Something It Wants More

I knelt over Yusuf's voice until the cold came in at my knees and took my legs, and his voice went on under the turf, patient and kind and not in pain, telling me it was quiet down here, telling me to stop, and I did not stop because I could not start. My hands lay flat on the still green ground and the warmth came up through them, his warmth, a man's body heat rising through a foot of peat as if the earth were only a blanket pulled up over a sleeper, and I knelt in that warmth and listened to my colleague being soothed, and understood that one of us had stopped running while I dug, and the one who stopped was the one it took.

I do not know how I got off the field. There is a gap again, the way there was a gap the night the face said my name, and the next thing I have is the cottage door under my shoulder and Yusuf's coat over the chair-back where he had left it, and I stood in the warm room holding his coat, which still held the shape of him, and did the sum I did not want to do. I had drained the field five days ago with a four-inch pump and my whole good faith, and the field had woken hungry and reached, and it had taken the man who came to help me, and there was nobody left now between me and the thing it was reaching for, which was me, which had always been me, which Edda had posted a letter to fetch.

I went to find Sefton because Sefton was the only person in Wend Hollow who had ever told me the truth, even drunk, even in pieces. The Lamb was not open and would not be, on a morning like that, but the side door gave when I leaned on it and he was at the bar in the dark with the pumps off and a bottle in front of him and no glass, drinking from the neck the way a man drinks who has stopped pretending, and he looked up at me in the grey light and saw what was on my face and his ruined eyes filled before I said a word.

"He's gone out, then," he said. "Your man. The cold one."

I had not said it. I had not said anything. The cold came up the backs of my arms, and then the thought behind it, that of course he knew, that they all knew, that there is a quality to a Wend Hollow morning after the field has taken one, when the whole village wakes into it and goes quietly about its day with one more empty chair and never says.

"Yes." It came out level and the levelness was a lie I could no longer afford and could not put down. "It folded over him in the field. I dug. I couldn't dig fast enough." I heard the old sentence come up out of me, the one I have carried since I was eight, and I let it. "I can never dig fast enough."

Sefton put the bottle down. He came round the bar slow, an old heavy man on bad knees, and he did not touch me, he stood in front of me with his streaming face and he told me the thing he had been holding behind eleven years of warden's duty and one shut word in a doorway, all of it, at last, because there was no longer any point on God's flat earth in not telling me.

"Annie's down there," he said. "My Annie. Eleven years. She walked out one November night same as your man, easy, in her nightdress, and I woke to the bed cold and the door open and I went out onto her and I dug, lass, I dug till my hands were meat the same as yours are now, and the ground took my digging the way it takes everything, and in the morning the field was flat and green and my wife was under it." He stopped. His breath went ragged and he mastered it the way I master mine, by counting, I saw his lips move on it. "And I'll tell you the thing the old ones won't, the thing Edda would shut me in a doorway for. She's not gone. That's the lie they let you have, that the wet takes them and the wet keeps nothing, drowned and done. They're not drowned. Some nights, when the wind's off the field and the pumps are stopped, I go out to the willow ditch and I lie down on the bank and I put my ear to the wet ground, and I can hear her." He was looking at me and through me, at eleven years of nights. "Breathing. My Annie. Down there in the dark, breathing, slow, in and out, the same as the night she walked out, not one breath less. Eleven years and she has not stopped. None of them stop. That's what the field is, water lady. It's not a grave. A grave lets you finish. This one keeps you going."

I stood in the dark pub and felt the last shelf I had give way. I had built the whole of my life on a thing I told myself about the grain bunker, that whatever else was true, Mattie had stopped. The inquest said suffocation and suffocation is quick, and a quick death is a small mercy, and the mercy was the one thing I could hold. He did not suffer long. I let go of his wrist and that was unforgivable but at least it was over for him fast. And now an old man crying behind his own bar was telling me the field does not let you finish, that it keeps you going, and the arithmetic ran itself before I could stop it, the way it always runs, and the answer was that Mattie had been awake under the grain and then awake under the field for twenty-eight years, six years old, crushed, breathing, not one breath less, the whole of my grown life, while I drove to other counties and drained other fields and told myself he had stopped.

"How do you make it stop," I said. The report voice was gone. I do not know what voice it was. "Sefton. There has to be a thing. You re-wet it and it sleeps but it keeps them. You said once it's pulling it doesn't stop till it's paid. Pay it what. Tell me the lever."

"There isn't one," he said. "You give it the one it's reaching for and it sleeps full and keeps them all and that's the bargain, that's the whole of it, there's no other lever, I'd have pulled it for Annie, don't you think I'd have pulled it, I'd have pulled anything."

