She lifted her boots high through the muck and rotten ice, but the field still seemed set on swallowing her if it could. She held her spade overhead as the last thing that would be left above boggy water if it did.
Her toes froze through the rubber and two layers of dry woollen sock. As far down as her steps plunged, winter was still buried and bitter. It would be hard digging once she cleared away the mud.
But the years had taught her that she had to start early. Dig her holes while the ground was still solid and the cold would numb her blisters, so that she could fill them deep and firm before any tilling took place closer to the surface.
The man who rented the field had expressed amazement once at her hard arms, calloused hands, how strong she kept herself at her age. He’d flushed and coughed afterwards for being so forward, but had still asked- if she didn’t mind him being so forward- how she managed it.
She’d smiled, handed him his lemonade, and said it was mostly luck. A little clean living, her body keeping her as well as she did it. He’d swallowed it along with the chilly summer drink she always made up for him fresh.
It would be a sad day if she ever had to leave aside a hole for him. If it came to that, if he ever caught something up in his tractor or dug deeper than his grains needed, maybe she should just let him ask his questions. Pour him some lemonade out of season, and answer.
Maybe she should even let him go to the police, if that was what he wanted. What would they do? It wasn’t as if it was a crime, choosing the driest spot she’d found in a kilometre of bog and setting her spade to the ground. Its first plunge into the earth ground only against gravel. The second skipped against bone.
It wasn’t her fault the thaw kept forcing them up. When she hauled up the spade, the arm came with it, triple-jointed and hooked, at one of its elbows, into a claw blunted by years of being reburied.
The skulls were the worst. She didn’t know what they might have looked like with flesh, but as bone and bare jowl, they were a nightmare. Dozens of them leered at her from out of her nightmares for weeks, every year, after she chucked them back into their holes.
If he told the police, whoever they told wouldn’t stand for chucking those skulls back in their holes. They’d want to dig up the whole shebang, match bones to the sharp, threatening Vs of rib cages and marvel at legs so long and strong and stubborn in their joints she had to drag each, whole, to their burial, leaving heel-wide grooves in the mud.
They’d lay the skeletons whole across her field, which she would never rent again. But it wasn’t even about the money – they would have to pay her, wouldn’t they? It was a life, hers, she’d spent watching tractors pass back and forth across that field. It was about the first tooth she’d found as a little girl. She’d cut her finger on it and cried, and her grandmother had told her to keep it quiet, it was a secret, she didn’t want anyone else to hear, did she?
It was a nightmare and a creed and a habit, a little scar on her thumb and a little suspicion, maybe, that, if some bright-eyed diggers put all those skeletons back together, with scant mud for skin and wheat for tendons, they might resent just how many years she’d kept them buried.
