by Russell Hill
“All right if I come along?”
“No reason why not. More grist for the writer’s mill, Jack? You won’t see anything like this on a movie set, I’ll wager.”
He was busy at the Rayburn, the cast-iron cooker that not only served as the stove but also heated water and gave off enough radiance to warm the kitchen. He dished up a plate with fried eggs, several browned bangers, and two grilled tomato halves. I remembered the English breakfast I had been served my first morning in London. This was nothing like it.
“Are you eating?” I asked
“If I could get hold of some nose of turk and tartar’s lips and a cauldron to cook them in, maybe I could make a charm to settle my gut. Don’t let that spoil your appetite, though.”
“Can I go with you, dad?” Terry asked.
“No, it’s no place for boys. You stay here and keep Jack close by. I don’t want him wandering. Your mother will need some company when she comes down.”
I finished my breakfast, Robbie carefully washed the dishes and set them on the counter to dry. The kitchen was spotless by the time we put on wellies and stepped out into the farmyard. There was a high overcast and we set off in the same direction we had gone the morning before, climbing up Robbie’s field, crossing the lane, then swinging around the brow of the hill where the travelers were encamped. We said little to each other. Robbie moved quickly and I had to work at it to keep up. It reminded me that I was sixty and lived a sedentary life. Ahead of us there was now a plume of soft gray smoke that rose beyond the next field. It was punctuated by puffs of oily black that rose like smoke signals.
“They’re at it already,” Robbie said.
We came over the brow of the last hill and paused to look down on Michael Stryker’s farm. The house was large, brick and stone, and there were outbuildings that were solid and walls of stone that stretched into the fields. In one field there was a scattering of lorries, tractors, a skip loader, and a deep trench that had been carved in the center. Black smoke rose from the pit and we could see the small figures of men moving about, a flock of sheep huddled in one corner of the field, their faint cries drifting up.
“We’ll go down through the poplars,” Robbie said, pointing to a line of trees that descended toward the back of the farmhouse. “No point in announcing our arrival. The boys said the farm was shut off with army lads at the gate.”
We came down through the thin stand of trees until we were in the back garden, climbed over the low rock wall, and went around the house into the farmyard. A heavyset man was standing next to another beat-up Land Rover, a dog at his heels.
“Michael,” Robbie said.
The man turned.
“What the hell are you doing here, Robbie? They say my farm is infected and you’ll traipse it back to yours and they’ll murder your flock as well.”
“Terry and Jack have been all over your fields, Michael. They look for rabbits up along the rise. They’ve done all but kiss your sheep. We came across the poplar field. Nobody saw us.”
“Still, these arseholes don’t give a flying fuck whether or not your sheep are sick. Kill ‘em all, that’s what Colonel Blimp over there says.” He gestured toward a squat army vehicle parked nearby. “Look at ‘em!” He pointed toward the pit where soldiers were dressed in white suits covering their boots and heads, white masks across their mouths. Two of them were pulling a dead sheep toward a skip loader. Already a half dozen sheep carcasses were piled in the scoop.
“It’s not the goddam anthrax or the fucking black plague, is it now? You’d think they was from Mars in their fucking costumes.”
“They’re only doing what they’re told, Michael.”
“Well, whoever’s telling them has his head up his arse, that’s for sure.”
The door of the army vehicle opened and an officer in battle fatigues stepped out. He came toward us and Stryker said, “Who’s your friend, Robbie? The nazi coming at us will want to know what you’re doing here.”
“Jack Stone. He’s a Yank who’s been staying with us for a few days. He wanted to see the lamb cookers up close.”
The officer stopped in front of us. The legs of his fatigues were bloused above the boot tops with precision and his black boots shone like glass.
“Who are these two, Stryker? I don’t remember seeing them before.”
“Why don’t you ask them yourself, you pansy killer?”
The officer’s stoic expression did not change. “And who might you be?” he asked Robbie.
“I’m Michael’s nephew,” Robbie lied. “This is an American friend. We live in the village and we came out to see Michael’s troubles.”
