Only by that time she had changed her mind. Perhaps he would never do quite right before her. She was watching as he took the farm back, and he was failing her, as if he was doomed to fail before her eyes. Perhaps it would have been better if she had not kept it for him so that he had to follow, looking like his father, in his father’s footsteps, resented by her for being what he was being which was only after all what he was and what his father had been before. Bit by bit, he took the farm back, and though it was what she had been waiting for all these years he had the feeling that she didn’t want it to happen any more. He had begun with the barn, which he needed to put his machinery in. He emptied it of its junk. He rid it of the fantail pigeons that nested in the rafters, put it back how his father would have had it. She had loved the fantails, which had come as a pair and had bred into a flock over the years, ornamental white birds, not wood pigeons, that used to perch exquisitely in the sunlight on the crest of the roof, or coo and strut and display on the ground of the yard. She asked if they couldn’t have stayed. They’re the sort of birds that live in dovecotes, not barns, he said. Look at the shit on the floor. If his father had been around, there wouldn’t have been a single pair of fantails nesting in the barn. But his father hadn’t been around. It was she who had let them colonise the place. We’re a farm, Mum. We’re growing food for people to eat. In this context they’re just a kind of vermin. It hadn’t been his choice to have the farm; it was she who had hung on to it. How could she then not let him farm it as he saw fit?
So one evening he closed the big barn doors when the birds were roosting, and the next morning he went out with his gun.
Don’t come, Mum. Don’t look. Don’t see this.
And he went in and closed the door behind him and shot a dozen birds in the fluttering space, and only then let the rest of the flock escape. The door thrown open, light flooding in, a rush of wings overhead. The dead birds heaped in a barrow, to be taken and buried or burned on the fire. Blood red on white feathers. His look hard on them, the hope in it that he had killed enough so that the others wouldn’t come back. If his mother had had her way, she would have given the whole farm over to her fancy birds, let the hedges grow and fall across the ditches, the bramble and blackthorn spread and tangle into thickets, those roses with the French names ramble out from the garden over everything.
One day in the winter that followed, he started on the cowshed. Only himself and his mother at home now since Jonny was away, and he found it hard, in the quiet of the house, to be idle. When there was no activity Jonny’s absence became all the more noticeable, and with it the implication of his own continued presence, his permanence in the place. This particular day it was raining heavily. The ground outside was too sodden to work and would likely be so for some days to come. Clearing the cowshed was something to do. No urgency to the job, only that the building was derelict. The cowshed like the old barn had stood empty for fifteen years, but there was nothing he needed it for. It was obsolete as well as derelict, though it had only been put up in the 1930s, the modern building seeming emptier than the old one could ever have been.
The metal door rattled open onto a clanging void, concrete floor, tin roof, railed pens, feeding troughs, lengths of pipe that once held rat poison. There was no other debris there save what had been used for the cows. Even the murky air had a different quality from the air of the barn, a stale but still acrid odour come of the long disintegration of shit and straw, which had seemed to impregnate even the metal. He put on overalls and gloves and tied a handkerchief across his face, and spent a day clearing, putting what might be sold at auction or for scrap out into the yard where the rain washed it down. His mother saw it there and came out to see what he was doing, wearing a big black oilskin because the rain was hard, came into the shed and pushed back the dripping hood to look about her. How long since she had last been in there? Not since the cows left, perhaps, when it was a bright space soft with straw and warmed by the beasts. But the electricity had been cut off long ago, wires hanging loose, overhead sockets dangling smashed bulbs. She went to push the door fully back and let in more light, of whatever light there was outside on a day like that, but the door was stuck in its runners, it wouldn’t go any further. She was coughing in the churned-up, sour-smelling dust, holding her hand to her mouth.
What are you doing?
Clearing.
Why?
To take it down. We don’t need it any more. We can put up a modern grain store instead.
And he said he would take down the cart barn too.
But it’s a lovely old cart barn.
But that’s what it is. It was built for carts.
Didn’t she see, the point wasn’t the past but the present?
You and your bright new toys, she said, turning away and back out into the rain.
As if a man was still only a boy.
It slowly came to him, how they had changed. She might have been thinking these thoughts for a while, but he hadn’t noticed. He didn’t much notice that sort of thing – but maybe other people didn’t either, not when it was a question of the people they lived with. The people you lived with you took for granted, you didn’t expect them to change or even to get any older, not visibly, only infinitesimally and unseen from day to day and yet each morning looking the same. She had once read a book about a silent spring. There had been a time when everyone had seemed to be reading that book but that time was passed. It said how chemicals were destroying nature. He thought, they would have got over it by now, and besides, things like DDT had been banned; modern science had come a long way since then. But the idea was still alive in her, making her afraid of what he did. She would say, I worry, you know, about the future. She would come downstairs in the mornings. The birds, she would say, did you hear the birds this morning? That lurking possibility in her, each morning, that this day of all days the birds might not have sung. Or if they sang today, that their numbers were reducing, numbers of buzzards or sparrows, or of returning swallows, the house martins’ nests in the eaves not filled this year, not replaced, the lapwings not come to the fields. She spoke as if his work was a threat to them all, the everyday work of the farm some kind of violence. These sprays you use, I can’t stand the smell of them. She took up his overalls in her yellow rubber gloves and put them into the washing machine. The smell clings, she said, even when they’re washed.
