By the time they sat down to lunch the clouds were closing in. It looked like it would rain again.
Did you hear the forecast today?
No.
It’s almost one, time for the news. I’ll put the radio on.
The forecast came before the news. Scattered showers, sometimes heavy.
Well, we might have told them that.
She spooned the raspberries from a bowl. Summer there in the glass bowl, and a spatter of rain on the window.
What shall I do now, one or other of the boys would say on days like this. When it was wet outside and when the holidays were long. Or at the beginning, when they first came home, when there was the sense of the days stretching empty before them and they had been so busy at school. The emptiness must have hit them when they came home. They ran about in it and called it freedom but acted as if they were trapped. They ran wildly through the house, bowling imaginary balls with windmilling arms. How about making one of those model aeroplanes Uncle Peter gave you, she would say. I don’t think you’ve made them yet. But sit still, indoors; how could they do that? They were too wild to sit still. She was angry with them for being in the house, though she had longed to have them home, their urgency pressing on her like the weight of the day outside. Angry as if they were prisoners together, in this echoing house which was home, with the lovely garden outside bounded by the hedges that she herself had planted, and the wide empty spaces beyond.
When this brief shower ended she would go out into the garden again, however wet it was. She would kneel on a pad placed on the wet grass and tear at the weeds, which were lush and came out with the wet soil clinging to their roots, and the process of it would calm her, the seeking of the weeds among the plants, the touch of them in her fingers, and at last she would rake up the green mess into the barrow and wheel it to the compost heap that smelled of grass and decay. But as the afternoon went on the sky would clear. The evening might again be fine. These past few evenings had tended to be clear, with always in them the hope of a dry day to follow. Before she went indoors she would go back around the garden, looking at where she had worked and where there was work yet to be done, inspecting buds of whatever was flowering and breaking off deadheads between her muddied fingers.
Burying Billy
He was fourteen or so, home from his public school. The boys went to different schools now and it set them apart from each other. They didn’t even come home on the same day. Jonny came first. He was already settled in by the time Richard came back. Jonny was lucky in that there were boys his age in the village. There didn’t seem to be any of Richard’s age around.
Can I go shooting with Billy?
I suppose so. If he says that’s all right.
Maybe it was what he needed. She’d let them have air rifles but they hadn’t up till then done any more shooting than that. She’d let Billy keep Charlie’s guns for them. She might have got rid of them altogether but she hadn’t. It had been a part of staying on, carrying on the life that Charlie had left.
Billy wasn’t to be put off by a boy’s silence. Billy didn’t speak that much himself.
They walked out side by side. The youth was far taller than the man, and the man’s coat was too long for him, reaching almost to his knees. It was still one of Charlie’s old coats that he wore, an old green waxed jacket – she would never have thought it could have been kept so long, old when she had given it to him, worn and torn after all these years, and shiny with the wear. Possibly Billy had shrunk in that time. His hair was quite white now beneath his cap and he had grown a grey fuzz of beard. His old black Lab, Rosie, walked at their heels, slow now, she too grey at the mouth. She saw the three of them coming back, Richard carrying a hare, its two hind legs tied with string, his hand holding the legs and the string, putting it down on the old mounting block in the yard behind the kitchen. Not speaking. The hare had been a big one so its head hung down off the edge of the block, awkward and staring. Had they talked at all? Billy didn’t enter the house. He turned away, nodding goodbye, with Rosie lagging at his heels. C’mon, old girl, was all she heard him say. You could see Rosie wouldn’t be walking with Billy much longer. When the old dog died, she thought, Billy would be alone.
How was it? she asked, when Richard had taken off his boots and come in the kitchen.
We got a hare. His look was bright but exhausted.
I thought you were after rabbits.
Billy says rabbits aren’t sport any more. They’re all myxy, the rabbits. Dying of disease whether you shoot them or not. Had a shot at a woodcock though.
The brightness was there under his words but he wasn’t showing it to her. He went past her and poured a glass of water, drank it where he stood.
It was nice of Billy to take you.
Yeah.
Perhaps he’ll take you again.
Serious now, glass put down. A tone of voice that indicated he was about to ask her something. But, Mum, Rosie’s getting old. Billy says the vet says she might have to be put down. Can I take Jess with me next time?
That’s a good idea.
When Rosie dies, will Billy get another dog?
I don’t know. Maybe he’ll think he’s too old to get a young dog.
If he got one and he died, then we could look after it, couldn’t we? I could tell him that. Then he’d feel OK about getting one.
Well yes, I suppose so.
After that he went out with Billy and Rosie and Jess, and then only with Jess.
When Rosie finally died – not at the vet’s but at home, where Billy wanted her to die – he said he’d help dig her a grave.
That’s kind, she said. She had never seen him so kind to anyone.
Can we put her out on the farm?
So long as you don’t get in Jackson’s way.
I thought we could put her somewhere they used to shoot. I thought of a good place.
Yes, that’s fine.