“Well, Michael’s nephew, you made a serious mistake. This is a quarantined farm and you have no business here whether you’re related to Mr. Stryker or not. You’ll leave and at the farm gate you’ll find two of my men who will disinfect your boots and you’ll stay on the hard road when you walk back to the village and stay off the verge and you won’t take any shortcut through a field or you’ll deal with me again and I won’t be civil the next time.”
He stood watching us, then spoke again. “Now. This moment. Leave.” He turned to Stryker. “You knew better than this, Stryker.”
There was a whoosh! as the skip loader dropped the petrol-soaked carcasses into the pit. An orange flame filled with oily black streaks shot up, drowning out the bleating of sheep in the corner of the field.
“I’m not my nephew’s keeper, Colonel Poufter.”
“You’ll keep a civil tongue in your head, Mr. Stryker.”
“What I keep in my head is none of your bloody damned business!” Stryker spat, missing the shiny boot by inches. “You need to get out of the weather before you get your boots wet.”
It was beginning to mist again. The sky dark, our faces lit with the orange glow of the burning carcasses; it could have been a scene out of a Brueghel painting, soldiers outlined against the fire, the skip loader poised to drop more sheep, flames boiling up and everywhere the stench of the burning flesh.
Stryker turned to Robbie. “Thanks for coming out, nephew. You be going back to the village now and tell them the nazis will be in later to loot and burn. Tell them to hide the women.”
The officer stood silently, arms folded across his chest and Robbie and I went to the front gate, pausing to step into a pan of green liquid while two young soldiers watched us. As we stepped out of the disinfectant, Robbie said, “There’s a man who wouldn’t be missed if somebody stove his head in.”
“The Colonel?”
He turned to the two soldiers. “If they gave you two real bullets, I’ll bet you’d slag that son of a bitch with the shiny boots. Right?”
“Sir?”
“Fucking puppets,” Robbie muttered.
We went back to the farm by way of the village, Robbie silent most of the way and he disappeared into the cow shed when we got to the farm, leaving me at the kitchen steps. Inside, Maggie was at the table with Terry. They were playing some sort of card game and Maggie looked up, asked, “What was it like?”
“Not good. They’re killing all of Stryker’s sheep. It looked like a Brueghel painting. The old Brueghel, the one who painted obscenities.”
Then I noticed Terry looking intently at me and I thought, the boy doesn’t need to know the details and I said, “They’re only doing their job. Apparently it can’t be helped.”
Maggie reached for another card, asked Terry, “Do you have any threes?”
“No,” he said, “go fish.”
“It’s all right Jack Stone,” she said. “You don’t need to sugar-coat it.”
22.
After tea that evening, Robbie turned on the telly, listening to the clipped accents of the BBC news readers, cursing softly as they described how thousands of cattle, sheep and pigs were being destroyed, followed by a brief statement from the Prime Minister, who appeared on the doorstep of Ten Downing Street. Robbie’s voice rose in anger.
“Fucking Blair, fucking arseho
le prick, you wouldn’t know a sick sheep if you were buggering it. Maggie, he’s right out of Monty Python, oh Christ, this parrot’s dead, you thick twit!”
Maggie asked him to turn it off but he ignored her and she and Terry went upstairs. I, too, went upstairs and sat at the little table in my room and tried to write out the afternoon’s events. There was an oily smell in the room and I knew some of the dense petrol smoke from the fire at Stryker’s and probably other farms as well had drifted over Sheepheaven Farm. Downstairs the voice from the television droned absently.
I slept fitfully and woke in darkness. When I looked at my watch it was three o’clock and I lay there until I could stand it no more, got up and dressed and sat at the laptop. The screenplay was easy to start. The fires at Stryker’s farm were so perfectly suited to film, the outlined men and the animal carcasses dropping into the pit, flames billowing up. I wrote that first scene as if I were copying something from a page, and I backed up, began another scene.
INT. MORNING, UPSTAIRS HALLWAY DOOR.
JACK’S POV: Maggie stands in the doorway holding two mugs of tea.
