1993 - In the Place of Fallen Leaves (32 page)

Tom wasn’t the only one to lose his groundless optimism of the morning twilight, that today might be different. During those next few days there was nothing but confusion, as people lost hope and with it reality. Fred Sims’ addiction to sneezing was worse than ever as he bumped us down the hill to a phantom coach supposed to take us to a non-existent school, while his crates of milk curdled in the phone box. Wasps and hornets bumped into each other in the air. The old bell in the church boomed when you least expected it. The animals, even as their ribs stuck out, were getting restless, and Ian and Tom exerted themselves in the false dawn to put up an extra barrier of electrified wire around the fields; Daddy kept on becoming intrigued and touching the buzzing wire, which throbbed unpleasantly through his organs, but he’d forget by the time he saw another one. Fortunately Tinker learned to growl when he went near and so distract him.

It wasn’t only nettles and coltsfoot, meanwhile, that flourished without water in the and soil. Rhubarb with leaves the size of tablecloths spread themselves across lawns, and the tomato plants that mother dug into the bed at the kitchen door multiplied along the side of the house and climbed the walls like wisteria. She picked a bucketful of green ones in the morning and put them on the window-sills. The following day they’d all be as red as the letterbox, and I’ve never in my life tasted such sweet tomatoes.

“Love apples, us used to call them. Is they fruit or vegetables?” grandmother asked me. “Nobody knows, see. And they never will, neither, until they’re too clever for their own good.”

“Don’t you know, grandma?”

“Course I do, maid,” she replied. “They’s sweet little vegetables, that’s what they is.”

§

People even got confused over time itself, especially in our house where the piano tuner, distracted by the mosquitoes that accompanied him, had left behind one of his metronomes by mistake, and it mocked us with its sardonic version of time rocking back and forth, back and forth, without going anywhere.

“If you set that thing going one more time, girl, you’ll be for it!” mother shouted through from the kitchen.

Slaughter

M
onday was a somnolent morning, when even Pamela seemed to have plenty of time for breakfast before leaving in a state of calm. After she’d gone the rest of us sipped tea and Ian said:

“Us’ll need everyone’s help herding. We’ll bring ‘em into the farmyard.”

“Surely the abattoir lorries can go right up to the fields?” mother asked.

“Course they will, mother,” he replied, “but there’s some they won’t give us nothin’ for. Douglas ‘as got to slaughter they.”

Mother was puzzled. “What are we going to do with the carcasses?”

“Fill the freezers, mother.”

“Don’t be stupid, bay. Us can fit a few joints in, what about the rest?”

Ian was reluctant, and he was looking into his mug of tea. “Bury them.”

“Bury them? Where? Ian, you can’t—”

“—Don’t you worry,” he interrupted: he looked her in the eye. “Mother, we idn’t payin’ good money to no knacker who’ll sell ‘em for glue. Mike Howard’s going to use ‘is digger; Douglas is coming round s’mornin’.”

Mother looked like her head was caught up in a cobweb of perplexity. She sat down.

Ian stood up. “Bring Dad and Alison up top field. See you there.” Tom left with him. The dogs joined them as they crossed the yard. The silence in the kitchen was tightened by their departing figures, as we sipped our lukewarm tea. Then mother pushed her chair back and rose purposefully to her feet. “Okay, you two, let’s get ready.”

I collected the tea mugs. As mother rinsed them at the sink I put a hand on her back. Mother relaxed her hands in the water, eyes gazing into it. She took a deep breath and exhaled it slowly. “Whatever you might hope for in this life, girl,” she said, “don’t expect to understand men. At some point they stops growing up, like, but they still carries on in another direction. My father, my husband, now my own sons. They all baffles me.”

She might have added the dogs to her list. They followed their own precise but ludicrous logic, describing huge superfluous arcs in pursuit of a breakaway heifer. And the cattle followed another, even stupider, pattern, thus thrown into terrified confusion by Ian and Daddy flapping their arms as if trying to take flight and Tom yelling hypnotic chants, and by the dogs veering in upon their flanks and nipping their pasterns. With panic in their eyes the herd were driven along the lane, the flurry of hooves further ruining the melted tarmac.

Douglas was waiting in the farmyard, sitting impassively on a barrel by the barn with his old leather doctor’s bag, as the herd were brought wheeling into the yard in a splatter of gravel, their hooves sticky with tar.

