by Cynan Jones
My smell must be underneath everything, he thought, it must be very deep. I don’t think it is in the air like hers seems, so it is enough to be around her, you can just walk into it and have the chemical sense of her. She has to come close in to get mine. The way you can only get the smell of some things when you touch them. Even when she is asleep she comes nosing in and it’s like she breathes me in and seems to change and settle on me. I don’t understand how a woman can like the hard, angular body of a man.
He made soft fists of his hands, stretching the weariness in them. I wonder if she feels from me the thing I feel about her when I touch her. Not in sex, which he understood now was a different thing from everything else. I just mean when I touch her skin before we sleep and I understand all the things beneath it. Animals can’t have that. They can’t hold their loved ones that way and feel right through their skin. That’s never worn off, whatever else. He looked at where she slept. I can’t imagine living without that.
He went into the bathroom and did his teeth and realized in his stupefying tiredness that he would never get to sleep in the bed so he went quietly back into the bedroom and took the clock downstairs and sat numbly on the sofa. The fire was burning out. He knew he should keep it in but he was just too numb. He sat with his elbows on his knees and held the clock and listened to the pinging and ticking of the stove cooling, the last settling embers shifting down through the grate, the metronomic ticking of the clock. Three hours. He didn’t even want the television on. He stared at its vacant, dark cataract.
They had been through much together, being with animals. Working as a team was a thing in itself most couples do not face constantly, but given working with animals, the small pressures were insistent and regular.
She seemed to suffer more under the smaller problems than the larger, and it always surprised him when she drew on wells of strength to face the bigger crises.
They had both grown up on farms and knew what to expect, but often it was the modernization which wearied them. The paperwork and cataloging and form filling their parents had never had to face, and which confused and sometimes swamped them. Every time an animal was moved it had to be noted, a vaccination given they had to record it. It made sense, perhaps, on the big wide farms the other side of the border, with their managers and offices and employees. But the weight of paper was crippling to a small farm, and neither of them was built for it, so it was a great burden.
They wondered constantly how to improve the return on the farm, thought wildly of turning the outbuildings into accommodation for holidaymakers. But the idea of having these people come into their lives for weeks at a time, of clean, expensive cars on the yard, a ruddy, loud-voiced family all in pristine country gear. He had nothing against these people but they were different and it was impossible to imagine them here, at least yet.
They thought about going organic, but by the time they looked into it with conviction organic lamb was fetching only a fraction more than nonorganic, despite the finalized organic products selling for far more in the supermarkets. The stress and extra controls were not worth it. So they resolved to follow the principles they believed in and ignore the rest, and sold what they could locally through the slaughterhouse.
They looked into direct sales, into doing the butchery themselves, but a licensed vet had to be present when you slaughtered an animal and their fees for this were prohibitive and the cost of setting up a hygienic place for the butchery was out of reach; ultimately, the animals had to go through the slaughterhouse, and they were at the mercy of the market price.
Sales of the fleeces worked at a loss, the shearers and transport coming to more than the check for the wool; rearing the stock cattle more or less covered its costs. He thought of running a shoot on the farm, but the landscape wasn’t challenging enough on one level or expansive enough on another to bring in the rich guns. They thought of specializing in rare breeds, of working to grants, even of alternative livestock like buffalo, or vicuña, whose fleeces were selling for hundreds. But ultimately, in their bones, they were sheep farmers, both of them, and they had gone into it knowing they would never be anything else. They had buried themselves in each other and the small, modest, ticking-over thing they had created, and that was enough while they could manage it.
He could not see this now, through the blur of the work. He could see it now only as a machine that he had to keep running, or it would seize up, and he was throwing himself at it relentlessly as if he were no more conscious than a part of the device.
I’ll miss a watch, he thought. She won’t know this one time. It’s quieter now. We’ve done the glut and it was quieter tonight, just the one lamb. He accepted the facts he put to himself. I have to be okay for a while longer so I’ll miss just this one. She needn’t know.
He blindly set the alarm for eight o’clock, drunk with tiredness. For a moment he thought he could feel the clock ticking, as if he felt right through it. The lamb’s heart beating in his hands. Her body under his touch. It’s time and touch, he thought. It’s these two things. It’s because we are aware of them. The draw to go upstairs and climb in next to her warm body was unbearable, but he knew he would not do it. He thought of the way he could feel right through her skin. I wonder if that’s why we get so desperate in everything. It’s like we’re touching something we weren’t ever meant to feel.
He put the clock down on the table and lay down on the sofa and pulled the spare duvet around himself. It was the longest they had been apart. She had gone once before for ten days to help when her father had been ill but this was the only other time and he could not accept that it was permanent and that it was three weeks since she’d died.
She went down to the horse to check on it and curry it and in her head there was a strange wistfulness that she did not have a horse of her own and had not ridden for years.
It was a beautiful day, but cold, one of those false starts of spring.