MAGGIE:
Time for a break, Jack Stone.
(she holds out a mug of tea)
After that the scene fell into place. It was like writing in a journal and the dialog came spilling out of my memory word for word. By four-thirty I had written a dozen pages. I looked back over them and it was like reliving those moments, Maggie stepping out of the tub, Robbie standing with me next to Michael Stryker, the British officer coming at us; and I could see other scenes: the Stryker boys in the pub; Mary, the barmaid; Jack the dog scrabbling over the backs of the sheep.
It was still dark out, just past five, and the house was quiet. Unable to contain my exhilaration, I went quietly downstairs, put on a pair of wellies in the back hallway, pulled on a mac that hung on the hook with the others, and slipped out the kitchen door into the farmyard. It was damp and the air smelled of manure and straw. I could dimly see the shed and could hear the hoofs of the cow shifting inside. I crossed the farmyard in near blackness. Behind the shed was a pile of old timber and I felt in the dark, trying to find something I could use as a walking stick. I found a stick that would serve and went along the wall to the gate. I started up the slope in the direction that Robbie and I had gone when we went to the Stryker Farm, and was glad that I had the stick, using it to keep my balance on the slick grass. It had been close-cropped by the sheep, and as my eyes became accustomed to the darkness I could see the sheep clumped together off to my right, occasionally bleating at me as I climbed.
I reached the brow of the hill just before the hedge that separated the field from the lane, and I turned and looked back.
A light went on and I knew it was the farmhouse and then another light directly below it. The bedroom and the kitchen. Maggie was up and Robbie would be up, too, and I imagined her padding around the kitchen in her bare feet, rising up on her toes, her breasts free under the dressing gown tied loosely at her waist. The lighted windows were diffused by the rain that came now, softening the yellow points one above the other like the eyes of some animal lying on its side in the darkness. A light went on in the farmyard and I knew Robbie was going out to the shed. He would milk the cow, let it out into the pasture, clean the stall and come back in for breakfast.
I watched a few moments longer and then started down. I had forgotten the walking stick at the top and the slope was slippery. I lost my footing several times, falling backwards, sliding for several yards before I was able to brake myself with my heels in the soft turf. I knew I would be a muddy mess when I got to the bottom.
I was soaked through by the time I got to the wall at the edge of the farmyard and I climbed over rather than work my way along the wall to the gate. As I passed the barn the dog barked and Robbie came to the open door, a pitchfork in hand.
“Holy Jesus,” he said. “If I didn’t know it was you, I’d think maybe you was a nutter running from your keepers.”
I stood in the spreading light, looking down at my ruined shoes, my trousers caked with mud, and I knew I looked incredibly foolish.
Robbie had a huge grin on his face as he stood looking out into the rain. “I could ask where in the hell you’ve been or I can just assume that you’re a daft American who likes to wander around in the rain and dark. May I suggest you come in here and take off what’s left of your clothes. You go traipsing into Maggie’s kitchen like that and you’ll know what wrath is.”
I went into the shed where there were several sheep penned at the end, and a bare light bulb hanging down with a cord running from it to what looked like a large electric shaver. It had long teeth along the face and piled on a pallet next to it was a mound of sheep’s wool, dirty gray on one side, pure white on the other, long slabs of it, and among the penned sheep was one naked sheep, pale and skinny.
“Shearing time?” I asked.
“Not really,” Robbie replied. “Not for another month. But Michael Stryker told me the army put down Billy Gray’s flock and they’ll put the rest of Michael’s down tomorrow and it didn’t make sense to kill sheep with perfectly good wool on them. So he said I should shear mine, just in case they decide to do my flock in too.”
“But isn’t the wool diseased?”
“No, it needs a host that’s living, and if I bag this with camphor and store it in the rafters, after all this shit is done and gone, I can at least get a few quid out of it. I’ve got a chap in Southampton says he’ll take the lot. He won’t ask questions. I won’t get full value but at least I’ll get something.”
“I thought the government was going to reimburse farmers for the animals they kill.”
