The Calves are Leaving The Farm - by Ben Blackwell
As I quietly packed the last of my clothes into the car, Mia peeked through the flat window. I don’t know whether she regretted last night’s argument, but she did not say goodbye. No matter, our rent was covered until the end of the month and she had paid the deposit. Not that I could’ve paid next month’s rent anyways. I finally got my P45 confirmation this week.
The grey storeys crowding me fell away to the lush countryside. My father was still out in the fields. The front was closed so I tried the back door. Locked. I couldn’t be bothered to scour for my father so I waited. I was fed up long before the yapping of the dog, below the curve of the hill, was audible. She was presumably with my father. Once in sight, the dog bounded toward me, jumping, and pushing me against the back door. I tried to hold her back. I was wearing a new pair of jeans but it was no use: they were pawed in mud. The low sun behind my father blinded him from me but I could hear the large key for the cowshed on a chain rattling against his chest.
My father let me in. He still spoke with the same slow, thick accent I had tried so hard to shed from my own voice. He still brought up stories from when I was “a little babber”. He still muttered and slurred when his mouth spoke but his mind was preoccupied with other thoughts. We stood by the sofa.
“Been all good then? Living out in the city?”
My father was scrunching up his flat cap.
“Good, thanks. Do you mind if I stay a few nights? I’ve got a break from work and I wanted to see you.”
My father nodded to show that was okay. My face flushed.
“How’s things here?” I asked.
“You know how it is, lad. Same old, same old.” He scratched his unkempt bristles.
My old room was just as I had left it, with posters slanted on the wall, held up with blu-tack older than the dog. That night the racket of the cows and crickets and birds kept me up. I much preferred the blended cough of cars.
My father’s boots were gone by the time I went downstairs to make breakfast. I spent the day watching Netflix. I also microwaved a leftover meal. He spent the day opening the chicken coop, mending a fence, counting the cows, moving them from one field to another, picking up any eggs from the chickens, loading a truck with some of the cows, refilling the trough with water and talking to his favourite bull, Leroy. I asked him how his day was. All he had to say was: “It were alright, me lad.” I carried on watching my show. It was dark outside.
I knew I should’ve either started looking for new jobs in the city and cheap residences, or at least continue the poetry collection I had been writing over the past few months. Saw a woman on the telly say she’d made a decent wedge from self-publishing. All I needed for that was my laptop. The collection still wasn’t right though. I mellowed in front of the TV. Sometimes I left the TV off so it became a black mirror. For weeks a dazed silhouette clad permanently in pyjamas glanced back at me. My father worked outside. We did not see each other except by accident. We repeated the same conversations often enough I could completely ignore them and say the right thing every time.
My father leaned in the doorway to the living room. “Up to much today?”
I dug out another lump from the ice-cream tub and shook my head.
“How come you’ve decided to come back here after so long then? Your work would’ve wanted you back by now.”
“Missed home.” I said.
My father sighed. He knew I was lying. The pained wrinkles around his eyes gave it away. “Well, you’ve certainly been home for a while. Why don’t you give us a hand tomorrow?”
“I guess so.” I put down the spoon.
The first day was hard – I wasn’t used to having to be awake before the sun even began planning to rise. The second day was a bit easier. The third day was the hardest because I’d spent the previous night watching Netflix until half-three. The fourth and fifth day merged into one. My father gave me the weekend off but spent it busying himself with some minor jobs on the farm. The second week came and went. So did the third and fourth. My tasks were largely the same but interspersed with drops of difference: fixing the chicken mesh, taking the dog for walks, installing a new trough. That was the first month working on the farm.
During the next few months, my father granted me greater responsibilities of moving the cows from field to field and counting their numbers every morning and night. My father retained the honour of opening the cowshed every morning with his key. It was during these few months when I began to anticipate the crisp taste of the morning fog, to ponder over the clouds that were bright pink in the evenings, to contemplate the quiet moments when it was just you overseeing the cows. It was nearing the end of winter and many of the herd were swollen with babies.
My father called in a vet because of his advancing age and my complete inexperience in this aspect. For the first two births, the amount of blood was making me slightly faint but my father was grinning all the way through.
“Not to worry, lad. When you were a little babber, you were just the same.”
I don’t think I ever saw him as happy since I’d been home. After the vet left, my father stopped me before we went inside for the night. He fumbled around in his pocket before clasping the cool metal into my hand. I knew what it was before I unclenched my fist: another key for the cowshed, a copy of the one he kept on a chain near his heart. My father winked, then continued walking home without a word. The next day I opened the cowshed for the first time.
I still hadn’t touched my poetry collection since I had returned, but then again, did I need to? Not when the farming life shone the sublime onto me more than any number of hours melting in front of a laptop near a smoggy window in the city. This lifestyle continued for many months, but the most vocal among us was the dog.
On the one-year anniversary of me arriving home, my father was crying. Some of the calves were being loaded onto a truck headed to another farm, to eat and grow until they would be sold to the slaughterhouse. Fat tears flooded down his wrinkles. He didn’t want me to see him weep so I pretended I never saw. He preferred it that way.
***
After that he never cried any other time he sold the calves. I only found out why when dementia began chipping away at my father’s mind. In the nursing home my father was surprised every time I saw him, believing I had gone to the city and gone forever. Then my father forgot whatever I had said and thought I was his brother, who was thirty years in the grave. The strangest feeling is mourning someone whose body you can’t bury, because although their mind is diseased, it’s still surviving, flowing between different decades, people, locations. Flowing between shores I have no access to. I was taking the dog for a walk when the nursing home called me to say he died. I kept working the farm, the cold key rattling against my heart.
Written by Ben Blackwell
I am currently an undergraduate studying English and Creative Writing at the University of Exeter, being originally from Bath. As you can probably guess from my course, I spend a lot of my time reading and writing. I hope you enjoy my story.
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