The Long Sleep Has No Bottom

I went down onto the field the way you go down into water you already know is too deep, on purpose, with a rope.

That was the plan, and I will set the plan down first, because the plan is the last clean thing I had and it lasted about as long as plans last in that place. I had heard them the night before with my ear in the wet, all of them, two hundred years of held breath, and clearest of all Mattie, close, saying he had been waiting so long for me to come and dig, and a person who hears that does one of two things. She runs, and spends the rest of her life knowing she heard it. Or she goes down. I went to Sefton at the Lamb after closing and told him what I meant to do, and he wept and told me there was no digging a person out of her, that he had clawed the green over Annie until his nails came off and brought up nothing but more green, and I said I was not going to dig. I was going to go down. There is a difference and I needed him to hold the other end of it.

So at three in the morning I stood at the low corner of the Long Field with a length of climbing rope round my chest under the arms, the good kind, eleven millimetre, run back across the turf to the sluice chamber where Sefton sat in the brick with the bitter end made fast to the winding spindle and three turns of it round his forearm besides, and a head-torch, and the soil probe, and my notebook in my breast pocket because I am the kind of fool who brings a notebook to her own funeral. The plan was that I would walk out to the place Yusuf had lain down, where the turf had folded over him slow and even, and open a trench there with the probe and my hands at the soft seam the field makes when it has just taken someone, and reach down for whatever I could reach, and if the ground tried to keep me Sefton would feel three sharp tugs and haul, and the rope would not let the field have me the way it had had everyone else, who had all walked out alone with nothing tied to the living world behind them. I had a variable. I had a control. I had thirty metres of rope between me and the dark.

The rope is what the field went for first.

I had walked perhaps twenty yards out, the green sucking soft at my boots, the head-torch laying a yellow circle on grass that should have been November fawn and was instead that low even sweating green, when the ground under my left foot was not there. I have stepped into a hundred dip-well trenches in my life. I know the lurch of a foot going into a cut, the quick clean drop and the jar of the bottom. This was not that. This was the field opening under me like a held breath let go, the turf parting along a seam I had not cut, and my leg went down past the knee into black wet peat that closed on it warm, and the feeling came first, the cold flood of it up the back, and my arms went out and found nothing, and then the other foot went, and then I was sitting in a trench that had not been there a second before, peat to my waist, and it was rising.

Not me sinking. It rising. The black coming up the sides of the cut and folding in over my thighs, my hips, the weight of it gentle and enormous and even, the exact even pressure of a thing large lying down on you, and I knew that pressure, I had met it at three o'clock on the first night with the duvet thrown off and the count in my mouth, except now it was not a dream weight I could turn my head out from under, it was forty acres of wet ground deciding, at last, to hold me. I got my hand to the rope at my chest and pulled and felt it run, felt Sefton take up the slack, and for one breath it bit and held me upright against the closing peat, and then the field did the thing I had not planned for, because how do you plan for it. The trench wall behind me folded over the rope. The peat came up over the line where it ran out across the turf and lay down on it the way it lay down on Yusuf, swallowed thirty metres of eleven-millimetre climbing rope into itself between one pull and the next, and the tension went out of my chest, and out at the sluice I heard, thin across the dark, Sefton shouting my name into a rope that no longer went anywhere, hauling on a line that came up dripping and black and ended, I would learn, in nothing, frayed clean, gone into the ground with the rest of what the field has taken and kept.

The control was gone. The variable was gone. I was up to my chest in the Long Field in the dark with the weight coming on, and there was no one holding the other end of me, and the engineer, who has stood in me my whole life and read the gauge while the eight-year-old screamed, opened her mouth to say a number, and the number would not come.

In for four. I had nothing to count with. The peat was at my collarbones, warm, patient, and when I made my ribs lift against it they lifted less than the time before, and less again, not because I had stopped trying but because the ground had begun to breathe me. That is the only way I can set it down. It had matched me, the way the probe had cycled to my count in the cab, the way the thing at three o'clock had pressed in time with my chest, and now it was leading, a long slow draw and a long slow give, in, and out, slower than I would ever choose, and my body, which has followed a count its whole life because a count is calmer than fear, followed this one, because it was calmer than anything. It was the calmest thing I have ever felt. It asked nothing of me but to stop fighting the pace of it, and my lungs, traitor, tired, thirty-six years tired, wanted to.

And then I heard them.