“I can see you’re a real Mary Poppins, Jack. They’ll take a year and they’ll haggle over how much it’s going to be and we’ll see endless pieces of paper. Big farmers like Michael can weather that, but for me it means going on the dole.”
“But when they come for your sheep, they’ll see that they’ve been sheared.”
“If they decide to come for my sheep, then Will and his brothers come over and we dig a pit and I do them in myself, save the fuckers the trouble, and tell them I couldn’t bear for anybody else to slaughter my sheep. They’re dumb enough to buy that story. Besides, I won’t shear them all at once. I figure if I do five sheep every morning and five every night, I can do most of the flock in ten days. I turn the sheared ones in with the flock and they’ll blend in. It’s not all about the money, Jack. It’s my way of punching that pompous prig in the shiny boots. Now you get out of your wet kit and wrap yourself in this.” He offered me a blanket that hung over the edge of a stall. It had the rank smell of sheep and cows and was rough to the touch.
Robbie opened the edge of the pen, grabbed a sheep by a leg and dragged it out. Jack the dog stood, watching the other sheep, tense, and when one of them made a bolt for the opening the dog nipped at it, just enough so that the sheep turned in panic and rammed into the others.
In a flash, Robbie had the sheep on its back, the head between his legs, and he took the clipper, turned it on, and cut a wide swath up the belly, turning the wool away from the skin, returning to make another pass, and I watched as he expertly peeled the wool off the legs, then shifted the struggling sheep to its side and continued up toward the spine.
Suddenly he let out a yelp, and dropped the cutter. He bent to pick it up again. “Fucking thing’s wearing out,” he muttered, and I could see that the cord was frayed and he had obviously gotten a quick electric shock.
I waited until he finished and released the naked sheep. He pushed the mound of wool onto the pallet and straightened up. “Baa baa, black sheep, have you any wool,” he said. “Yessir, yessir, three bags full. Ten quid a bag, Jack. One for my master, one for my dame. One for the old chap who lives down the lane. You know what that means, Jack?”
I shook my head.
“It means the poor fucking farmer didn’t get but a third of what he sheared. Lady Uppercrust got a bit since
she owned the field, and the old chappie down the lane, he must have been the tax collector, and it hasn’t changed all that much. Just the names. Only now two and a half bags goes to the Inland Revenue. These were my father’s shears. Poor fucker used them for thirty years. But he could shear a sheep in a minute, clean as a whistle, not a nick, not a drop of blood, not a tuft left anywhere. Naked as the day they were born. He’d shit in his pants if he could see me here now. He wanted me to be an educated man, letters after my name, wear a coat and tie. Here I am, stink of sheep with their shit smeared on my boots, you need only half a fucking brain for this kind of work, Jack. Be a good trick if I fried myself with his shears, wouldn’t it? I got to fix them before they electrocute me. That would be a good joke. Dorset sheep farmer gets a charge out of shearing his sheep. Make a good tabloid headline. You best be getting into some dry clothes before you catch your death.”
“As near as I can tell, you’re an educated man, Robbie.”
“If you don’t have the fucking letters after your name in this country, Jack, the upper class pisses on you. I’m a sheep farmer, and I’m no better than those lads you got shitfaced with.” The anger in his voice told me the conversation was over. He reached for another sheep and Jack the dog edged back.
I stripped off my clothes, wrapping myself in the old blanket and crossed the farmyard to the yellow light of the kitchen door.
23.
Wrapped in the blanket, I went into the house where Terry began to giggle and Maggie eyed the bundle of wet clothes in my hands.
“What have we here, Terry? One of America’s red Indians come with an offering? What in the world happened to you, Jack Stone?”
“I went for an early morning walk.”
“Looks more like an early morning crawl in the muck. Here, let me take those,” and she reached out for the wet clothes. As she took them, her hand stroked my wrist momentarily, a soft gesture that was like an electric touch. “I’ll wash these and we can hang them by the Rayburn. They’ll be dry before noon. You’ll probably want to run a bath before you have breakfast.”
