Homecoming

by Susie Steiner

  Her boots curl over cemented-in stones. She carries a plastic bag and in it a fruit loaf she’s baked for Primrose. No one can say I’m not doing my best, Ann thinks as she looks over at the mish-mash of sheds to her right, strewn with bits of wood, straw, bags of feed, rusting tools and rolls of wire. Farmyards are messy places, but still. To her left is the chicken coop, with one of its posts at a drunken slant. She notices a dismantled lawnmower spread over a sheet of tarpaulin. Must’ve been there a while, because pools of rainwater have rusted red in its stiff creases. Such dereliction, Ann thinks. It is a failing this, a sign of some mothering instinct gone awry, to not tend to your place with care. Letting it go to rot like this, she tuts. And then Ann is brought up short. This is the very reason Primrose didn’t want her – doesn’t like her: her quickness to judge. Ann frowns and her head throbs with the confusion, of feeling she’s right in what she sees, but that Primrose might be right, too.

  She walks around the back of their small hayrack, to where the pigpens squat at the lower end of a field. Two enormous pigs are asleep side by side in the soup, like a married couple after an excessive meal.

  ‘Primrose?’

  She can see Primrose’s lower half sticking out from one of the arches. She is lying on her back, the mechanic. She has her arms above her head, tinkering with something in the roof but when Ann calls out, the arms stop.

  ‘I’m not disturbing you am I, love?’ Ann says. ‘I didn’t mean . . .’

  ‘I wasn’t expecting you,’ says Primrose. She shows no sign of coming out.

  ‘I’m sorry, love. I wanted to see how you were. I baked you a fruit loaf.’

  Ann stoops to look inside the pig shelter, raising her carrier bag to Primrose, but she is obscured from the chest up in the darkness of the arch.

  ‘Shall I go and put the kettle on?’ says Ann. ‘Wait for you in the kitchen? You can come in when you’re ready.’

  ‘Alright,’ says Primrose.

  Ann walks back to the farmhouse and into the kitchen she always finds cheerless. The light is factory-like, and Ann sees in the worn linoleum and the chipped kitchen cupboards and the crumbs still on the table, more of that domestic neglect which she cannot understand. Open on the kitchen table is Primrose’s book, and as the kettle boils, Ann glances at the diagrams of wires and circuit breakers. ‘If a three-core flex is being fitted to a metal bulb-holder,’ she reads,‘connect the green-and-yellow wire to the earth terminal on the cover.’

  Ann goes to the sink where she runs a hot tap, her frozen fingers tingling under the water’s spreading warmth. She wrings out a cloth and begins wiping the table crumbs into a cupped hand.

  ‘Has the kettle boiled?’ says Primrose behind her.

  Ann startles and wipes her hands on her trousers. ‘Yes, so it has,’ she says. She busies herself at the worktop which runs along the wall, getting cups down and filling them.

  By the time Ann turns round, Primrose has sat at the kitchen table.

  ‘Are you recovered, love?’ says Ann. ‘Lauren said she took you to Malton General. That you needed . . .’

  ‘A D&C,’ says Primrose.

  ‘I would’ve taken you, you know. You only had to ask.’

  ‘Lauren was kind to me.’

  ‘Right, yes,’ says Ann, turning to fill the cups with boiling water. With her back to the room she says, ‘You seem busy with the pigpens.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Is the roof leaking?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Ah, just routine maintenance then,’ says Ann.

  ‘I was fitting a light.’

  ‘A light?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘In the pigpen?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘In case they want to read?’ says Ann, unable to stop herself.

  ‘I’m using parabolic aluminised reflectors. They can withstand outdoor temperature changes. It’s quite a tricky job.’

  ‘I can imagine,’ says Ann.

  ‘Partly because it’s hard to see what I’m doing.’

  ‘Ah well,’ says Ann, adding after a pause, ‘the light will help with that.’

  They both take sips of tea.

  ‘I’m so sorry Primrose, about the baby. Joe and I, we’re both sorry. Max has been . . . torn up.’

  ‘Not so I’ve noticed,’ Primrose says.

  ‘How d’ye mean?’

  ‘He’s not been here, hardly. And when he is here, he’s insensible for drink.’

  ‘He’s bound to be upset. Men are not so good with their feelings.’

