The Furrow King

Chapter One: The Mouth

The rain came up the Cwnbrin Valley the way it always did in November, not falling so much as leaning, driven flat off the shoulder of the hill so that it went in under a man's collar and found the small warm hollow at the base of his neck.

Leonard Probert had stopped noticing it years ago. He stood at the gate of the top field with his hands in his coat pockets and watched his daughter.

Maisie was sitting on her heels at the far end of the field, near the wall, in the place where the grass gave up. She had her back to him. She had been out there an hour and ten minutes, which he knew because he had looked at the kitchen clock when she went out and he had looked at his watch when he came up the track, and the arithmetic of watching her had become the arithmetic of his life.

The field was good ground. That was the strange part. Three years he had worked Pant Mawr and the top field had always been the best of it: forty acres of thick upland pasture that came through even a bad spring green as a bottle. The ewes fattened on it. The Ministry man had said it was the finest grazing above the eight-hundred-foot line he'd seen that side of the mountain.

And then there was the patch.

It sat about twenty yards in from the eastern wall, a rough oval of bare earth maybe twelve feet across. Nothing grew on it. Not grass, not thistle, not the tough little rushes that colonised every wet dip in the valley. In summer the pasture came right up to its edge and stopped as though there were a wall there, a wall you could put your hand through. In winter the earth of it stayed dark and open and slightly raised, like a scar that had healed proud.

He had ploughed it once, his first spring. He had turned it, limed it, sown it with a mix the merchant had sworn would grow in a car park. Twelve days later there was nothing there but the same dark crumb of soil, and the seed had not so much failed to germinate as gone missing altogether, as if it had been taken.

He had let it be after that. A farm has a hundred small defeats in it. A man can't argue with all of them.

"Maisie."

The wind took his voice sideways. He climbed over the gate rather than open it, because the hinge had dropped and he had been meaning to see to it since August, and he walked out across the wet grass towards his daughter.

She was talking. He could see it before he could hear it, the small movement of her jaw, her head tipped a little as though she were listening as much as speaking. She had her coat on, at least. She had it buttoned wrong, one side hanging longer than the other, and her hair was black with rain and stuck to her cheeks.

Seven years old. Small for seven. Joy had been small too.

"Maisie, love, it's gone half four."

She didn't turn. Her voice came in pieces through the wind, and what he heard was: "—and I said I would, I said I would come, but he says—"

"Maisie."

She stopped. She put both her hands flat on the bare earth, fingers spread, the way you might steady a dog you were about to leave. Then she stood up, and turned, and smiled at him, and it was such an ordinary child's smile that he felt ashamed of his own unease.

"Hello, Daddy."

"You're soaked through."

"I'm not cold."

"That's not the same thing." He put out his hand and she took it, and her fingers were freezing, and the cold of them went up his arm like a wire. "Who were you talking to?"

A pause. Just the length of a breath.

"Nobody."

They went back down the field together. Halfway to the gate she looked back over her shoulder at the bare patch, and Leonard, who had been a farmer long enough to read the direction of an animal's attention, felt the small hairs rise on the back of his neck for no reason he could have defended in front of another adult.

The farmhouse at Pant Mawr was long and low and had been built by men who did not expect to be warm. Stone walls three feet thick, slate floors, small deep windows, and a chimney that drew badly whenever the wind was in the east, which was most of the time. The tenancy came from the estate office in Llanbrin, nine miles down the valley, and the rent was low because nobody else wanted it.

Leonard got the fire going and put Maisie in front of it with a towel and a mug of tea with too much milk in it. He fried bread and two eggs and a slice of black pudding, and he ate his standing up at the counter, because sitting down at the table meant sitting opposite the chair, and after three years he still could not do it every day.

Joy had died on a Tuesday afternoon in October, upstairs, while he was dipping sheep four hundred yards away. Thirty-four years old. She had gone up to lie down with a headache and she had never come back down, and by the time he found her there was nothing in the world to be done, and the ambulance took two hours to reach the valley because the driver missed the turn at the chapel. A haemorrhage, the doctor said afterwards. Something in the wall of a vessel in her brain that had been thin since the day she was born and had chosen a Tuesday.

