The younger boy loved the older boy and would do it because of the way the older boy had said so quietly and straight that it had to be done and he knew that the older boy felt very sad inside, perhaps sadder than him.
‘It might not die properly,’ said the older boy. ‘I’ll try and not hurt it and just do it quick.’ It made the younger boy feel sick when he knew he didn’t have to kill the rabbit.
The older boy picked up one or two stones and they didn’t feel right and then he found one which sat in his hand and thought it would be okay. The stone was warm and flat in the older boy’s hand.
He always told the younger boy to do the things he didn’t want to but this time he didn’t; so the younger boy knew it was a very big thing they were doing.
The rabbit was twisted and all the wrong shape since trying to move and the boy knelt down close by it. He didn’t want to touch the rabbit with his hands.
‘Don’t touch it with your hands,’ he said, ‘because it might be poisoned and we can’t wash our hands.’ He wanted to touch the rabbit with his hands so he could calm it so it could die gently.
He’d heard about this disease; how his mother’s brothers when they were younger would have to go out around the farmland and would come back with bags full of rabbits that they had shot. They had to burn them. And he knew that the disease still happened, but not so bad.
He put his foot on the rabbit’s shoulder to hold it down where he thought he should hit it on the neck and the rabbit’s deep and sad eye opened at him and was deep and very beautiful. And the boy didn’t show anything but inside he asked the rabbit if it was alright to do this and the rabbit’s eye just half-closed in defeat, very slowly.
He hit the rabbit with the edge of the stone. He hit it as hard as he thought but he couldn’t bring himself to want to hurt the rabbit, which was necessary, so the rabbit jerked under his foot and its back legs stretched and kicked. He hit it again in the neck where he had hit it before and there was a lot of muscle there and now the mouth was open and the tiny teeth showed, and the eye looked at him black and flashing with fear. Then he knew he had to hurt the rabbit and in him was the horrible slow panic of knowing something like this. He put the edge of the stone hard into the neck and just pushed and turned and tried to crush. He wanted the rabbit to die very much now and there was a click and the eye flashed and he knew it was done. The tiny mouth was gritted with strain and the teeth looked very sharp and white.
The younger boy was holding the big rock in both his hands up by his cheek and when he saw from his brother’s face that it was done he dropped it away and it landed on the dry ground with a deep thud.
They didn’t feel good about the rabbit dying but it was better. They took some old concrete from around the dry wall and took it over to the rabbit. When they went back to the rabbit it looked quiet and peaceful. The younger boy felt sorry for his brother and looked at him to see if he was okay and he was. The older boy told him about how another thing might take the rabbit and then take the poison; so they covered it up with the pads of concrete.
The younger boy put the concrete over the rabbit’s head and wanted to walk away very quickly because his hand, for a moment, had brushed the fur; the older boy put the cement down on the rest of the rabbit and it wouldn’t balance so he turned it over and rested it down. When he rested it down, the back leg moved.
When they walked away he did not tell the younger boy that the back leg had moved and told himself a lot that things moved after they were dead for a while because the nerves jumped. He’d seen his father skin an eel and even without a head it had jumped and twitched. He wished that he knew he’d killed the rabbit. He did not tell the younger boy that the back leg had moved because he knew that this knowing — the rabbit not dead perhaps and dying still under the heavy concrete — was only his; and he thought: ‘if I had touched it with my hands I would have known for sure.’ He knew then that people must be very strong.
The breeze was up a little and it was nice because it had been dry for so long, and still; and the two boys left the track and walked quickly over the low, green field, and the younger boy rubbed his hand where it had touched the rabbit’s fur.
Chapter Five the Tractor Wheel
Kate was not from here and she didn’t grow up to be on a farm. When, years later, they found that Gareth had chlamydia — had caught it from the sheep — and this was why she’d lost the babies, Gareth was relieved. It fell on him. It was not a failure of her body and he hoped that Kate would not blame herself then. But it remained impossible for her to accept that some things die. After losing the babies, she felt every death.
She was checking the cows in the barn and she knew then that one had lost its calf and she was very angry with Gareth for not telling her. He had cleared up the bloodied hay but she knew there was a cow who should have a calf that did not have a calf after counting twice, after seeing the cow empty. She heard Dylan go off in the car.
You could hear cows placidly flicking flies away with their tails. The old wheel of the tractor was in the barn and she could almost feel the hard treads in her back. The sun was coming down on the corrugated barn roof and it was very hot inside, like in a greenhouse, and outside the sparrows were crazy loud, picking and fighting at the hay seed and dust-bathing fatly. But she was just very angry.
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Gareth thought of her now. He doubled back up a dry track that was wide enough to take a tractor and had deep track marks so it was awkward to walk with his painful ankle. The sun had really come up now.
‘I must never forget how perfectly built she is,’ he thought loudly to himself. ‘She is changing now, but it does not matter.’ He’d meant simply to search the top fields, to rule them out, hoping for the vet to come then, and then return on the quad bike to the house; but he was walking, and it was as if he needed to walk.
He feels himself open his shoulders and hold his head up against the irritations of the missing cow, and the violence of the rabbit; he feels his body brace itself and challenge these things. ‘It does not matter, she will change,’ he thinks. And he knows that he must help her feel this for her to be well again. His body still demands hers, the familiarity of the map of her. The places of her that give softly when he holds her; that have changed and grown and shifted through the years, as if lilting with the changes of his own flesh, to be in tune still; as if he was the hard land and she the water that would always know it, however it changed. The things of her still fascinate him. It is true, he knows, that his man’s chemistry will always want the tight trap of younger women, or the exoticness of a different skin — something other than he had; but he knew they would not have the smaller skills to satisfy him; would be over-aware, like strangers, be too full of thought to properly trick his body to the places he had reached with his wife. It is easy for him now to indulge his visual need for women — his son’s magazines, the television, the magazines he has shyly for himself — but he never believed that they would, any of them, feel as good to him as her. He cannot imagine his body against the body of another girl. They had grown to each other and she had only ever been with him so he thought it was like she was only his shape inside.
He thinks of her perfect feet — how for years after they’d met she’d still kick off her shoes at every opportunity, to be barefoot. When did she stop doing this, he thinks. He did not notice. It gives him a strange guilt.
He thinks of his daughter’s bare feet, and of the painted wellies she refuses to take off. He wonders how she will be, his daughter with strange green eyes from somewhere in their background, one or the other of them. Will she love like her mother? With belligerent decision. It scares him slightly. He knows his fear for her will grow as she gets older in a way it did not with his son, and he hopes he will not hurt her because of his fear for her.