The Long Dry (3 page)

Tommi Falch came in late, a boy of six who said he’d seen an angel in the waterfall: ‘welais angel yn yr rhaeadr.’ He said it like a boy coming on in a school play. Whenever Tommi spoke, his father remembers, it seemed he had rehearsed, which gave him a gladness, as Gareth imagined, reading the memories, to be like those tragic children in films who delivered sentimental lines with crushing but accidental poignancy. He said ‘I’ve seen an angel in the waterfall.’

Tommi was to see an angel again, years later, when he lay dying in a bomb crater towards evening during one of the last days of the war, not feeling any pain from the wound that had torn off his arm. A man ran past with a shard of metal, blast-whitened in his back, ripped and shaped like wings. ‘Angel,’ said Tommi, as his life levelled out.

He was a tiny and scared child and he still looked mesmerised and stood talking quickly, opening and closing his hands while he told the preacher, Tegla Davies, what he’d seen. The preacher listened quietly. His father wrote how it always seemed he was listening to a far off sound. There were eleven of them at the school that day and not one of them would ever forget the thing they were about to see.

Outside there was a vicious frost and the preacher took them out to see the angel.

The preacher was a man whose mellow voice and stern fervour gave him effortless control over the children and they were quiet as they walked. There was no malice meant for Tommi in taking them to see a thing which could not possibly be there – he didn’t for a moment want the boy to look a fool. Clearly, Gareth’s father reflects, the preacher would have been thinking of some lesson, some didactic: how God could manifest Himself in many ways; how angels could visit, pehaps, a pure enough mind, even in the beauty of water. He was successful at getting the children to believe in God, not by forcing them to believe, but by showing them things which would make it almost impossible not to. For the first time in their lives, they felt the quiet excitement of grown ups.

When the preacher reached the bridge he stopped and held on to the bluestone wall. He was trembling. The children filed around him. The tiny riot of the stream below them and the falling sound of melting where the sun fell thinly over the hoar frost, and the preacher shaking. These are the things his father remembers most. The waterfall was frozen. And there in the ice, where the fall began, was a girl, catching the light like spider thread, with her white shawl spread out around her in the frozen water.

It was years before they were told she had drowned herself because she’d found she was with child and in his father’s village they talk about it to this day. This story stood out for Gareth. He’d seen a lot of things die, and none of them beautifully.

He left the bike at the top of the lane and walked into the long field that crested the hill. They called this field Top Field. Over the road was the plot. He could hear Bill’s tractor ticking close by.

Bill had lived on the next farm and grew up with Gareth. He had a very pretty sister. Bill was simple.

When Bill’s father died they had to leave the farm because they found out they did not own it. It hadn’t belonged to them for years. Bill did not understand.

Bill’s father had invested heavily in pigs. He borrowed from the bank to build pigsties and a place where he could kill and salt the pigs, which is a hell of a business. Pig farming was a very different thing from cattle and sheep, which he sold, but it seemed the clever money back then.

They had long kept just one pig; would feed and fatten up the pig then slaughter it and slowly the children came to accept this process (only the head scared them, whenever they found it, and when they sneaked into the cool pantry and opened the brine barrel, the grey distended cuts of flesh floating in the water would always disturb them). Their father decided to develop a pedigree herd of Welsh pigs – a strong, long pig with long wide ears and a long jowl and he protected them mercilessly from the invading Landrace pigs, which came in
from Sweden around the 1950s and which, to the general wisdom, were a good thing to start breeding into your stock. He farmed the pigs outdoors, and his fields were scattered with the corrugated iron farrowing arcs which Gareth’s father said reminded him of Nissan huts and airfields. (This picture amused Gareth – squadrons of flying pigs).

Even when the Welsh breed opened up its herd book for a time in the middle of the 50s and encouraged the introduction of pure Landrace blood, Bill’s father held out – despite the accumulating problems of maintaining sufficient male and female lines while avoiding inbreeding. It became more and more difficult for him. To keep the blood lines fresh, stock had to be imported from several sources, which was always a risk, and gradually, without a doubt, the number of pure pigs was decreasing. He borrowed more and more. Meanwhile, over-production of low-quality pigs – the very thing he fought against – almost collapsed the market and herds declined in line with their fall in profitability.

The herds which had cross-bred cleverly still stood; the improved carcass quality and production efficiency of the scientifically-bred Landrace enhanced the originally hardy constitution of the old Welsh breed and made them economically viable, reducing Bill’s father, who had never hybridised, to the standing of a hobbyist. Eventually, his fight for purity backfired. Increasingly, piglets were born with defects, all with cartoon names – ‘splay leg’, ‘kinky tail’, ‘blind anus’ – all harking back to some sexual deviance. In desperation, in ‘57 he introduced a line of Landrace boars, hired in from across the border. Ironically, they were of Danish origin, rather than the Swedish stock:
the Danish strain had already caused great problems out in Canada. The pigs born developed raised lesions on their skin, had broken hooves, died easily of pneumonia, and it took some time for the local vet – a cow man, really – to diagnose the hereditary Dermatosis vegetans. Everyone was pretty sure the semi-lethal recessive gene responsible lingered in the Danish pigs.

