Landed (10 page)

When the pile by the shed was a pyramid the height of a man they progressed to the second half of the operation. For an afternoon hour in the last of the pale sun the old man swung the axe. Owen lay the chunks of wood on top of one another in the shed, as instructed; his grandfather demanding the wedges were laid neatly.

‘I'm a dry-wood-waller,' Owen whispered to himself. As much as he could he studied his grandfather. The old man took a second to appraise each log as he placed it on the great wooden block, judging its knot and grain. When he swung the axe he did it slowly, with little seeming effort: he gripped the end of the handle with his right hand, with his left grasped the shaft up by the axe head and lifted it up and over his shoulder. Then he offered the axe head gently up into the air, as it rose letting his left hand slide down the shaft until it met his right hand at the end of the handle. The axe head was now directly above his grandfather's head, the shaft vertical, and for a fraction of a second it seemed to hover there, gathering latent energy, before beginning its easy descent.

What was hard to see was how fast the axe head fell, the sharpened edge of five pounds of forged steel slamming into the log along a line of grain, such was the functional, perfunctory grace of the action. Most often the log was split with one blow. Sometimes it took more, depending upon the species of tree.

When Grandma called Grandpa in to take a telephone call from a dealer, Owen tried the axe himself. It took all his strength to lift and wield, and by the time it fell onto the log there was barely enough momentum in the swing to make a mark. He became quickly furious, throwing himself into the action, but there was no improvement in its effect. He knew he was fighting against the axe and what he had to do was to collaborate with the tool, to work with it.

So Owen experimented, feeling his way into each part of the choreography – the legs-apart stance, the lift of the axe, the fall. His grandfather could not be still on the phone: he always gripped the receiver as if by its throat, like an animal he mistrusted, and spoke so tersely that whoever was on the other end must put their receiver down wondering what it was they'd done to old man Ithell that so angered him. But he remained in the cottage.

Grandma peered into the dark, as if trying to see that sound: of wood cracking. ‘Leave him,' the old man said. The light had gone by the time Owen came inside. The boy was beaming.

 

The next afternoon Owen split the logs, his grandfather content to let him, to be the one to pick up the chunks and fill the shed. Owen had the knack, rode the paradox – did he generate or harness this effortless power? – and now he got to know the different kinds of wood. Ash split clean and easy. Beech past a certain age was obdurate. Oak, too, was tough: you had to choose the right grain to attack, and then be patient, confident of your choice – make little impression with the first two or three blows, have to work the axe head back out of the log each time and reset it on the block, yet feel the log break apart under the fourth.

The old man rolled a cigarette. ‘You should have seen the elm I got after the disease,' he said. ‘Went over and took it from the Powis Castle estates over there. Tough? You couldn't bloody split it with an axe.' He coughed and spat a gob of phlegm. ‘Had to
saw
the damn logs, into cubes.'

Green wood they stacked against the outside wall of the shed, on its sheltered side, under the eave, for use in two or three years' time. Laid down like wine. When the pyramid was gone, Owen saw his grandfather's satisfaction. ‘See us through,'
he said. Fuel for the Rayburn and the sitting-room fireplace, to last the winter. Owen returned to Welshpool.

 

After the rain, the air froze, the earth solidified, and still the wind blew, finding gaps around windows, doors, through the thick stone walls of the cottage. Owen's grandparents saw each other's breaths condense as soon as they went up the stairs.

The old man's left hip was hurting. He expressed no gratitude to the surgeon who'd performed the first operation, replacing his right hip. ‘Don't work as good as the old one,' was all he said; did not appreciate the pain gone. And now the other one.

It was Grandma who rang Welshpool, before the February half-term. ‘He could do with some help,' she told her daughter-in-law. ‘He'll not ask for it himself.'

 

The day Owen arrived the temperature seemed to fluctuate: he could not, with the use of his human senses, tell whether it was rising or falling, it seemed to be doing both, somehow. Up on the hill it was cold to Owen's bones but the sun warmed what it reached, weakly. Then the ground felt soft, the frozen earth apparently attempting to thaw, except that his nose and ears stung, the air prickly and brittle.

