The Long Dry

by Cynan Jones

  It was the other side of the road from his land and ran in a long strip about an acre deep. It was where the road was quite wide, and close to the village. He wanted it to build on. At least, he wanted to sell the land as plots. He knew it wouldn’t happen soon, and hoped the idea wasn’t thought of, or he’d be easily outbid. But if he could get the land, and then get planning, he could make a lot of money. The village would grow, and he knew physically that he could not farm forever.

  Far away, he heard the duck go into the water. ‘If I can get that land,’ he thought, ‘when the village moves this way I’ll file for planning.’ (They’d already put in speed limits, as they do before allowing houses to be built, though they don’t admit it). ‘I can get planning and sell the plots, and it will be a few years from now and then I can rent out the top fields and some other land and keep the farm like an island, without having to work it all, because I won’t be able to; and the plots will bring us money, if I can get that land.’ He hoped very much that the agreement from the bank would be enough.

  He thinks of his father’s memories that he reads at night to help himself sleep. To bring some sound into the stillness. How it is difficult and slow to understand sometimes; how the dictionary does not have the words he doesn’t know; how he must make bridges of meaning, here and there. As if he were walking on stones down a river. He prefers to call them memories, because memoirs sounds too grand, too fake.

  Mopping his brow with the rolled-up sleeve of his shirt he thinks of the building land and how his father used to work for the bank he’s borrowed from, though the bank has globalized now. How, from reading his father’s memories, he is beginning to understand the reasons why he gave it all up – this good career – to bring his family here, to bring them up on the land. It’s unnaturally quiet up here, in this sun. Things are exhausted.

  A story he read some nights ago comes back to him, strange against the heat now, crystalline in its difference. Its difference to everything else in his mind; clear images standing out, like a photograph in a white room.

  __

  the Angel

  He knew the place, even today, from visits to his father’s family years ago, where the water goes under what used to be a beautiful low stone bridge before it was rebuilt for no apparent reason. On the high side of the bridge, upstream, there is a constantly still pool, hollowed into the deep shale. The waterfall is usually quiet, unless there has been a great deal of rain washing from the fields, into the river, swelling the water. It falls only eight foot or so, into the pool. The other side of the bridge the water bubbles away over shallow, broken rock.

  His father had been with the other children at Ysgol Sul, the Sunday School, in a small room by the chapel. It had a blackboard and a brand new gas heater which gave off a thin hiss the very sound of which, ever since, would be enough to clothe his father with the illusion of warmth. It was a very hard January – the seasons then were more severe, or else his father’s memory had sharpened them. They wore shorts then, too, of course. His father was one of the oldest children there.

  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

  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.

  T
he 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.

  *

  Chapter Four

  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.

  __

  Emmy

  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.

  __

  Water

  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 th
e 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.

  __

  Rachel

  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.