So eventually they laced the food with rampant contraceptive. Looking around the town nowadays, it’s a shame they didn’t lace the chips.
Another case against the ducks — or some might say for — is simpler. The farm where he had picked the ducks up in the Transit is on a low hill overlooking the bay, constantly plagued by fighter jets. The Americans and lots of other people come to practise flying here and when they do, it sounds like they are tearing up the sky. Sometimes they are so low you feel them; and you can always tell when there is some trouble because they practise harder, and in the night you can hear the heavy hum of Hercules planes shifting things around.
When a jet goes over low at calving time sometimes a cow will drop its calf and it will be dead and unready. If you call for compensation, they ask you for the number of the plane and the exact time it passed over the cow. On average, the jets travel three times faster than sound.
A duck went through the windshield of one of them, macerating itself into the cockpit and the pilot ejected. The navigator flew the plane and landed it safely two-hundred miles or so north. Bits of the cockpit were spread for miles around the hills and didn’t hit anyone and a team of Crash Investigators came. Again, ducks.
He backs the Transit up by the pond and it makes a sound just like the one he used to make when he was being a truck when he was a child. The crates are heavy full of duck and the stink is bad. It stinks like the insides of a fish and it’s been cooking slowly in the back of the van. He puts the crates down one by one by the edge of the pond then cuts the twine with a Leatherman he found in the van and makes the ducks go out. They’re not sure what the pond is.
They pat into the water one by one, confused and fik fiking. In the crates they were bunched in, bunched into themselves and had the stupid air of herd animals. When they get into the water they are confused and then they kick a little and feel themselves glide and feel all their clumsy weight turn easy. Then their necks lift and stretch and some of them flick their clipped wings and they turn into proper ducks; a real thing. It’s their first time in the water.
He watches them. Damselflies and strong white butterflies, delicate as hell, are everywhere around the pond, and machine-like dragonflies hit smaller insects in the air as they fly. The reeds are flowering with their strange crests and on the island in the middle of the pond the willowherb is starting to come to seed, and the thistles.
From now on in the evenings he’ll come down here, sometimes with his father, and whatever has happened in the day will be okay. They’ll try uselessly to count the ducks and he’ll watch the light change and sink into the water — the white light of a lake. The evenings will shorten and the flowers turn to rough seed and the grass will stop growing, not that it’s grown much this dry year. Then, if there is rain, the mushrooms will come which his sister loves to eat because she believes in fairies, and they will take bags down to collect them and most will not get eaten and will sweat and go off in the plastic bags.
He lifts the bread crates back into the Transit; he’s old enough to sweat now and it’s very hot. Everyone is still bewildered by the heat.
He gets into the Transit and turns it on and likes the growl of the diesel engine. He presses down on the brick of the pedal, swings the van away from the pond and smacks the radio on loud to smash away the quiet place — the beat breaks out, bass line, moving up his spine. And his head fills up again with tight breasts and bare arms and small skirts and white skin bluing in the epileptic lights. He’s not little now, he knows, and he has to want to go away from here.
Gareth felt the cool wind the speed of the quad bike made as he rode to the top fields. He knew now that if he didn’t find the cow soon it would become a problem. I should ask Bill to help find the cow because he will like helping, thought Gareth.
He had seen the bank yesterday, and they had agreed in principle to his putting in a bid for the seven acres of land that skirted the road, close to the top of his farm, close by this field. The auction was next week. Gareth thought about it a lot.
It was the other side of the road from his land and ran in a long strip about an acre deep. It was where the road was quite wide, and close to the village. He wanted it to build on. At least, he wanted to sell the land as plots. He knew it wouldn’t happen soon, and hoped the idea wasn’t thought of, or he’d be easily outbid. But if he could get the land, and then get planning, he could make a lot of money. The village would grow, and he knew physically that he could not farm forever.
Far away, he heard the duck go into the water. ‘If I can get that land,’ he thought, ‘when the village moves this way I’ll file for planning.’ (They’d already put in speed limits, as they do before allowing houses to be built, though they don’t admit it). ‘I can get planning and sell the plots, and it will be a few years from now and then I can rent out the top fields and some other land and keep the farm like an island, without having to work it all, because I won’t be able to; and the plots will bring us money, if I can get that land.’ He hoped very much that the agreement from the bank would be enough.
He thinks of his father’s memories that he reads at night to help himself sleep. To bring some sound into the stillness. How it is difficult and slow to understand sometimes; how the dictionary does not have the words he doesn’t know; how he must make bridges of meaning, here and there. As if he were walking on stones down a river. He prefers to call them memories, because memoirs sounds too grand, too fake.
Mopping his brow with the rolled-up sleeve of his shirt he thinks of the building land and how his father used to work for the bank he’s borrowed from, though the bank has globalized now. How, from reading his father’s memories, he is beginning to understand the reasons why he gave it all up — this good career — to bring his family here, to bring them up on the land. It’s unnaturally quiet up here, in this sun. Things are exhausted.
A story he read some nights ago comes back to him, strange against the heat now, crystalline in its difference. Its difference to everything else in his mind; clear images standing out, like a photograph in a white room.
__ the Angel
He knew the place, even today, from visits to his father’s family years ago, where the water goes under what used to be a beautiful low stone bridge before it was rebuilt for no apparent reason. On the high side of the bridge, upstream, there is a constantly still pool, hollowed into the deep shale. The waterfall is usually quiet, unless there has been a great deal of rain washing from the fields, into the river, swelling the water. It falls only eight foot or so, into the pool. The other side of the bridge the water bubbles away over shallow, broken rock.
His father had been with the other children at Ysgol Sul, the Sunday School, in a small room by the chapel. It had a blackboard and a brand new gas heater which gave off a thin hiss the very sound of which, ever since, would be enough to clothe his father with the illusion of warmth. It was a very hard January — the seasons then were more severe, or else his father’s memory had sharpened them. They wore shorts then, too, of course. His father was one of the oldest children there.
Tommi Falch came in late, a boy of six who said he’d seen an angel in the waterfalclass="underline" ‘welais angel yn yr rhaeadr.’ He said it like a boy coming on in a school play. Whenever Tommi spoke, his father remembers, it seemed he had rehearsed, which gave him a gladness, as Gareth imagined, reading the memories, to be like those tragic children in films who delivered sentimental lines with crushing but accidental poignancy. He said ‘I’ve seen an angel in the waterfall.’