The Dig

  THE DIG

  First published in the United States by Coffee House Press, 2015

  Copyright © Cynan Jones, 2015

  Originally published in English by Granta Books under the title The Dig, copyright © Cynan Jones, 2014

  First published in Great Britain by Granta Books, 2014

  A version of one chapter of this novel was originally published in Granta magazine in 2012

  Excerpts from The Long Dry and Everything I Found on the Beach copublished in Great Britain by Granta Books and Parthian Books, 2014. First published in Great Britain by Parthian Books.

  Cover design by Murray & Sorrell FUEL

  Typeset in Vendome by Lindsay Nash

  Author photo by Alice Fiorilli

  Coffee House Press books are available to the trade through our primary distributor, Consortium Book Sales & Distribution, cbsd.com or (800) 283-3572. For personal orders, catalogs, or other information, write to: info@coffeehousepress.org.

  Coffee House Press is a nonprofit literary publishing house. Support from private foundations, corporate giving programs, government programs, and generous individuals helps make the publication of our books possible.

  We gratefully acknowledge their support in detail in the back of this book.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Jones, Cynan, 1975-

  The dig / Cynan Jones.

  pages ; cm

  ISBN 978-1-56689-394-7 (eBook)

  1. Animal welfare—Fiction. 2. Rural conditions—Wales—Fiction. 3. Psychological fiction.

  I. Title.

  PR6110.O624D54 2015

  823’.92--dc23

  2014039064

  FIRST EDITION

  FIRST PRINTING

  Contents

  Part One: The Horse

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Part Two: The Dig

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Part Three: The Cloth

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Part Four: The Sea

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Part Five: The Shard

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  This edition for Colin and Metz.

  HE PULLED THE van into the gateway and dropped the lights. It was a flat night and the van looked a strange, alien color under it. For a while he sat there carefully.

  It was lambing time and here and there across the shallow valley and variously on the hills there were lights on. And while it looked to him from this distance like some community at work, he knew that all those farms were involved in their own private processes, processes in their nature give or take the same, but in each space of light carried out in isolated private intimacy.

  He looked out across the scape and recalled in those wells of light those farms which were sympathetic or against this thing he did. In his time he had covered most of this ground and in his mind he drew vaguely the shape of the lands that attached to each farm and called back the names of each property he knew as if he were noting constellations.

  It was a time of mixed certainty for him, with these people awake at night; but they were also busier and distracted, and with that general busyness disregarded noises more readily, accepted them as products of another’s work. Attributed more readily the distant bark of dogs.

  He was a gruff and big man and when he got from the van it lifted and relaxed like a child relieved of the momentary fear of being hit. Where he went he brought a sense of harmfulness and it was as if this was known even by the inanimate things about him. They feared him somehow.

  He opened the back of the van and the wire inside the window clattered and he reached for the sack and dropped the badger out. He spat into the dirty tarmac beside it.

  The dogs had pulled the front of its face off and its nose hung loose and bloodied, hanging from a sock of skin. It hung off the badger like a separate animal.

  Ag, he thought. The crows will sort that.

  He kicked the badger round a little to unstiffen it. He kicked the head out so it lay exposed across the road. Its top lip was in a snarl and looked exaggerated and some of the teeth were smashed above the lower jaw, hanging and loose where they had broken it with a spade to give the dogs a chance.

  They hadn’t had the ground to dig a pit so they had fastened the badger to a tree to let the lurchers at it and its hind leg was skinned and deeply wire-cut.

  That could be a problem, he thought. That could be a giveaway, but everything else is fine. The other injuries would be disguised.

  The badger’s underbelly was torn and ripped where they had let the terriers at it before he had finished it off with a shovel.

  Messie was good tonight, he thought. She was good and persistent.

  The badger’s teats were pronounced and swollen with feeding and several of them were torn off and the pelt was slick with the mix of blood and milk.

  It’s a shame we didn’t get them cubs, he thought.

  He thought about tearing off the leg.

  Ag, I wouldn’t get it, he thought. I wouldn’t get that off. He was suddenly repulsed by the idea of touching the badger again. Of giving it any reverence.

  The idea of hiding this act suddenly made the big man angry and fatigued. He had been up all night and the walk and the hard digging and adrenaline made him tired, though it came up only as a swelling of anger in him.

  He got back in the van and it sagged under his weight. He took off the gloves and threw them into the passenger seat that was bearded with dog hairs. A little way down the road he turned round and came back and drove over the badger. Then he turned round and did it again.

  He let the van idle and got out and stood over the sow. The skull was smashed to remnant. He looked at the leg and it still stood out like butchery unnatural and premeditated.

  Bitch, he said; then he ground his foot down on the leg, and stamped over and over, smashing the thin precise line of the wire out of the raw flesh.

