The Long Dry (6 page)

There is an electric sound of birds.

The cow slept for a while, or slumbered, chewing the cud of the Timothy grass it had taken from the hedge, at the edge of the field. When she woke she was spooked. Birds hopped and snipped around her. She felt watched. She was very warm from the sun and she slumbered for some time. Then she got up and moved on. She clattered on, breaking back through the thick dry growth.

From the mud, like a broken machine, a cage of bleached white bones stood up. Many a cow had died in the bog, stuck and having to be shot where they struggled. You couldn’t tell if the cow thought of her own death when she saw the bones. She left another long green pat as she walked; and for no reason, in no particular way, went on over the fields.

Gareth walked down to the bog. The heat is crazy. Everything seems subdued. Walking out after lunch was like walking into a wall of heat, and he couldn’t see very much for a while, until his eyes accepted the light. He said: ‘if the vet comes, you have to get Mummy.’

He went the way he thought the cow had gone, across the fields. He didn’t know if the cow was in the bog, but the last time a cow did this she was in the bog. She’d made a nest and bedded down and had her calf quietly there.

From the road, above the land, he hears a dog barking, his neighbour’s vicious shouts. The anger that is in him turns on them – the anger that is really because of the cow, and the rabbit, and his hurt ankle. He tries to put it on his neighbours. They are fat vicious people who don’t know very much and don’t like anything and it shows in their dogs. They came here some time ago, to Bill’s farm, with the idea of using the land. But they did nothing, and let it ruin. He had tried to like his neighbours, but they were just not people you could like, in the end. He was sure one of their dogs had taken the cat.

They had lost the cat last summer and had said that she must have been taken by tourists. They thought this because there was always a chance the family that took her was a good family. A lot of tourists come here every year. Most of them are from cities and they don’t understand the country – it is like a park to them. They see a cat and they think it is a stray because it isn’t very close to a house.

So they coax it away, feeling sorry for it; worse than that, because they don’t understand the way of things, the cat gets in the car. Like a kidnap. He imagines the cat suddenly in the city and being totally afraid, but he knows the neighbours’ dogs had had it.

Once, one of the dogs – they are Alsatians and untrained and nasty – had come down the lane and was in the yard where Emmy was. It barked at her and ran at her and she stood stock still and it barked right into her face but she didn’t cry or move. And Curly came out, old as he was even then, and tried to bark the other dog down but it just growled at him and inside Curly knew that the other dog could kill him. Then his son had come out and bravely ran at the dog which fled back up the lane, though it hesitated horrifically for a moment. They will be in the fields with the lambs one day, and Gareth will take a gun to them, and he will kill them. He will take the dead dogs back to his neighbours and if they say anything he will open all his anger on them because he is a very strong thing when he is angry.

When the neighbours got their dogs they argued about naming them. Their first ridiculous idea was to give them Welsh names which they could not say properly. They could not agree on names and in the end named one each, defiantly. So the dogs became tools they used against each other, like everything else about them. She named the bitch, with whom she shared some features, Cher, after the pop star; he gave his dog a lordship’s name, which, in his voice which sounds like a chicken, he shouts across the fields because it’s always escaping. The dogs fight constantly, too. Dogs are always a distillation of
what their owners are. They learn by observing, not by being broken.

Sometimes, when he checks the stock at night, when he wants the night’s long space, Gareth hears them fight, their angry voices tearing out over the fields and the dogs barking, like now, and it angers him, because it is a blasphemy to the easy quiet of this place.

They used to say the bog was haunted, to keep the kids away. It was easy to believe, sometimes. Even now, in this dry world it had become, there was a presence to it, a sense of watching, a sense that it was waiting.

Gareth had found the pat, already drying, where the cow had rested by the bank. Bright orange flies crowded on it, preying on other flies on the dung, and laying larvae in it. He knew then she had headed to the bog.

