The arms were still there, tight about him.
They’re Daddy’s cows. His voice was thin, high-pitched, strange even to himself.
Not really, they weren’t ever really Daddy’s cows, you know that. They were Great-Uncle Ralph’s, Ralph’s herd. Daddy only kept them on for Matthew’s sake.
Again her arms tightened as he struggled against her. So? We can keep them too.
She bent down in front of him where she could look into his eyes, but not letting go, her two hands to his upper arms. She spoke gently, reasonably. But, darling, we can’t. You know Jackson’s running the farm now, not us, and Matthew’s getting too old to deal with them anyway.
Fuck, he said. Fuck. To her face.
The men were putting a chain across the back of the truck. They were closing the doors, folding up the ramp. Through the openings between the slats of the truck he could see the cattle, their reddish haunches and sides; their faces turned, rubbed against, looking out. The noise they made seemed not to be the noise of individual animals but the prolonged moan of one single sad trapped beast. He cried for the great beast. He cried more than he had ever cried at any other time. He wrenched himself away now as the arms had gone limp, and ran behind the truck as it started up. He went on running as it bumped away along the drive. He ran with flailing arms, fell, picked himself up and ran again, the tears streaming, a cut on his knee running with blood.
His mother ran after him but he was too fast for her. Maybe she was letting him run, letting him run it out of him. He could come to no real harm on this track. But when she finally reached him, at the gate by the road, he did not so much as let her look at his bleeding knee. Even as she crouched before him he turned away. Tight, shaking, tear-drenched face averted, fists clenched white, he brushed past her soft hand and her skirt and walked back towards the yard.
There, boy, there. There it is. There you go. Old Matthew put two hands to his shoulders and spoke in the same tone that he used for the cattle. Matthew too had tears in his eyes.
The smell of them lasted in the fields for months. In the empty shed it remained for days and weeks and years, even in the cold when other smells faded, the smell or the memory of the smell, in dung drying to pale flaking crusts on the concrete floor. He used to go every now and then into the old cowshed, where no one else ever went, not pushing back the big door, he wasn’t strong enough to do that – and besides, it made such a noise rolling back on its runners that people would know he was there – but softly in by the small door at the side of it where the catch was broken. Once he was inside he had left the people and the world outside. He closed his eyes and knew again the warmth of the cows in their wire and concrete stalls, their lowing and shuffling, the green splatter of their shit. He was crouching safe between their red-brown flanks.
No one would find him. Not even Jonny, though he heard him calling in the yard.
Where are you? That one of the calls of the younger brother: Where are you, Wait for me, Let me come, Can I play too … There was always a choice to be made for him in those calls: would he answer, would he let him in or not? No. He would not let him in here. This must be his place alone.
Where are you? I know you’re somewhere around here. Then the creak of the metal door pushed open. Jonny was cleverer than he thought. Or it was his own fault, he must have not quite closed the door, Jonny must have seen it just so slightly open. A bar of cold light entered the grey of the shed. There was no time to move, only the cows to hide him.
What are you doing? Jonny stood before him at the opening to his stall.
None of your business. Go away.
The cows were quite gone. Only their dried-up smell remained. Jonny stood where they had been.
But there’s nothing here.
Go away.
He went on standing there looking puzzled. He didn’t even start to move.
See this, Richard said, and pointed at a little pile of blue-dyed grain.
What’s that?
That’s poison, he said. It’s called Warfarin. Matthew put it out for the rats. It doesn’t matter about the rats now so I’ve been collecting it up. If you come in here again I’ll poison you.
Still Jonny stood there, wide-eyed now. But it looks like grain, he said.
It is grain, but it’s been soaked in poison. That’s why they make it blue, so you can tell the poisoned grain from the good stuff. The rats can’t tell because Matthew puts it out in pipes on their runs, and they run through in the dark and eat it because it smells like any other grain, and maybe it tastes like any other grain because they come back for more, and because sometimes Matthew puts sugar with it to make
