The Long Dry by Cynan Jones Page A

bathing in the dust – like they do in the cow barn, so the dust lifts and catches the sunlight coming through the wooden slats, dancing up in gold spirals. The flies buzz and tick. With the day properly here now, the swallows are high in the sky. As he comes into the yard, the heat seeming to rise off it already, the lost flight of pigeons explode into the air and are gone, hard over the house.
    Kate is in the first field. He sees her pacing quickly at the gate, her head down and he can tell she is speaking to herself, to the ground, her hair tied off her face; and she iswalking too quickly. He sees the problem as she looks up and meets his eyes, the blood on her arm.
    ‘Where have you been?’ It bursts out. ‘The bloody cow has thrown its calf. I can’t get it. I can’t get it out.’ She keeps on talking, cursing at him and the cow but he is already going to the cow.
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    The heavy brown cow was lying awkwardly back up against the bank. He ran to the shed to get the ropes and wished he had the bike to make things faster and to not hurt his ankle more and he knew she would be angry at him for not bringing the bike.
    ‘Where the hell have you been. I thought you were coming straight back,’ she was saying. He had the ropes now and was running over to the cow, wincing at the pain in his ankle. She stopped at the gate and did not come with him to help and he did not know why and he kept thinking about the blood running down her arm and the time she cut herself in the shower. She was still shouting.
    The cow was a mess. The wet rod of the calf was half out, with one of its front legs twisted awkwardly still inside the cow. The calf seemed dead, but they often did and then they were alive when you got them out. He put his hand into the cow and tried to find the leg but it was all wrong and he knew the hoof had already cut the cow inside.
    He had his eyes open but he was staring nowhere, trying tovisualise from what he could feel, the shape of the calf inside the cow. Kate was still screaming at him from the gate and he was trying to think. ‘Where the bloody hell were you, you said you’d check the damn cows an hour ago so that’s why I didn’t check them. You should have bloody told me you weren’t going to check the cows.’ He looked briefly at her and she scared him; she was coming apart. He felt his patience snap in his stomach, the adrenaline of it go through him. ‘Just go,’ he shouted. ‘Christ. Just go.’
    The cow tried to lift herself as it sensed the things around her and he put his hand gently on the cow.
    ‘Easy, easy, easy,’ he was saying to her, his other arm on her haunch. ‘Easy, girl.’
    He brought the leg round and laid it along the calf’s body inside its mother but he couldn’t get it round enough to bring it out. He looked up again and Kate was gone from the gate but Emmy stood there scared and bravely watching.
    He took the pulling ropes and closed the noose around the one free leg then tried to fix the rest of the rope behind the other shoulder blade. The calf was limp and its tongue now was flopping from its mouth. He sat back and braced his feet and pulled on the ropes, trying to gauge his weight in time with the contractions of the cow. He missed the extra traction of his little finger. Sometimes, it’s the smallest things you lack. He could feel things give very slightly, a half inch won but brought back inside by the cow’s big body. Then it came all at once, and the long black calf came out with the speed and sound of liquid. It was dead. He smacked it a few times but he knew that it was dead. Bloodleaked thickly from the cow’s gaping uterus. She panted slowly with the shock of birth. From the mark they’d made on her back, he knew she carried twins. The other calf inside her might be already dead. Emmy was by him now, looking at the dead black calf. It looked to her like a patch of wet tarmac on a new road.
    ‘Mummy says she wasn’t strong enough to pull the calf out