Touch by Graham Mort

of a beech bole, snowing dust over his boots. His hands guiding the timber through. Each season, each year’s ring of grain bisected by steel. Today he saw the first celandines huddled in the hedgerow, their bright stamp of gold putting a seal on things.
    Three more ewes to lamb and he’ll be through. All that newness. The first time he’s lambed alone. Last year the children had been home to help. Returning to their teenage roles. Now he makes up his own sandwich and thermos of coffee. Even with his hand inside the ewe, that hot tunnel of slime and blood, tugging at the lamb’s tucked-in hooves, he wondered why he was still alive. What use was he to anyone? What use to the life that was in him? It ran on, obeying its own time; it couldn’t be rushed. But there he was again, joining things up that weren’t really joined. Though, in a way, everything was. Everything came together in the end. Everything meant something, though you couldn’t often say what or why. That was the thing. You could hardly ever say why.
    Daniel knuckles his eyes. He licks salt from his palm. Sunlight glitters on a flaw in the window glass. A spider is tying the clothes rack to the door. He has to squint to see its tightrope of silk. And now the kitchen clock is chiming, cracking open another hour, another day. Whatever you fancy, love . The pillow’s drift of linen making her hair almost invisible. Like that spider web glistening and disappearing. Suddenly, everything is hard to see.
    Daniel gets up to put his plate in the sink. He sweeps his hand across the crumbs on the table, sticks the cellophane cover back over the jam jar and fumbles the elastic band over it. When he replaces it in the pantry he sees her rows of preserves. Damson, Plum, Strawberry, Greengage, Raspberry . Then bitter orange marmalade and a line of pickles and conserves neatly labelled in her handwriting. He remembers what it was like to eat the last loaf she had made before she died. The last loaf from the freezer. Thawing it, knowing she’d never make another. It was as if he was eating her . Her body and blood. The bread had blessed and choked him.
    The dogs are barking, yelping at the length of their chains. Maybe they’ve caught scent of the fox that’s been creeping around since lambing started. He hadn’t had the heart to take a gun to it. Not yet at any rate. Wasn’t there room enough for every creature? Every creature in its place. People could make room. Let him do his job properly that was all. Let the fox take its chance. He didn’t seem to have the heart for killing anymore. But that was wrong and he knew it. You couldn’t go against nature for long without making a mess of things.
    It’s the postman’s van the dogs have seen, toiling up the dips and curves of the track, which needs another load of quarry bottoms after last April’s rain. It’d felt too much at the time. Too much like going on regardless. So he’d left it for another year. Annie had died in early December. And at home, not in the hospice. He was glad of that. He’d got her home and hadn’t been too proud to ask for help like his own father would’ve been. Like his own father was when his mother had pressed a hand to her head and gone on working at the washtub, trying not to heed the pain. When she went raving that winter in ’61 they’d tied her to an armchair with sheets and lashed it to the trailer. Then they’d towed her over snowdrifts to the doctor. She hadn’t lasted long after that and neither had his father, dropping dead in the shippen with the feed pails in his hands. Annie and he had moved from their rented cottage to the farmhouse. Starting out for themselves.
    That had been a time of hope. Hope mixed with the grey suds of fatigue. That few months before Peter was born seemed like the happiest of all now. But maybe that was just the way things were with hindsight. Looking