What happened the next day did so in silence: snow fell thickly from daybreak to sunset. They watched it from indoors. The following morning Owen rose early and went out with the dogs. The sky was blue, the land white, the snow hard, encrusted. He walked across it, around the shoulder of the hill, and the snow was like a powder shaken over the ground to reveal the footprints of those who'd crossed it, all the animals who did not hibernate but persevered through the cold. The dogs scurried this way and that, noses to the ground, and Owen could see what they had always been able to smell. A badger
had come up from below, a hare sprung across the field, a fox come skulking after what it could scavenge. He found spots of blood. A rabbit, perhaps.

It struck Owen that he'd heard foxes in the night. Incorporated the sounds into his dreams. Whether or not he'd ever actually woken it was impossible now to say. Up the hill had come a fox dog's bark, dry and staccato, and the yowling of a vixen, their hot rut a part of this cold season.

 

Owen drove the tractor across the snow to feed the sheep sugar beet, sheep nuts, hay. Their clamour in time of hunger was overwhelming: a hundred ewes, Owen thought, mimicking chainsaws. By this time of year they'd been brought down off the tops, to the less exposed pastures around the cottage. In addition his grandfather had been cutting back his liabilities: subletting the furthest fields to a young farmer at White Grit, reducing the count to a couple of hundred ewes. ‘Not enough to make money,' as he said. Their time on the hill was running down. Owen's grandmother had put in train the move to an almshouse bungalow down in the valley, though she knew her husband wanted no part of the arrangement; preferred all talk of it to take place out of earshot.

 

The skies were dark, purple-black, but it was just too cold to snow again. A low sun forced its way between the heavy clouds, which loped sullenly on over the hills.

‘One missing,' the old man said. ‘Count them for me, boy.' He'd never sought Owen's second opinion before. The boy confirmed the number: sixty-four.

‘We'll take these ones in,' Grandpa decided. ‘Then you can come back to look for it.'

With the help of the dogs they drove the ewes, heavily
pregnant now, into the large barn. It was almost time to scan them, see how many each carried, prepare to sort them into lambing groups.

Owen walked back around the flank of the hill to where the small flock had been, the first of the fields between the badger copse and Malt House Farm, and followed the perimeter of the field for places the ewe could have escaped. One section of wall had lost its upper stones; a stretch of fence had sagged a little. Shreds of wool had snagged along it, no doubt where sheep had scratched themselves. She could have clambered over. Would hunger drive a single ewe to separate herself from her flock? Owen wasn't sure. Perhaps pregnancy made them erratic, or more daring. Owen traipsed haphazardly, in approximate, ever-widening circles beyond the field, his attention wandering.

He heard a piercing whistle overhead and looked up. A pair of buzzards, wheeling in the blue sky. The beak and claws, their calm killer's eyes alert to any prey that might emerge from hiding: rabbits, rodents, robbed of cover, snow a bare white betrayal. The sound the birds made seemed one of glee.

The whine of the tractor grinding up the track to the other flocks brought Owen's attention back to the search. ‘Where are you, sheep?' he yelled.

 

Owen returned to the cottage for lunch, admitted the failure of his mission. He assumed the incident was over, a loss to be absorbed. When they'd eaten, to his surprise his grandfather said, ‘I'll join you.'

The old man began by recounting the ewes in the barn: sixty-four still. Then he whistled the dogs to him, and they trekked back to the emptied field. Meg was limping, Owen noted, as if in imitation of her master. Getting on now herself. Pip would be the last of the mothers and daughters of their
line to work these hills with Gwyn Ithell, would end her days in domestic tedium, twitching in her sleep, dreaming of the wild running up above.

Grandpa gave his unintelligible instruction and the dogs took off. Pip bounding over the broken wall, Meg stumbling after.

‘Damn sheep's going to be camouflaged by the snow,' Owen suggested.

‘Hear the bugger bleating fore you ever see it, won't you,' his grandfather told him. They walked rapidly up one side of the cut in the next cwm, down the other, then further over the hill again, the old man never stopping to think or plan. Ordering Owen to walk thirty yards across from him, commanding the dogs to sniff out some other area. As if there was an obvious way to proceed in such a search, a definitive formula, though Owen could not find its logic.

