Cynan Jones - The Dig

I don’t know, I was asleep, said the man.

Did you go out this morning?

I just fed the dogs. That’s all.

The policeman looked over to the dog run with distaste.

What sort of dogs do you have? he asked, as if he had an interest in them.

Some big ones and some little ones, the man said. This couldn’t be it, he was thinking. They were like this when they raided the house. They had these stupid questions, then the rest of them all came out from nowhere.

You haven’t been out this morning? asked the policeman. No, said the man. Somewhere in the near distance a chainsaw started up and some of the terriers yapped, knowing the sound from going ratting.

The policeman looked round at the yapping of the dogs. Anyone been here? he asked.

No, said the man.

The policeman thought of the tire tracks without the rain in them.

Mind if I take a look in the van? he asked.

The big man’s heart quickened as his brain worked through his routine, as he went over each step. Yes. He’d followed his routine. He nodded at the van and the policeman went over and opened the back and looked in. There were just some palettes and bales in there. The policeman felt this horrible inside apprehension as he turned his back on the man. He had an extreme dislike of him.

Distantly, the chainsaw was biting and idling. It stank of dogs in the van.

The policeman stepped back and smiled at the man and made a kind of “everything’s fine” gesture.

Well, he said. Thanks for your cooperation. Something is wrong here , he knew. He thought again of the rain keeping his children awake and thought how easily someone like this could turn, and thought again of the firearms charges and how there should have been backup, and he knew there was something wrong with the man.

He looked out over the valley and then at the dog run and then he drove off.

When the policeman had gone, the man went to the coal bunker and lifted out the badger. From inside the sack, the badger had dug into the pile of coal and the sack was torn and blackened with filth.

The big man knelt by the bath panel and pushed it and the plastic wraithed against the bath as it flexed and he took hold of the sharp top of the panel and bent it over and lifted it off. Knelt down like that in the big coat, the bulk and actions of the man looked bearlike.

He stood the panel out of the way against a wall and with his face down smelled the dry piss and the uncleanliness around the toilet and the copperiness of the old pipes. He had the kind of extra-awareness of when you see a commonplace thing from a different perspective and noticed the way the copper pipes had the strange eucalypt green on them that looked somehow stony.

Just inside the space under the bath was a row of various pots and dishes filled with sharp-smelling raw detergent that he had put there to curtain any scent the police dogs might find and he moved them to one side. There was something almost comic in the way the big man had to be careful and delicate to do this, to not spill them.

Then he lay on his shoulder in the aspect of some big mechanic and reached under the bathtub and brought out the sack from where it was tucked up the other side.

He unwrapped the gun and looked at it and then he wrapped up the gun again. He put the sack down in the bath and with the awareness saw the dog hairs in the bath and the strange brown stain under the taps from the long time it had not been used.

He put the bath panel back on and took the gun outside and went down to the boundary fence where the machinery was crashed and growing in amongst the trees and then he wrapped the gun in a second plastic sack and put it in amongst the machines as if it was just debris. Somewhere far off he could hear a woodpecker trat on a tree.

Let them come now, he thought to himself. They can search the house.

For a moment sunlight had come tipping in through the slats of the barn again but it was gone now and the golden pool with it and Daniel traveled the length of the troughs with armfuls of hay as the ewes hefted round him to feed; and it was then, as he unfolded the hay, that he found her cloth.

It was just a thing she had, like a comfort thing — a bright piece of pink patterned cloth that was variously a hair tie, a headscarf or bandana, or was worn about her neck to stop the dust and grime tracking down her collar. It was as much a thing of her as the Stanley knife she always carried for snipping the bale bindings or a hundred other purposes. It was a difference between them that she always carried a few specific things — her cloth, the uncomplicated Stanley knife, an old strapless wristwatch — to meet the simple repeated questions of their daily processes while he relied on brute strength, guesswork, or the availability of some thing he could make use of. He felt it important that there were solid differences between them, whether, as he knew, she was right in some things or not.

They were haymaking and she was wearing the cloth as a headscarf against the beating heat inside the tractor cab.

They were in the new field at the top which they had acquired that year and that had been historically part of the farm before his parents had sold it off. For a few years it had been grazed by a handful of sheep the hobby farmer put there, and on and off Welsh Cobs had come and gone, cropping the grass to a baize turf. But for a long while the field had been untended and had gone feral.

Over the winter they took off some of the bramble that balled chaotically about the field, and tore up the sentinel blackthorn and gorse that advanced off the hedgerows, burning the cut stuff down into two or three impossibly small piles and there was a childlike enjoyment in the way the various thorn crackled and flamed so ferociously.

Later, they took a scarifier over the grass to scrape out the dead, yellowed stuff and let the new growth come and they let the field become meadow.

In the way things gather names, the field came to be called cae piws , the pink field, as cleared of its wild growth it burst into a display of red clover and tufted vetch, with sprawling beds of fumitory. The field then seemed to stick to its scheme as ragged robin appeared and isolated cuckoo flowers, and shyly, in the damper corner a rarity of orchids. Into this they even let the thistles come, their stiff, pinnate leaves turning brittle in the sun as they cut them down before their buzz-cut pink crowns turned to seed.

Naturally, as the months wore on, the grass outgrew the flowers and it was into September before they cut the hay, when she lost the piece of cloth, as if the field had taken back this piece of pinkness into itself in return for what was cut. And there it was, as if she had only just dropped it, stiffened and bleached with hay dust, as if she had left it on the radiator as she always did and it had slipped quietly down.

For a while he could not touch it. The sheep pushed in against his legs and he braced them, like being in a strong current, and held on to the bar of the trough. It was impossible that she was dead because his feelings for her had not diminished at all. It is the ability of a person to bring a reaction in us that gives us a relationship with them, and for the time they do that they have a livingness to them.

He remembered the sight of her in the cab of the tractor while she drove along the rows of bales and he stacked them on the trailer as the boys threw them up. He remembered the sweat and the itch of seed, the burn of the baling twine inside his fingers, the bales grazing his knuckles, the diesel air about the tractor. He remembered her with the bright splash of color of the cloth worn on her head, how they had joked that she looked girlish and Alpine. Heidi they had called her that day, and how he had wanted her in the rich way we can want a woman we physically work with, and how he was glad it was his wife he wanted this way.