What the Peat Keeps

I did not sleep again after the boot. I sat in the Land Rover with the heater running until the windscreen went grey, and I told myself, in the flat voice I use for site reports, that a child's wellington in a drainage trench meant nothing. The fens are full of lost things. Peat gives them back. A boot rises because it traps air and the water finds it and floats it up, that is all, that is simple buoyancy, and I had pulled stranger objects out of wet ground in eleven years of doing this. A bicycle. A church door. Half a horse. I did not pull the boot out of the dip well. I left it floating there and I drove back to the Drowned Lamb and I waited for Yusuf to come down with his instruments, because Yusuf measures things, and a man measuring things beside me is the closest I have ever come to feeling safe.

He arrived at eight with his case of loggers and his thermos and his coat zipped to the chin, because Yusuf is always cold, and he looked at my face and did not ask. He has a sister he does not talk about either. We are good colleagues that way. We let each other keep our locked rooms.

"Show me your numbers," he said, "and then show me where you slept, because you look like you didn't."

I showed him the numbers first.

We walked the field edge in the early light, the two of us in waders, the willows on the ditch bank bare and black and dripping, and the field lay there the wrong colour. Forty acres that should have been November brown, beaten flat by frost, and instead it held that low wet green, the green of a thing that has not been told the year is dying. I had written unseasonal sward retention, query waterlogging, query thermal in my notebook on the first day, in the same hand I use for everything, and I had underlined nothing, because underlining is for people who are frightened.

Yusuf set the first logger by the sluice and read it and frowned and tapped it and read it again.

"Your test drain ran how long?" he said.

"Nine hours. Low setting. I switched it off at first light."

"And the table was where, before you started."

"Minus forty centimetres."

He showed me the screen. He did not say anything for a moment, which from Yusuf is a shout. The water table under the Long Field stood at minus one hundred and ten. It had dropped seventy centimetres. In one night of one four-inch pump on a low setting it had dropped the better part of a metre, in peat, which holds water like a sponge holds water, which gives it up slowly and grudgingly and never like this, and the rain had come in the night besides, and by every law I have ever trusted the table should barely have moved, should if anything have climbed back toward the surface, and instead the ground had drunk itself dry from below.

The cold reached my chest before the thought did. My breath went short and high and I made it go slow, four in, hold, four out, the way the woman at the clinic taught me when I was nineteen and could not get into a lift, and Yusuf watched the screen and not me, and said, in his measured way, "That is not possible."

"No," I said.

"Pump's off now."

"Off since first light."

"It rained."

"Eleven mil."

"Then it cannot be down," he said. "A pump that size against ground this wet, with rain on it. It cannot be down seventy. It cannot be down seven." He crouched and put his hand flat on the green turf the way you would put a hand on the flank of an animal to feel it breathe, and I wanted to tell him not to, and I did not know why, and I said nothing. He stood and wiped his palm on his coat though his palm was clean. "Soil temperature," he said. "Get me soil temperature. Something is wrong with the heat budget. Decomposition, maybe. A peat fire underground, smouldering, that can drop a table, that can. It happens."

"Peat doesn't decompose here," I said.

He looked at me.

I had not meant to say it. It came out flat and certain, in the report voice, and I did not have a citation for it, only the feel of the ground when the spade went in, the way it closed over the blade and held it, the way nothing in it smelled of rot. Wet peat preserves. That is its whole nature. It is acid and airless and cold and it does not let things break down, it keeps them, a boot, a church door, half a horse, a bog body the museums come for with their tags and their tents, two thousand years old and the eyelashes still on it. Peat does not let things rot. The thought arrived whole and I did not like the shape of it, so I wrote soil temp, query oxidation in my notebook and underlined nothing.

The locals would not come onto the field.

It is the kind of thing that sounds like colour afterward, and it was not. We needed a third pair of hands to run the level survey, someone to hold the staff while I read it, and I had put the word about the village, and the word had gone quiet wherever it landed, and in the morning two men from the village came down to the gate in their work coats, brothers, the Pallants, and they stood at the gate and would not come through it. They held the staff for us over the fence where the ground was hard. When the survey took us out toward the middle, where it was soft and green and glistening, the older one set the staff down in the grass on his side of the ditch and said, not unkindly, "We'll not go on her this morning."

"On it," I said.

