An old sow died in the sty, and it didn’t take long for the flies to find her. So I rang the knacker’s yard and the man answered laughing, saying that he only had to shoot a bull and he’d be with me in half an hour.
Sure enough, his wagon drove clattering into the yard, and his voice yelled from the driver’s side window like a drunken pirate. He grinned and hugged himself for the joy of the day’s rich novelty, then he turned and reversed to the pig sty door. He must have felt like he was off to a good start, so he jumped from the cab and hitched his trousers up with a flick of his thumbs in his belt-hoops like a line dancer.
I’d call him a Geordie, but that would be a coverall term to suggest that he’d come over the Pennines from the North East. Geordie’s a loaded expression, and if I get snippy about the dialectic differences between Wigtownshire and the Stewartry, I’m only a hypocrite for failing to draw a comparable line between Rothbury and Bishop Auckland. But “Howay man”, he said, and he asked for my name. I gave it to him, and he wrote a completely different word on the paperwork, still laughing. Then he said how much he hated doing pigs “because they hanna handles”. I’ve pulled dead pigs before and I know what he means. There’s no good grip, and there’s always more weight than you’d like. So you heave and haul, and your hands cramp because they’re slipping towards the narrow end at the knee or the nose or the neck.
His wagon fell open at the back. The door came down and the stink started rolling. There was the bull he’d mentioned; a red and white simmental with a bloody sgurr. The tongue had slopped from the mouth and folded on the floor as if the fallen beast was trying to lick the place clean. A dozen dairy calves lay dead beside it, and the wagon must have been on a round of hill farms too, because there were some blackie sheep skulls at the back. Hill sheep die sporadically throughout the year, but there’s rarely a rush to gather each one as it comes. So they lie at the gateways and the backs of the sheds until there’s enough to warrant a load, by which time the badgers and kites have done most of the work anyway. I asked him how he could bear to work in the shadow of such a stench and he laughed, saying “I canna smell it, like”. A dozen Magic Tree air fresheners hung from the rear view mirror inside the cab, and the floor was a papery drift of fag-ends; the sense of smell had clearly been scorched out of his head. He kept his piece on the dashboard with the clingfilm open as if he was challenging botulism to do its worst.
For ten minutes, he leant with one arm on the wagon and told me a story I couldn’t understand. I smiled and nodded as he smoked his way along a chain of Regal Signatures; the kind of fag that makes a doctor weep. Then he was all action, clipping a wire rope around the sow’s back and under her armpits. She was a big animal, and as he rolled her over, the veins stood out on his forehead and hers. Then he stood back and pressed a button to start the winch pulling. The corpse lurched forward and sideways, and even when you’re not doing this by hand, it’s hard to balance the hidden weights of a pig. She twisted as she came, and for a moment it seemed like the doorframe was coming with her. The knacker man laughed and stopped to readjust the cable, but it slipped again and he stopped and laughed in frustration. Soon she was at the bottom of the ramp, and I had to lift her head onto the aluminium sheeting so that she’d slide up nice and easy. A stain of something wet had left a smudge from the sty to the ramp’s bottom.
Farmers know I’m not a farmer. Not really. And on this occasion, the knacker man seemed to guess that I’m in more than one line of work. “No offence like” he said, “But are you something arty-farty?” I laughed and said “Yes, I’m a writer”.
He smiled in delight, saying “Howay man”, and “Ganna write a story about us?”
First published on Bog Myrtle & Peat (www.gallowayfarm.blog) 24.08.23
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