottering new life of it did not come.
He carried the calf out of the barn, counting the cows inside, and went out into the field. Kate would be sad about the calf. The calves died very rarely for them.
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Over the hills behind the farm the light started. Just a thinning of the very black night that made the stars twinkle more, vibrate like a bird’s throat and put out a light loud compared with their tinyness. He’d noticed the missing cow.
He’d hoped it had got out of the barn and into the field, where there were other cows with older calves out. She was very close to calf and heavy and perhaps went because of the terrible thing of the still birth.
In the dark he could not see the cow and he carried the dead calf across the field, hard grazed because there had been no rain. Somewhere, a large truck growled along the road, near the land he had his eye on. He dropped the calf into the old well at the bottom of the field because he did not want Kate to see it and because it was expensive to send in the dead calves to find out why they died. You always lose some, he knew. There is no reason. You will just lose some. He hoped the cow had not gone missing.
The farm sits on a low slope a few miles inland from the sea. Gareth’s father bought the farm after the war because he didn’t want to work for the bank he worked for anymore. The farm had belonged to an eccentric old lady who was found feeding chickens in her pyjamas by the postman one morning. She had no chickens. Three sons and her husband had gone to war and they were all killed in the war one after the other, in order of age. When they found her feeding chickens that were not there she was taken away and put into a home where she died of a huge stroke like she couldn’t be away from the farm. When Gareth’s father bought it, the farm was collapsing.
The family moved in with the intention of rebuilding, of refurbishing the farm; but after the first few frantic months they did little and settled into the place. Things took on names – the rooms and the fields.
In the new house, after the floors were re-done and the walls sealed and plastered, painted brightly, things were placed here or there – the ornaments and bowls. It was too deliberate, like posing for a photograph, and odd to Gareth who was young then.
When the house started to live around its new people, things seemed to find a more comfortable place for themselves – like earth settling – haphazard and somehow right, like the mixture of things in a hedge. They relaxed and walked round the house in their shoes. Before that, for a while, it had seemed to the children like the house was
bewildered by the attention – it was like they were when their mother wiped their face with a cloth.
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‘I wanted him last night,’ she thinks. ‘Really. And then I don’t know. It went away again. I went flat, like I was numb, when he started touching me, and I tried to be patient and coaxing but he could tell, so he stopped and he didn’t say anything. I could tell he was angry. Not really with me, just, he’s been very good recently not starting anything and then I started something. And then he knew I didn’t want it; and I don’t know why. I miss his hands. God, I miss his hands.’
She’s started this, now. This way of thinking – as if she’s talking aloud with herself, as if she is a face framed in a mirror talking back to her. A means of control, or of measure. Of trying to make sense. Women get old quickly, when they get old.
She feels her body moving under the rough cloth of his shirt, which she has thrown on to be out of bed. In the mirror, behind her, the unmade bed. She feels her body is soft and filled with water and dropping with age, and there is no way he can look at her now and feel the things he has felt for her in the past. He will want her because of his care for her now, not out of desire. It’s like being allowed to win a game. He can’t possibly want her body. She wonders about cutting her hair short again.
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Sometimes they go funny. When they’re fat with calf. They go funny and they do something, and it’s impossible to guess what they have done by trying to think like them. Because they don’t think when they do this. If they decide to go they can go a great distance. Just stumbling and crashing along and it doesn’t make any sense. All you can do is try and find them and hope they are okay and do what you can. Stay near them. Check them. Mostly they’re okay once the calf has come.
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She was a dairy shorthorn – the only roan, which is a mix of red and white hairs that makes her look mostly red, the colour of bricks – the other shorthorns were white, or red, or white and red, but they didn’t have many. Most of the cows were Friesians – the black and white cows of children’s programmes that Emmy thinks look like jigsaws. They only keep a few cows now, after the quotas. They had milked many, but when the quotas came in they stopped after a few years because it was expensive to purchase the quota. Also, they had good cows with good butterfat in their milk and it was hard keeping the yields down, and you had to pay heavily if you overproduced. Many of the small farmers around them stopped dairying too, and left it to the big farms, which the quotas favoured. Mainly, they farmed sheep. They sold off a lot of the cows and kept a few for beef and, at first, for their own milk, but later mostly for stock cows. Gareth was glad they had kept some shorthorns because they were less greedy than the Friesians and were happier with feed. Without the grass it was hard to keep the Friesians fed.
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He looks down at the dry earth and he knows that it has been too dry for marks now for weeks – for hoofs, or pads or tracks. His best chance will be fresh cowpat, or a crushed section of hedge where she has forced her big weight through. You would think it would be difficult for them to move with such big bags and being all heavy, but they are stubborn big animals, and they can go through things when they choose to.
He kicks up a small rough stone and uses it to saw some twine he can’t undo without his finger. His Leatherman, he can’t find. Emmy bought him the Leatherman on her own (her own choice), on the birthday after he lost the finger – saying it does lots so it can help be what your finger was. He loved his daughter for this – her way of making tragedies smaller, by finding answers, charmingly.