Ian sent Daddy and me over to guard the fence by mother’s sorry-looking vegetable garden, while mother put lightweight gates across the front entrance. Tom ordered the dogs to their place by the kitchen door.

“We’ll let ‘em calm down a while,” Ian ordered. He went over to Douglas, while mother went in to make tea.

“Tidn’t too many?” Ian asked, gesturing to the remnant of his herd, no more than twenty, only the most scrawny and sorrowful, that were worth nothing to the abattoir, whose ribs pushed out through their sad hides, and who’d been abandoned even by parasites, the last of whom had gladly jumped on to any of the dogs that’d got close enough during the drive.

Douglas, facing the sun, had lowered his head. “No,” he replied, without raising it.

§

Grandfather wasn’t helping us with the cows: I found out later that he’d refused to, and instead gone for a long walk around the village. He saw uncle Sidney and his children ripping out the hedges between the fields of their farm ready to sow wheat, like the Saxons who cut down the high hedges to make their large continental fields that were so unsuitable for Devon, and were soon divided up again; he heard uncle Terence and Terry with their chain-saws laying to waste the small copse in the dip between three fields and he thought of the riots that had taken place when threshing machines were introduced in the previous century; and going past the hippies, who already had to walk around in groups, grandfather remembered the first men from the Labour Party who arrived without warning in the square and tried to inspire people with the chimera of democracy. Word soon got round and they were sent packing with bloodied noses, not because the villagers were inculcated with the gentry’s Tory views, or even because they disagreed with the idea that people were equal, but because they wanted to be left alone by outsiders.

“So, she’s right,” he thought, “time’s stopped still, and we’re going backwards.”

In his beet field behind the church he took a handful of earth and, closing his fist, felt not the rich reddy soil of his heartland but sandy, dusty topsoil slip through his fingers. “What’s happening to our land, mother?” he cried.

§

Tom broke open the last bale of hay and strewed handfuls round the yard. Gradually the panic in the eyes of the cattle contracted. While we drank tea, replacing the sweat that poured from us in that cauldron of a morning but dried instantly on our skins in the strangely metallic heat, Douglas set up his tools in the depths of the barn. He plugged in his gun, and called out to Ian from the shadows: “Bring the first one in, bay.”

Ian didn’t move, but simply nodded to Tom, suspecting that there was an appropriate order to the slaughter, and that Tom might guess it by instinct. Tom walked over to a sad old cow, her udders shrivelled, and looped a makeshift halter of bailer twine over her neck. He slapped her bony haunches and led her to the barn.

“What’s they doing?” Daddy asked me.

I knew how everyone protected him with tact and white lies. “‘Tis slaughtering, Daddy. Douglas is killin’ the cows, ‘cos there’s nothin’ for them to eat.”

Daddy looked confused, and began to march away. “I’m going for a walk,” he declared. His eyes were brim-full with moisture. Succumbing to a sudden, irresistible urge, I gripped his arm and pushed him gently: tears spilled from his eyes and ran down his face.

“They’s only cows, Daddy,” I said. “You’s got to stay yere, help me keep ‘em from goin’ on the vegetables.”

Reluctantly he stepped back, and gazed towards the barn, where shadows swallowed first Tom and then the gaunt cow he was leading. Ian didn’t follow him: he hesitated outside. I ran across the yard, past Ian and into the barn, and swung the doors shut behind me.

§

Douglas put the gun to the cow’s forehead and squeezed the trigger. Her knees buckled, and spindly legs gave out. She sank forward, and then rolled over like a floppy doll. Outside, only Daddy discerned the nutter that shimmered through the herd, like a faint breeze through a field of corn.

Tom pulled tight a slip-knot over the hind legs of the carcass and strung her up on the pulley, which we swung along the freshly oiled track that ran round to the back door of the barn, where we dropped the carcass into the trailer that Mike Howard had parked there.

I opened the front doors of the barn, and the cows in the yard stopped chewing and looked at me with dumb suspicion. Tom walked straight through the herd to a maverick at its centre, and put his halter over its neck. He had chosen the strongest of that sorry group: although as emaciated as all the others there was a measure of defiance still in the rigid uprightness of his neck. Tom turned to lead him to the barn but he stood his ground, pulling Tom up short. Tom turned round: there was resentment at the edges of the bullock’s widened eyes as well as fear. Tom, narrowing his own eyes, growled: “The reaper’s yere. Your time’s up.” The bullock stared back at him a moment longer, then opened his mouth and let out a long, mournful low, a rising note of anger that surrendered to a resigned moo. Tom felt himself enveloped in a sweet cloud of freshly mown hay, and he led the bullock to the barn.

