Cynan Jones - The Long Dry

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Gareth walked down to the bog. The heat is crazy. Everything seems subdued. Walking out after lunch was like walking into a wall of heat, and he couldn’t see very much for a while, until his eyes accepted the light. He said: ‘if the vet comes, you have to get Mummy.’

He went the way he thought the cow had gone, across the fields. He didn’t know if the cow was in the bog, but the last time a cow did this she was in the bog. She’d made a nest and bedded down and had her calf quietly there.

From the road, above the land, he hears a dog barking, his neighbour’s vicious shouts. The anger that is in him turns on them — the anger that is really because of the cow, and the rabbit, and his hurt ankle. He tries to put it on his neighbours. They are fat vicious people who don’t know very much and don’t like anything and it shows in their dogs. They came here some time ago, to Bill’s farm, with the idea of using the land. But they did nothing, and let it ruin. He had tried to like his neighbours, but they were just not people you could like, in the end. He was sure one of their dogs had taken the cat.

They had lost the cat last summer and had said that she must have been taken by tourists. They thought this because there was always a chance the family that took her was a good family. A lot of tourists come here every year. Most of them are from cities and they don’t understand the country — it is like a park to them. They see a cat and they think it is a stray because it isn’t very close to a house.

So they coax it away, feeling sorry for it; worse than that, because they don’t understand the way of things, the cat gets in the car. Like a kidnap. He imagines the cat suddenly in the city and being totally afraid, but he knows the neighbours’ dogs had had it.

Once, one of the dogs — they are Alsatians and untrained and nasty — had come down the lane and was in the yard where Emmy was. It barked at her and ran at her and she stood stock still and it barked right into her face but she didn’t cry or move. And Curly came out, old as he was even then, and tried to bark the other dog down but it just growled at him and inside Curly knew that the other dog could kill him. Then his son had come out and bravely ran at the dog which fled back up the lane, though it hesitated horrifically for a moment. They will be in the fields with the lambs one day, and Gareth will take a gun to them, and he will kill them. He will take the dead dogs back to his neighbours and if they say anything he will open all his anger on them because he is a very strong thing when he is angry.

When the neighbours got their dogs they argued about naming them. Their first ridiculous idea was to give them Welsh names which they could not say properly. They could not agree on names and in the end named one each, defiantly. So the dogs became tools they used against each other, like everything else about them. She named the bitch, with whom she shared some features, Cher, after the pop star; he gave his dog a lordship’s name, which, in his voice which sounds like a chicken, he shouts across the fields because it’s always escaping. The dogs fight constantly, too. Dogs are always a distillation of what their owners are. They learn by observing, not by being broken.

Sometimes, when he checks the stock at night, when he wants the night’s long space, Gareth hears them fight, their angry voices tearing out over the fields and the dogs barking, like now, and it angers him, because it is a blasphemy to the easy quiet of this place.

__ the Monster

They used to say the bog was haunted, to keep the kids away. It was easy to believe, sometimes. Even now, in this dry world it had become, there was a presence to it, a sense of watching, a sense that it was waiting.

Gareth had found the pat, already drying, where the cow had rested by the bank. Bright orange flies crowded on it, preying on other flies on the dung, and laying larvae in it. He knew then she had headed to the bog.

He found the hoof marks in the soft mud that would usually be up to his waist, and impossible. The cow had crashed through, and for a while it was easy to follow the broken trail of her body. The ground looked starved. Gareth thought of the thing he had seen in a newspaper, long ago, of a three-year-old boy who had followed fallen-down trees and gone missing. He had followed the trees because he believed they’d been knocked over by a dinosaur, and he wanted to speak to the dinosaur. Gareth imagines him following the fallen-down trees, torn up on their sides from the ground. The boy was Scottish, he remembers that much. Sixteen hours later, they found him safe.

It’s strange for Gareth to think of his father so far away, in Scotland during the war. He’d never really talked truly of the war and reading the memories it was odd to know he was posted to Wick and Dundee and Orkney, and Brighton and the Essex Marshes and Carlisle. He smiles at the thought of his father writing — ‘when Hitler was doing all the evil and all the devilry a devil of his sort could do.’ It sounded lovelier in Welsh — a Hitler yn gwneud pob drwg a phob diawledigrwydd a allai cythraul o’r fath ei wneud. He imagines his father saying it. He thinks how it must have been for him, posted to Wick, further than he’d ever thought to go, where he was made Chauffeur and Batman to the regimental Chaplain. Then, high in Scotland, the happiest three months of his war passed, driving round the locale with the Chaplain. He speaks of the time he was taken to see the Chaplain’s ninety year old aunt, who spoke only Gaelic, which the Chaplain translated.

She wanted him to sing to her in Welsh. Gareth had only heard his father sing once or twice, and he imagined it must have moved her very much.

He stops for a while to rest his ankle, using it to loosely kick some old bones that lie like a cage, half buried in the firm mud. He desperately wants a coffee, now. ‘Damn this cow,’ he thinks to himself. He reaches down and pulls up a dandelion root and goes into his pocket for his knife so he can clean it, so the bitter juice will take his mind off wanting a coffee. It’s such an automatic thing, reaching into his pocket, that he has to realise the Leatherman is not there all over again. He snaps the root, and uses his nail to scrape off the dirt.

Chewing the foul root he remembers the taste from his childhood — their rations — when his brothers and he played in the drainage ditches here by the bog. He’d passed the ditches earlier, dry and clear now and parched, like the inside of a shoe. The memory comes to him very strongly with the very strong taste, coming up clearly from inside him. It is like feeling, this. Memory and real care sit under the surface, like still reservoirs waiting to be drawn from.

It is easy, he knows, to take from the surface of these things, like dipping a bucket into water self-consciously: you can call up these things. But when it comes up un-beckoned, without self control, set off by some scent in the air, or fear, you can be shocked by its depth, which you hold in you all the time.

He knows that this is where his father got his quiet dignity, his ability to love so simply and so much. Through coming face to face with all this care in him. He thinks, if we have tragedy then we have to face care, like this taste makes me remember playing soldiers, and I can’t help it. We have to admit our massive love for people. If we don’t ever need to know its depth, we just feel the light on the surface.

When his father was young he married a girl he’d met and they were blissfully happy. Two sons were born. The bank moved him again and they had to leave the lovely house by the sea, but they were still very happy. A few months later another son was born. The birth was a good one, but a day before she was due home, his wife, Thelma, had an embolism. They tried to save her, but she died. His world was shot to bits. Gareth had no doubt that this was where his father’s strength of care had come from, and his ability to be so happy at the very simple thing of a family.