The Dig Read online

  There was a brief flash of wide hunger but it was like he’d forgotten how to register it and Daniel said automatically: No, I’m okay. The garage owner was looking at him as if he’d just seen him take a blow to the head.

  Okay then.

  Daniel took the goods from the counter and went out. He turned and nodded at the garage owner and went over the empty forecourt looking at the rich Georgian houses across the road.

  He got into the pickup and was about to drive off when the garage owner banged the door and passed a wrapped bacon roll through the open window. His guts immediately roiled. He looked at the roll in this hands and the garage owner just banged the sill of the door and walked away.

  Driving home he saw the badger on the road. He slowed. It was prone on the road. There was a magpie pulling at it. As he neared, the bird took a final pull and the leg raised as if it waved. Then it dropped again and the magpie let go of the scrap he was trying to loose, hopped, and went over the bank.

  He did not understand. He had lived all his life here and he had never come close to hitting a badger.

  He kept thinking of impact. Of horrible impact.

  chapter two

  HE SHIFTED THE bunched carrier bags and the cleaning stuff and the shoe polish and dustpan and brush and box of nuts and hinges and screws and found an empty jar under the sink and opened it and smelled it and it had no smell and he smelled only the lanolin and straw and always the undertone of cattle on his hands.

  There had been a snatch of cold weather again that seemed to slow the lambing down for a while, and now there was only a handful of ewes left to lamb, and there was a reticence to them.

  He had not yet accepted her death as a fact. It was impossible.

  Daniel looked at the faded label stuck to the jar, peeled and lifted a little from being washed. Blackberry. He remembers the warm sun on his neck, the soft presence of her a few yards away, the firm pop of the pulled fruits.

  He put the jar into his pocket and walked out through the back door and through the distraught garden and headed to the church, her piece of cloth crushed in his hand.

  The church sat at the very top of the land, bordered with a wall and flanked on one side by dignified beeches. It was the church his mother and father were married in and the church where she was buried, right beside the land, as if she could stretch out in her sleep and feel it there. The day before her funeral, from the house, he had heard the slice of the spades digging the ground.

  He knelt by the grave and took the jar and put in her piece of cloth inside its plastic bag and set the jar down for her, pushing it a little into the soft earth.

  He cleared away the curled flowers and looked at the grave-marker. It looked plastic and new. It had no weight to it and no permanence. He read her name and put his hand in the dirt above her and he wanted to drag her from the earth again and have her there with him.

  At the funeral he was in a daze, had the sure sense that she would be in the house when he returned there. He was at a distance from what was happening. There was the smell of opened soil like when they dug the garden together and he kept looking around for her. He had been driving once and two pigeons had come down on to the road and the car in front had failed to brake and hit one, mashing it to a paste with a dull thunk and brief change in speed. He felt the people look at him then with faces like the one he imagined he wore at that moment. Like they were aware he was about to be flattened by some terrible great thing.

  …his days are like grass;

  he flourishes like a flower of the

  field;

  …it is

  gone,

  and its place knows it no more.

  He hears again the parson speak, words that chiseled into his brain like into the gravestone slate about him.

  He refused that. I don’t think it is true. He looked down at her and spoke as if to her. I don’t think it’s true. I think a place can remember.

  He walked through the gravestones to the church gate and looked out over the sweeping valley. Red kites lifted above him, scanning over the bursts of gorse and he walked out of the church and followed the bridleway along the wall. He touched as was his way the ancient stones with their atlas of lichen mapped across them, looked down at the wasting piles of grass cuttings tipped from the mown churchyard, the scattered sprays of plastic flowers lifted from their places, broke vases and tattered ribbons from long-decayed bouquets, strange colors that were unnatural and minutely carnival there somehow. He hardly registered the van that passed. Did not look up. He was looking at the still-wet earth from the grave on his hands.

  A place remembers, he thought. A place has to remember.

  The big man saw Daniel there against the wall, clipped the verge briefly with his front wheel as he turned to look back at him. A thought came to him: The man was weak.

  He watched the church recede in the mirror, slowed as he passed the farm lane, and let the thought fill out. He took the corner and pulled up upon the verge.

  The big man was still uncomfortable. That policeman, he thought. Ag.

  He’d taken the phone call that morning and there was not much time to decide things; the men were here tonight.

  The first sett he had in mind was too close to outbuildings with men and dogs he did not know. This might be the place.

  He’s weak, the big man thought. He’s weak and he is a farmer by himself. He will be occupied. News spread out here, soaked out, and he knew about the loss of Daniel’s wife and why he was at the graveyard. He’s trying to get through on his own.

  He knew the setts locally and knew that this sett was relatively distant from the house of the farm. It was walkable from his own place. It’s the one, he said to himself. A man on his own, what can he do?

