across the fields, up at the sky, at his father’s car, his shaking hands, the sky.
He had his reasons, he says. He’s often regretted it, and he’s often thought that his reasons weren’t enough, but he thinks he would do the same again.
If he’d been older when he made that journey then perhaps he would have been stronger; perhaps his thoughts would have been clearer. But he was seventeen, and he had never knelt beside a dead man before. So he drove away. He stood up, and turned away from the man, and walked back to his father’s car, and drove away. He didn’t look in the rear-view mirror, and he didn’t turn around when he slowed for the junction.
I suppose it was at that stage that I began to realise what had happened what I had done.
That was how he put it, when he told her, walking out on the path beside the canal after lunch, the dogs running along ahead of them with their claws clicking on the tarmac strip. I suppose.
He had driven his father’s car into a man, and then over him, and now that man was dead. He felt a sort of sickness, a watery dread, starting somewhere down in his guts and rising to the back of his throat. His hands were locked on the wheel. He couldn’t even blink.
And he knew, even before he got back to his father’s house, that he would have to return to the man. He couldn’t leave him laid out on the road like that, with his legs neatly folded under his back. He knew, or he thought he knew, that when the man was found then somehow he would be found too, and the girl who’d drawn upon his bare chest wouldn’t even look him in the eye.
So it was her fault as well, it seems.
He fetched a shovel from a barn at his father’s farm and drove back to where he’d hit the man. It sounds so terrible now. Cowardly? He carried the shovel down the embankment to the field below the road and took off his jumper and began to dig.
He was used to digging. The field had only recently been harvested, and the stubble was still in the ground, so he lay sections of topsoil to one side to be replaced. He was thinking clearly, working quickly but properly, ignoring the purpose of the hole. Once, knee-deep in the ground, he looked up the bank and realised what he was doing. But he couldn’t see the man up on the road, so he managed to swallow the rising sickness and dig some more. And all this time, the sound of metal on soil, the sky above.
And then it was deep enough. It was done. So long as it was further beneath the surface than the plough-blades would reach then it was deep enough, most probably. He climbed up the embankment to the road, wanting to hurry and get it done but holding back from what he had to do, from the fact of having to touch him, having to pick him up and carry him down the bank and into the hole he had made. The death he had made in the hole he had made in the earth. He bent down to take the man’s arms. He could smell whisky. He stopped, unwilling to touch him, unwilling to go through with what he’d found reason to do. They were good reasons, but they didn’t seem enough. But then he remembered her skin on his, and her eyes, and he knew, he said, that he could do anything not to lose that.
She’d made him do it, then. That was how it had happened.
He gripped the man’s elbows and lifted them up to his waist. He backed away towards the embankment and the man’s legs unfolded from beneath him, his head rolling down into his armpit, his half-bottle of whisky falling from his pocket and breaking on the road. He didn’t stop. He kept dragging him away, away from the road, down the bank, into the field.
She’d said, when he finally told her all this, that she wanted to know it all. How it was done. How it had felt. So now she knew.
He laid the man down beside the hole in the earth and rolled him into it. The man fell face down, and he felt bad about that, about the man’s face being in the mud. He went back to the place on the road and picked up the pieces of glass. He threw them down on to the man’s back, and then he took the shovel and began to pile the earth back into the hole.
He threw soil over the man until he was gone, until the soil pressed down on him so that he was no longer a man or a body or a victim or anything. Just an absence, hidden under the ground. It was only then that he looked up at the sky, dark and silent over him, the moon hidden by a cloud. He drove past her house in March again, and then back to his father’s house. He put the car-keys away in the kitchen drawer, and the shovel in the barn, and he stood in the shower until the hot-water tank had emptied and he was left standing beneath a trickle of water as cold as stone.
So now she knew.
They were married before either of them had the chance to go to university: his father retired early, after a heart attack, and he had to take over the farm. It only made sense for Joanna to move in and help. George had been there when his father collapsed: he’d heard the dogs barking at the tractor in the yard, and gone outside to see his father clutching at his chest and turning pale. He’d dragged him from the cab into the mud and begun hammering on his chest. I didn’t want to lose him to the land as well. He’d beaten his father’s heart with his fist, and forced air into his lungs, and called out for help. She was there with him. She rang the ambulance, and watched him save his father’s life, and decided she would marry him. She can remember very clearly, standing there and deciding that. And he still thinks he was the one who asked her.
When she remembers it now, it’s always from a height, as if she can see it the way the sky saw it: George kneeling over his father in the mud of the yard, shouting at him to hold on, the dogs circling and barking.
And now this giant of a man sits in an armchair clutching a hot-water bottle and watching the sky change colour outside. He refuses to watch television, listening instead to the radio while he keeps watch on the land and the sky. He claims to take no interest in the running of the farm: he signed everything over to them almost immediately, and has rarely offered an opinion. But she knows that he watches. She has seen him looking at a newly ploughed field from the upstairs window, or running a hand along a piece of machinery in the yard, or lingering by the kitchen table while she does the accounts. She has seen the faint smiles and nods which indicate that he is well pleased. She hopes that George has noticed; she suspects that he has not. Sometimes, when George takes his father his evening meal, his father will talk about something he’s heard on the radio: a concert recording, a weather forecast, a news report. Often they’ll just sit, and George will listen to his father’s short creaking breaths, thankful to have him there still. She doesn’t sit with them at these times. She reads, or deals with paperwork, or goes back to her writing, waiting for him to reassure himself that his father is well.
They’ve never had children, and this has
They’ve
