Cynan Jones - The Long Dry

He tastes to her of coffee. In the morning, when he comes to wake her up.

‘The cow’s gone,’ he says. ‘The roan with the heavy bag. She’s gone. I’m going to look for her.’

He walks out and though it’s early there’s a promise of heat in the sun. It’s been like this for weeks.

She thinks of him walking down the lane, along the hedgerow, into the long field, the flies buzzing and ticking as he walks quickly over the dried ground, scuffing the loose stones.

He climbs over the first gate and she hears it clang gently through the open window of the room. She imagines him stopping; watching and listening, and all he hears are the flies and the flat moans of the sheep when they look up at him.

She looks at the watch on the table by the bed and it’s just gone six.

__ the Calf

He’d woken earlier and gone out to check the cows. The night had been still and again he could not sleep with all the thoughts filling the silence of the un-moving night; so he had got up and gone into the clear, still morning. For very long it had been very still. It was before the light came up.

With the light of the torch he found the stillborn calf dead in the straw of the barn. He rubbed the stump of his missing finger. He could see the cows’ breath in the morning air — which even then was cold — and a warm steam off some of their bodies. The mother of the stillborn calf was kneeling beside the calf lowing sadly and gently. The other animals hissed and puffed and chewed straw.

He took the dead calf by its ankles and lifted it from the straw that was bloodied by birth, not by the calf’s death. It was strange because the mother had licked the calf clean. He thought of the mother cow licking her calf and not understanding why it would not stand clumsily to its feet, its legs out of proportion, its eyes wide. Why the incredible tottering new life of it did not come.

He carried the calf out of the barn, counting the cows inside, and went out into the field. Kate would be sad about the calf. The calves died very rarely for them.

__

Over the hills behind the farm the light started. Just a thinning of the very black night that made the stars twinkle more, vibrate like a bird’s throat and put out a light loud compared with their tinyness. He’d noticed the missing cow.

He’d hoped it had got out of the barn and into the field, where there were other cows with older calves out. She was very close to calf and heavy and perhaps went because of the terrible thing of the still birth.

In the dark he could not see the cow and he carried the dead calf across the field, hard grazed because there had been no rain. Somewhere, a large truck growled along the road, near the land he had his eye on. He dropped the calf into the old well at the bottom of the field because he did not want Kate to see it and because it was expensive to send in the dead calves to find out why they died. You always lose some, he knew. There is no reason. You will just lose some. He hoped the cow had not gone missing.

the Farm

The farm sits on a low slope a few miles inland from the sea. Gareth’s father bought the farm after the war because he didn’t want to work for the bank he worked for anymore. The farm had belonged to an eccentric old lady who was found feeding chickens in her pyjamas by the postman one morning. She had no chickens. Three sons and her husband had gone to war and they were all killed in the war one after the other, in order of age. When they found her feeding chickens that were not there she was taken away and put into a home where she died of a huge stroke like she couldn’t be away from the farm. When Gareth’s father bought it, the farm was collapsing.

The family moved in with the intention of rebuilding, of refurbishing the farm; but after the first few frantic months they did little and settled into the place. Things took on names — the rooms and the fields.

In the new house, after the floors were re-done and the walls sealed and plastered, painted brightly, things were placed here or there — the ornaments and bowls. It was too deliberate, like posing for a photograph, and odd to Gareth who was young then.

When the house started to live around its new people, things seemed to find a more comfortable place for themselves — like earth settling — haphazard and somehow right, like the mixture of things in a hedge. They relaxed and walked round the house in their shoes. Before that, for a while, it had seemed to the children like the house was bewildered by the attention — it was like they were when their mother wiped their face with a cloth.

__

‘I wanted him last night,’ she thinks. ‘Really. And then I don’t know. It went away again. I went flat, like I was numb, when he started touching me, and I tried to be patient and coaxing but he could tell, so he stopped and he didn’t say anything. I could tell he was angry. Not really with me, just, he’s been very good recently not starting anything and then I started something. And then he knew I didn’t want it; and I don’t know why. I miss his hands. God, I miss his hands.’

She’s started this, now. This way of thinking — as if she’s talking aloud with herself, as if she is a face framed in a mirror talking back to her. A means of control, or of measure. Of trying to make sense. Women get old quickly, when they get old.

She feels her body moving under the rough cloth of his shirt, which she has thrown on to be out of bed. In the mirror, behind her, the unmade bed. She feels her body is soft and filled with water and dropping with age, and there is no way he can look at her now and feel the things he has felt for her in the past. He will want her because of his care for her now, not out of desire. It’s like being allowed to win a game. He can’t possibly want her body. She wonders about cutting her hair short again.

__

Sometimes they go funny. When they’re fat with calf. They go funny and they do something, and it’s impossible to guess what they have done by trying to think like them. Because they don’t think when they do this. If they decide to go they can go a great distance. Just stumbling and crashing along and it doesn’t make any sense. All you can do is try and find them and hope they are okay and do what you can. Stay near them. Check them. Mostly they’re okay once the calf has come.

__

She was a dairy shorthorn — the only roan, which is a mix of red and white hairs that makes her look mostly red, the colour of bricks — the other shorthorns were white, or red, or white and red, but they didn’t have many. Most of the cows were Friesians — the black and white cows of children’s programmes that Emmy thinks look like jigsaws. They only keep a few cows now, after the quotas. They had milked many, but when the quotas came in they stopped after a few years because it was expensive to purchase the quota. Also, they had good cows with good butterfat in their milk and it was hard keeping the yields down, and you had to pay heavily if you overproduced. Many of the small farmers around them stopped dairying too, and left it to the big farms, which the quotas favoured. Mainly, they farmed sheep. They sold off a lot of the cows and kept a few for beef and, at first, for their own milk, but later mostly for stock cows. Gareth was glad they had kept some shorthorns because they were less greedy than the Friesians and were happier with feed. Without the grass it was hard to keep the Friesians fed.

__ Curly

He looks down at the dry earth and he knows that it has been too dry for marks now for weeks — for hoofs, or pads or tracks. His best chance will be fresh cowpat, or a crushed section of hedge where she has forced her big weight through. You would think it would be difficult for them to move with such big bags and being all heavy, but they are stubborn big animals, and they can go through things when they choose to.