  PART ONE

  The Horse

  chapter one

  THE DOG STIRRED as Daniel came between the buildings and got up in its chain and stretched and yawned and in the torchlight Daniel saw this lazy stretch and the torchlight caught on the links of the chain.

  He went through the feeding yard, the cattle crunching at the feed ring in the spilled-over floodlight from the shed, and he heard the dog shake and settle again in the kennel behind him.

  The night rippled with stillness.

  He went into the sheep shed. The ewes were variously rested and the place was maternal and quiet. There was just crunching, the odd cough of sheep. He rested the torch on the shelf and turned on the light and some of the lambs bleated and there was a clatter from the warming box as the orphans excited at the thought of food.

  While he waits for the kettle to boil he walks the shed. From the beams hang compact discs, strange astral things in this half-light, now ignored by the sparrows and starlings they are there to keep out. Every now and then they catch some light with some incongruous Christmasness and he thinks of her hanging them, her other things of quick invention, as if she were a child making models off the television.

  A singular moth flutters in through the wind baffles to the naked bulb above the kettle, cuspid, a drifting piece of loose ash on the white filament, paper burnt up, caught in the rising current from some fire unseen, unfelt.

  At the back pen, one ewe pads the ground, her lip lifting like a horse mouth. It is his shift, he must stay until she lambs, though he knows t
his Beulah breed are good mothers and often need no help. He knows she is close, that it will not be long.

  The kettle rolls mechanically, steam bowling into the light of the bulb, and clicks and he makes the mix and while he rests the wide jug to cool on the shelf he checks the stalls, the tired lambs somnolent and pliant under their mothers’ warmth, and lifts out the water buckets, cupping out the floated hay and the droppings that stain chromatographical in the water; and the thunder of filling the water buckets at the tap does not disturb the soft crunching of the slumbered ewes, lying as if exhausted after eating, a thing replete about them. And in this quiet night he feels briefly, as if something unseen touches his face, the ancientness of this thing he does, that he could be a man of any age.

  He looks again at the ewe, padding, and goes to her and she grinds her teeth and looks goat eyed at him and he sees the lamb presented backwards, the small catkin of tail tadpole-like in the sack, the obscene bag proffered from her vulva glistening with dark water.

  He puts the ewe on her side and puts the gel on his hand, its bright pink surgicalness foreign in its manufacture against this natural process. There is an understood geography, familiar and mammal, as if some far back thing guides his hands about the lamb inside her, understands the building of the baby, this thing he does, which could be repellent, comfortable to him somehow, the warmth, the balloon warm and lipid. It is only visually there is shame. The fluids and motherly efforts are beyond that, too ancient for shame, and he understands a great and vital force at work, equanimical with his instinct, and assured.

  He pushes back the breaching lamb, its mother prone, fallen in crunching straw, teeth crunching. He looks nowhere, working with gentle strength, thinking, far away, unfocused. There is a brief sound of rain. Quiet crunching. The light rain on the tin above, and outside the suck and clap of cows feeding in the floodlights. And the rain goes quickly. A hiss. The hiss of the water troughs filling.

  He finds the back legs, cups the sharp hoof in his palm as he folds each back and draws it somewhat from the ewe; the throb, power of pelvic girdle and birth muscles chew his arm. And then he draws the lamb in one smooth strong stroke, and slaps and rakes its wet mosslike fur to make it breathe, feels the power of its fast heartbeat in the chicken-bone cage of its ribs, still wet in his hands from the grease of birth, all these things of life, from jissom to mucus slavered between thighs to the wet sack of birth and glistening oiled newborn thing—all of these things of life awatered.

  He looks about himself, trapped between the trough and hurdle, sees the plywood starling be-shitted at the stop-end of the trough, the immediacy of the smell of hay, which in his mind can only smell of hay for he has no reference to any other thing. He is almost crazily tired, craves her help, for some company here mainly, to help the effort on. But this is now the rhythm, the way the shifts will work. He feels as if his body runs only on the air in it, but he knows, feeling even as he is, a feeling of strength—of a reserve of strength; like he could give more, whether tired or not, that this thing is of purpose utmost.

  He lets the mother clean the lamb, tea-dipped on birth and tannin colored, and as she nibbles at the covering bag he works the fat clotted cream globule of first plug from her stiff and giving teat, this vital colostrum come.

  He leans from the ewe, stares down and there sees a head of barleycorn, vertebral and desiccated amongst the straw like a skeleton in a bird pellet.

  He rests on his knees like that, a man ancient in some aspect of prayer. He feels oaken and finds once more vapors of energy with which to lift him and, somehow, dazed, he gets to his feet once more, goes about the work, the brief rain passed, outside the sucking and clapping of the cattle feeding in the lights.

  For a while he stays and watches the Beulah get to its feet. It is straight up, its instinct to live, head held high quickly, its gray-and-black-spattered coat in still loose rolls; it is vital with instant curiosity, an interest in air, even in its own feet.