He fought through it more or less but then a few years later pigs started to simply die. They diagnosed swine erysipelas – the thing they call ‘the diamonds’. The germs that cause this can live in piggeries and on ‘pig-sick’ land for years so it was assumed the pigs that came in brought this. In one form of this disease, the skin discolours into raised purplish areas, which at first looked like the dermatosis again, so they did not treat it properly. The purplish areas run along the back and over the flank and belly and look like diamonds, more or less, which is where the sickness gets its name. In the chronic form, the pig’s joints are affected, causing lameness, or the germ attacks the heart valves, making cauliflower like growths on them until they fail and the pig dies. The vet looked at the dead hearts and gave his misdiagnosis.

The pigs were becoming recognisably ‘depressed’, went weak, then collapsed and died within a day or else died suddenly. It was really Mulberry Heart disease, and the second, younger vet confirmed this when he found the bloated, mottled livers and hearts lacerated with haemorrhages.

The herd was culled and any of the good meat sold. Bill’s father gave all the money he could to the bank and a few years later shot himself.

Before that happened, another farm bought the place and broke it up. They used much of the land themselves, but let the family stay in the house for a rent, and farm cows on some of the land. The family never knew the place was not theirs anymore, their father kept that from them.

When the old man died and they couldn’t work the farm anymore, the big farm sold it. They had to move into a small house in the village but Bill could not adapt. Gareth would find him walking round the old place, mystified, at night; or in the day, amongst the unused outbuildings as they were then, and around the boarded-up house.

So Gareth’s father gave some land to Bill. He fenced off a few acres by the road and said to Bill it was his land now, and he could farm it. So he takes the orphaned lambs and grows things there and helps out on the farm when help is needed, like at shearing time – and he cuts grass for old ladies in the village and takes people spuds and cabbage; but underneath, as Gareth knows, he doesn’t understand still.

Gareth didn’t expect to find the cow up here. But he needed to check, to rule this out, because it was easier to search here. If she was not here, then he would have to check the bog. He did not want to think that the cow was in the bog and he hoped he would find her here but knew that he would not. He wanted to find her before the vet came for Curly. Being in the top fields he could hear the cars coming and would know if the vet came down the lane because he knew the sound of the old vet’s van. Then he
would have the bike to get back. He knew she was going to have a calf but somehow he didn’t care about the cow inside and was more worried about the way Kate would be and the things that would happen if he didn’t find her. He knew that he was looking in the top fields in case the vet came and he knew inside that the cow would not be here, and that he should look for her in the bog.

He lies awake now – so still at night – and I know he’s thinking of the unhung gates, and the dead grass, and perhaps of how fat my body is. Other nights, reading, reading, reading. By the bed light he looks at his father’s diary – not a diary. A collection of things he remembers.

I think it is hard for him to read the diary – the memories that were handwritten by the old man. He has to decipher the writing, and the Welsh sometimes, because it is a difficult language often, even for the people who speak it. He has Dylan’s old school dictionary by the bedside, and I can hear him scrabbling for meanings as I lie beside him, when he thinks I am asleep.

After the first miscarriage she was not well. It was strange because Dylan had taken strongly, and had grown full and vibrant and well inside her and she had not suffered any loss before him as many women do – as if their body cleans itself by flushing out the unused mess of ten years or so, so it can begin fresh and rich and make the healthy baby of a clean young body. It was then the headaches started. They were rare, but they were very bad.

They continued to try, first easily then with more need, to give their son a brother or a sister. She miscarried twice. On the third time they told her she couldn’t have children then. She was thirty-four and damp like Autumn, not wet in the way young women are, like Spring, but damp and rich and earthy, and it didn’t seem right that she could not have a child. She was fertile and hungry, like fallen leaves.

When she took the farm hand she was angry and possessive. Gareth was away from the farm that day.

The farmhand was younger than her and blue-eyed and heavy and Gareth had taken him on because after the miscarriages her headaches had grown more frequent and Gareth wondered if it was because she could not do the work. She loved her husband very much but she was in the shed and the farmhand was there.

When he touched her she kissed him hard and pushed against his hands and when she tore off her jumper so he could see her full breasts he looked hunted and scared of
what he had started. She took him in her hands and got out of her clothes and let him take her against the filthy tyre of the tractor.

When it was done she felt sick and he was sitting on a bale in shock, and she grabbed her clothes and her Wellingtons and ran barefoot and crying over the yard to the house and in the bathroom she was sick over and over and she cut herself for the first time. Gareth found her sitting in the shower with the long cut on her arm starting to clot. She wouldn’t speak to him.

