The Dig Page 8

  The field here was scrubby and drained into a small splash and as he dipped over on the bike a flight of teal went whistling into the air, crashing off the pond with the special vibrancy of smaller birds. He watched them go up at the extreme angle they took and wheel above the woods, piping and whistling with energy, before they cut away out of sight.

  The teal were wild birds and followed the colder weather down as it crept south. When you held one, you understood how delicate and fine they were, and it was difficult to believe they could survive on the water.

  This was the field where she had died. He looked back up to the farm, at the strange kelp of the tire tracks the bike had left in the wet fields and tried not to think of it.

  He took the sack from the bike and undid the cord and tipped out the lamb. He shook the sack again and the severed head fell out and rolled a little like some grotesque ball. He had a moment of sickness, then he bent and picked up the loose head by the ear and threw it hard over the pond into the woods beyond.

  He had the image of her lying there with a smashed head. His knees were in the wet ground and part of her face had gone like a crushed carrier bag and the blood leaked thickly in the surface water. He had heard the crack, had sensed it almost as something that shouldn’t be in the panoply of sounds about the farm. It had been the speed of it. And then he had heard the horse run. There had been a split second as he registered the sounds, and then he had become this thing that just tried to get to her as fast as possible. She lived for five minutes maybe, that was it. She couldn’t speak.

  He sat down on the ground by the lamb. It started to rain again, the rain falling with a susurrating sound into the surface water of the field, almost hissing into the grass. There was the odd burst of water as a few stray teal returned into the pond.

  The weight of the rain, the place he sat, some combination of things about him balled into another memory, of standing with the gun as they pushed the dogs through the woods. He could smell the foily metal of the gun, feel the rain soak into his hair and run down his skin, hear the snap of the rain on his waterproofs, waiting, focused and ready with a sense of strange timelessness, every now and then checking the position of the other guns waiting in the field. There was a shout of “over” and a cock pheasant came climbing out of the trees and he shot it as it accelerated, dropping it in the rushes that surrounded the pond. It was a direct and full shot and the bird had balled and fallen.

  When they went to pick it up they couldn’t find it. The bird had fallen like a stone and he had marked it, but when they went into the rushes they could not see it and the dogs were mad with the too-many scents that crisscrossed the space. They found a patch of feathers where there was impact, but the bird was gone and they wondered if something had been in the rushes and had been quick enough to take it unnoticed.

  Three weeks later they were shooting again. He was on a hedge line and a cock came out running, one of the spaniels behind it. The dog got to it and mouthed it and he heard the handler call it off and shout to it to drop the bird and as he was the closest he jogged over to the bird and picked it up. It felt immediately thin and light, like an old person’s hand, was not glorious in the way healthy wild things are.

  He held the pheasant as the others came up and it looked at him and its eyes opened and closed once slowly, then it died. It just dropped dead in his hands. As it went limp he felt a mouthful of smell and when he looked at the bird and separated the feathers he saw that its back was grated with pellets and the gangrene had turned it a soft green. It was the bird he had shot, he was sure of that, and it had lived for three weeks like this, decaying, and it had died accusatorily in his hands. As if it was waiting for him, so that he saw. He kept seeing the way the eye had slowly opened and closed. It had taken the appetite to shoot away from him, and it was like a presentiment of something.

  A few more teal came down in the splash. He felt distant. He felt distant from everything, the things inside him and the things around him.

  Her death stayed at the same time incomprehensible and matter of fact, and he just sat there in the rain, getting colder and colder and listening to the susurrating sound of it hitting the surface water and wondering how deep her blood had gone.

  PART FIVE

  The Shard

  chapter one

  I’LL TAKE THE money first, said the big man.

  It was close to Easter and the men wanted him to take them to a sett to work their dogs. They were Midlanders. They were mostly Midlanders or from the Valleys, the men that came to him for this, and it started mostly this time of year. It was a reason why you saw the number of dead badgers go up on the roads.

  He folded the rolls of twenties and put them inside his coat and zipped it up.

  We’ll go down from here, he said. The men nodded. They were standing there with the two lurchers, one each on a lead, and the terriers were still in the car. The man had dumped a sack on the ground and the lurchers were looking intently at the sack. The men were wearing ex-army camouflage and it gave him an extra disgust of them.

  At the presence of the new dogs the big mastiff was bridling in the shed and the shed walls thumped with the strength of him inside. Every now and then the men looked uncertainly over to the shed.

  They got the tools together and rested them against the car. There were the spades and the long-handled pick. They had the iron spike and on the bonnet they laid out the billhook and the small axe and a short carpenter’s saw.

  The man came out of one of the sheds and put the snare wire on the bonnet and some pegs.

  Likely won’t be room for a pit, he said as he put the snares down. You want to do him out there? the man said, as if checking.

