by Patrick Gale
Thirteen steers were needed for collection by the cattle lorry the next morning. The law had relaxed since the BSE crisis but they were still effectively obliged to have every animal slaughtered before it was thirty months old. One or two were obviously finished, weighing in at six hundred and fifty kilos or more and with properly beefy flanks and thighs. Others of the same age were not such good feeders and needed a few weeks more. So there was much arguing about which of the borderline cases should go. Then one of the ready ones was found to have lost his metal ear tag which won it a stay of execution because it was illegal to send them to slaughter without two tags in place, and another Hansel and Gretel discussion ensued as to who was fat enough to take the lucky animal’s place.
The twelve already picked had been ushered in twos and threes to the cattleshed on release from the crush. The remaining animals now milled nervously around as they were inspected, snorting, ducking their heads, and seeking comfort in the closest possible proximity to each other. Some even thrust their heads shoulder deep between their neighbours’ legs. Others pressed, head first, in tight huddles in the inner corners of the pens as if affecting an interest in the weeds on the high walls, all unaware that it was their rumps, not their faces, that were being assessed.
At last a choice was made, a stocky two-year-old that, though still giving the impression of youth because he was so much shorter than his companions, had filled out his frame as far as he was likely to do. He joined the others in the shed with something like relief, kicking up his heels as he felt himself on deep straw and out of scrutiny. The rest were turned out from the yard’s lower gate into new pasture and soon broke into a run and were lost to view in the fog.
How soon did they forget? It was a question he had last dared ask thirty or forty years ago, when he was a boy and it was still profitable for their father to run a dairy herd alongside the beef one. Some calves had just been separated from their mothers and the despondent, regular lowing had kept waking him in the night.
‘They’re animals,’ his father said. ‘They don’t remember. They don’t understand time. They get worried sometimes but that’s just instinct, not feeling. Don’t let it bother you.’
But it did bother him. Frequently. And he envied friends at school whose fathers produced only daffodils and broccoli on their land, or potatoes and anemones. Growing up, he had hoped for but never acquired, the hard outer layer that had come so naturally to his brother. He mastered all the tasks that were set him. He had been on courses on chemical spraying and hedgerow management and conservation headlands. He learned how to fill out the complex paperwork that would prove they had complied with new regulations and qualified for various EU subsidies. He had even done quite well in ploughing matches over the years. He had proved he was a good judge of calves at auction. But still this inner softness, weakness even, persisted and made him feel an impostor among his family and peers.
Looking at advertisements in Farmer’s Weekly sometimes, at the sentimental picture plates of wet-eyed calves and contented sows with titles like Little Mischief or A Mother’s Pride, he wondered if he were not mistaken. Perhaps all farmers felt the way he did and were simply masking their occasional discomfort from one another, the way men liked to pretend to each other that they had neither respect for women nor emotional need of them.
Once, when a steer they had only had a week sickened and died, racked by seizures thought to be caused by lead paint poisoning from some shed on the farm where he was reared, his father seemed upset for a few minutes but that might simply have been because he had not put the animal down himself with a gun instead of incurring hefty vet’s bills in the hope of pulling the wretched thing through.
Another time a cattle lorry had come driven by a man who started using an electric prod as they herded the steers on board and his brother had sent him away indignantly and complained to the haulier who had hired him. But that hadn’t been concern for the animals’ welfare so much as worry the animals would not fetch a fair price. If an animal was frightened before slaughter, he claimed, it could tense up so badly its muscles held too much blood in a way that would spoil the meat. He had simply feared that a cattle prod would tense them up more than a simple whip or stick would do. The slaughtermen called such a blood-heavy carcass a dark cutter, his brother told him, a term that now came back to him whenever he passed a butcher’s shop window or was chopping meat for a stew.
He had topping to do all that afternoon so he could listen to the radio in the tractor as he drove up and down the grass fields for a few hours, dreaming of other places, other lives. But that evening, just before sunset, he slipped down to the shed where the cattle were waiting. If his brother had challenged him, he’d have said he was heaping up the silage for them but he also came down to exercise his guilt and wonder.
It was amazing how swiftly the mud and shit crumbled off their coats when they were bedded down in a good depth of clean straw. He stood a while, leaning on his pitchfork, watching their eyes on him as they chewed or rubbed their noses on the silage heap in a kind of ecstasy of greed. They looked healthy, content again, and, of course, entirely unsuspecting, and this cheered him. He wanted them to have as good a last night as possible and was disgusted at himself. Faced as they must have been with an occasional lovely face or particularly endearing child, had concentration camp guards indulged in a similar sick sentimentality? Had they given their charges pet names and convinced themselves their arbitrary instances of kindness counted for anything?
They had toad-in-the-hole for supper. He ate too much and slept badly, tormented by indigestion and dreams in which he must answer for himself to his father and accusing friends but could muster only bovine bellows.