  He got from the van and it lifted and relaxed. In the fields the lambs were bleating habitually and there was a green bolt of new growth in the bank. He crossed the narrow road and stood up into the hedge and looked over onto the field. After the rain, the upper field was fizzing with water. He studied it. He did not know if the badgers were at the sett.

  He got back in the van and drove a little way on then parked by a gate and climbed over and cut back along the top of the field. Then he followed the farm lane down, and as he crossed over into a second field a rush of thrushes came off the ground. He walked on, looking at the bank.

  Partway down the field there was a run in the bank. The blackthorn that capped it was like a tunnel and the earth was disturbed and excavated like a primitive road. There were dropped piles of bracken by the run as if they had been spilled.

  He heard the gate clang the other side of the lane and then Daniel’s weight land. He heard the bumps of footsteps approaching down the track.

  He stayed very still.

  When Daniel had passed, the big man looked at the gorse and at the thick-packed blackthorn and saw the stiff gray badger hair there.

  That will do, he thought. He was decisive. That’s enough of a sign.

  He would take the risk that the badgers were there.

  He knew the sett was in the woods at the far edge of the farm.

  He’d have no reason to be down there, he said.

  chapter three

  WHEN DANIEL CAME into the shed the ewe looked immediately incorrect. She was stretched out, camel-prone in the straw and her head was pushed out, the lips working wildly, strained as if trying to get away from the pain at the back of her body.

  He swung over the hurdle into the pen of twins and went to her. There were flecks of froth about her mouth as she had been like this for some time, and he thought of the sea and the waves, and of walking into them and the hollow tiredness he felt.

  The ewe was distended and her waters had broken but there seemed to be too much thick blood and fluid in the straw, as if it had sloughed out of her, and the other ewes were unsettled and circled well away from her. He swore over and over to himself, and this was his way of finding a grip on things, of bringing it to a dealable realm.


  He put his hand into the ewe and she bucked so he had to lean on her and she glazed at him with crazy eyes as she felt him stretch her and try to get his hand in to her womb through the panicked muscles.

  He found a head and with his thumb tried to follow its shape, to find the nose and the lobe of the skull and follow it back to the neck. He located a foreleg, bent over like an elbow, and drew it forward to lie against the neck like undoing a knot in the dark, feeling the extraordinary strength of the sheep’s pelvis clamp on his arm.

  The ewe panted and groaned and he closed his eyes and tried to see the shape of the lambs inside her with his hands. They are twins, he thought. They can often get crowded and bunched together and he gritted his teeth against the rejective, blunt, maw-like pressure of her pelvis as the ewe tried again to shift.

  Something wasn’t making sense. He did not understand and neither did the ewe. He tried to map the bodies inside her, followed a slick throat down to the forelegs, skimmed his fingers out to find a back knee. One lamb. He drew his arm out a little then found the second head, thinking it strange shaped at first, then understanding the soft bones above the eyes, found the flap of an ear and as he moved his hand he understood and the understanding rolled up in him like vomit.

  The sheep was livid now in her pain and constantly noisome and he could feel her trying to expel the thing of pain in her, could feel the monstrous lamb being forced into the ungiving bones inside her.

  When he stood up he felt sick and spots shifted in front of his eyes like motes of hay dust. Like the momentary surprise of picking up an empty box you thought was full of weight.

  He went over to the kettle and looked for the knife and went in amongst the tools in the crate beside the gate. The vet would take too long. He was calculating this, trying to harden himself against his own want to not see anyone, to not have to talk and work with the vet. But he would take too long. I am not choosing this wrongly, he thought.

  He poured boiling water over the knife and the hacksaw in primitive sterilization and went back to the ewe, tried to settle her. All her energy went on trying to expel the lamb and she was too exhausted to move and now and again butted her head into the block wall in distracted, impossible pain.

  The ewe was slathered and he dried his hands and arms on the straw, wiping off the thick grease of fluid and blood and lubricant so that he could get more purchase on the saw and then with his left hand he reached in to the sheep and found the smaller, malformed head.

  He was brutal now. A brutalness descended on him of necessity so that he may do this thing, and he drew out the mouselike head.

  The sheep screamed and he pulled the head as far as he could, feeling back to where the stubbed neck married the one dead body inside. Then he pulled on the head in his hand to taughten that neck and cut into it with the hacksaw, the loose skin rucking under the blade until it scythed in and bit and sunk down through the hardly acknowledgeable flesh into the bastard spine.

  He broke through the bone and the head lolled and he made taut the apron of meat and veins to go through them until the head came off.

  As he let go, the stump went back into her body and the ewe tried to get up in shock and he had to weigh brutally on her while she bucked and kicked. There was blood all over her and there was blood in the straw and it flicked into his face and mouth as he held her until he felt the energy go out of her.

  He went back into her and felt a sharp pain as she resisted, pushing the split vertebrae of the severed head into his knuckle. The ewe kicked him once, catching him below the knee, the force unbelievable but somehow lost in the noise of adrenaline and blood of them.