  The men nodded. One of them, the skinnier one, already had this kind of cruel little firework going on in himself. The other man just looked like he liked to push things and break things and didn’t look like he had the more scientific cruelness of the thinner man.

  If you want to do him out there, there might not be room for a pit. If that’s it, we’ll put him on a tree.

  The terriers inside the car were going crazy at the sight of the tools.

  Gun?

  The bigger man nodded and went to the car and brought back the shotgun in its case. He was physically unwieldy.

  Licensed? asked the man and he nodded and said yes in the deep Birmingham accent. He had a neckless squareness but did not carry any look of great athletic power. It’s a registered gun, he said, saying “gun” like it was the Welsh for it, with his accent.

  They divided up the tools and got the terriers from the car.

  What’s in the sack? said the skinny one. It was like the bigger man had a caution and slowness in asking things and a respect for the other big man, but this skinnier one was more socially stupid.

  He put down the sack again and drew out the fox. Without looking hard you would not have seen the burns in its eyes from it being frozen.

  There were lambs bleating in the fields about and the light was just beginning.

  We’re after foxes, said the man. Clear? And the men nodded.

  In the light the tools looked as if they were made of stone.

  •

  They walked down through the big man’s land with the dogs and the tools, through the cemetery of machines.

  The bigger man was an enthusiast of old cars and felt galled at the things he saw there, the Rover P6, the Triumph recognized only by its bones as if he was some adept mechanical archaeologist.

  The men made no effort to cover their noise and as they passed the hedge they threw up the blackbirds that had sheltered here through the night and heard them batter into the remaining darkness with their laser-like call.

  Messie went ahead and worked the bank but the other dogs were on leads, the lurchers livid with strain at the rabbits that went bumping away quickly from their torchlight. Here and there in the field were spent balloons of earthballs, their spores choked from them, like papery fruit.

  They
dropped down to a copse and went over the fence that marked the edge of his land, heard the small breeze amplify in the hazel around them. There was no true need for the torches but the townsmen were not used to such darkness nor this level of quietness and they were not restful in it.

  •

  When they came out of the copse the big man told them to turn off the torches and for moments they were blind. Then shapes came out, like shapes on a wax rubbing as their eyes adjusted.

  There was a low open field to cross.

  Are they broken to stock? asked the man.

  Both the men nodded.

  We can’t have them going for the stock.

  The men looked into the field and eventually made out the strange bulks of cattle. The men were nervous at the cattle. They were neither used to big animals.

  Farm buildings were beyond the field and the lights from the house looked to be guttering through the naked trees that were before it.

  They went over the fence and followed the hedge line out of the field and went away on to the upper fields and out onto a road. Then they cut off the road on to a bridle path. There were houses in sight and they did not use the torches and slipped and cursed on the path, following mostly the pull of the dogs. The bigger man was heaving and panting and his asthma was getting up. Every now and then you could hear the hiss of him as he used the inhaler and it looked childlike, a big man like that using such a small thing. It made him look like a simpleton.

  There was a luminous blue light come now and they stopped awhile and looked out over the valley, the strange puffs of sheep coming visible, the whitewashed farmhouses with their twinkling windows quartz-like in the flat gray land.

  Some birds were now up, and strangely in that light a group of gulls went ghostly off toward the beach, as if fleeing the coming light. You could not see the sea from here, but there was the sense of it.

  They looked out across the feminine curves of the hills and the man told them where they would go. Then they cut along the church wall, the dogs sniffing at the magpie-lifted ribbons and plastic flowers that had come over from the graveyard, and they went over the fence and into the sloping field.

  The big man knew that up here they could not be seen from the farm.

  Those are the woods, he said. He pointed. There was the dark mass, like hair on a body, straight before them. We’ll work our way about to it, he said. The farm is just down there. They could hear the muffled sounds from the barn.

  The lurchers were stiff at the sheep, and the ewes brayed and stamped the ground.

  It’s not easy land, he said. There’s some boggy stuff to work through. He was thinking of the man with the asthma, not with concern but with a sort of despisement.

  The terriers were stiff and shaking already with excitement.

  Take the gun out, he said. Give me the dogs.

  The bigger man unsheathed the gun and broke it and held it in his arm and the other big man took the dogs.

  Now, he said. Go.

  The men worked their way across the fields, staying well up on the hedge lines out of eyesight from the farm. They came in to the pond field from the side and hurried the exposed few yards into the woods. The settled ducks set to chucking and gawping on the water but they did not lift into the unpredictable light.

  Once inside the woods, the big man knew it was safe to use the torches carefully again.

  Keep them to the ground, he said. If you shine them up he’ll see them.

  The owl cut low against the bracken and its wings tilted and it stretched out its furred legs in a way that was somehow catlike and landed on the post and its white also was the very clean white of a cat that has white to it. Then it saw Daniel, and went off over the scrub, leaving the strange white silent thing of itself, like snow can.

