The Dig

by Cynan Jones

  The men were straight off the mound to the dogs but the noise had been massive and abrupt. The fox had gone, and they couldn’t understand how a fox could come into the smells of them and the sound of them digging but it had and the dogs’ reaction had shattered through the cloak of trees.

  •

  Daniel was going through the cattle when he heard it. He stopped. For a moment he listened to the rattle of the corrugated iron as one of the cows scratched inside the barn, and to a tractor clanging as it changed loaders on the next farm.

  His own dog was up and alert on the roof of the kennel and there was the clink of its chain as it scented the air, smelling the echo of sound. Over the cwm the sound had set other farm dogs off but he knew what he had heard. It was not fox, he was sure. The bark was different from the sheepdogs. Smaller dogs.

  He stayed still, as if recalling the sound, trying to pin it down, and then went through the cowshed and looked out over the dark fields to the woods. Sounds came to him through a wall of thought. He listened hard.

  The men settled the dogs and when the sheepdogs in the nearby farms started up they saw it could cover the thing.

  The big man was looking at the tops of the trees for the breeze to see which way the sound might have gone. He listened for the sound of a quad bike. When there was none after some time he seemed to settle. He had been like an animal growing in its senses and his whole frame in the big coat seemed to shrink minutely as he relaxed. He could hear faintly the echoey sound of the sheep in the barn above and thought the noise inside must be complete and heavy. Ag, he thought. You wouldn’t hear it over that.

  After a while they started again to dig.

  Daniel stayed still, listened. He had just fed the sheep and they were only just quietening from the great bleating they made as he unfolded the hay. They had fallen quiet with eating now, and he listened. The dogs had bothered him. It was trancelike, like feeling for a lamb, as if his mind felt round his land like a great hand feeling for something wrong, some fault in its body, some small thing out of place.

  And then he heard it, was sure he could hear it. Some tap foreign to the concert of the land. Once. Twice maybe. It wasn’t a random sound; it was a sound of work. A tink far away, like the sound of a thrush cracking a snail. And then it was gone again.

  Despite the cold the skinny man worked in his T-shirt and you could see the national tattoo turn grotesque with the work and the strange, febrile bulldog inside his forearm. He had the peculiar heating of fatless men and he swung the pick onto the stone a second time before the man could stop him, and then a third, shattering the thick leaf of shale, the strange percussive noises going off into the air.

  Too much noise, said the big man. Next time dig round.

  He had this strong captaining and the skinny man looked at him guiltily. It was like he was drunk in the effort and he was showing a kind of childlike excitement. The big man just stared right through him. Then he went off into the woods.

  Daniel went into the house and through the kitchen and went into the lean-to for the gun.

  He opened the cabinet and took out the .410. Then he put it back and took out the twelve bore.

  In his tiredness the gun felt heavier than he remembered. He breached it. The smell and the look of the gun made him think of the shard, the metal smell still somewhere on his hands.

  He took a box of cartridges and went through again to the kitchen. Then he got the bag of rice and prepared to swap the lead out of the cartridges.

  The Aga pinged and drew his attention and he put the gun down breached on the table and took the box from the open oven.

  The lamb was dead. It was dead and comfortable.

  He put his hand to the lamb’s ribs. Nothing.

  He got up and put the gun back in the cabinet, and then went out. And there was something sacrificial in the way he did.

  The skinny man was in the hole passing the dirt up to the asthmatic man. It was deeper than him, and you couldn’t see the skinny man unless you looked right in.

  Every now and then the big man passed water down to him which he tipped on his head as if he were too hot. They were close to the badger now and they could sense this closeness and the men talked encouragingly to the dog.

  The big man had returned and was standing with the dogs.

  This is it, thought Daniel. This is the last bit I have. Right here. He was down on the wet ground clenching his fists and trying to calm himself and rouse himself all at once. He could feel his fists sink into the wet earth.

  He listened to the men call to the dog, could hear the accents, hear the spade slice the ground, muffled, the men digging her grave at a distance. The noise of the work and the slope of the mound protected him and he looked up through the big trees, then down at the place around the dig.

  There was a pile of severed roots. The tools.

  He felt something set in. This is it, he said to himself. He could smell the new opened ground. Then he stood up, and the dogs went berserk.

  The spade coming was like the wing of a bird.

  He watched the jay pick up from the ground the leftover food they always threw from the door. He watched the day sink. The cold snap had come, the low sun started to decline.

  He was looking at the jay. They had grown more confident now, since more magpies had been trapped in the hedgerows, like they filled their space. The jay was curious moving and the same color as the sunset and he was looking at the symmetry of that color and thinking of the pink cloth she had lost.

  He heard the door click and the jay startled and flew off, the blue splash of its wings dazzling in their selfness against the bird.

  She came out, pushing her feet into her boots. She looked bigger than she really was in her clothes. From the house came the smell of warm bread.

  I’m going down to the horse, she said.

  He watched her walk away. The light seemed to vibrate in the land and he felt a great love for it, as if he had seen it anew. He had the great, choking feeling.

  The sun was dropping before her and he watched her go over the fields.

