Cynan Jones - The Dig

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, hardened 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.