He found the hoof marks in the soft mud that would usually be up to his waist, and impossible. The cow had crashed through, and for a while it was easy to follow the broken trail of her body. The ground looked starved. Gareth thought of the thing he had seen in a newspaper, long ago, of a three-year-old boy who had followed fallen-down trees and gone missing. He had followed the trees because he believed they’d been knocked over by a dinosaur, and he
wanted to speak to the dinosaur. Gareth imagines him following the fallen-down trees, torn up on their sides from the ground. The boy was Scottish, he remembers that much. Sixteen hours later, they found him safe.

It’s strange for Gareth to think of his father so far away, in Scotland during the war. He’d never really talked truly of the war and reading the memories it was odd to know he was posted to Wick and Dundee and Orkney, and Brighton and the Essex Marshes and Carlisle. He smiles at the thought of his father writing – ‘when Hitler was doing all the evil and all the devilry a devil of his sort could do.’ It sounded lovelier in Welsh – a Hitler yn gwneud pob drwg a phob diawledigrwydd a allai cythraul o’r fath ei wneud. He imagines his father saying it. He thinks how it must have been for him, posted to Wick, further than he’d ever thought to go, where he was made Chauffeur and Batman to the regimental Chaplain. Then, high in Scotland, the happiest three months of his war passed, driving round the locale with the Chaplain. He speaks of the time he was taken to see the Chaplain’s ninety year old aunt, who spoke only Gaelic, which the Chaplain translated.

She wanted him to sing to her in Welsh. Gareth had only heard his father sing once or twice, and he imagined it must have moved her very much.

He stops for a while to rest his ankle, using it to loosely kick some old bones that lie like a cage, half buried in the firm mud. He desperately wants a coffee, now. ‘Damn this cow,’ he thinks to himself. He reaches down and pulls up a dandelion root and goes into his pocket for his knife so
he can clean it, so the bitter juice will take his mind off wanting a coffee. It’s such an automatic thing, reaching into his pocket, that he has to realise the Leatherman is not there all over again. He snaps the root, and uses his nail to scrape off the dirt.

Chewing the foul root he remembers the taste from his childhood – their rations – when his brothers and he played in the drainage ditches here by the bog. He’d passed the ditches earlier, dry and clear now and parched, like the inside of a shoe. The memory comes to him very strongly with the very strong taste, coming up clearly from inside him. It is like feeling, this. Memory and real care sit under the surface, like still reservoirs waiting to be drawn from.

It is easy, he knows, to take from the surface of these things, like dipping a bucket into water self-consciously: you can call up these things. But when it comes up un-beckoned, without self control, set off by some scent in the air, or fear, you can be shocked by its depth, which you hold in you all the time.

He knows that this is where his father got his quiet dignity, his ability to love so simply and so much. Through coming face to face with all this care in him. He thinks, if we have tragedy then we have to face care, like this taste makes me remember playing soldiers, and I can’t help it. We have to admit our massive love for people. If we don’t ever need to know its depth, we just feel the light on the surface.

When his father was young he married a girl he’d met and they were blissfully happy. Two sons were born. The bank moved him again and they had to leave the lovely house by
the sea, but they were still very happy. A few months later another son was born. The birth was a good one, but a day before she was due home, his wife, Thelma, had an embolism. They tried to save her, but she died. His world was shot to bits. Gareth had no doubt that this was where his father’s strength of care had come from, and his ability to be so happy at the very simple thing of a family.

He tries not to follow the tunnel of thought that is opening up before him like a big mouth. That perhaps a crisis would cure them too – would push away the tiny problems that were damaging them like splinters. Not the cow, or dead calves, or a son leaving for college, or the land he wanted, or her body not being wanted anymore. A crisis, that would reiterate the importance of life and of reaping happily from it what you could. Sickly, he thinks his father was lucky to have this.