  He put in his other hand and drew up the forelegs and gripped them in the vees of his fingers and he eased the other head through her opening, the dead body moving behind it, will-less and without life, like paste in a tube.

  He got the head and feet out and went back and steered the sharp misgrown stump out of her then wrenched out the lamb.

  The ewe lay gurgling and blinking, and even in this she turned in some maternal programming to clean her offspring and looked down on it, its hindquarters ungrown and fishlike, as if it grew strangely out of the pool of blood and fluids that messed the straw.

  He looked at the lamb with a sick solid feeling and got up to get a sack.

  When he came back with it, the ewe was licking the severed head and he felt sick well up in him. He tried to fight off the image of the destroyed head, of her destroyed head.

  He gathered into the sack the lamb and the separate head and gathered up the filthy straw before he cleaned the saw and then his hands under the tap and took great desperate gulps of water. He poured iodine on his knuckles and bit his lip against the sting and sat down with his back against the standpipe. He was shaking, and from somewhere, a great hopeless anger began in him.

  He wanted the final hit. He had just a little of something left in him to keep him going and he felt this great want for it to be knocked out of him, to suffer some unpassable collision so that he could just lie down. It was a kind of weak hopeless anger, and he felt calm now at the thought of failure. Like a boxer stumbling forward to welcome the punch that will put him finally down. Let him rest.

  But God, he thought. There’s this anger. It’s the anger keeping me going. Gritting my teeth, pushing me on. It’s like it is going to make me work it out, before I can stop.

  She would not have liked that. She would not have liked this anger in me. I was not an angry man.

  God, he thought, give me something to burn it out. He thought of a colossal car crash, of the huge finalizing impact. He put his palm against the upright and felt the rough wood there under his hand. The barn was full of her.

  Then he thought of her with the cloth in her hair again. Of her smiling. I can do this, he thought. I can still do this. There was the huge responsibility of the farm and he would keep going because of it. He seemed to know though, that the need for the hit, the final crack, would come more and more.

  chapter four

  IT WAS BREWING to rain again, the sky bruising up and coming in from the sea.

  The big man parked the van. All the rain had brought a sheen to the mud.

  He got out and walked through the litter of tires and broken sheeting and the old scales of asbestos trod into the ground.

  The dogs had started up at the sound of the van and he shouted them. They went quiet. There was the big mastiff in the shed, thumping with an animal weight against the wall.

  The big man went in and made the call.

  I’ve got the place, he said. He could not shake the thought of the policeman. It was like a tick in his brain. I’ll leave the mastiff off, he thought.

  •

  The last time they had come they found the guns and the illegal poisons and then the barks of the dogs they brought with them settled to a low, locative yelp while the officers photographed the finds in place.

  When they searched further they found the money he had accumulated but they did not notice his maps. They found pornography and some old shooting magazines, and they picked up the O.S. maps cursorily in the same way as the pornography and the magazines and threw them down again. His maps were his pride. They marked every badger sett for miles around and though he had the information in his mind, he had the special totemic association with the maps of the things we mark for purpose. They somehow defined him.

  The magistrate was a sleeping partner in a local construction firm and a member of the hunt and knew of the man as a terrier man. There was a leniency. The things they had found could be explained—the guns and poison to keep down vermin; the undisclosed money from some antisocietal feeling against bank accounts. The guns even, in paranoia for the protection of this fund. He was defensible like this, a forgotten outcast rejected by society just trying to function his own way. But if they had linked up the maps they might have begun to extrapolate, to trace out the criminology of him.

  When they took him, cuffed and bundled in
the back of a van, the place had the same vacated sense of a garden after a storm. He was given a couple of months. He wouldn’t get away with it again.

  In his absence, his dogs had been put down.

  Daniel looked down at the spent feed sack tied with baling twine lying at the foot of the stack, the mutilated lamb monstrous within it, its twin heads bagged together as if there was some conversation, some horrible severed dialogue. She didn’t have to see that, he thought. She always hated that. Those terrible operations. Then he looked over to the gate where the tools lay, looked at the grotesque hacksaw.

  He wondered what to do with the lamb and knew he would take it to the edge of the wood and just throw it there. He was supposed to declare it, do some paperwork, incinerate the carcass. But there was a pointlessness to that, and however unfarmerly it was to encourage them, he preferred that the dead lamb was taken by a fox, or buzzard perhaps. Perhaps the kites that scanned up the ground and wheeled always over the higher fields in the evening.

  He put the sack in the bread crate at the front of the quad and cracked the bike on and went over the field. The gateway was soft and cut up and beneath him the pasture was spongy with the sitting water of weeks of rain.

  He got off and swung open the bottom gate and sucked back through the mud to the bike and went through and down to the edge of the wood.