Only it didn’t. His overalls when they came out of the machine were clean. If anything, they smelled of detergent, since she put in so much. He thought that she must have imagined the smell, on them and possibly sometimes even on himself.
He saw grey in her hair, lines on her face, a particular fine vertical pair of lines on her brow, above her nose. They must have been there for a while. Criticism in them. Some hardening where he used to think that she was soft.
Why don’t we have cows again, like we used to? We could use the shed. You haven’t torn it down yet.
He had the shed pulled down.
It was she who had sold the cows. The hurt was still there in him. The boy’s white knuckles in the grown man.
The herd
He had understood what was happening the moment he saw the cattle truck. He saw from the landing window as he was coming down the stairs. Ran then, down and along the passage and out the back door. There was his mother standing with some papers in her hands. The driver of the truck had opened the doors, set out a ramp.
No. You can’t do that. He ran and tore the papers from her hands and threw them down in the mud of the yard. The driver turned and looked at him, and he saw through into the interior of the truck, the empty space striped with light waiting for the cattle to fill it. Hands grabbed him and held him tight, his mother’s hands holding him back with more force than she had ever held him. She pulled him back tight against her. Her arms folded about him like iron. No. He twisted about and screamed and kicked at her legs. Then after a while he stilled.
Jonny was standing beside them now. Quiet, only wat
ching. He felt Jonny’s quiet. It made him quiet. He wasn’t going to be babyish beside his little brother. His mother’s arms softened about him but didn’t remove themselves. When he gave a shiver that might have been the beginning of an escape, they tightened again.
A boy should not run mad into a herd of cattle, even when they seemed at their most docile, driven out from the shed towards the ramp. He knew that. He should not scatter them or panic them into the unpredictable. He knew these things. His father had told him such things. When his father had told him things like that, the knowledge had seemed special, intended for him man to man, making him a man even when he was a boy. Whoa, go-aan then. Matthew the cowman was herding the animals as if there had been no commotion, as if he wasn’t there and had never screamed, so calm that it was as if the animals had not seen him either. Matthew walked forward slowly behind the herd with his arms outstretched, speaking long low vowels. On the other side Billy and the driver did the same. The rusty-coloured cattle moved with slow inevitability towards the ramp. Go-aan, you, up there. The first one or two hesitated, looked about them. That’s right. Go-aan. As they reached the ramp the animals behind them seemed to flow together, becoming one softly heaving mass within the prison space of the truck.
The arms were still there, tight about him.
They’re Daddy’s cows. His voice was thin, high-pitched, strange even to himself.
Not really, they weren’t ever really Daddy’s cows, you know that. They were Great-Uncle Ralph’s, Ralph’s herd. Daddy only kept them on for Matthew’s sake.
Again her arms tightened as he struggled against her. So? We can keep them too.
She bent down in front of him where she could look into his eyes, but not letting go, her two hands to his upper arms. She spoke gently, reasonably. But, darling, we can’t. You know Jackson’s running the farm now, not us, and Matthew’s getting too old to deal with them anyway.
Fuck, he said. Fuck. To her face.
The men were putting a chain across the back of the truck. They were closing the doors, folding up the ramp. Through the openings between the slats of the truck he could see the cattle, their reddish haunches and sides; their faces turned, rubbed against, looking out. The noise they made seemed not to be the noise of individual animals but the prolonged moan of one single sad trapped beast. He cried for the great beast. He cried more than he had ever cried at any other time. He wrenched himself away now as the arms had gone limp, and ran behind the truck as it started up. He went on running as it bumped away along the drive. He ran with flailing arms, fell, picked himself up and ran again, the tears streaming, a cut on his knee running with blood.
His mother ran after him but he was too fast for her. Maybe she was letting him run, letting him run it out of him. He could come to no real harm on this track. But when she finally reached him, at the gate by the road, he did not so much as let her look at his bleeding knee. Even as she crouched before him he turned away. Tight, shaking, tear-drenched face averted, fists clenched white, he brushed past her soft hand and her skirt and walked back towards the yard.
There, boy, there. There it is. There you go. Old Matthew put two hands to his shoulders and spoke in the same tone that he used for the cattle. Matthew too had tears in his eyes.
The smell of them lasted in the fields for months. In the empty shed it remained for days and weeks and years, even in the cold when other smells faded, the smell or the memory of the smell, in dung drying to pale flaking crusts on the concrete floor. He used to go every now and then into the old cowshed, where no one else ever went, not pushing back the big door, he wasn’t strong enough to do that – and besides, it made such a noise rolling back on its runners that people would know he was there – but softly in by the small door at the side of it where the catch was broken. Once he was inside he had left the people and the world outside. He closed his eyes and knew again the warmth of the cows in their wire and concrete stalls, their lowing and shuffling, the green splatter of their shit. He was crouching safe between their red-brown flanks.