  ‘There’s upset and then there’s just plain old pissed.’ Primrose says this without sympathy or bitterness, her face holding Ann to account. Is it directness, that makes Primrose speak without flinching, or is she enjoying seeing Ann squirm?

  ‘He’s been thrown out of the Fox so I’ve heard,’ Primrose is saying. ‘Taken to drinking in Athorpe these days.’

  Ann looks to the floor, as if she can no longer stand Primrose’s hard gaze. ‘You can get through it, you two,’ she says. ‘You and Max. All marriages have their bad patches. Joe and me . . .’

  ‘He knocked off the local barmaid just after you had a miscarriage, did he?’ says Primrose.

  ‘No . . . no,’ says Ann. She puts a hand up to her brow, rubs it. ‘But he’s not a bad lad, Max. Not deep down. He were always a bit closed off. This is his sadness talking, not the better part of himself.’

  But Primrose has stood up. ‘I think you should go,’ she says. All her anger for Max, she’s giving it to me, thinks Ann. Both barrels. And fair play to her, because he’s not been around to take it.

  ‘Primrose, I’m askin’ you. I’m beggin’ you. Please don’t leave him. He’ll fall apart good and proper if you leave him. Joe and me, we’ll help, get him cleaned up. Please.’

  ‘I’d best get on,’ says Primrose.

  ‘D’you want me to beg? Because I’ll get down on my knees now Primrose, on this floor, if it would help. He can’t lose you, Prim, not on top of everything else.’

  ‘Really Ann. I must get on.’

  *

  ‘Ah, come on lad.’

  Joe looks to the sky with the phone pressed to his ear as he hears Max’s recorded voice for the fifth time. ‘Come on, son,’ he says, after the bleep. ‘Worse things have happened at sea. Come home and we’ll see a way through it.’

  Then Joe kicks his boot on the damp yard floor. ‘Well, call us when you can. Your mother’s right worried.’

  He hangs up and walks to the outbuilding where the feed is kept, to pick up a sack of ewe rolls. They are feeding them constantly, the ewes, now their time is near. He drags a sack out to the yard and heaves it onto the front of the quad bike, and as he straightens, he glimpses the back of Ann’s fleece. Almost a stranger, both nursing their bruises and unable to bear the other one bumping up against them. He watches her on the far side of the yard, walking into the field behind the hay barn – the hospital field they call it, for any that are weak or ailing.

  He drives the quad bike onto a track running out back across the in-bye. The workload has been heavier without Max these last days, but not half as hard as it would become in the next month or so. If Max doesn’t pull his boots up, Joe’ll have to hire in help and they can barely afford that.

  As he approaches the first field, the bleating from the ewes is loud – louder than it should be. You expect it once they’ve lambed, the constant bleating, which is a conversation with their young. But not so early. He drives the bike to the centre of the field, distracted by the noise, and stops at the metal manger. He dismounts and hauls the bag of feed over, tips it up and empties it. As he does so, he looks across at the sheep who are calling out in their strange way. One approaches the manger and begins to feed and Joe feels down her swollen belly, saying, ‘What’s all this noise then?’

  Joe is scanning the field and then his gaze stops on something – a pinkish-white blur on the grass, about thirty feet away. He strides over, folding the feed sack as he
goes, thinking it a badger that’s been half eaten by a fox or some such and he should get rid of it in the sack.

  ‘Oh no,’ he says, kneeling beside the aborted lamb. It is pink, wrapped in its amniotic sac as if cellophaned, its little legs out front. He stands and kicks it with his boot. Its mother has not left its side, though she has stopped short of licking it clean. She nips at the grass occasionally, but mostly she has her head up, crying out.

  An early one, he thinks. He puts the stiff little body in the feed sack.

  It happens.

  He thinks to carry on with his rounds of the fields, checking them. Then he sees another whitish blur on the grass, further away. No, he thinks, no, no, no. This is something more. He is walking faster now and the ewes’ bleating is loud in his ears. More little blurred bodies on the ground, beside walls or in ditches. A couple have been got at by foxes, their heads torn off. Joe begins stumbling, to see how many there are, hidden, in the dip beside the stream, in grassy pockets, as if the ewes have gone off, private, to deliver their shame. How many more, up on the fell, that he didn’t notice? How many more in the next field?