It was two years before she was well again but she still feels sick now when she thinks of what she did, and the nagging doubt haunts her sometimes. It has never been the same since then. He blamed it on the miscarriages.

It was hard to bring up Emmy with Kate being ill. He had taken her from the shower and cleaned her cut and they had made love very gently after crying together. Kate cut off her hair, so it was all short and severe, and still talked very little; and when the pregnancy held past the more dangerous months Gareth was very happy. Emmy was born in the Spring.

Gareth cuts across the open fields, knowing the cow will not be there, and crosses the hedges where the gaps are wide and dry. He can see in the dry bank the places that have been dug by badgers, and their beaten path. In the blackthorn, or here and there around a fence, you can find the stiff grey hairs, touched black and white, if you look.

You can see as well the trail of hay and straw they steal from the feeding troughs to make their bedding which they keep meticulously clean, or the pads of red bracken. There’s a tree he knows, an elder, where they go to clean their claws and keep them sharp, taking off the damaged parts and the caked earth on the rough bark of the tree. This is close to the set, and he’s very secret about where the badgers are, even though they can bring disease to his cattle and his land.

In the third field down, close to Bill’s plot, a wide strip of bright green grass follows the line of an underground stream which goes down to the river. There are a lot of good springs on his land, he is lucky, though this year even they are too little. Even so, he has to pay a tax each year for the water he takes from his own land. They flooded valleys full of farms and villages once, to give water to towns.

He sees Bill climb onto the old Fordson tractor and they lift a hand to each other. If you look at him now, he looks emaciated; has dissolved almost to the point where he looks as if he’s held together by his clothes. On his plot, amongst chaotic sheds full of his tools, sometimes you feel he could simply dissipate into the clear air, like so many dead leaves. It’s strange for Gareth to think that he’s seen this man more or less most days of his life. He hasn’t seen his sister for years.

She was small and pretty and when her father shot himself she was sixteen. She did not like her mother, who could not tolerate her growing up, and she left home to become an air stewardess. It was as if she wanted to refute things utterly. The hold of the land on the people who grew up here. The hold of a meaningful place.

Gareth never forgave himself. She was one or two years younger than him and he’d rescued her more times than he could ever remember. From pirates, Red Indians, dragons. She grew up expecting to be taken away.

One day they were in the hay barn hiding. He can never remember what from. They weren’t old enough yet to realise that, actually, they had started hiding from nothing, just to be together and feel their hearts quicken, with their breath held and them both trying not to pee.

They were at the top of the hay and there were mouse droppings and dry, pasty white bird droppings and feathers and white shafts of strong light coming in on them where 
the barn slates were broken. Their skin itched and stung in the hay pleasantly. She was lying next to him in a blue check dress that she wore all through the summer – and if it got dirtied it had to be washed so she could wear it the very next day. Not knowing why, he felt his penis come awake and though he went red and tried to hide it she saw it stiffen in his shorts. She made a quick exclamation as she saw it move and closed her top lip widely; then she put out a finger and pressed it. He was incredibly embarrassed. It had happened very suddenly and it was bewildering. He climbed down from the hay and ran off. Nothing ever happened between them again.

Four days ago Kate found a mole. The cats had brought it dead into the kitchen. They never eat them, because the taste is bad to cats, but they bring them in as gifts. It always amazed her how clean moles were, with the velvet fur which can brush either way. She was angry at the cats for killing something beautiful and blind but they didn’t understand. If they caught a rat they got a plate of milk.

Kate threw the mole behind the barn and the flies found it. The green flies which feed on the wounds of sheep and lay their eggs in them this time of year, so the sheep have to be dosed all the time. They laid eggs on the mole as it began to stink. The skin on its face and hands dried up and stretched and beetles took it so half of the face was
bone now and you could see the teeth. The eyes go first. Sexton beetle larvae broke down the meat and guts and the things inside and soon there was a hole in the side of the mole and the flies buzzed round it constantly. Even small birds came and took maggots that were feeding on the mole to feed their chicks, and took fur as well, to line their nests.

The beetles too ate the fly maggots and dug a shaft below the mole and dragged it some way down, rolling off the skin so some of the mole was in the ground and was above too. It was too big for the beetles to use totally. They laid eggs close by and fed the hatched larvae with partially digested bits of mole. Later, the beetles bit an entry hole in the rotting carcass and helped the growing larvae in. They fed themselves.

When much of the goodness of the mole was gone and the bigger insects went the ants came, cleaning the bones and the lining from the skin, and taking the weak maggots. They worked beautifully, with blind obedience, blind as a mole until all the mole was gone with them into the ground again, and only some parts of bone would be left if you found it now.

