Clay by Melissa Harrison Page B

patch, canned tomatoes and beans from the garden and went to church every Sunday, but since his father had died she hardly spoke. In the evenings they sat together with the television on, but she often seemed to him to be looking somewhere past the screen.
    ‘ Czy znalazle ś ż ony? ’ she asked him quietly every few months, smoothing her apron down nervously and looking past him. ‘Have you found a wife?’
    At first he had thought that she wanted him to marry, was impatient for it; but as time went on he wasn’t so sure whether it was hope behind her question, or fear. And so he waited. The women he knew did not interest him, in any case.
    He had voted yes to Europe – they all had. It was a yes to cheap seeds, cheap fertiliser and new markets; why wouldn’t he? He filled out form after form about the farm and its yields, laboriously, his mother helping when she could. He took out a loan, modernised the dairy in the way the health officials said he must. He did everything they told him to.
    The nearby slaughterhouse was the first to go, unable to cope with the barrage of new regulations. Now Jozef had to send his beef calves away to be killed, and the meat was bought there too. He could no longer sell it in the village, and it was the same for all his neighbours. The market began to dwindle, but a new supermarket came.
    Then one of Jozef’s neighbours sold up and left for Kraków. Jozef borrowed more money, bought his land and planted wheat.
    But then his new dairy failed an inspection. Jozef got a fine, and couldn’t pay. The bank foreclosed. It was so quick; one day he was expanding, the next everything, everything , was gone. He could not understand what had happened.
    He remembered waiting helplessly in the kitchen for his youngest sister to come and collect his mother. She sat at the scarred old table, the same one he had laid his father on seventeen years before, turning a box of matches nervously over and over. When eventually she left she pressed the little blue box into his big hands and muttered a blessing, or it could have been a prayer.
    A big pork producer – Polish in name, but linked, so the village said, to America – moved in and bought Jozef’s land. When the first of the company men arrived to raze the old farm buildings, they found that the house, with its steeply pitched roof and weathered cedar shingles, had already burned almost to the ground.
     
    It was definitely a wolf; the second set of prints had confirmed it. TC thought hard about where it could be living and decided it must have a den somewhere in the woods where the playing fields met the railway line. There wasn’t anywhere else with enough cover, and besides, there were lots of squirrels on the common, and probably rats. He began to comb the woods for fur-filled droppings or the debris from fresh kills, though he knew the carcasses themselves would either be eaten or buried for later. He found more prints, but he did not search for the den, or for the animal itself; it was enough to know that it was there, the two of them inhabiting the same thickets and coverts, his passing perhaps regarded now and then by grave yellow eyes.
    He was up and out most mornings before Jamal or his mother were even awake, his tracking book in his backpack, yesterday’s mud still on the knees of his school trousers. Now, when he climbed his favourite tree and sat motionless, he often found himself picturing his father’s admiration as he told him what he had done. He would bring the wolf to him, somehow, or bring his father to the wolf. And there would be an understanding between the three of them, and it would make his father stay.
    When he left school each day the light was already draining from the sky, which bore down, those winter afternoons, like slate. Usually he would go to the common for a bit; sometimes he would go and sit by the railway embankment and watch the trains. The older kids often went to the newsagent or the chicken shop on the