Cynan Jones - The Dig

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.

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.