She sees the cat cut slyly across the lawn. The cat had long been tormented by the gentle terrorisms of the children. In defence, he had adopted a placid, somewhat bourgeois cynicism; he also smouldered with the simple fury of having
had his balls cut off and in defiance of his emasculation paced about the place with the slow steps of a tiger: it’s a threatening ability in nature to look like you can put down great weight gently.

The other cat, whom Emmy had insisted on naming ridiculously, used different tactics, she being a she. She was beautiful – a tortoiseshell with teardrop eyes and the inbuilt mischief anything with lovely eyes has naturally. She loved Gareth, and seduced him every chance she got. She was frivolous as only the beautiful can be. She was the hunter.

The other cat brought bigger things in, like baby rabbits and once, remarkably, a seagull, as if to say ‘if I wanted to I could’. But the constant offering of small rodents and slow birds were brought by her.

There had been a third cat, a sister, but she was gone. She was weaker from the start and, as she would, Kate loved her the most. She went missing at hay-making and no one wanted to believe that she had gone under the machine, so they decided to accept that she must have been kidnapped by holidayers, as happens. Gareth was convinced the dogs next door had taken her.

Gareth comes back along the road in case the cow has broken through the hedge, but he knows she has not. There is no sign of her. In the hedge, bordering the piece
of land he wants to buy – he sees the houses in his mind – is the dead black ash of old fire. All summer there have been little fires in the hedges where people have thrown cigarette ends from their cars. They throw out the cigarette and drive on, as the flame curls and starts and rips up the very dry grass of the bank into the brittle hedge. It takes nothing, this year.

He wonders if the vet will come. Curly now is very old. He’s had him since he was a pup.

When Emmy was very small she used to drag the dog round by his ear, as if she were using him to help her walk. They joke that the dog taught her to walk, not them. Now he is very old and can’t clean himself properly and has developed a painful lump the size of half a football on his side. Yesterday he was bitten by a rat, so the vet has to come now. It is time.

He goes over the style that joins the footpath cutting through their land – the strange, ambiguous green arrow – and as he lands he turns his ankle. It hurts sharply for a moment, and he suddenly feels tired and angry. He can’t stop thinking of the dog. Often, the ground here is crossed with tracks – foxes and cats, walking boots and strayed sheep. Now there is nothing – no sign of movement; just the deep shape here and there of a horse’s hoof made long ago, when the mud was wet. The immoveable fact that the cow is missing begins to anger him as he follows the footpath, the shock of his ankle slowing to a dull pain. He
must be very careful with his anger because it is very big when it comes.

The footpath runs between two hedges for a while before breaking out into open land, following a line of blackthorn down towards the river to the beach, still some miles away. The view is stunning, with the land going gently away and the sea before you, silk and blue above a line of thick gorse, bursting into yellow. In this weather, in this heat, the gorse sometimes smells of coconut and honey, and you can hear the seed pods exploding in the sun with sharp snaps.

The scent comes to him and he hears far away the ducks in the water, and the Transit cutting back, he guesses, into the farmyard. Looking out over the sea he thinks of his son; he does not want to farm, but he’ll know one day what a wonderful place this is.

A pheasant lifts in front of him, a claxon call – the call they always make, just twice, before thunder. He’s losing his hunger to shoot now. Before, he would trace the line of the gun at his shoulder and imagine the shot and the pheasant falling. It’s incredible how beautiful a pheasant is.

He sees, some way in front of him, a strange thing, something dead and crushed. He finds it is a rabbit, crushed and broken under the weight of broken bits of concrete. He stares, looking at it, thinking of the dog, hollow for a while. It infuriates him that men are capable of such articulate cruelty.

The two boys had come along and found the rabbit dying by the bank. The breeze was up a little and it was nice because it had been dry for so long, and still; and the rabbit was wet and matted like a cloth, like a dog when it gets wet. At first they thought it was dead. It had the shapelessness of meat.

The boy saw it lain in the short grass by the bank, by the dry droppings and the scuff marks of other rabbits and the thick hard blackthorn above, coming into fruit.

‘Hey, look,’ said the boy. He didn’t want his brother to see it, but he knew now the other boy would see it anyway so he said it.

The other boy stood away from the rabbit for a moment then edged to it and peered over it and neither of them were sad because the rabbit was dead.

The eyes were open and they did not move. Around them the breeze was going warmly through the blackthorn and the ticking sound of a tractor working came to them across the fields. Then the rabbit’s eye moved.

The smaller boy went to prod it with his toe because he needed to understand better. He screwed up his face when he stretched out his foot. The eye moved slowly, just half-closing but not quite: as if it were willing itself just to close.

‘Don’t prod it, it’s still alive,’ said the other boy. The tractor ticked and chugged far away. They were both of them sad then but they did not want the other to see it. They stood around and nearly walked off and they knew it wasn’t a right thing.