No one would find him. Not even Jonny, though he heard him calling in the yard.
Where are you? That one of the calls of the younger brother: Where are you, Wait for me, Let me come, Can I play too … There was always a choice to be made for him in those calls: would he answer, would he let him in or not? No. He would not let him in here. This must be his place alone.
Where are you? I know you’re somewhere around here. Then the creak of the metal door pushed open. Jonny was cleverer than he thought. Or it was his own fault, he must have not quite closed the door, Jonny must have seen it just so slightly open. A bar of cold light entered the grey of the shed. There was no time to move, only the cows to hide him.
What are you doing? Jonny stood before him at the opening to his stall.
None of your business. Go away.
The cows were quite gone. Only their dried-up smell remained. Jonny stood where they had been.
But there’s nothing here.
Go away.
He went on standing there looking puzzled. He didn’t even start to move.
See this, Richard said, and pointed at a little pile of blue-dyed grain.
What’s that?
That’s poison, he said. It’s called Warfarin. Matthew put it out for the rats. It doesn’t matter about the rats now so I’ve been collecting it up. If you come in here again I’ll poison you.
Still Jonny stood there, wide-eyed now. But it looks like grain, he said.
It is grain, but it’s been soaked in poison. That’s why they make it blue, so you can tell the poisoned grain from the good stuff. The rats can’t tell because Matthew puts it out in pipes on their runs, and they run through in the dark and eat it because it smells like any other grain, and maybe it tastes like any other grain because they come back for more, and because sometimes Matthew puts sugar with it to make it sweet. And when they’ve eaten enough they go and die in their holes. They die, and dry out, from the inside out, like mummies, I’ve seen.
Jonny had taken a step closer.
Didn’t you hear what I said? If I put it in your food you won’t smell it or taste it, any more than a rat does.
It’s blue. I’ll see it, won’t I? I don’t eat in the dark.
How long?
As long as it takes
It rained in the Lakes, and the hills were grey. When the rain stopped and the sun came out the hills were purple and the sky was blue. Jonathan took pictures in black-and-white. Why do that, she wanted to say, when there are these colours? It’s the colours that make the place so beautiful. But he was seeing the curves of the hills and the sheen of the lakes, and the way the light came between the clouds and fell across them. It made her aware of things like that, travelling with Jonathan. She started to see what he saw, what she might not have seen for herself. She began to see where he would take his pictures – or if not where, then when. What concerned him might be the light or the shadows, not the colours or even the forms. The moving things, the moment, the places between, and how he might catch them.
One day they climbed a mountain into a big wind. She stood at the top with her arms out like an aeroplane falling forward into the wind but the wind kept her upright. She could see the horizon where the wind came from, and a lake dark in the valley deep below, and cloud moving through the valley. She called to Jonathan, her words carried back on the wind, and he came and stood there too and put out his arms. Then the wind blew the cloud up from the valley. They could feel the cold and the moistness of it before it reached them, swirling up and hiding the lake and then all the land below until there was no view any more but only cloud, and he pulled her close and put his arms around her.
Do you still love me? she said. She said it again, loud. She had to speak loudly as the wind took her words away.
Of course I love you.
Do you love me as much as you did in Japan?
Of course.
Sometimes I think it’s different, now you�
��re in England.
Why should it be different?
His face was cool, damp with the mist.
Just that things are different here.
Maybe it’s you that’s different.
Wind. Cloud. Words blown about in the cloud. He. She. One of them. Different.
Maybe he was no different, she thought in that moment. Only the place. That was what was wrong. What seemed free in Japan was no longer freedom once he was home.
She remembered why he had left Japan, or why he said he was leaving. I’m not Japanese, am I? I’m outside of it all. I can only watch and not touch.
But that’s your job, she said, that’s being a photographer. That’s who you are. You watch. You look. You see, and you show us things about the world we live in that we don’t know we’ve seen.
It seemed OK there, in Tokyo, that he was doing that.
And besides, you touch me, she said. You touch me lots.
He laughed then, as if she was right and he was silly to have had that idea.
OK, he said, maybe you’re right, but I still have to go home, for a while at least, and you can come too, and then we’ll go from there.
The walk took them on along a ridge and through bare stretches of land. They had to watch the ground carefully for the path. It was only a thin beaten track that had been made by the people who had walked it before. No one but the two of them up there that day but she was aware of all the others, walking that path looking for the cairns, or some of them building the cairns, picking up stones to mark where they had been so that other people could see and follow. If it hadn’t been for the cairns they might have got lost, up there on the top of the mountain. She went behind him in the mist, his dull green coat that blended with the rocks. She had come all that way to be with him but he receded before her, camouflaged in his green coat, closed into his thoughts. She ran to catch up with him.
Harvest Page 11
