The Dig Read online

  The cat scuttled in out of the weather and rubbed itself on the bales then went into the corner and settled itself and he felt a quiet transfer of love for the cat. His eyes filled with tears. He looked at the cat and held back the tears and felt himself smile desperately. Oh God, he said. You were so good. It was so good to have you.

  The cat came up and sat with him, and for a while they sat like that, in the comfortable sound of the rain, and the closeness of the cat was almost too much.

  The big man got the terriers in the van and seeing the brutalized chainsaw they were cooperative with each other and calmer, different from when they sensed they were working a badger, when they got individual and competitive.

  When he got to the farm the farmer came out to meet him. He wore a stiff waxed jacket that looked new and unweathered. He had a seniority to him, a type of important mantle.

  This was one of the bigger farms locally and had years ago been one of the manor farms that worked under the big house. You could tell the historical management of it by the wide fields and the way the big oaks were spread out in them.

  It was misty here lower in the valley and the oaks looked veiled and there was a chattering of starlings on the wet ground. You could not see most of the birds. It was the sort of open drifting mist that played with the distance of things. You could hear the tractors working somewhere on the land.

  There’s two spots, said the farmer. He was a magistrate and knew of the man from the hunts. His jaw was sagged from a cynical habit. It gave him the air of being above everything.

  The big man nodded and got out the brutalized chainsaw and began to fill it with fuel. He was gruff and taciturn. He had added too much oil to the two-stroke so that the fuel would smoke.

  The blade of the chainsaw had been taken off and he’d fixed a rubber pipe to the exhaust. It looked a strange, bastardized thing.

  The magistrate farmer took the man over to the big modern barn. After the damp outside air there was a dustiness in the outbuilding.

  The man brought the terriers down with him two to a lead and stationed them about the straw bales. Then he started the chainsaw there on the ground.

  The noise filled out.

  A little straw blew about the floor from the vent of the motor and the big man picked up the saw and revved it, crashing the noise in the barn. The mist had been deadening the noises so it was a very abrupt sound.

  The dogs stood stock still, shaking a little with alertness, their eyes shifting minutely with little rapid surveillances.

  He revved the saw again until it started to choke smoke through the thick rubber pipe. Then with a strange mobility he went round the stack and pumped in the smoke to the gaps and runs in the bales.

  When the rats came out they came out with pace but the terriers ripped into them. The dogs were catlike in their speed. When they caught a rat they shook it like they were trying to break its back, which they were. They were yelping. Bites seemed to just drive them on.

  The noise in the barn was terrible and solid. There was the clatter of the chainsaw and the metallic yelps of the dogs. That made a main terrible noise. It was a brief, flurried clatter of killing.

  When they were done the men lined up the rats and counted them. The big man took the rats that were not quite dead, trod on their scaly tails and systematically smashed their heads with an electric fencing spike he’d picked up from the wall of the barn.

  The farmer sickened a little at that brutalism. The dogs were whining and sniffed and their breathing came now in quick loud little pants. You could not smell the straw through the petrol smell and the choked-out smoke drifted about the barn like the mist outside.

  There’s the log pile too, said the farmer. There was a strange hum in his ears after the noise in the barn. He had a disgust now for the big man but understood him as an instrument. He was surprised and impressed that the man could manage such a discipline in his dogs.

  There’s something else too, said the magistrate farmer. His jaw sagged with the habit as he looked at the big man. The big man was experimentally putting weight down on a rat under his foot as if he was testing to burst it.

  I can have a look, said the man.

  Badgers, said the magistrate farmer.

  Daniel took up the cooled milk mix and took up the black lamb from the warming box. Its head swayed almost imperceptibly with exhaustion. It was like a very old thing asleep.

  The earlier wind had dropped and the rain now settled and gathered into a thickening mist.

  He husbanded the lamb, heard the brief interior gurgle as he fed the tube down and it met the lamb’s stomach. It was a remote sound, like something far off, not there right in his hands.

  As the tube reached the lamb’s stomach there was a brief smell of its insides, then he fed down the milk. The tiny lamb seemed will-less, its eyes just tired. It was as if they did not have in them any witnessable want for life.

  The thickening mist gave an enclosure to the shed. Every now and then the lamb choked back the milk and he fed it with an invasive passivity. He compared this to the willful sucking of the other lambs at the bottle, the way their bellies swelled drumlike. Sounds, outside, seemed to become isolated, lost things.

  He heard now the far-off sound of chainsaws. That sound had been constant here with the clearance work they had begun earlier in the year.

  It was such a day, he thought back, perhaps the mist thicker, more enclosed. They had stripped the hedges and taken out the gorse and willow by the roots and what was not worth keeping as firewood was put to burn in the field. The chainsaws worked restlessly.

