Harvest

and spent a day clearing, putting what might be sold at auction or for scrap out into the yard where the rain washed it down. His mother saw it there and came out to see what he was doing, wearing a big black oilskin because the rain was hard, came into the shed and pushed back the dripping hood to look about her. How long since she had last been in there? Not since the cows left, perhaps, when it was a bright space soft with straw and warmed by the beasts. But the electricity had been cut off long ago, wires hanging loose, overhead sockets dangling smashed bulbs. She went to push the door fully back and let in more light, of whatever light there was outside on a day like that, but the door was stuck in its runners, it wouldn’t go any further. She was coughing in the churned-up, sour-smelling dust, holding her hand to her mouth.

What are you doing?

Clearing.

Why?

To take it down. We don’t need it any more. We can put up a modern grain store instead.

And he said he would take down the cart barn too.

But it’s a lovely old cart barn.

But that’s what it is. It was built for carts.

Didn’t she see, the point wasn’t the past but the present?

You and your bright new toys, she said, turning away and back out into the rain.

As if a man was still only a boy.

It slowly came to him, how they had changed. She might have been thinking these thoughts for a while, but he hadn’t noticed. He didn’t much notice that sort of thing – but maybe other people didn’t either, not when it was a question of the people they lived with. The people you lived with you took for granted, you didn’t expect them to change or even to get any older, not visibly, only infinitesimally and unseen from day to day and yet each morning looking the same. She had once read a book about a silent spring. There had been a time when everyone had seemed to be reading that book but that time was passed. It said how chemicals were destroying nature. He thought, they would have got over it by now, and besides, things like DDT had been banned; modern science had come a long way since then. But the idea was still alive in her, making her afraid of what he did. She would say, I worry, you know, about the future. She would come downstairs in the mornings. The birds, she would say, did you hear the birds this morning? That lurking possibility in her, each morning, that this day of all days the birds might not have sung. Or if they sang today, that their numbers were reducing, numbers of buzzards or sparrows, or of returning swallows, the house martins’ nests in the eaves not filled this year, not replaced, the lapwings not come to the fields. She spoke as if his work was a threat to them all, the everyday work of the farm some kind of violence. These sprays you use, I can’t stand the smell of them. She took up his overalls in her yellow rubber gloves and put them into the washing machine. The smell clings, she said, even when they’re washed.

Only it didn’t. His overalls when they came out of the machine were clean. If anything, they smelled of detergent, since she put in so much. He thought that she must have imagined the smell, on them and possibly sometimes even on himself.

He saw grey in her hair, lines on her face, a particular fine vertical pair of lines on her brow, above her nose. They must have been there for a while. Criticism in them. Some hardening where he used to think that she was soft.

Why don’t we have cows again, like we used to? We could use the shed. You haven’t torn it down yet.

He had the shed pulled down.

It was she who had sold the cows. The hurt was still there in him. The boy’s white knuckles in the grown man.

The herd

He had understood what was happening the moment he saw the cattle truck. He saw from the landing window as he was coming down the stairs. Ran then, down and along the passage and out the back door. There was his mother standing with some papers in her hands. The driver of the truck had opened the doors, set out a ramp.

No. You can’t do that. He ran and tore the papers from her hands and threw them down in the mud of the yard. The driver turned and looked at him, and he saw through into the interior of the truck, the empty space striped with light waiting for the cattle to fill it. Hands grabbed him and held him tight, his mother’s hands holding him back with more force than she had ever held him. She pulled him back tight against her. Her arms folded about him like iron. No. He twisted about and screamed and kicked at her legs. Then after a while he stilled.

Jonny was standing beside them now. Quiet, only watching. He felt Jonny’s quiet. It made him quiet. He wasn’t going to be babyish beside his little brother. His mother’s arms softened about him but didn’t remove themselves. When he gave a shiver that might have been the beginning of an escape, they tightened again.

A boy should not run mad into a herd of cattle, even when they seemed at their most docile, driven out from the shed towards the ramp. He knew that. He should not scatter them or panic them into the unpredictable. He knew these things. His father had told him such things. When his father had told him things like that, the knowledge had seemed special, intended for him man to man, making him a man even when he was a boy. Whoa, go-aan then. Matthew