I grew up in sight of this field. I played here as a child on my way home from school, though usually on my own, because I was never that popular, for reasons I now understand. My impulse was to be alone, and by my sixteenth year I no longer played with the other schoolboys at all, not even football, not even in warm weather. Instead, I read books over there by the wall or under that tree. The field inclined from south to north so that in rainy times a pool gathered at the south end where in autumn migrating geese landed to rest. They cackled so much the field itself seemed alive. In summer, the ground softened under rain and felt like brown flesh with grass for skin, perfumed with all the flowers that found their way through the surface. In winter it was a hard field, not made of flesh at all, not made of anything except the hardness that stops your boot from sinking for ever into the snow, a hardness that says, Ground.

I took the shovel and heaved to the side the snow that had fallen on the partially dug hole, all under the disinterested gaze of the man who stood six metres away. He plucked another cigarette from a silver case, tapped it, and placed it between his lips, never took his eyes off me, his left hand snug in his pocket.

Hardly a day for momentous events, and anything written in the book of history about today would be erased by fat grey clouds that shed cold crystals everywhere and anywhere, on the pine trees, on the lights and spires of the town visible a mile away in the dim morning light. This was a day to hide things in. The gusty wind found every footprint and filled it, along with its direction, and our presence in the field would leave little impression and even less evidence. In fact, that November 25th offered nothing to the senses to distinguish it from any other winter day in earth’s rotation and the rotation of air through every pair of lungs or under every pair of wings. But it’s well known that all events have to occur in a day of some kind.

Although a baker by trade, today I was a digger. I shovelled for maybe twenty minutes and alternated with the pickaxe to loosen the hard clay. A good rhythm. The man went through three cigarettes. In no hurry, I scraped a thin film of snow with each swing and spread it wide in the air to give the illusion of volume and so keep myself busy longer. After I hit clay I did the same. The man made no move to correct my method, if he did notice anything. With each upward movement I took stock of my surroundings. A tractor with mud frozen on its wheels stood in the doorway of the barn, along with forks that hung from the beam, and the stable for the ponies that hadn’t been seen since the day before yesterday, when the soldiers first came to the town. Snow on the barn roof, on the fence that circled the barn, dropping off the branches in the rising wind.

I shovelled to keep warm, to keep my heart beating, yes, my heart beating. I repeated these words in time with my dig and swing: Ice and snow, wind. Ice and snow, wind. Stay alive. Stay alive.

We were in the middle of nowhere, we had a baby blizzard growing bigger, and, despite my attempts at delay, I was already a metre down into the hole.

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