They had an extra-early start, before sunrise, to be ready for the lorry. Guiding steers from their shed into a cattle truck was even harder – given their arrangement of buildings – than persuading them around the yard and into the pens. Cattle lorries were so long they would only fit into the main farmyard one way and had to be parked hard up against the cattleshed’s outside wall. The animals had to make a u-turn, out of their shed, in through a smaller one that might once have been a piggery, and out through its other side where a narrow door opened directly opposite the lorry’s rear. To steer them from the large shed into the smaller one, the two tractors were parked tightly, nose to tail, with a couple of pallets lashed on either end, blocking off any other route. An old galvanized steel gate was leant against the side of the lorry’s tailgate to prevent escapes and help channel the animals up and in and the tailgate was thickly spread with old straw from within the small shed to mask any alien smells like pig which might have lingered from previous loads.
Cattle lorries had barriers which folded out from the walls and subdivided their interiors to stop animals falling and hurting themselves. Six or so steers at a time could be driven in and the barrier folded out and bolted shut behind them. But persuading even six animals to pass through the small door on the other side of the little shed and up into a lorry – something they had only been in once before, when they were far smaller and more biddable – could rarely be accomplished at the first attempt. Steers had a maddening way of bunching up inside the little shed, forming a bottleneck just inside the door or allowing the inevitable curses and thwacks to panic them. As often as not one, placed just out of range by his brothers, would take one suspicious look at the lorry then turn around to face the wrong way, obstinately blocking the route for his fellows. Once one of them took fright and decided to run back the way they had come it was impossible to stop the others following and the shed was so low and small it would have been crazily dangerous for a man to push in there with them in an effort to head them off. All one could do was try to block the route back to the bigger shed, lashing out and cursing when the steers tried to turn back and cooing desperate encouragement at the least sign of an animal daring to pass on into the lorry. Sometimes just one or two would comply and stagger up the tailgate and in only to be spook
ed and thunder back down when their brothers failed to join them quickly enough.
Of all the stages of his interaction with a steer, the day of its departure was the one when his determination to treat it humanely was most likely to crumble. If only they would trot peaceably on board the way they entered a new field, it would have been possible to treat them well until the last. But they never went peaceably, or very rarely. His guilt at sending them for slaughter fed his frustration at their wilfulness and stupidity and he would lash out as fiercely as his brother then feel himself diminished for it.
The sun rose on a steady, penetrating drizzle and the lorry arrived so soon afterwards that it might have spent the night in a lay-by in the village and been waiting there for dawn. The driver was new and not local. Masking his nerves in truculence, he complained about the smallness of the yard.
‘Nobody told me,’ he said, although his lorry was no longer than usual, and he made a great performance of having to nose up into Home Field then execute a multiple-point turn in order to be able to back up to the position where they needed him.
No one was like this when their father was around, as he had one of those stern countenances that commanded respect, but he had driven up-country for a cousin’s funeral the night before.
‘I don’t do rounding up,’ the driver said flatly, hearing a steer bellow inside the cattleshed as he climbed down. ‘No insurance.’
The farm was insured against third-party claims, it had to be. But no one told him that as it was not a thing one wanted known. The usual driver always helped a bit. He liked to. But he was a farmer’s son and knew what he was about; a novice in such a situation offered more risk than assistance. This man was an outsider and an unknown quantity. He was older than most drivers and had a terse bitterness to him that spoke of failures and bad solitude.
‘Just stand and hold the gate firm against the tailgate,’ they told him. ‘We’ll do the rest.’
They could manage with just the two of them so long as the driver held his ground at least and had the sense not to start shouting and hissing at the animals as they approached.
Watched suspiciously by him, they made the last few arrangements, scattering straw and securing the barrier for him to stand behind. Then they walked in through the small shed and counted out the first six cattle.
These milled around a little at first, mooing mistrustfully and driving him and his brother back into the space between tractors and cattleshed a couple of times. Then their leader showed the way, heading up the tailgate with a few clattering steps. The rest followed him with little resistance until they felt the safety barriers being swung across and bolted behind them, by which time it was too late.
The next seven included an especially strong, wild specimen his brother had nicknamed Shakin Stevens on account of his quiff, that had once actually jumped out of the crush when being wormed, and they proved far less tractable. They surged in and out of the little shed several times, only panicked further by the stinging from the hosepipes. They wedged themselves in there the wrong way round, backs to the exit, blinking as the blows and curses rained down on their faces. They squirted diarrhoea across each other and rained down piss by the gallon. They answered the mooing from their brothers in the lorry with bellows and snorts. The stupid driver made matters worse by trying to encourage them as if he were on a rugby touchline and their curses at the cattle became as much curses at him, not that he would have noticed above the din and churning back and forth. Then one of them, who had spent several minutes blocking the exit for the others while he stared out at the lorry, finally took a step or two back and the rest began to leave. First two tried to go through at once and threatened to become wedged, then they went out in quick succession.
He and his brother pressed on into the shed hissing, shouting, waving their arms and lashing out so as to be sure the others followed before the leaders changed their minds and doubled back. The driver shouted again, even louder this time, and they cursed the bugger for his stupidity that might cost them another ten minutes of torment. Then there was a bright ding of hoof on metal and the clang of a falling gate and suddenly there was mooing coming from quite the wrong direction.
All at once the other four animals surged out.