§

Flies and delirious mosquitoes gathered at the back of the barn. The sun didn’t move. Mother picked weeds from cracks in the concrete.

Half the herd in the farmyard had been destroyed: a patch of blood where each animal fell had spread out. The barn was gradually being rilled with a curious odour that sat with a metallic taste on my tongue. I watched Douglas intently: at the back door of the barn, before we lowered each corpse into the trailer, he selected a bistoury from the set of surgical instruments given to him on his fourteenth birthday. With the razor-sharp blade Douglas spilled the last residue of life from the animal, blood splattering his apron. I was mesmerized: Douglas had never changed, his bovine bulk, carrying the functional fat of farmers, was ageless, his black curly hair peppered lightly grey. I’d never heard him utter a sentence of more than four words, and we children had always avoided him as much as he had us. But now, watching him handle those instruments in his ham-like hands with an unbelievable delicacy and precision, despatching a herd of unfortunate cows as if in reality he was making some subtle improvement to their lives, I felt the urge to take one of his scalpels myself and cut through the lengths of bailer twine that tightened his buttonless jacket, to lean into the sweat-suffused shirts and the delicacy of those enormous hands.

Meanwhile, we’d strung up another limp and rickety cow and pulled it along the track to the back door. Douglas pressed two fingers against its throat, then bent over his bag of instruments and picked out a catling. He pulled taut the end of a length of twine that tumbled from his pocket and checked the sharpness of the blade. I stepped round the hanging carcass to stand beside him as he lifted the neat tool, almost lost in his fleshy fingers, to the animal’s neck.

I inhaled deeply his sweat, run so deep into the fabric of his clothes that it had lost its ammoniacal tang and become a tantalizing sweet scent: I wanted to bury my face in his firm barrel of flesh. Douglas made a deep incision on one side of the animal’s neck and drew the catling in a graceful curve across to the other side, cleanly slicing through the animal’s flesh. Most of the purple blood gurgled onto Douglas’s filthy apron, but I felt drops of it sprinkle over my face and eyelids. The metallic taste on my tongue grew heavy and filled my mouth, and I felt myself suffocating in the heavy odours that had replaced all the air in the barn. I turned and ran through the dense cloud of death, ignoring Tom’s command to come back, and swung the barn doors open.

The ten remaining cattle had been standing motionless, in a state of resignation, but as the barn doors groaned on their hinges and, coming into the fierce sunlight, I tried to wipe the blood from my eyelids, the herd was hit by the malodorous promise of extinction. All at once they began turning and lowing, and pawing the ground.

“Close in on ‘em!” shouted Ian, but within seconds their shapes were lost in a vortex of dust. We were all forced back, choking. Tom came running out of the barn and up to Ian, who held a handkerchief over his mouth and was stepping indecisively back and forth.

“Drop back, drop back,” Tom told him. The dogs were already alert, and at his whistle they flew forward, round the whirlwind in the middle of the yard, and to his feet. He stationed the dogs and members of his family in a wide circle around the cows, and watched anxiously, as we waited for them to calm down.

§

Douglas took advantage of the respite to sharpen his instruments. The flurry of resistance outside didn’t bother him: he was a patient man. Usually he brought along his own animal, a spindly, ageless cow, to lead the others through, but he’d figured that the sun would have squeezed all courage from the cattle, or that even if they sensed the danger they might gladly relinquish their tormented existence. He’d reckoned without a lablolly girl.

He sharpened a bistoury with a tiny file, too small even for a woman’s nails. He rarely did such work nowadays, most farmers becoming fearful of the law and taking their animals to the shambles at Longdown. Sometimes, though, he’d set out his instruments on the kitchen table and bring up their edge, just for the pleasure of working them down along an infinite line of degrees of sharpness. “You wants to get the atoms on the edge dancin’ single-file,” his father had told him. Blunt knives he found infuriating and more than once, as a child, he’d grabbed one from his mother’s hand as she sliced vegetables or chopped meat, and taken it off to sharpen its blade.