 

They came home at dusk. ‘Check them sheep in the barn, would you?' Grandpa asked Grandma. ‘Should be sixty-five. We can only figure sixty-four.' Owen went with her. Switched on the electric light, bare bulbs hung on wire strung from one beam to another. Yellow, buttery light. A half-hearted murmur of bleating. His grandmother walked into the pens, where the pregnant ewes milled waist-high. Unable to escape this intruder in their midst, they affected to ignore her. She confirmed the count.

 

When Owen came to breakfast he found his grandfather at the table, staring into a gloomy corner of the room. The grey and scratched, heavy plastic Ever Ready torch beside his mug of tea.

Grandma dolloped ladlefuls of porridge into the bowl in front of Owen. ‘Been out all night,' she said to her grandson. ‘I told him, Will there not be enough sleepless nights for you
with the lambing?' She banged the lid back on the pan. ‘You can't tell him.'

‘Did you find her?' Owen asked.

The old man gazed at the wall. He shook his head. ‘Not yet,' he said.

 

Owen fed the sheep, first those on the hill, the tractor's great wheels carving through the snow. No more snow had fallen in the night, everything icing up. He broke up the bales of hay and scattered it for the frantic ewes. They seemed less important to him this morning, somehow: mere numberless beasts, while their lost sister was taking on a singular identity, a significance. When he fed those in the barn he counted them yet again. Each recount was more absurd than the one before – they could hardly have kept on getting it wrong – yet each one had a little more of a peculiar kind of hope: that there was something magical in the ewe's disappearance. Perhaps it wasn't the sheep that had been misplaced but a number itself, and this number was what he would refind in the counting. Not this time, though. Sixty-four once more.

 

Owen walked out to look for his grandfather, looking for the sheep. His feet crunched on the frozen snow. Climbing halfway up Corndon, he turned, scanned what he could see of the crooked hills around him. No sign of man or dogs. He raised his gaze. The day was extraordinarily cold and clear: he could see across to Cader Idris, that great throne of its summit. The morning had been still, but as he stood there Owen could feel that change was coming. It was less cold than it had been an hour or two before, and the crystal air was subtly agitated, as if across the visible landscape the giant Cader had woken after a night on the mountain and shaken out his blanket, and the
disturbance of air rippled eastward. Owen lowered his gaze and was startled to register russet on white: some twenty, twentyfive yards away a fox was sitting unperturbed, staring coolly back at him with its amber eyes.

 

At lunch, Grandpa shook his head. ‘Can't figure it,' he said, speaking with his mouth full of stew. ‘If it's trapped, why's it not bleating?' He swallowed, contained a burp in his throat. ‘Would someone steal it? Isn't worth it, see.' He shrugged. ‘Maybe out there, but the dogs haven't found her. Maybe dead, but it's not like sheep go off to die, like. She'd have laid down where she stood. Can't figure it, can I.'

The puzzle had rattled around his head while walking. He was baffled. ‘I'll count 'em in the barn again.'

You're wrong, Owen thought. That's the only explanation. There never were sixty-five. It was always sixty-four. If you knew them individually, or numbered their ears, or wrote down how many were in each parcel or flock we'd not be trapped in this error, with no way out.

 

Grandma joined them in the afternoon, and the three of them went up the track past the forestry plantation and came back around the side of Corndon, spread out between the stones and the heather, the dogs scampering across the white crust then sinking, and breasting through soft snow like aquatic mammals, whiskery snouts showing. The old man was limping badly, his face contorting with pain whenever his leg jarred.

They dropped down to the lane between their hill and Roundton, snow packed down by tractors, the road surface a slab of ice now, a frozen river, the snowplough not yet reached the back roads out here. Grandpa asked at Woodgate Farm; Brithdir. A sheep could escape not through intention but by
accident, lose its orientation instantly, skittle along bleating in any old direction. Then it would attach itself to any flock it came across. Such had been known. But the folk the old man consulted had noticed nothing.