Damning the idiot for not having even the nous to hold a leaning barrier in place, his brother stamped out after them and immediately swore and shouted for him to follow and quickly.
The last seven cattle were loose in the farmyard. Two were tasting the willows in the hedge. The rest were merely standing, nonplussed by their unexpected release.
The driver lay on his back, hands flung up above his head as though he were falling down a pit. The gate he had been holding in place lay across his hips. There were muddy hoof prints up the front of his overalls, as in some cartoon. The kick that had felled him had caused his nose and a part of his forehead to cave in so that his face was now a kind of bowl where vivid blood was pooling.
He ran to the back door to ring for an ambulance, although he was fairly sure the man was dead, and to call the abattoir. Another driver could not be freed up until that afternoon at least, so they had to move the tractors then let out the steers that were already loaded and herd all thirteen animals back into the cattleshed. If one of them had blood on its hoof, it was impossible to tell which by now. He forked up the silage for them and they fell to eating at once, swiftly calmed by food.
It did not seem right to move the body until the ambulance arrived but they lifted the gate off it and laid the man’s hands at his sides.
‘We should cover it,’ he said. ‘Shouldn’t we?’ But his brother couldn’t answer because he was slumped in the filthy straw on the tailgate and had buried his face in his palms, shoulders heaving.
He was fetching clean potato sacks from the mill shed to make a sort of shroud when a family of walkers arrived on the footpath from the cliffs, thinking to cross the farmyard, and he felt he had to wave his arms and warn them off as they had children with them. As he shouted instructions that came out more abruptly than he’d intended because of his nerves, and sent them the long way round the farm, down the lane instead of across the fields, he saw fear in the husband’s eyes and, in the wife’s, something like disgust.
MAKING HAY
The children burst in full of the pleasure they assumed the young, by their very youth, gave to the old. While they were signing the visitors’ book, Maudie exchanged a look with Prue then reached into the baby jacket she had been pretending to knit for some weeks. She took out a crib she kept hidden on a piece of card and scanned it expertly. Grandchildren, she read. James, nine, vehicles, football, bananas. Effie, seven, ponies, death, Jaffa Cakes. There was a number after every entry on the card, be they friend or relative, to indicate how much she currently loved them. Neither child was scoring highly.
‘Look who’s come to see their old granny!’ she exclaimed, catching sight of her daughter-in-law’s pick-up speeding away.
James and Effie kissed her dutifully. Effie sat in one of the specially high-seated armchairs and bounced self-consciously. James mooched, staring at Maudie’s bandage.
‘Wave hello to your grandfather.’
They waved uncertainly. Maudie’s husband sat apart with the few male residents. The cramped back sitting room, where smoking was allowed, was the men’s territory. They congregated, taciturn, around the sports channel for the long stretches between meals, leaving the ladies the run, so to speak, of the more spacious and sociable day room. Grandpa stared at the children blankly but two of his companions waved back and Herbert Boskenna did that clicky thing with his dentures which was his equivalent.
‘Can I watch too?’ James asked. ‘The Grand Prix’s on.’
‘No, dear. The men don’t like to be disturbed. Maybe when you’re older.’
‘How about in here, then?’
‘Miss Tregenza’s waiting for Gary Cooper.’
‘She’s asleep,’ put in Effie and they all looked briefly at Miss
Tregenza, a thin, pale thing with little hair and no conversation.
‘No, dear,’ Maudie observed. ‘She always looks that way when she’s waiting.’
‘Nurse’ll be in in a moment,’ said Prue, ‘to turn Gary Cooper on, then she’ll perk up. You’ll see. She likes Gary Cooper. We all do.’ Prue gave one of the coarse chuckles which reminded Maudie why they had never been friends until now.
‘There’s a banana in that fruit bowl with your name on it,’ she told James but the boy sulked, unused to denial. ‘Do you want a Jaffa Cake, Effie?’
Effie pulled a long face. ‘I’m on a diet,’ she said. ‘Mum says I mustn’t eat between meals.’
‘Well teatime’s a meal.’
Effie pulled the face again. ‘Better not,’ she said.
‘How long have you got?’ Maudie asked them both.
James sighed with a characteristic want of tact. ‘Quarter of an hour,’ he said, as though that were a small eternity. ‘She’s gone to Cornwall Farmers to fetch Dad more wrapper for the silage.’
‘Is he doing that this afternoon, then? I wouldn’t have thought it was dry enough…’
‘Yup,’ James said absently, staring as Nurse clicked in a Gary Cooper DVD. Miss Tregenza’s reanimation was nothing startling but she opened her eyes, shut her mouth and assumed a look of complacent serenity. She began to croon the introductory music, slightly in advance of the orchestra.
‘Knows all the tunes,’ Prue said as the titles rolled up the screen. ‘Ooh, The Fountainhead. I think I like this one. Patricia Neal always had such lovely, crisp-looking hair.’
‘Wouldn’t you rather be helping your dad?’ Maudie asked, ignoring her.
‘Not really,’ James said. ‘It’s all tractor work really. Mum won’t let me load new rolls of plastic on the bale-wrapper in case I get my hands stuck.’