Maisie had been four. She had asked, for about a year, whether her mother was coming back, and Leonard had told her the truth every time in the plain flat way he told everything, and then one day she had stopped asking. He had thought, God forgive him, that this was progress.

He washed the pan. Behind him Maisie was drawing, her tongue between her teeth, the pencil going in short hard strokes.

"Miss Bleddyn says you're not talking at school," he said.

"I talk."

"Not to her, she says. Not to the others."

Maisie considered this with the seriousness of a much older person. "They talk about tractors and the Eurovision."

"That's what people do. They talk about nothing much and it makes them friends."

"It's boring."

"Aye," said Leonard, before he could stop himself. "It is."

He dried his hands and came and looked over her shoulder. She had drawn the field. He recognised the wall, the four-square lump of the barn, the line of the ridge. In the middle of the field she had drawn the patch, and she had pressed so hard filling it in that the pencil had gone through the paper in three places.

"What's that?" he said.

"The mouth."

Something went through him. Not fear exactly; a kind of dropping sensation, like missing a step in the dark.

"It's a bare patch, love. Bad drainage. There's probably rock under it."

"It's a mouth," she said, not arguing, simply correcting him the way you'd correct a man who'd got the day of the week wrong. "It's open because he's waiting."

"Who's waiting?"

Maisie put the pencil down. When she looked up her eyes were her mother's eyes, brown and level, and there was nothing wrong with them at all.

"Him," she said.

He let it go. That was what he did, in those days: he let things go, because there was always the next thing. The ewes had to come off the hill before the weather turned properly. Two of them were lame. The Land Rover needed a new exhaust bracket and the merchant's bill was eleven weeks old.

But the following Thursday he came in from the sheds at dusk and the house was empty.

He found her in the top field in the dark with a torch she'd taken from the dresser drawer, sitting cross-legged on the bare earth itself, in the middle of it, with her shoes off and her socks off, her bare feet pressed into the cold soil. The torch lay beside her, pointing away, and its beam lit up nothing but grass and rain.

He went out onto the patch to get her and the ground under his boots was soft. That was wrong. Everywhere else in the field the ground was frozen an inch down, hard as a road. Here his boots sank, and there was a smell that he knew and could not place for a moment, and then placed: the smell of a grave being dug. Turned earth. Wet clay and iron and the sweetish rot underneath it.

"Right," he said. "That's it. In."

She didn't move. He bent and got his arms round her and lifted, and she came off the ground stiff as a plank, and then she began to scream.

He had never heard her scream like that. It was not a child's tantrum. It was a raw, tearing, adult sound, and it came out of her without pause for breath, and she fought him — kicked, arched, clawed at his face with her nails so that he felt one open a line under his eye. All the way down the field, all the way through the yard, all the way into the kitchen, she screamed the same three things over and over in the space between breaths.

"He's lonely — he's on his own — I promised I'd come back!"

Leonard held her on the flagstones in front of the fire until it stopped. It took nineteen minutes. He knew because the clock was over her head and he had to look at something.

When it stopped it stopped all at once, like a tap. She went soft in his arms, breathing hard, and then she said, in a small worn-out voice, "Sorry, Daddy."

"It's all right."

"Is your face bleeding?"

"Yes."

"Sorry."

He carried her up to bed. He sat on the edge of the mattress in the dark for a long time afterwards, listening to her breathe, and he told himself what he had been telling himself for three years: that she'd lost her mother, that children go strange with grief and come back out of it, that what she needed was time and food and no fuss.

Down the valley, the wind changed. Somewhere below the house a gate he had definitely latched began to knock, slowly, against its post.

He would remember that night afterwards as the last one that was still ordinary. It wasn't, of course. It had not been ordinary for a long time. But it was the last one in which he was still allowed to believe it.