  Joe sits down on a rock. A ewe, who still has her lamb inside, nips at the grass beside him. He rubs his forehead. How many? At least twenty dead in this field alone, near a month before term. What have I done? How has this happened? He is rubbing and rubbing his forehead, harder, until he is hitting it with a clenched fist.

  The ewes are crying out. He knows them and they know him. And here’s death on the field, fresh and raw. Some of these ewes, that were crying out with their loss – he’d rubbed them at birth until they warmed up with life. Fed them careful, kept them with their mothers, clipped their horns, picked maggots from behind their ears. And now this, death all over his field, and who’s to say how many more?

  What has he done? Made some terrible mistake? He thinks to the year and the decisions he’s made. To buy that tup – was it a wrong ’un? To put them out on the fell – too soon? Too cold? He knows what it likely is. Toxoplasmosis. And he thinks to the feed, the stuff he’d bought in from Granville Harris. That knockdown price. Why had they wanted him to take that feed so bad, Eric and Granville, if it wasn’t to get shot of it? He bangs his fist against his forehead. He can’t bear to check the next field, for what he might find there.

  *

  From: ann.hartle@cooperative.coop

  To: b_hartle@hotmail.com

  Subject: terrible news

  12 March 2006, 7.02 p.m.

  Bartholomew love,

  We need you home. I know you’re a grown man and you’ve a life of your own but we need you home.

  I’ve just come in from the fields and we’ve had near 200 lambs die on us. Our lives have turned black, Bartholomew. We need you home. Your father is broken by it.

  They started coming a week ago, either stillborn or born alive but terrible weak, and then not lasting the night, or the pregnancies have come to nowt, as if the foetus has been reabsorbed. Each day we go out and dread what we’ll find. At first we thought it might just be a few, but it’s not stopped, the death on the field.

  I’ve never known it this bad, not even with the culls. At least then the lads we knew came from the abattoirs and took away the sheep and we knew it was going to be done right, even though everyone was sad about it. But this. This is medieval. And the ewes shouting from the field like we’ve done it to them, deliberate. Death is everywhere and each morning we step out and we don’t know how many more we’ll find.

  We’ve sent some of the dead lambs to the laboratory for testing, to see what infection it is we’ve got. Joe is sure it’s the toxo and has something to do with the feed he bought in from Granville Harris, though to my mind that’s a distraction. Just a way for him to get through it.

  We had to burn the bodies, there were so many of them. Oh Bartholomew, I’ll never forget it. The smell of those lambs burning, it filled up the in-bye. And the ewes in the field – they knew what was happening. They were bleating and circling and bleating. They didn’t stop crying out.

  And the pyre, the flames. It went on and on. I never knew that bodies take an age to burn. The smoke stuck to our clothes and got in our eyes and our throats. I held his hand while he watched it.

  There are still some that seem to be carrying to term – about 150 ewes that we’ve put indoors, in the outbuildings, because we’ll not take any chances with them. But I don’t think Joe can lamb them now. He’s too broken. I’ll have to get Adrian in, I think – that lad from the veterinary college. But we need help – we need you home, Bartholomew.

  Mum

  *

  Dusk the following day and Joe squints and rubs his eye where the smoke has stung it: blue smoke, which swirls over the pyre behind his hay barn. Still more to burn. No news from the laboratory, but he’s sure it’s the toxo. At the top of the pile of bodies, bent legs with dainty hooves are silhouetted, black in the burning blue mist.

  He walks fast away to his Land Rover, driving at speed towards Lipton. His mind is foggy. He operates out of a visceral, unthinking part of himself.

  Joe pulls up outside the club. It is still light – the evenings are lengthening into spring. Glory days, usually, but not now. He wishes it was winter, two months ago, when things could still be rescued, when there was still time, when the dark would have covered him up.

  ‘Hello Joe,’ says Eric, without his usual garrulous laugh. He is standing next to Ron Chappell as always, in an otherwise empty room. ‘Shall I call Keith to fetch you a pint?’

  ‘I don’t want a drink from you, Eric,’ says Joe. ‘I’ve taken enough from you.’

