Harvest Georgina Harding (the gingerbread man read aloud .TXT) 📖

the chair back and sat down and drank your tea, then slammed the mug on the table and pushed the chair back again, and went out to the barn and checked again the grain that you had already brought in, to reassure yourself that that grain at least, that you had brought in earlier from other fields, was all right, free of the fungus, that that grain would sell all right, get a good price; and your brother went with you because really, despite the differences, he wanted to help. So they did that. Then they went out later in the day and cut the headland of that last field, even though there was probably too much moisture in it. There was no point in doing any more. They packed up after that and went in, and because he still couldn’t rest, Richard suggested that after supper they might go out lamping.

What’s lamping? Kumiko said.

I’m not sure it’s your sort of thing, Jonathan said. He wasn’t sure it was his either, not any more. So why did he say he’d go? Old times’ sake. Richard’s momentum. Because rabbits were a pest and this was the best moment to get them. Because they were brothers and lamping was fun.

Going with them felt like a dare. She liked the feeling of going with the brothers, doing what they did, being the third, the girl in the men’s world. They waited until it was dark and then they went out. It was very black outside, no moon or stars. The farm was very quiet, out all alone in the countryside. It was one of those nights when the rest of the world didn’t seem to exist.

The night was dark, the cloud cover making it unusually warm. The scent of the tobacco plants drifted across the lawn. They were flowers for the blind, that you saw all the better when you closed your eyes. Claire heard the shots from the field. They must be getting a lot of rabbits. In all the time she had lived with them, husband and sons, she hadn’t come to understand why men so liked to kill things.

A strap tied over the roof of the Land Rover, through the open windows on either side. First Jonathan driving, then they would change places. His brother sitting on the roof held by the strap and shooting. The field naked, the rabbits exposed, which had lived and bred all summer hidden within the crop. Where the rabbits showed, like rocks strewn on the bare land, the Land Rover drove fast and directly towards them. The rocks moved. They moved fast but the Land Rover was fast, bumping over the stubble, skidding on the turns because of the slipperiness of the cut straw. They ran from its lights but at the same time they were caught in them. They kept to the beams as if the beams were tunnels from which they could not escape, and only now and then did one by sense or accident veer off out of the beam and into the safety of the darkness alongside it. The gun fired, reloaded, fired again. The rabbits fell. Some of them fell directly, simply folding or rolling over in the beam. Others were wounded, and the Land Rover slowed or diverged then from its path to follow the erratic animal for the gun to finish it off. Why had he said he would do this? It was Richard’s game, not his. So often he had found himself playing Richard’s game.

A slug of whisky from the hip flask they had brought out with them. A switching of roles. The man on the roof rapped on it when he was ready, and the driver drove. They shouted to one another through the window over the noise of the engine. Left. Straight ahead. Go for it. Left, left. Hold on tight while I turn. Yeah, that’s great. Get that one. Good shot. Jonathan shot well. Perhaps he shot better than Richard that night, or perhaps that was because Richard drove better, more evenly and matching his speed to that of the rabbits. They told Kumiko to count but she lost count after twenty. She seemed to enjoy it, shouting out too, holding on to the door beside her and to the metal frame of the cab, as the Land Rover lurched across the fields. They must have shot dozens of rabbits. A good night’s work. Passing the hip flask. Driving back, all three of them in the cab now, Kumiko in the middle seat and the brothers on either side. All three elated. But Richard driving slowly now, all settling back into their separate grown-up selves.

When they got to the yard the clouds had opened up and let through a slip of moonlight. Kumiko stayed out alone. She wanted to feel the night. Calm herself. See some stars. She had never done any kind of hunting before.

As the clouds broke further apart and moved away, she thought how they would begin to show, the bodies on the ground.

Richard was beside her. She didn’t know where he came from. I was just going to lock up, he said, then I saw you. I nearly locked you out.

Will you go and pick up the bodies tomorrow?

No, Richard said. Something will scavenge them. They’ll be gone soon enough.

She said she didn’t like thinking that.

It’s how things are, he said. Nature is hard. We used to have a word for things like that, Jonathan and me, ‘maumau’.

I know, she said. He told me once. (Only Jonathan had been talking about more than nature. He had been talking about men, what men do to men, what he himself had seen, what he could not erase.) But it’s funny, she said. We have a word in Japanese that sounds almost the same, ‘mā mā’, but it means something very ordinary, sort of OK. Nothing bad at all.

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