They were looking after the horse for a friend who was having a rough time and going through a divorce and had nowhere to paddock the horse and the horse had just arrived and had hardly made a dent in grazing the field.
The horse was a placid horse but horses are great, instinctive animals and the mare seemed to have sensed the disquiet in her owner and was recently uncharacteristic.
It was towards sundown but there was an hour of light left, especially on such a clear day, and when she got into the field the horse was watering at the pond.
Most horses locally were cobs, but this was a hunter and was higher and more gymnastic.
She walked to the horse, calling it, and began to pat its flank and the horse shook the water from its head and walked up from the pond with her.
Beyond the pond, over the trees, the rooks were circling into a ministry and she watched them as they called and circled and she curried the horse. The horse seemed annoyed and took a few steps away and she followed it but stopped and looked for a while at the farm a few hundred yards off and thought of what was inside her. She felt a great feeling of wealth and happiness go richly and simply through her. And then the horse kicked her.
That was her. She had no thought, and was just dimly aware of the world shutting off before her.
Her brain was dead by the time he got to her and really it was just her body systematically following that he watched.
He carried her the four hundred yards to the house but then turned and laid her down in the barn. He thought she would be furious if he brought her bleeding into the house.
When the doctor came, her head was hemorrhaged into aubergine. The hoof had struck her with the force of a bowling ball traveling at eighty miles per hour and the right side of her cranium was crushed. An x-ray would have looked like broken plasterboard.
The old doctor persuaded him to come in to the house and they waited for the ambulance to come and take her body. He had known them both since they were children and had no small amount of grief and anger at this and they sat with a hopeless passivity at
the thing which had happened.
The old doctor was at his desk when he received the coroner’s report a few days after. It said in empty scientific language how the hoof had fractured the skull casing and killed the brain. It also said at the bottom of the page that routine tests revealed that she was pregnant. The doctor fought with this information over and over.
He did not know that she had felt this change inside herself, as if she had felt this collision of genes and was sure she knew, had there with the horse that afternoon looked back at the farm and felt this impossible love for it and for her husband and the great rightness of it. He doesn’t need to know it now, she had decided, not with lambing coming up. I don’t need to test yet. I know. I am sure of it. But I will wait. He will get protective when he knows. Afterwards is better. And she felt girlish with the warm secret of it.
After the funeral in the little church above the farm the doctor carried this information, fighting hard not to just expel the poisonous knowledge of it. As a man of science he had long lived with a solid reverence to the facts. That they were unemotive objects that had to be navigated, as physical as debris in the road. To view them as this was the only way he could tell someone of cancer, of a blood clot near the brain, of infertility. Facts had to out. And so he went to Daniel with this information and with a need to get it from himself.
The doctor was in the living room with the older people and went through and found Daniel in the kitchen where most of the others were gathered. That soft magnetism of kitchens. He looked at Daniel. He saw a solidity and stubbornness in the man that worried him. There was a look something like wildness, as if he was in some long suspended moment of anger waiting to decide on what to bring it down. All this the old doctor saw with futility.
He doesn’t need to know, he thought. He doesn’t need to carry this. What good would it do?
The old doctor backed away from Daniel, and stood blankly and stared at his paper plate and squashed up the crumbs of sponge with his forefingers and swallowed them with the horrible fact back down.
It’s better that he doesn’t know. Why would he need that knowledge?
chapter two
THERE HAD BEEN a shattering of rain on the roof of the dog shed but it had passed quickly. It was not yet light. Through the door and out through the run the big man could see inland the darkness beginning to thin and go powdery, but the darkness still had body, a closed-ness to it with the passing rain.
The dogs messed around, tumbling over each other as he took the feed bowls. Only Messie stood still and aloof, giving just the odd snap at the other dogs if they played into her space.
The big man looked at her with a kind of reverence, standing off the other dogs. This dominance came off her that was difficult to understand in a relatively small animal like that and he was very pleased of having bred the dog. Since they took them after his arrest he’d had to start from scratch.
He poured the dog biscuits that were like colorful chips of wood into the silver feed bowls and the other dogs rushed in around him. And Messie just trotted to one of the bowls and the dogs there made way for her. It wasn’t an aggressive thing she did. It was just natural dominance.
He poured a little of the boiled water into the mash and mixed it round and the steam roiled into the light of the single bare bulb that lit up the shed. Around the walls, too high for the dogs, he’d put up the last rats they’d caught. A single nail was through each skull and they hung as misshaped macabre pouches from the beam below the roof as if some giant shrike had its larder there.
He put down the bowl of mash and looked once more at the dog Messie. The man in his big coat was like some puffed-up bird. Ag, you’re a special one, he thought. Then he sloshed the leftover water through the door into the run and watched it carry a dog shit away with it in the fog of steam it made across the concrete.