  For days from the wet fires dirty smoke shifted up amongst the mist, giving it a rusted color. The fires were gray and mudded where the ash had cooled in the rain but a great heat was still in them and stumps and the bigger branches stood from the slake partially blackened.

  The hedges took on a damaged look. They took most of the trees out and he began to resent it. It was taking on what he considered an Englishness, a forced tidiness and management that he did not like. He felt that his closeness to it was threatened because it had visibly changed so severely and because of an intervention by other people. That it had turned into a thing he didn’t know intimately any more. It was a visual shock. Like the one time she came home with her hair cut short. They had applied to a scheme to reclaim some of the wasted land and the decisions were being made by the grant people as to what now happened to his land. It was all better in the long run, they said.

  He rhythmically pulled the tube from the lamb and it coughed and choked weakly. In a way he knew it stood no chance, but at the same time knew there were no certainties of that kind. Even the weakest thing could make it. Sometimes it simply seemed some element of surprise that carried an animal through.

  He watched the motes of mist snaking. Since her death he had asked them to stop the work. There was an aftermath. The field looked battle shocked, the ground stark, an altered sense of light. He couldn’t see the fields from the house and he was glad of that. The stumps left in the hedgerows and the sharply angled butts of hazel were bleached and obvious still. It was accusatory, something about it. The fires had not burned down completely and needed to be relit. Already there was a strong clarity in the ditches, a reapplied squareness to the field.

  They were ditching. The mini-digger worked in the mist, ship-like in it. Its engine sound seemed flattened. The big pipes to put in the gateways lay about in piles and every now and then seemed to appear in the mist. It was like a dockyard.

  The ground of the field was disrupted from the caterpillar tracks of the digger and strongly patterned into zip shapes and the reeds had been crushed and spread beneath them. It looked trodden over. There was a noise, too, to the alteration of the ground.

  When they came to the shard the driver let the digger idle and got out and tried to shake it and test it. It wouldn’t move. It stood there three feet or so out of the ground at the edge of the field. It was cast iron and had a cooked, harden
ed look. The shard curved slightly, striated with fine lines as if it had been lathed. The outside face was polished where the sheep over the years had rubbed against it and wisps of old wool hung within the curve.

  The driver got both hands on the shard and hefted it but the shard did not shift. There was no flexibility in it.

  You won’t, Daniel said. He was feeling a disappointment and betrayal that the shard had to come out of the ground. He had mythologized it as a child, a piece of lightning solidified there, a great sword, had over the years battled to move it himself. He thought it the gut of some truck or implement long abandoned and it was like a mark for him. Like the mole she was self-conscious of above her hip. It felt wrong to remove it. It was right in the line of the ditch and it had to come out but he was disagreeing emotionally with what they were doing.

  He was not a superstitious man but that is different from building superstitions of your own. He was unsettled at the shard coming out of the ground, as if it would bring a wrongness.

  They used the digger arm to push and pull the shard back and forth like a tooth and eventually it loosened a little and the earth made wet lips where it went into the ground.

  The digger cleared the earth around and then dug at it and when it came out it came with a wrenched sucking sound as if tearing a bone from a socket. The noise of the two great iron things coming together had been more of stone than metal, the echo deadening in the mist, but when they dragged the shard away from its place the teeth of the bucket skidded over it with a screech. It lay graunched, seven or eight feet long, like a felled tree. Where it had been in the ground it was darker and more permanent looking and did not have the same rusted look. It looked like a knife with a handle.

  The men on the chainsaws had stopped to witness the removing and there was speculation as to what it was.

  It’s a bit of old waste pipe, said one. Drainage. They used to use metal.

  Daniel looked at it. There was a wrongness and a loss to it being out of the ground.

  It was then the man arrived. He just appeared out of the mist which seemed to emphasize the size of him. He had two terriers with him that went immediately and sniffed about the fires.

  Big work, he said. The men stopped and were looking at him. He looked around them all and at Daniel.

  Do you want anything rid of? he asked. He looked over at the dragged-up shard. I’m taking scrap.

  No, said Daniel. I don’t need it. He knew of the big man. Knew of his reputation. He had an immediate anger that the man had come onto his land.

  Them old implements? asked the man. There was a kind of unnerving thing to him, there in the mist. It was as if he had no idea of right ownership.

  The dogs were yelping in and out of the reeds. He shouted at them and they quieted. It was a bizarre obedience.

  No, said Daniel. Part of the scheme was that the rubbish and scrap, the old implements and machinery had to be got rid of. It unnerved him, the man coming with this timing. He was angered but knew he could not provoke the man or give him reason to feel personally aggrieved.

  Nothing else? asked the man. There was a load to the question. A physical weight.

  The other men were standing around. The big man had brought unease to everyone. Daniel could feel the mist slightly on his face.

  No, he said.