Scenarios of disaster come to him, wash over him and he can’t stop them. They are like storm waves and like a man in the sea now he has to try and ride them. He says to himself to not believe in fate, or of being careful what you wish for. The words ‘I don’t mean this, these thoughts aren’t real’ are like caught breaths of air. But now he can’t stop the thoughts from hitting him. Perhaps, if it was brucellosis and it was in the herd, they would have to annihilate the animals and that would be the end of it and they could start again. The exhaustion of doing the same thing everyday would change. Or if something happened to just one of them that glued them all together – something they could survive. A car crash they walked away from, re-aware of the value of life. A quick pain; a quick, ready pain that reaffirmed the balances of want. Thoughts come
to him violently, that it should be her to whom it happens, because the others have strength. The strength is needed in the people who stand by. Or else he wonders if an attack on himself would bring cohesion – make them realise what they could lose: a cancer he survives.

But underneath he understands that if he thinks these things, it means there’s no strength there. And only if a tragedy occurred would he know if there was any left at all. How can one wish for cancer? In the coming weeks, it will all haunt him. A voice in him says: this is the simple cowardice that breaks us all eventually; a breaking of the surface strength. When you run out of the things that make you want. When you think of everything, of every other way to change a thing other than taking it head on. He just wishes Kate was better. That she would laugh, or walk unnecessarily in the sun, or simply love him back – which in the end amounts to tolerating what he feels for her. The idea of thirty more years with her… we live too long, he thinks. We’re expected to love too much and too long. He mustn’t be like this, he thinks, he mustn’t let this dark thing take him: this ever-hungry, very close big cloud of not caring anymore, and of not wanting. This is the enemy which must be fought until the end.

The vet came down the lane in his old van. It always amazed Gareth how such a quiet man could bear the
rattling of that van; but then he understood the old vet had a tremendous respect for age. It was as if his still using it, and driving it, kept the van alive. He would not trade it in, and he would mend it when he could. Only when something massive went wrong with it would he give the van away completely. It gave Gareth a great faith in the quiet old vet.

The vet knew what he was like and accepted it. He would have been a doctor, but he knew that eventually the constant questions of people, their need for reasons, would wear him down; he would have to articulate things and explain the things he did, where in reality most of what he did he did from instinct, and animals just accepted this. He blew two short blasts on his horn.

Gwalch, the younger dog, barked and hopped at the vet when he got out of his van. Curly lifted himself heavily onto his feet and his tail wagged passively. A big, loud bee went around. The vet’s eyes settled on the old dog and he smiled at him sadly and fondly and said ‘hey, boy’ very quietly.

The bee went around, and when it went close to the ground it drew up tiny little curls of dust. It was buzzing gently. ‘They think now that bumblebees tread air, like we tread water,’ thought the vet. It went round and round the small place by the door and if you could draw a line out behind it, it would look like a snake, with the same purposeful pattern of moving. ‘They look curious, but they are careful finders of things,’ he thought.

He felt the smallest tickle of something on his skin and had a fleeting smell of soap. Emmy giggled and another roll
of bubbles floated out from her wand and over to the old vet. Curly wagged his tail more when he saw Emmy, and started to walk to the vet.

When Emmy heard the van coming down the lane she knew it was him and she had just put her head round the door and seen that her mother was asleep. So she went quietly back out.

‘Mummy is with her headache in bed,’ Emmy said. ‘Dad’s lost a cow.’

‘So you must be in charge,’ he said. And she gave a delighted nod. She thinks the bee looks like a helicopter.

There was more to what she said than beautifully bad grammar. It belied her logic. Since she was very tiny she’d always thought the best thing to do with any pain or worry was to go to bed. Because the thing that hurt you had to go to sleep as well. Then all you had to do was wake up very quietly, so you didn’t wake the bad thing up. Then you got out of bed and left it sleeping, so it didn’t hurt you anymore. Her parents had no choice but to accept it often worked for her, so they didn’t question it too much, but they wished they could believe it too. One thing that had always fascinated Gareth was the way his children came up with things completely by themselves.

‘Have you come to mend Curly?’ she asked.

This hurt the vet a bit and he stumbled for a moment around the different things he should say. Then looking at the girl he just knew he had to be brave with her.