He took a spade to dig the grave, and the old man came with the dead black dog slung like a shot deer across his shoulders – still strong, he must have been, for all that he had shrunk – and they walked out into the fields. When they came back Richard went into the workshop to make a cross. He worked on the cross for a few days. They were quiet days because Jonny was away somewhere, staying with a school friend. Just herself and Richard in the house, and he calm and industrious. He found some pieces of oak, put them together with a joint which he had learnt in his carpentry class, not nailed but joined, and he planed and varnished it, and then he carved on it the dog’s name, and a little lower down, the year it was, 1963.
How old was Rosie, Mum?
I don’t know. You’d better check with Billy.
So he found out how old she was and then he carved the year of her birth above the year of her death. He made it quite beautifully.
There wasn’t time for Billy to get another dog.
He got ill during the next term when the boys were away at school. She didn’t tell Richard how ill Billy was. He was an old man living alone. Sometimes anyway one didn’t see him for days. Nobody in the village quite realised how ill Billy was until the ambulance came. He died just before the term ended.
You should have told me. I could have come home to see him. I wanted to see him. You never let me see things.
At least he was home for the funeral. It was astonishing how full the church was. You didn’t know Billy could have had so many friends. They came in old cars and vans and on bicycles, and some of them looked as if they had come out of the past, rural faces of a kind that you thought you didn’t see any more, scrubbed and shaved for the occasion, arriving early and shuffling in, filling the pews from the back first. When she came in with the boys there was only space at the front. She and Jonny walked on up the aisle but Richard peeled off and squeezed himself in at the back. It was the first funeral they had been to. They had been too young, she had thought at the time, to see their father buried – you didn’t want children to see that sort of thing, th
ey thought in those days, it was all too horrid for them, too much of a shock. But the boys were older now, not children any more, looking older and stilted and unlike themselves in their school suits. The light was bright in the church that day. It was a winter’s day but the low sun was streaming in at an angle across the aisle. She looked round when they were singing. The light from the high windows fell hard on the faces of the old men in the pews behind. It struck their bald heads and their whiskers and the lines on their faces and their gnarled hands. Richard stood out among them, a public schoolboy, tall and young and straight in the black suit which she could see was already becoming too small for him, hair so golden in the light, thick and golden and sticking up on his head where it didn’t brush down, his face smooth beside all those weathered ones, pink, cheeks shining with tears. She realised how he had loved the old man. She could see his mouth mouthing the words of the hymn but she wasn’t sure if he made a sound. She could see his shining face but she couldn’t distinguish his voice from the rest. There might have been a glass wall between them, she and Jonny at the front of the church, Richard and the old boys where the cold light shafted onto their pews at the back. He looked so tall – he was very lanky just then, before he filled out – the school suit too short in the arms, his long wrists bared and his hands so large holding the red hymnal. Why had he chosen to separate himself? She had thought the three of them should have sat together. Suddenly she saw that they were apart. It only showed now. They always had been apart, even when they had seemed together. Perhaps they had been apart from the beginning, but it was only later, looking back, that memory told her that. Or perhaps memory made it so, hindsight paving the way for the present. If you were a mother you looked back again and again, attempting to explain how it was now, seeing moments when it might have been different, if you had made it different then.
Looks like we’ll be able to go at last.
Go? The word confused her. Where were they going? They were not going anywhere. It was the combine that was to be going, the beginning of harvest. Later she would think that it was also the beginning of going. The beginning of the end of being becalmed.
Looks like we’ll be able to go.
She had drawn the curtain. The day was bright. No clouds. Jonathan spoke from the bed, sitting up, yawning at the sky.
We’ll be on the move now. Thank goodness for that. I’m sorry, I’ve kept you here too long.
Last night’s dew was heavy, Richard said. We can get the combine out there but we can’t start till lunchtime. We’ll have to wait for the damp to clear.
Claire was happy at the sound of their voices as they walked out into the yard. Men’s voices, her two sons’ voices mixing with the voices of the other men, the purpose in them of the work they were about to do. This place of waiting filled all of a sudden with purpose. The sound of the machines starting up. The tractors and the combine. The combine having to be driven out to where they would begin, readied in the field.
Jonathan hadn’t driven a tractor since that summer before he went away. He felt the past judder beneath him. The blue scent of it in his nostrils.
Concealed in the oaks at the edge of the field the pigeons went on calling. A few white puffs of cloud grew in the sky. When they made their start Claire went out with the girl to watch. One year spilled back into another, the circle rounded, ends joined. Richard was suddenly animated, flowing. Doing what his father did. Maybe all the solutions were there, in the work, in the plain growing of things. That all that mattered.
Richard climbed up to his seat in the combine. From the high seat he could see far across the land. He could see to the end of his fields and across the fields beyond, see the rising dust where other combines worked in the distance, see the village and the church tower, and another church in the village beyond. He set the header going, its long blades moving. He began to work forward into the grain, the revolving header like a great yellow wheel cutting into the sea. The machine roared beneath him. It chopped up the sea.
When the combine was full Jonathan drove up alongside. Kumiko watched as he positioned the cart directly beneath the spout, adjusted his speed to match that of the combine. Then he put a thumb up to Richard and Richard let the grain go from the spout. It was good to see. The grain spilled down, a golden stream into the cart, dust rising about it. They had handkerchiefs tied over their faces because of the dust. They drove alongside one another, aligned, brother to brother, until the flow of grain ceased. And when the cart was full Jonathan would drive it back to the yard and unload, and return to the field before he was needed for the next load.