It is not a sound that comes through the air. It comes through the ground into the bones of you, into the jaw and the back teeth and the long bones of the arms, the way you hear the sea through a hull. Breathing. Not one. Not Yusuf alone under the place he lay down, not Annie alone under eleven years of green. All of them. The whole field breathing at once, in that same slow enormous rhythm the peat had taught my chest, two hundred years of the taken drawing the air down and giving it back, down and back, a sound with no edges to it, vast and soft and close, the field full to the willows with the breathing of everything it had ever kept, and not one of them, not one, broke the rhythm. Nobody coughed. Nobody gasped. Nobody, in all that breathing, ever once stopped. I had asked the question my whole life, the question every person asks at three in the morning with the duvet kicked off, when the air is gone and the weight is on you, do you finally stop, does it end, is there a bottom to it. I had my ear in the ground at last and the answer came up through my teeth and it was the worst answer there has ever been. The long sleep has no bottom. They were all still breathing. They had been breathing for two hundred years. The stopping never comes.

"Ren."

Close. Right at my left ear, where the peat was warm against my jaw, a small clear voice with no soil in it at all, clean as a level read off a staff, the voice I have not heard out loud in twenty-eight years and have heard every night since.

"Ren. You came. I knew you'd come and dig."

I could not turn my head. I tried and the weight held it. But I could see, in the yellow of the head-torch that had fallen and lay throwing its circle sideways across the trench, a hand come up out of the black peat a foot from my face. A small hand. Six years old. The fingers I had held while the grain ran through them, pale and whole and not rotted, not a day rotted, reaching up out of the ground toward me with the soil sliding off the back of it, and past it, where the torchlight should have shown only the black wall of the cut, there was a way up. I want to set this down exactly because I have never seen anything more beautiful and it was a lie and I knew both at once and it did not matter. The trench wall above his hand was not black. It opened. There was a softness in it, a paling, a slope of warm dry ground going gently up and out toward a grey that was not the grey of the night sky but the grey of a morning, an easy morning, the slope a tired person could walk up without effort, and I understood that all I had to do was take the hand and stop pulling against the weight and the weight would carry me, would lift me, that the field was not holding me down at all but holding me, that I had had it backward my whole life, that down was up here and the way out was to lie back into it.

"It stops hurting," Mattie said. "When you stop. I didn't believe it either and then I stopped and it stopped hurting and I just had to wait for you. Lie down, Ren. Lie down with me. You're so tired. You've been so tired your whole life." The hand turned, palm up, the way a child holds a hand up to be taken across a road. "We can be together. You won't have to count anymore. You won't have to hold anything up. Nobody can ask you to dig fast enough ever again. It's quiet. Lie down."

I have carried a stone in my chest since I was eight, the exact weight of a wrist going loose in my grip, the weight of being eight and not strong enough and feeling the strength I did not have run out through my fingers with the grain, and I have carried it through every drained field and every untucked duvet and every count in the dark, and I have wanted, more than I have ever let myself know I wanted, to set it down. To stop holding it up. To not be the one who has to pull and pull against a weight that always wins. He was right. That was the unbearable part, kneeling buried to the collarbones in the dark. He was right about me. I was so tired. I had been tired since I was eight. And here was the hand, his hand, warm now, and the way up, and the morning, and the promise that the hurt would stop and the count would stop and I would never again stand over a hole digging while someone I loved went down through my fingers, because I would be down there with him, finally, the two of us, and the field would hold us both, and it would be quiet, and it would be over, and there would be no more weight to lift because I would be the weight, lain down.

My ribs lifted, and barely lifted, and I let them not lift all the way. The breath I had been fighting for went shorter on its own and I let it. In, slow, slower than four, slower than anything, matched to the breathing of two hundred years, and out, slower, the field drawing it gently out of me and not giving as much back, and I felt myself agreeing, the whole of me, the eight-year-old and the engineer and the tired thirty-six-year-old body all of them sighing yes together, yes, all right, yes, we will stop, we will lie down, we will take the hand, and the peat came up warm and soft over my throat to the line of my jaw, and his fingers were a hand's breadth from mine, open, waiting, warm, and I let my own hand drift toward them through the black to be taken, to be led up the soft grey slope, to set the stone down at last and stop.

And on the way to his hand my fingers passed through a fistful of loose peat, and the peat ran. It ran through my open fingers, cold and fine and shifting, exactly, exactly the way the grain had run through my open fingers twenty-eight years ago when I was eight and screaming and his wrist went loose in my grip and the weight came up from under and took him down and I felt my strength go out through my hands with the seed and I could not, could not, hold on.

And my hand, before the count, before the engineer, before any thought I could call mine, on its own, against everything, closed hard around Mattie's.