  This is everything. This is everything I need, he said.

  epilogue

  They pull up the cars some way off from the place and get out, holding the latches up as they push the doors to. It is impossible to be silent with the wet ground. The dogs pant, scuffle.

  The policeman looks down at the wet ground while the others get out around him, get readied. He presses his foot into the mud of the verge, lifts it deliberately. When he checks his torch, his footprint is clear and defined. He thinks of the earth of the sett, its witness. There are the boot prints. Matches of soil. A dog’s hair taken from the mouth of a tunnel.

  There is the faintest squelch on his radio and he presses his ear, nods there in the darkness. The teams are in place. The greatest risk is the dogs.

  Perhaps in his sleep the big man distantly registers the clink of chains, the click of doors, the suck of footsteps. As if they happen in some earth some way above him. Then they come, with an immediate noise.

  He is sleeping and stunned bright light-like for a moment into a childlike immobility. His own dogs echo riot in the sheds and the police dogs respond, deafening in the low, crouched house. And though this is his space he is disoriented, startled and slow.

  In the confined room the constant yelps are deafening and confusing and like bright lights to the man, and he is unsure what he can do.

  Lights blind his eyes, a dog barks inches from his face. There is nowhere to go. He has nowhere to go.

  In the small hole of his room he feels sick misunderstanding fear and lashes at the dog, kicks and scuffs as he cowers, finds himself stopped up against the wall, tries to use the thick blanket like a hide.

  The handler shouts him to be still, to stay still in the spattering space of noise, the sniffer dogs breathing through the tunnels of the house, the shouting men.

  He sees past the dog’s glaring eyes the metal cuffs, the instruments re
adied for his taking. He revolts again but the dog yaps. The dog yaps. The dog yaps every time he moves.

  acknowledgments

  Thanks to the Society of Authors for a Foundation Award and to Literature Wales for a bursary, both of which gave me time with the book.

  Thanks to Gordon Lumby of Badger Watch & Rescue Dyfed for confirming things I already knew, and for furnishing me with details I didn’t.

  To John Freeman and Philip Gwyn Jones, for consecutive votes of faith.

  Thanks too, Jon McG., Euan, and Ch. and the rest of you. You know who you are.

  Also by Cynan Jones

  The Long Dry

  Everything I Found on the Beach

  FORTHCOMING FROM COFFEE HOUSE PRESS IN 2016

  from

  The Long Dry

  the Cow

  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 unmoving 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.

  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 tininess. 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 stillbirth.

  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

  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 any more. The farm had belonged to an eccentric old lady who was found feeding chickens in her pajamas 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 redone 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.

  “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.

  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.

  from

  Everything I Found on the Beach

  The sergeant was on the beach and looked down at the body and the younger policeman Morgan was with him and it was the first time for him, seeing something so severe.

  The body had most of the fingers of one hand off and there was a big wound to the face and out through the back of the head.

  The tide had lapped up on the body and the salt water had swelled the edges of the big wound. It was early but the birds had been awake and the eyes were already gone. It was really severe to look at.

  The owlish man got out of the taxi that he’d just rolled up along the little slip to the beach and came down the slip and called out to the young policeman.

  The sergeant looked up tiredly. “Christ,” said the sergeant. “Keep him away.”

  The young policeman saw a small crab scuttle from under the face of the body and it seemed to dislodge the balance of the head so it rolled slightly, as if it moved in its sleep. It made the young policeman feel sick. “What have you got, Morgan?”

  The young policeman went up to the owlish man who was standing by the blue and white tape the other police had put up. The owlish man was pecky and curious looking.

  “What have you got?” he asked again.

  Morgan shrugged. “We don’t know yet. We’re not sure.” He looked very pale and sick.

  The sand beach was long and slightly curved and the water hissed where the edge of the tide petered out. They were putting up a screen now around the body and the owlish man was looking, trying to see whatever he could.

  “When did you find him?” asked the owlish man.

  “Right early. Someone walking a dog.”

  The old guy had been walking his dog and described how the dog had run up to the corpse and scattered the birds and the idea of the birds pecking at the face made Morgan sick inside again.

  “You look paler than when I picked you up the other night,” said the owlish taxi driver, trying to be light.<
br />
  The owlish man could just see the legs of the body now. The legs looked distraught and wet like the tide had been over them and he noticed the kind of shapeless deadness to them as if they weren’t real.

  “Any explanation? Nothing on him?” asked the man.

  “No.” The policeman had swallowed down his sickness once more. “No. Unless the tide took it. He could have been washed up. We’re not sure yet.”

  “Didn’t happen here then?”

  “We don’t know,” said the policeman. He thought about the fingers missing and about the big wound to the face. He wanted to go back to the body. It was easier actually being by it and looking at it like a big fact. There was something unreal and factual and more dead about the body that way and it was easier to deal with.

  The sergeant called up to the young policeman.

  “I shouldn’t be talking to you,” Morgan said to the owlish man. He got more formal. “I can’t give you any information at the present time. I’ll have to ask you to leave the scene.”

  Other men had parked up and were coming down the slipway in white forensics suits onto the beach. There was something weird about the beach that looked like it had been busier at one time, some time in the distant past. But then it had been abandoned, fallen out of favor.