"That's right," he said, and looked at the field, and looked away from it the way you look away from someone undressing, quick, ashamed, and the two of them walked back up the drove with their hands in their pockets and did not once turn round, and I stood in the middle of forty wet acres with Yusuf and the dropping water and understood that we were the only living things who would set foot there.

We worked till noon. The readings got worse. Every dip well I had sunk read lower than the last, the front of the drop moving across the field like a tide going out, and Yusuf stopped saying it was not possible and started just writing it down, which frightened me more, because a man stops arguing with a number when he has begun to believe it.

It was at the willow ditch that the bank went.

I had walked the line to check the ditch flow, the slow brown crawl of it under the willows, and I had my back to the field and my eyes on the water, reading the surface for the boil that tells you where a drain comes in, and behind me the green ground made a sound. Not loud. A long wet sigh, the sound a wellington makes coming out of mud, the sound the grain made, and I turned and the bank under the nearest willow had slumped, a clean slice of it slid down into the ditch, the peat shearing away in a wet black wedge the size of a door, and in the raw face it left, in the cut, something was sticking out.

The fear came first, up the backs of my legs, into my stomach, before I had named the thing. Then my breath stopped on its own, held high in my chest, my body deciding for me. Then the slower part of me, the part that reads staffs and signs reports, told me what I was looking at, and I did not want to know it.

A hand.

A human hand, out of the cut peat, at the height of my knee, the wrist still buried, the fingers up. Pale. Not pale like death, I have seen the dead, the dead go waxy and grey and slack. This hand was pale like a hand that has been in cold water, the nails clean and whole, the knuckles soft, the fingers slightly curled inward the way a sleeping person's hand curls, easy, half open, as if it had let something go a moment before, or was waiting to be given something. There was peat under the nails. The skin was unbroken. It was, and I knew it the way I had known about the rot, perfectly preserved, kept, intact, not a bone, not a relic, a hand the museums would weep over, two thousand years old or two, no way to tell, because down here time does not do to flesh what it does everywhere else.

Yusuf came up beside me. I heard him stop. I heard him breathe out through his nose, careful, the breath of a man holding very still.

"Bog body," he said, and his voice was steady and I loved him for it. "It's a bog body, Ren. They turn them up all the time out here. The works disturbed it. We log it, we fence it, we call the county archaeologist. That's all this is." He had his phone out. He was already photographing it, the flash going pale against the pale hand, doing the procedure, and procedure is a rope you can hold. "We don't touch it. We record the position and we call it in."

"They bury shallow here," I heard myself say.

"What?"

"In the churchyard." Sefton had told me my first afternoon, in the Lamb, generous with the drink, his ruined kind eyes wet, telling me a local thing the way men tell outsiders local things, to seem warm, to seem open, to give you a small true thing so you do not look for the large hidden one. Ground's too wet for proper graves, see. Coffin goes in deep, coffin comes up. Floats. We've had them surface in a flood, lid and all, the whole box riding up out of the plot like a boat. So we bury shallow and we weight them. Slab on the lid. Field stones, big ones. Hold them down. He had laughed when he said it and the laugh had not reached his eyes. You learn to keep things down, living out here. "They bury them shallow and put stones on the coffins so they don't float up. Everyone in the village knows it. It's just how it's done."

"Ren, that's not relevant to a two thousand year old body."

"I know," I said, and I did not know why I had said it, only that the two facts had reached toward each other in the dark of me, the floating coffins and the shallow stones and the kept hand reaching up out of the cut, and some part of me older than the engineer had understood that they were the same fact, that this whole black country was built on the one principle, that the ground here gives things back and you spend your whole life weighting them down.

We stood and looked at the hand. The ditch water crawled. A willow let go a drop onto the back of my neck and I did not flinch, because I could not move, because all of me was watching the soft pale fingers in the cut and counting, four in, hold, four out, slow, slow, and the field was very quiet, and into that quiet, while we stood there not touching it, not breathing, the fingers closed.

Not all at once. The way a hand shuts when the sleeper in the bed beside you takes hold of yours in the dark, slow and certain and without waking, the curl going to a grip, the soft fingers folding down into a fist around nothing, around the cold air, around the place where a hand to hold would be, and the small sound the wet skin made as it moved was the worst sound I have ever heard, and Yusuf's phone hit the bank, and somewhere out across the green forty acres, low, patient, and very near, something breathed in.