  He bends and drinks from the tap, can taste the plastic of the pipes that bring the water in, hears even in her absence the rebuff, how she brought refilled bottles of fresh water to the shed, albeit from the same supply, from their kitchen tap.

  He thinks of her sleeping now, the rest she needs, thinks of the warmth of her body, the nest-like thing she could be to his tiredness. Then he notes the new lamb in the book, writes in the backward presentation, flicks back and traces his hand across her writing, looks up to the tub of dropper bottles and sprays he does not understand, that are her domain, like the movement records, and the paperwork, all the more careful aspects of the farm.

  He watches the Beulah on its feet, its interest in the air, and watches it take its first few steps.

  He stood and looked out, understood the strange ventriloquy of sounds that disturbed his land; how a barking fox could sound as if it were right the other side of the farm, how in this prehensile night there could come the illusion of the sea nearby. He listened to that, still as it seemed: the wind coming over the trees then dropping through the hedges and over the fields with the distant noise of waves breaking and running. And such was its likeness that he could not be sure this wasn’t the sound of the shifting tides carried from the coast that was dropped away out of sight a few miles off.

  He looked up at the bare ash branches, mercurial and somehow elephantine, rising out through the low floodlights and they hardly stirred, making the sound seem very far away. A distant white noise. A noise bearing some primitive hushed whisper of the permanence of vast things.

  The sound seemed tangible in the air, and everything felt silent before it. The sheep sighed and crunched, the cattle’s feet slapped as they moved in the mud. The dog chain rattled like coins in some dark pocket. But this sound brought stillness.

  As he looked out in the pitch dark beyond, a barn owl came into the floodlight, glid silently between the barns and was gone, seeming to leave some ghost of itself, some measureless whiteness in the air.

  He went into the boot shed and clicked the light and took off the old jacket, patched with blood and vital fluid, the inner arms birthmarked with shit, floured with grassdust that stuck to the lanolin which through all the embraces had enoiled the coat. He took off the hat. He lifted down the waterproofs over the top of his boots and stepped out of the boots on to the cold concrete floor and pulled his trousers out of his socks. For the brief second he stood balanced on one leg he knew he was stupefyingly tired. Even this small act was almost too much.

  He lifted the boots out of the doorway and set them next to hers. His boots looked protective somehow. Her boots and trousers looked smaller next to his, the two pairs like an adult crossing the road with a kid.

  He stepped into his shoes without putting them on properly and went to the house. The backs of the shoes were so long crushed that they had molded by now to his heels.

  For most of their life the shoes had gone only the ten yards or so from the porch to the boot shed, or perhaps now and then to the log store a little way beyond. The uppers were unscathed and the soles were hardly worn but the backs of the shoes were crushed into a rag. At first they looked comfortable and loved, but actually they had the unfulfilled imbalance of things that had not been used to their fullness. The one part constantly abused had given up and, while the rest of the shoes held up, the wear of doing just one repeated thing had made them useless for any greater purpose.

  He felt the doorjamb under his hand and rubbed the worn wood there as he kicked his shoes off. He had long had this need to put his hand upon things—to feel them, as if they were points of reference. The doorjamb, the rough stone on the corner of the porch, the old slate windowsill on the way out to the sheds.

  He felt again the way the jamb had worn under his hand, and thought of her. He wondered if there were parts of her like that.

  He put the torch on to charge and went into the house.

  He looked at the clock. He seemed to notice for the first time it had Roman numerals, though he un
derstood he must have known this. But for a while it fascinated and disturbed him, his new registry of this.

  He put on the kettle. He leant against the kitchen unit holding the old beige mug in his hand. He had a sudden strange sense of time—not as a thing you live within, but as an element you grow alien to when you become aware of it, the way you lose the sense of your body being yours when you look too long in a mirror.

  I’ll give it four hours, he thought, attritionally.

  He undressed quietly. He could see where she slept, knew she was unwakeable now. For a long while he had sat at the table holding the tea and when he had finally gone to drink it, it had gone cold.

  There was just the light from the landing coming in and in the dark he could almost trace the outline of her in the bed.

  The scent of her was in the room and it almost choked him to understand how vital to him this was; how he could never understand her need for his own smell, could not even understand how she could find it on him under the animal smells, the carbolic, the tractor oil and bales and all the things he could pick out on his own hands. He had this idea of smells layering themselves over him, like paint on a stone wall, and again he had this sense of extraordinary resilient tiredness. He wondered what isolated, essential smell she found on him, knew the mammalian power of this from the way pups would stumble blindly to their mother’s teat, the way a ewe would butt a lamb that wasn’t hers. In the shock of birthing, all that first recognition would be in that smell. They would take the skin sometimes of a dead lamb and tie it on an orphan like a coat in the hope that the mother who had lost her lamb would accept and raise it as her own.