In these days nothing was missing. Everyone was present. They were golden harvest days. Her boys were men. One year spilled back into another. The years when they did not have the farm slipped out of sight, as if Richard had after all taken over directly from his father. As if Charlie had been there to teach him, Charlie still present in all of them. She would turn and go back towards the house, and there would be the sound of the machines sure behind her, the combine in the field, the tractor driving between the field and the yard, the other men in the yard working the grain as it came in.
Now he was driving in a sand-coloured cloud across the field in front of the house. The wheat was coming in thick onto the turning reel of the header. The wheat in this field was dense. The yield right across the farm looked good this year, and in this field in particular. Though there was still more moisture in the grain than he would have liked.
All that was needed was another few days of sun. Then this harvest would be all right after all.
Jackson – no, not Jackson, it was his son Tom who was doing the work now – was out on the neighbouring farm. Farther off, she could see others at work, the dust of other combines moving in the distance. Richard had taken off his shirt in the heat. By the time he came in he would be red with sunburn.
Want a ride? he said. You can ride up with me for a bit. He was taking a break. The tank was full and the grain cart was still out at the yard. She climbed the metal ladder and perched beside him holding the rail. It was hot and dusty. Jonathan came out with the tractor and stopped alongside. Both machines stationary this time, Richard pulled the lever to let the grain go. She held a hand over her face against the choking dust. Thumbs up. No talking, the machines were too loud for speech. Jonathan moved the tractor away. Richard set the header turning again. The combine moved forward into the wheat. She looked down to see the stalks drawn in and churning across the cutting blades. It was different up there, above it all. Looking out and down at the field ahead, the cut stripes where the combine had been, the rest of the crop waiting, the tractor away at the side, waiting. A long view out over the flat land. A sense, with the roar and movement of the great machine, of being on the bridge of a ship going out into the ocean. But the element in which they moved was wheat, not water, and already her skin itched with the dust. Richard drove the length of the field, turned about, worked back, turned again. She didn’t know when he would stop. They didn’t speak. Though he was so close they could have spoken only by shouting. When the combine was full again, Jonathan came again and drove alongside and took the grain, and Kumiko watched and the combine didn’t stop. She put her hand to Richard’s arm and he paused long enough to let her climb down. When she walked back through the cut field the stubble scratched her bare ankles.
Little brother was doing OK. Possibly a bit slow. Slower than the others would have been, but it seemed a good thing to have his brother doing the work and not some outside hand. Every few loads Jonny fell behind and there was a delay as the combine had to wait for him. He might have asked one of the other men to take over but he knew that Jonny was keen to do the job. And there hadn’t been anything broken yet, and no spills. One expected a novice to break a thing or two at harvest. Though he wasn’t really a novice of course.
A smile passed between the brothers along with the thumbs up.
Well done, Jonny, you did all right, Jonny. That’s what the thumbs up me
ant. They called him Jonny as if he was still their boy. And he smiled a boy’s open smile. He was happy just then. She could see that. He was in his place and he was proud. Maybe this was his place after all, he should be here always. But this was only a moment of sunlight. It was the middle of the day when the sun was up in the sky, everything bright, no shadows to be seen. When the moment passed that boy would have secrets, like boys do. Things he hid in pockets, at the back of his drawers. In his memory. That separated him from his brother. That separated each of them from the other.
He had been going nine hours. It was hard to stop after so many hours. It had been getting dark for some time. He had seen the sun setting behind the village. He had seen the last of the colour fade from the sky, put on the headlamps, but their light would not be strong enough to keep him going very long. He would like to have driven on until it grew quite dark, on and on in an industrial process, his mind narrowed in a tunnel of light. He kept his eyes concentrated now on the strip he was cutting, the sight of the wheat falling before him, which was no longer so smooth now but thrashing and lumping. His hearing was all for the sound of the machine, the constant of the engine, the dull roar of the drum. He heard as the dew began to fall. The stalks were becoming moist, beginning to slip against the blades. The rhythm was beginning to slip, bundles forming and breaking, the straw lumping and beginning to jam. It was tempting to keep going, to try to finish the field, or this stretch of it at least. He drove more slowly, attending to the machine, to the sound deepening and becoming erratic. If only he might keep at it, finish the strip, finish the field, work on through the night as if the rest of the world had fallen away. There would be only what loomed up before the combine, and the following tractor, its lights also on now, that moved away and then back alongside – and in other fields in the distance, the pattern repeated by other men. Tom Jackson was still going. Old Jackson would be out there with his son, watching, listening, with all his half-century of experience, stepping down to put his hand to the stalks; holding the decision to himself. He would not go in before the Jacksons. When Tom Jackson went in, then he would too. He would go in tired, his eyes stinging and his muscles aching, the throb still in his body, the reverberation in his head. He would eat and bathe, and sleep black sleep, and as he fell into that sleep the heads of wheat would still be falling and churning before his eyes.
Harvest Page 14