  He had been unable to sleep. He had come to believe that things had gone wrong because of the shard. That its removal had somehow upset a balance.

  He had lain thinking of the vertebral spike of the malformed lamb, and that had brought him to this thought.

  He stood over the shard. He had given it animation and it still had some presence to him but it was like a dead animal there.

  He stood in the field. There was severity, a strange squareness. The cuts of hazel still stood out.

  The ground was beginning to burst with growth now. The thin spears of grass looked fabricated, too fine and too green against the clay. Every here and there came a compact nettle. There was a part light. In the places where the water still stood the ground hissed, but much of the rain had run off into the new blatant ditches.

  He went to the near fire pile and kicked a little at the crust of ash. It had turned a gray pink now, still with a white powder from the passing of great heat.

  He dragged the long branch from the pile and walked from the fire until it was free and then weighed on it so it snapped where the flames had burnt and thinned it. There was a burst of charcoal, a blackbird, a sudden quick call in the quiet.

  Daniel kicked at the burnt end he had formed and rolled it to make the hard point of a thick spear. Then he went to the cut that the shard had come from. The earth had hardened with time, healed somehow. It was a scar.

  He used the pole spade-like to push back in some earth and kicked and scuffed at the bent lip of soil. Again he thought: Why do I not bring the things I need with me? As she would have done. He thought of the owl. It had been around more now. He could not separate it from her.

  With the empty tub of a discarded salt lick he went back and forth from the fireplaces and filled the hole with wet ash and again kicked at the soil and mud. Then he used the pole like a spike and began to remake the hole. A cold sweat started on him, as if there was a coldness even to his energy now, no extra heat.

  •

  For a few feet or so it skidded on the wet ground but then the shard bit and he raised it up. He felt the familiarity of it, under his hands.

  He found hold and walked it patiently to the hole, lifting it and dropping it, lifting it and dropping it. Then he bear-hugged the shard, and with all the strength he had raised it and let it go. It planted itself with its own weight.

  He stood and looked once briefly for the owl, believing somehow it might be there.

  For a moment he believed he heard voices, but he dismissed it.

  He looked at the shard. It was taller than him, this way.

  I’ll bring the tractor, he thought, knock it in with the front loader. He felt he must restore something.

  Then he saw for the first time the marks in the iron, a strange part-familiar lettering, a strange ogham there below where it would have been in the ground.

  He could not explain it, but he felt that there would be a rightness now. That it should never have been moved.

  chapter two

  THE BIG MAN assessed the space. The mound seemed to be set in some old clearing. It was ringed with thicker, older trees. There was a hollow before it as if the mound had been formed by some great digging out at some point. For some reason the man thought of the cell. It was perhaps the thick wall of trees.

  That policeman, he thought. He could not stop thinking of the four walls, the hatch for food, the dog-pen proximity of others. It was the worst thing for him: to be surrounded by people and to be forced to fit in the social system of them. He was too much an instrument to change what he did, but he had a strange feeling of exposure now. He was nervous about the policeman. I can’t go back, he said to himself. I wouldn’t get away with it again.

  He took a lantern and lit it on the ground to keep the light low. The man could see the mound was heavy with holly and it had a freshly washed look of newness in that light.

  Ag, I should get rid of the gun, he thought. Nothing else is so serious. They won’t catch me for anything else. Thinking of the things he did, his mind whetted at the thought of the badger.

  Take the dogs and find the holes, said the big man. Leave the lurchers. When you find a hole, cut some holly and stuff the hole with it, t
hen close it up with stones. Or dead wood. Make it heavy. Keep the dogs to hand for now.

  We’ve dug before, said the skinny man. The big man just looked at him as if he could ball him up like paper.

  When the town men came back they took a drink then went to the entrance hole with one of the dogs. The big man was holding the spade and it had the look of a cudgel in his hands.

  They fixed the locator to the dog and sent it in.

  The skinny man began to work his way over the mound, staring at the locator. The big man spat thickly. He remembered the sound of the dogs at the bus depot. Then the dog began to yelp.

  The big man eddied on the sound. He was trying to picture the system of the sett.

  They followed the locator until it pinpointed the dog. There was an excitement amongst the other two men.

  The big man staved his spade into the ground. Here, he said. Dig here.

  chapter three

  ABOUT AN HOUR had gone by and there had been a brief fall of rain. They worked in the lantern light and everything beyond the space it lit looked impenetrable and dark. At the edge of the wood a robin was singing, undisturbed by the digging within, and there was something unsettling in that.

  They had left the other dogs off the mound in the clearing and they were variously slumbered or cleaning themselves when the fox came through them. The fox seemed to be in their midst before it understood and the dogs exploded.