"There is one." Edda's voice, dry, from the doorway, and neither of us had heard the door, on that floor that creaks under everyone but her. She stood small and upright in her good coat with her gloved hands folded and she looked at Sefton with a contempt that was almost gentle, the contempt of the strong for the weak they have carried a long time. "There has always been one. I would not have told her, because it is not a lever for the likes of us to pull, but you have wound the poor woman up to breaking, Sefton, so she may as well have it whole."

She came in. She did not sit. She never sits.

"The field keeps everything it takes," she said, to me, in the voice she would use to explain the parish rates. "That is its nature and its strength and, if you have the stomach to look at it, its one weakness, though no one in two hundred years has been able to make use of it. It hoards. It is a thing that has been alone under the weight of the world longer than there have been words, and it has learned that the only cure for being alone is to take, and to keep, and never to let go, so it takes the breathing and it holds them awake forever because the dead leave and the kept cannot." She let that sit. "It will not be turned aside from the one it is pulling for by water, or by prayer, or by grief, we have tried all three for two centuries and buried the trying in that book. It can be turned aside by one thing only. By being given something it wants more." Her dry eyes did not move off me. "And no one has ever known what that could be, dear, because it already has everything it has ever reached for. It keeps it all. There is nothing left to offer a thing that never lets go. So the crack in the bargain is a crack no one can fit a finger into, and the field gets its Hollis, and we keep it wet, and the parish goes on. That is why I did not trouble you with it. A door you cannot open is not a door."

She inclined her head, the way she had inclined it over the weighted grave, and said, almost kindly, "Go home, dear. There is nothing here for you to engineer. It wants you, and it will have you, and the only choice left to you is whether you spend your last nights running from a field or whether you make your peace, as we all have had to. I made mine years ago." And she turned and went, upright, the floor silent under her, and left me with Sefton and his bottle and a sentence turning over and over in me like a peg the ground will not keep down. Something it wants more. Something a thing that never lets go could want more than the one it is already pulling toward. I am an engineer. I find the variable. I had been handed the only crack in two hundred years of stone and told in the same breath that no one could fit a finger into it, and that is exactly the thing I have refused all my working life to accept about water, that there is a place it cannot be made to go.

I did not go home. I had no home to go to, not really, only a cottage a field's width from where my brother was not buried and where my brother was. I sat with Sefton until the grey went out of the windows and the dark came back, and this time we did not build a life out of small sentences, we sat in the ruin of his, and I let the variable turn, and somewhere in the long dark of it I stopped being a woman the field was hunting and became, again, the one thing I have ever reliably been, a person with a problem and a method, and the method said: you cannot solve a system you will not measure, and you have refused to measure the one reading that matters since you were eight years old. You have never once let yourself listen.

So I left the pub near midnight and I did not go to the cottage. I went out the back way, down the slope the whole parish tips, to the willow ditch at the edge of the Long Field, where Sefton went on the bad nights to hear his wife, and the field lay flat and faintly, wrongly green under no moon at all, glistening, awake, and I knelt on the wet bank the way he had told me, the way I had sworn since I was eight I would never do, put my face down to low ground and let the weight of the dark be over me. I lay down on the bank with the cold soaking up through my coat and I turned my head and I put my ear flat against the wet peat, against the breathing ground, and I listened.

And I heard them.

Not one. Not Annie alone, the way Sefton heard her, an old man straining for a single voice. All of them. The whole long field of them, two hundred years of empty beds and weighted graves, breathing, a vast slow tide of breath rising and falling under the turf in no rhythm and every rhythm, layered down and down into the deep peat, the recently taken near the top and under them the older and under them the older still, all the way down to a brown-ink Hollis from before the church learned to lean, and not one of them stopping, not one breath less in any of them, a field full of the kept drawing breath in the dark and letting it go and drawing it again because they have no choice, because the field will not let them finish, and I lay with my ear in the cold mud and the engineer in me took the reading at last, the one I had refused my whole life, and could not call it anything but what it was.

And then, close, closer than the others, just below me, just under the wet skin of the world where the warmth comes through, a small clear voice that I had wiped the mouth of, that I had watched go slack and parted with the soil at its corners, a six-year-old voice with two hundred years of patience in it, breathed up through the peat into my ear and said my name. Said it the way he used to say it through a bunker wall when we were small and hiding. And then, soft and glad and not afraid at all, he said he had heard me up there for days now, walking about, and he had been waiting so long, so long, longer than I could count even with all my counting, and would I please, please come and dig.