After that Jackson wouldn’t have him out on the farm, or not for a year or two, until he was old enough to show that he was sensible and could do a job of work as a barn boy. Billy got a new rope and put it up on the tree, and he got some planks and made a lookout platform, but Richard hardly ever used it. Jonny took to going there with a book to read. It was his place after that, a place for little boys and not for hawks.
Of course, his mother was correct. Jackson was only doing what everyone was doing then. A farmer could not afford to be sentimental about land. He learnt that as he learnt to farm. Eventually he would come to grub out more hedges, cut down more trees and fill more ponds than Jackson had, to work every fertile square yard of his soil. It was like she said, it was what a farmer did. He’d been to college and it was what they taught, and it was what you learnt when you bought the machinery that was bigger than the machinery had been before, so that you could work with fewer men and bigger fields. And if you didn’t, well, you couldn’t be competitive, could you? You wouldn’t survive.
Only by that time she had changed her mind. Perhaps he would never do quite right before her. She was watching as he took the farm back, and he was failing her, as if he was doomed to fail before her eyes. Perhaps it would have been better if she had not kept it for him so that he had to follow, looking like his father, in his father’s footsteps, resented by her for being what he was being which was only after all what he was and what his father had been before. Bit by bit, he took the farm back, and though it was what she had been waiting for all these years he had the feeling that she didn’t want it to happen any more. He had begun with the barn, which he needed to put his machinery in. He emptied it of its junk. He rid it of the fantail pigeons that nested in the rafters, put it back how his father would have had it. She had loved the fantails, which had come as a pair and had bred into a flock over the years, ornamental white birds, not wood pigeons, that used to perch exquisitely in the sunlight on the crest of the roof, or coo and strut and display on the ground of the yard. She asked if they couldn’t have stayed. They’re the sort of birds that live in dovecotes, not barns, he said. Look at the shit on the floor. If his father had been around, there wouldn’t have been a single pair of fantails nesting in the barn. But his father hadn’t been around. It was she who had let them colonise the place. We’re a farm, Mum. We’re growing food for people to eat. In this context they’re just a kind of vermin. It hadn’t been his choice to have the farm; it was she who had hung on to it. How could she then not let him farm it as he saw fit?
So one evening he closed the big barn doors when the birds were roosting, and the next morning he went out with his gun.
Don’t come, Mum. Don’t look. Don’t see this.
And he went in and closed the door behind him and shot a dozen birds in the fluttering space, and only then let the rest of the flock escape. The door thrown open, light flooding in, a rush of wings overhead. The dead birds heaped in a barrow, to be taken and buried or burned on the fire. Blood red on white feathers. His look hard on them, the hope in it that he had killed enough so that the others wouldn’t come back. If his mother had had her way, she would have given the whole farm over to her fancy birds, let the hedges grow and fall across the ditches, the bramble and blackthorn spread and tangle into thickets, those roses with the French names ramble out from the garden over everything.
One day in the winter that followed, he started on the cowshed. Only himself and his mother at home now since Jonny was away, and he found it hard, in the quiet of the house, to be idle. When there was no activity Jonny’s absence became all the more noticeable, and with it the implication of his own continued presence, his permanence in the place. This particular day it was raining heavily. The ground outside was too sodden to work and would likely be so for some days to come. Clearing the cowshed was something to do. No urgency to the job, only that the building was derelict. The cowshed like the old barn had stood empty for fifteen years, but there was nothing he needed it for. It was obsolete as well as derelict, though it had only been put up in the 1930s, the modern building seeming emptier than the old one could ever have been.
The metal door rattled open onto a clanging void, concrete floor, tin roof, railed pens, feeding troughs, lengths of pipe that once held rat poison. There was no other debris there save what had been used for the cows. Even the murky air had a different quality from the air of the barn, a stale but still acrid odour come of the long disintegration of shit and straw, which had seemed to impregnate even the metal. He put on overalls and gloves and tied a handkerchief across his face,