It takes something to break the twine and he thinks, gradually now, my strength will leave me. When he moves the gate it collapses and bends with a hard groan. He does not get angry with the gate and he looks out, over the sea.
That morning he had watched the dawn. The dawn coming up from the ground. A single bird was singing, like a child talking to itself as it plays. He had thought of the night that was ending, and of the quiet dead calf and the missing cow, of his father’s memoirs which he is reading to help him
sleep or stop him thinking of the other things, like the land he wants to buy, and of his wife’s body; and he thought it was terrible how much he wanted her good body last night. Want will not diminish. It’s an odd thing to keep secret – how much we want each other’s bodies.
The harder mountains to the north stood out then, like knuckles at arm’s length in front of your eyes and the mist ran down from them, rolling onto the long sea until it turned to cloud and lifted into the sky. The sea was like wet glass in the sun.
For a brief moment, at this dawn, there was coldness – like a final rush of breath, then warmth came. It came slow and full and sure, like it had done for weeks.
Now, still early, he feels the warmth on his shoulders and starts down the sloping field. The cow is not here.
Swallows tuck and dive in the corner of the field where a natural spring has made the grass thick and full, taking the dew from the lush blades.
He cuts across the field and cuts under the ancient blackthorn, twisted and aubergine, clinging to the dry soil of the bank. The stream is dry. Here and there the water rises from the deep ground making patches of mud dotted with bright green weed and the footprints of birds, but the water does not run. There is a scattering of broken shells around a sharp stone where a thrush brings snails to feed on. He likes to hear this, the sharp clear tick of the shells being broken on the stone. It fascinates him, the tiny ingenuity of birds.
He follows the line of the stream down and ducks under the fence which hangs uselessly between the banks. In the next field, where the pond is, swallows drink from the water and take the small flies that buzz in crowds while it isn’t yet too hot. He remembers that he has forgotten that today he has to go and collect the duck. Perhaps he feels the breeze begin, a little. This year the swallows came early.
For a while the beauty of the pond and of the swallows holds him. Then, knowing the cow is not here either, he turns and starts back for the house.
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In the winter months the water runs down the lane, bringing with it the dirt and stones. And these and the fallen leaves fall into the ditches and the drains so that after a while they are blocked and the water runs in sheets across the fields, feeding the fine grass and sinking into the earth, which is rich and dark here.
Down the lanes and in the hedges there are always gorse flowers somewhere, but they come thickly in the Spring. First the yellow – the celandine and daffodils, dandelions and primroses, then white – star-gazed the anemones, clouds of snowdrops, may blossom and stitchwort – colour coming in schemes at first to the wide land, before other picks of colour – the dog violets, and the bluebells and campions, and, in the woods close to the stream, wild garlic. On a day like this – with the faintly lifting breeze shifting off the sea to the south-west, across the fields –
the smell of garlic sharp and sour and wonderful would come across the farm, earlier in the summer. But the flowering is over now.
The dog, Gwalch, has followed him down the lane, and he stands lean and young by the gate. He is a sleek and ready and strong dog. Further up the lane, he’ll find Curly, the big old dog curled and resting in the sun on the path, half-way down, which is as far as he could go now. The dog had started happily and with hope and had gone down the track after the younger dog and then just got tired and lay down in the sun.
The old dog looks up as he hears the curl of a car engine shift quickly down the road across the valley. Gareth hears it too. There is a nice hunger in him, and he wants coffee now. The house is blinding on the hill.
He looks down at his feet and sees the lime gathered on his old leather shoes. The lime has not gone into the field because there has been no rain. He looks at the field and the hard earth and pads it under his foot. He’s worried about the grass; it’s not good to be feeding hay at this time of year, with the young lambs and the calves coming. The animals need fresh grass. He knows too, that when the first rain comes it will wash away the lime and run off the dry broken ground.
She drops the bacon into the hot pan and it snaps in the boiling grease and starts to curl. She puts the bacon she has already cooked on an old plate and puts it into the warm
oven to keep warm. The bacon in the pan is spitting and cracking noisily and she turns the heat down. The kitchen starts to fill with a weak blue smoke.
They built the extension themselves, turning the old kitchen into a place to eat. Even now the walls are damp in the morning as the house sweats out the heat that comes into it in the day. The wallpaper lifts in chunks from the wall like bark coming off and there’s velvet-looking mildew here and there, all somehow unimportant and right and of no worry. They don’t notice now. The old house has these, like a tree does.
In the kitchen there is a stove with gas bottles illegally close to it. There’s a small window, thick with condensation, which is permanently open but still mists, and a calendar of farm scenes from a stockfeed manufacturer. There’s an old Belfast sink against the wall, and from this a pipe runs outside through the wall to an outside tap with half a foot of stiff green hose attached. Underneath the tap the moss and green mould grows thick and well.
The Formica units are always clean, so you can see the strange wary pattern on it, and above them, above the plastic pots of sugar and tea bags and constantly pilfered biscuits, chipboard cupboards hang somehow, heavy with half-used things and tins of beans and fruit that are never used.