Cynan Jones - The Dig

He didn’t know exactly what to do about this, but it was wearing. And then suddenly she was old, and the incongruity was not there.

Like a teenager finally growing up and letting the honest little bits of character from childhood come through, now his mother actually was old there was something once again more girlish to her, and he could trace this. It was as if he was coming to know her as the person she was before she even had him. There were all these little signs, and he began to understand how there must have existed a great chemistry between his young parents that had gradually been rhythmically buried by life. The role, he thought, looking at her now, understanding her fearfulness at having to split her care once more between her husband and son, his father half-paralyzed and he bereft. It’s the role, he thought. The role gets you through.

“Ma,” he said. “I’m okay. I don’t want you to come round.”

“It would tire two people to death, this,” she said. He saw in her eyes the flash at the word she’d spilled, saw it catch in the air before her and shifted his head, letting her know she could let it go. She understood that he was not being proud, remembered his childish independence and hoped it would be enough.

“I have to get through this,” he said. “It’s easier if I don’t see anyone. I have to just get through. It doesn’t matter how I am.”

He tried to put it as clearly as he understood it. He could not bear the responsibility of small talk, of reassuring people he was coping. He seemed to know the offer of sympathy would be like a gate he’d go crashing through. He could bear only the huge responsibility to the ewes, to the farm working, which would be tyrannical and which was in process now, and which didn’t care about him.

“After?” asked his mother.

“I don’t know after,” he said. And truly he didn’t. She held him then, and she felt the massive devastation of him.

THE BOY HAD not slept. He was gawky and awkward and had not grown into himself yet. When his father came to rouse him he found the boy awake with expectation. Warm, remember, said his father.

The boy nodded loosely in the way he had. The way was to have a minute hesitation before doing things. This came from trying to be eager and cautious at the same time around his father.

He was long and thin and he could have looked languid without this nervousness but instead he looked underdeveloped. When he got out of bed in his T-shirt and shorts it emphasized the awkward gangliness of him. He had the selection of muscles teenage boys’ bodies either grow or don’t but the skin on his face was a child’s.

He got dressed and went downstairs. In the kitchen he sat at the table with the kind of extra-awakeness not sleeping can give you and started automatically to spread paste onto the sliced bread. He had a low-level excitement running through him. A day off school. He felt the same illicit closeness to his father as he did when they went lamping and in these times he was capable of forgetting that his father did other things.

His father put the tea on the table and filled the big flask and then they sat and blew on the tea and drank it. Then they went out.

They took the dogs from the run and got them in the car and drove off the estate. The boy found the smell of the sawdust and dog shit in the run hard to bear in the early morning. The smell of it was a strange note against the deodorant he enveloped himself with.

He had not been digging before and was trying to imagine it. He imagined it frenzied and was excited by this. He did not know it would be steady, unexciting procedural work and that it would not be like ratting at all. He had broken his own dog to rats himself and this gave him pride. When they picked on him in school he kept his pride in this. He hung on to it.

The boy’s father parked the car and they sat seeing the dog runs and the broken machinery and the boy was momentarily stupefied by the darkness and emptiness about the place. In the car lights he could see just beyond the runs the bodies of cars like some disassembled ghost train littering the field.

The big man heard them pull up outside and saw the car lights catch and reflect on the mesh of the run and came out to them. The boy had a brief inarticulate awareness that his father shied a little when he saw the big man come from the house. He hadn’t seen that in his father before. The boy thought the man looked like some big gypsy.

The man leaned into the window and the dogs in the back came alive at this new presence and set off a yapping, which set off a yapping in the dog sheds beyond. The car was full of a deodoranty smell that got into your mouth.

They yelpers? asked the big gypsy.

They’re good dogs, said the boy’s father.

It stinks, said the man. It’s a girl’s bedroom.

The big gypsy looked accusingly at the boy and the boy felt himself redden. He felt the nervous flush go up in his throat.

They’re good dogs, said the boy’s father.

We can’t have them hardmouthed, said the man.

No. They’re good dogs, the father said.

We can’t work with hardmouthed dogs, the big gypsy said. The big gypsy was looking at the terriers, taking them in. The boy could feel there was a grown-man tension.

Then his father said: They’re not hardmouthed, mun. They’re good dogs.

There were three terriers in the back. One was the big Patterdale, Jip, thirteen inches at the shoulder and a solid fourteen pounds. He was about as big as you’d want for a badger dig without being too tall in the shoulder to suit the holes. It was why the man had called the boy’s father, thinking of the big boar.

What’s the pup? said the big gypsy. He nodded at the boy’s dog and the boy felt the redness on his throat again.

She’s just along, said the boy’s father. The big gypsy looked at the pup.

She’s not going down, said the big gypsy. He had to take the badger and there was too much risk the young dog would not be able to hold him.

The boy felt this shame and the crushed feeling from school came up in him.

She’s just along, the boy’s father said.

THEY PARKED UP in the machine yard of the big farm and got the dogs out and coupled them dog to bitch with the iron couplings.

In the east a powder of light was just coming and in the barn the tractors looked immense and military. At the edges of the fields the trees were still a solid deep black.

They coupled the boy’s pup to the older dog and coupled the gypsy’s older bitch to the big Patterdale. They had to couple the right dogs. Dogs that could work together at rat could fight at a badger dig, as if they sensed the individuality of the process.

They got the tools and divided them up to carry; then they took the big five-liter tubs of water from the van and the bag with the tin drinking bowls and the food and gave them to the boy. They weighed on him immediately. It was crisply cold and with their thin handles the weight of the water bottles burned on his fingers.

They went through the gate and down the lane, letting the dogs run in front of them, passively aware of which dog took the lead of the other as they rooted in and out of the hedgeside at the dying scents laid down in the night.

Mud had gathered in the track and the overnight rain left it wet and the boy, alert and cold and overawake, took in the sucked sounds underfoot and the clinking of the coupling chains and the body sounds of the dogs as they pushed through the undergrowth of the bank. He was using the gulping sounds of the water sloshing in the tubs as a kind of rhythm to walk by.