Daniel had woken late and for a while lain there almost stupefied. His whole body felt beaten for a moment, as if his muscles were made of plaster, the way they could feel after the first day of haymaking, with the fatigue of some heavy and unusual sport. Only the mild reprimand he allowed himself for missing a shift drove him up, and once he was up he fell into the automaticness of it again.
He had been in a way reluctant to go to the shed for fear of facing some catastrophe being on the other shift would have averted. A lamb strangled in its own cord; a young ewe—her pelvis too narrow—prone and sloughing blood through inside tears, her lamb drowned in its own bag, the strange hernia of bag split and bulbing from the uterus, the dead lamb’s head magnified in the fluid of its failed birth. All these things he had readied himself for as he put on his boots, went to the shed. But all was well. There was a tiny new lamb just shakily on its feet and still greasy where its mother had licked it clean. He took the lamb and sprayed the umbilical stalk with iodine and made sure the ewe had milk, and then he sprayed the number on the lamb and the ewe.
The wind soughed through the baffle netting of the shed and every now and then threw a fine rain against the corrugated tin that pinged and tinkered and brought somehow a greater sense of warmth within the shed. Briefly, there were gapes of sunshine through the fast-shifting clouds, but they came and went like laughter provoked in a crying child.
He did the automatic thing of changing the water buckets and checking the pens and then he mustered energy and cleaned out the stalls, feeling his body loosen under the work and every now and then looked over to the newborn lamb to see that it was drinking.
He reached in to the empty stall with the rake, let it bite, and then rolled in the trampled, dirtied bedding which moved as a wad, like some foul turf. Those stalls that had not been occupied for long were fine, and the bed came up lighter and more haphazard, some of the dung witnessable as solid objects in the straw. But those that had longer occupation were variously filthy and had a silage heaviness. Some smelt Marmitey, others had the smell of piss and illness. He was convinced he could sense illness in the air in some medieval way and trusted this even in relation to his own body and his personal understanding of his health. I am just tired, he said to himself now, I am not ill. I would sense it, and I am not.
As the wind soughed through the baffles he felt the cords in his arms loosen, casting out the rake then grubbing in the wet straw and forking it over the pen into the barrow until the act became compulsive and he determined to take up every piece of loosened straw off the dark stony ground beneath.
He clicked on the kettle and wheeled the barrow out of the shed and took it to the heap and tipped on the rotting bedding. Around the field crows were turning over the dung and taking up the worms. They made a strange black contrast to the fresh white lambs. Even in their adjutant walking they contrasted.
He stood holding the barrow. The hedges were not yet beginning to green up. It was as if there was a holding back to them. The ewes cried ritually and the lambs bleated back and now and then came in from play and pushed roughly at their mothers, their tails frenzied as they drank, and here and there were lambs sleeping in their mothers’ lee, folded up and catlike.
He went back in and made up the mix and fed the orphans under the warm lamp, noticing freshly as he did every time the tight, carpety compactness of the lambs’ fleeces, the way in places the skin was loose with the potential for growth, the force with which they sucked and drank.
The ground of the stalls had dried a little and he filled the spray with water and hypochlorite and pumped it up to pressure and sprayed the floor and walls of the stall, the hypochlorite stinging his nose with the smell of swimming pools.
It was the swimming pool of junior school he always thought of, how they did not talk to each other back then even though at weekends they played together on one farm or the other, his farm or her grandparents’.
Then they went to different schools. Her to the Welsh school when they moved up, and he to the comprehensive in the other town. It was years before he saw her again. When he did he recognized her instantly. He knew then. The
y both knew.
He swilled his cup and swung the leftovers from his cup under the gate into the gathering puddles and the cloudy dregs steamed on the mud.
He reboiled the kettle and blew the inevitable flakes of hay from the cup and made a coffee and poured in sugar from the bag that was fawn-stained and lumpy. He shook in the milk mix, watched the powder fatten like wet flour and sink into the cup, leaving the coffee a strange vegetal color.
Presently it began to rain and within minutes he heard the rain butt outside trackle with the falling water. He could go in to the house now, but he did not want to.
Spits of rain came over the gate, making a damp crescent stain on the ground inside the entrance to the shed. She had wanted that fixed, he thought. She was right. The shed faced the weather that came in from the northwest and it would have made a difference to fashion up some baffle netting or something to block that wide draught, the rain petering in. He felt dismayed at all the things he hadn’t done, the things he had not fixed. He thought about whether he had wasted time and could have done these things but could not think of when he had wasted time; then he tried to think of everything he did that kept him so busy and there were very few big things he could find, just the everyday running of things. Somehow time had gone too fast. It just goes too fast, he said within himself.
He sat on the bales and let his eyes go round the shed. The sheep shifted into new comforts under the rain but there was nothing doing. The new lamb was drinking. He wondered what sort of a mother she would have made. They had talked about it, were ready for it. He pushed the thought away.
