Read Online The Dig by Cynan Jones - Free Book Online

against the bath as it flexed and he took hold of the sharp top of the panel and bent it over and lifted it off. Knelt down like that in the big coat, the bulk and actions of the man looked bearlike.
    He stood the panel out of the way against a wall and with his face down smelled the dry piss and the uncleanliness around the toilet and the copperiness of the oldpipes. He had the kind of extra-awareness of when you see a commonplace thing from a different perspective and noticed the way the copper pipes had the strange eucalypt green on them that looked somehow stony.
    Just inside the space under the bath was a row of various pots and dishes filled with sharp-smelling raw detergent that he had put there to curtain any scent the police dogs might find and he moved them to one side. There was something almost comic in the way the big man had to be careful and delicate to do this, to not spill them.
    Then he lay on his shoulder in the aspect of some big mechanic and reached under the bathtub and brought out the sack from where it was tucked up the other side.
    He unwrapped the gun and looked at it and then he wrapped up the gun again. He put the sack down in the bath and with the awareness saw the dog hairs in the bath and the strange brown stain under the taps from the long time it had not been used.
    He put the bath panel back on and took the gun outside and went down to the boundary fence where the machinery was crashed and growing in amongst the trees and then he wrapped the gun in a second plastic sack and put it in amongst the machines as if it was just debris. Somewhere far off he could hear a woodpecker trat on a tree.
    Let them come now, he thought to himself. They can search the house.

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    For a moment sunlight had come tipping in through the slats of the barn again but it was gone now and the golden pool with it and Daniel traveled the length of the troughs with armfuls of hay as the ewes hefted round him to feed; and it was then, as he unfolded the hay, that he found her cloth.
    It was just a thing she had, like a comfort thing—a bright piece of pink patterned cloth that was variously a hair tie, a headscarf or bandana, or was worn about her neck to stop the dust and grime tracking down her collar. It was as much a thing of her as the Stanley knife she always carried for snipping the bale bindings or a hundred other purposes. It was a difference between them that she always carried a few specific things—her cloth, the uncomplicated Stanley knife, an old strapless wristwatch —to meet the simple repeated questions of their daily processes while he relied on brute strength, guesswork, or the availability of some thing he could make use of. He felt it important that there were solid differences between them, whether, as he knew, she was right in some things or not.
    They were haymaking and she was wearing the cloth as a headscarf against the beating heat inside the tractor cab.
    They were in the new field at the top which they had acquired that year and that had been historically part of the farm before his parents had sold it off. For a few yearsit had been grazed by a handful of sheep the hobby farmer put there, and on and off Welsh Cobs had come and gone, cropping the grass to a baize turf. But for a long while the field had been untended and had gone feral.
    Over the winter they took off some of the bramble that balled chaotically about the field, and tore up the sentinel blackthorn and gorse that advanced off the hedgerows, burning the cut stuff down into two or three impossibly small piles and there was a childlike enjoyment in the way the various thorn crackled and flamed so ferociously.
    Later, they took a scarifier over the grass to scrape out the dead, yellowed stuff and let the new growth come and they let the field become meadow.
    In the way things gather names, the field came to be called cae piws , the pink field, as cleared of its wild growth it burst into a display of red clover and