  •

  When the man had gone Daniel felt a tide of adrenaline. As if he had been left a threat. The old implements were the other side of the sheep barn. It gave Daniel a fear that something of his had been coveted. He could not disassociate the man coming from the moving of the shard. As if it had conjured him.

  He thought of the shard, lying there, a snapped bone. Something stricken. He wondered briefly again what it was. It worried him that there was no imagination in him. There was just a hollow, dead unknowing. Somewhere within him, the anger about the man coming onto his land.

  He listened to the chainsaws he thought were from the manor farm at the base of the valley and heard the yapping of dogs, their strange sharp note. An adrenaline came up in him again. He had a sudden fear for her, a belief someone had touched her or was going to touch her and harm her again. It was inexplicable.

  The big man stood at the entrance to the sett and stared as if he were following the tunnels along, assessing it.

  He saw the heap of freshly scuffed soil and the drawn-out bedding outside the entrance. The sett was on a slope and looked to head deep in and there was much undergrowth and thin sycamore on the cover.

  I’d need somebody else, he thought.

  He went out a little from the entrance and found the dung pit that in the colder weather was often close to the sett this time of year. The fresh spores looked soft and muddy. In the mud around were scrapings and footprints and from their impress he knew it was a big full-grown boar. A sow would put up a better fight if she had cubs to defend, but there was something more competitive to the size of a big forty-pound boar.

  On the nearby trees were the unhealed scars where the badgers had cleaned their claws and rubbed off the dirt from their coats.

  That’s them, he thought. They’re here.

  •

  He followed the river back up from the woods and periodically took out a snare from his knapsack and laid it along the bank.

  The water levels had dropped in the last month and the river was fringed with marsh marigold and he set the snares amongst it.

  The mink were here now, annihilating the streams and watercourses. It was as well to be able to produce one if they were stopped. It was legal to hunt them, and it would explain the dogs.

  When the big man got home he kenneled and fed the terriers and dressed the rat bites then went inside and made the calls.

  He talked briefly and arranged that he would call if he got the badger. They wanted something heavy preferably, a real fighter. They wanted a spectacle. Then he called the other man whom he had worked with on the hunts and whom he knew had a good, big dog. He would need a big dog against the possibility of the boar.

  It’s just a catch and release, the big man told him.

  Can I bring my son? the man asked.

  chapter three

  WHEN DANIEL CAME out of the shed his mother was there. He had not heard her arrive. She had come through the cows and carried the basket that was always on her elbow with the tea towel over it. She had aged quickly some years ago and then seemed to stop and looked now like she had for years. His father had changed differently. He had seemed to be always the same but then went old very suddenly, as if he had given in under a weight.

  The basket on his mother’s arm gave Daniel a strange sort of locus; he could rarely remember her coming without it. She looked him over, was sensible enough not to judge him in the clothes he was in, and they walked back to the house.

  “How’s Dad?” he asked.

  “Still slow with things,” she said. The stroke had split him down one side like lightning hitting an old tree. “He’s angry for you,” she said.

  Daniel nodded.

  They went into the house. By the time he had taken off his boots and waterproofs and come into the kitchen she was cleaning up and the kettle was boiling. He felt a slight filial guilt.

  He went over to the sink and cleaned his hands under the crashing hot water, a meringue of suds lifting out of the filling bowl. His mother emptied the basket of things, putting out a box of stew, a bara brith. A handful of small rolls.

  “Do you want this loaf?” she asked.

  “I’ve got the bread machine,” he said. They had bought that together. It was a thing of wonder to them. There was no false politeness.

  “You’re not eating.”

  There was nothing to clear. Just the scuffs of butter and crumbs off the plates some toast had been on, the odd bowl of cereal. A tinned pie was his one effort at hot food, and there was evidence of the tin.

  She dumped the plates into the suds and made the tea. For years this had been her kitchen, the center of the place where most o
f the important things of her life had happened.

  “Stew’s easy,” she said as she put down the tea. She knew she had to be careful with her son. “Dad sent you these,” she said.

  She handed over a carrier bag of Farmers Weeklys, back issues his father had already read. He could see where his father had thumbed and bent the pages. He still subscribed to the magazine and, like most farmers, was more shrewd and politicized than you would think. That the carrier bag was already on the kitchen unit made it clear his mother had already been in the house but he didn’t mind. Even in his head it was still his parents’ farm, though the idea of ownership and of the possession of it occurred to him only obtusely. He had grown up here and belonged to it and it was not like some property external to him. He felt more possessive over his tractor.

  He understood how it must have been difficult for his wife to come into the place, but she did so gently, without displacing anything. The bigger changes they seemed to make together, putting the shower in, painting the upstairs rooms. The house took her in just as the family had. She had come to play as a child and then there had been a long ten-year gap, but it was as if the house remembered her and accepted her in the way a dog might recall an old friend of its owner.