  ‘Here we go,’ says Eric. ‘Keith?’ he calls to the bar, keeping his eyes on Joe. ‘Keith! A pint for the dark crusader here. What’s troubling you this time, Joe?’

  ‘Granville Harris keeps cats,’ says Joe.

  ‘Ah yes, that makes it all clear.’

  ‘He keeps cats. You knew Granville Harris kept cats. And you know what cats give to sheep – you’ve been a farmer. You know that cats and sheep must be kept apart. You knew that feed was bad. And so did Granville. And now my lambs are dead.’

  ‘Ah, so your bad flock is down to me is it, Joe?’ says Eric. He jangles his keys in his pocket, shaking his head. ‘I’ve brought down your flock as well as carrying on with your wife? My, I’ve been busy.’

  ‘Primrose lost her baby,’ says Joe. He can’t think. The lack of sleep these last two days, the terrible scenes at the farm, and now the warmth of the bar, and the way Eric seems unsullied, makes Joe confused.

  ‘I know Primrose lost her baby,’ Eric says. ‘I’m sorry for it, man. She should have been kept away from sheep in her condition, but I’m sure it wasn’t that. I’m sure there was no connection with what happened to Primrose. You mustn’t blame yourself, or anyone for that.’

  Joe presses on. ‘The two of you plotted against me. “Joe is on his uppers,” you said. “Joe will take it and pay for it, too.” And now my lambs are dead and there’s bodies all over my fields.’

  ‘And how do you know it’s Granville’s cats that passed a sickness to your sheep? It was Granville’s cats, was it, and not any of the strays that wander in? Or your own cats, Joe, the ones that hide in your yard? You know that for certain, do you? Or what if it’s some other infection? Are you certain it’s the toxo? This is becoming a habit – accusing me. I’m your friend, Joe. But this is becoming too much of a habit.’

  Joe is feeling the futility of it all, but he blunders on. ‘You wanted to bring me low,’ he says. It’s as if the room doesn’t exist, only the words as they emerge from his mouth. ‘You wanted to see me make the choices you’ve made. You’d see me cook breakfasts and turn down beds like a woman.’

  ‘And why the heck would I want that, Joe?’ Eric has put down his pint and is standing tall before him, his patience worn out. ‘And less of the “low” I’ll thank you. And another thing. I’m not after your wife – I’ve a very nice one of my own, who spent some nigh
ts crying over the rumours you started. Now get out, Joe. Go home. There’s no talking to you.’

  Eric turns his back on Joe.

  He walks out of the club into darkness and climbs into his Land Rover. He takes out his phone and dials Max’s home number.

  ‘Hello?’ says Primrose.

  ‘Primrose? It’s Joe.’

  There is silence down the line.

  ‘Primrose?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I said it’s Joe.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Were you ever near sheep? When you were pregnant, were you ever out back near the sheep?’

  ‘We haven’t got any sheep.’

  ‘No lass, our sheep. The sheep on our farm.’

  ‘I know about sheep, Joe. I knew not to go near ’em or to be in the yard. Not to touch anything. Course I knew that.’

  ‘But Max, he could ’ave brought it home to you on his clothes.’

  ‘Why are you saying this, Joe? Are you saying it were my fault? Do you think we caused it, or that I could have stopped it from happening?’

  ‘Not you, Primrose,’ says Joe, and he gulps for air in his too-small cabin of the car. He tries to take a deeper breath. ‘Not you, no.’

  ‘Well then, why are you askin’ me this?’ says Primrose. ‘You all think it, all of you – that I should’ve taken better care of it. Max thinks it were my fault.’

  Joe puts his head back. Closes his eyes. The phone is in his lap. ‘Not you, Primrose,’ he whispers.

  He pulls down on the steering wheel and it’s almost too heavy for him, pulling the Land Rover out of its parking space outside the club. He eases out gently and as he does so he notices Eric’s Nissan Micra parked one space up. Its red paintwork is colourless under the light of the street lamp.

  Joe drives at a crawl and his heart begins to pound as he turns the steering wheel a fraction with his left hand. His body is quick with adrenalin and then he feels it, the violence of metal on metal, the rock of his Land Rover as it scrapes and slows. The resistance against the accelerator. And then the alarm, like a small dog yapping, breaking up the night. He pulls away and the resistance stops and he drives fast up Lipton High Street.