That year and the one before but we just carried on digging daddy and me. We knew that someday the rain’d stop, roots wouldn’t get washed away and everything would grow.

There were days I didn’t know if the wet in his eyes was tiredness, tears or just more of that long slow rain, whatever, the result was the same: I could see his backbones beginning to punch holes in his blue cotton coverall and recognise the wasting.

I got to be a good shot those years, shooting skinny rabbits dead amongst the slow snake grass greasy at my heels. Hoping to get to them before the dog did and not always making it. Snaring woodpigeons for squabs, bite sized chunks of dark meat to spit out the buckshot tinkling on clay grazed cracked plate. Squirrels too, I wasn’t proud anymore after I could feel my gut sucking nothing but air, they’ll tell you farmers don’t starve and they’re right but what you got to do to stop from starving ain’t nothing that anybody’ll tell you.

The cows was ok. but the milk was thin and already sold, we took some for the table, cracking runny eggs in with grey dead flour to make pancakes that tasted of rain and black burnt fat, I can taste ‘em now: hot and rubber like an old tyre baked in the sun streaked thru’ with rancid grease and still flat tasting for all of that. I was grateful tho’ that we had the flour and a few chickens that’d brave the rain to scratch a while then lay poor mans eggs. Time was we’d had double yolkers, big fat eggs the hens’d straddle for a day before they could drop they was so big.

The pig was gone, half eaten by us and the other half swapped for shotgun shells to keep food coming in. Daddy wasn’t much of a shot but was a dab hand at laying traps for rabbit, ducks and anything that could be said to set foot on our land and be considered fair game.

I tried for deer, stalking slow and sure, tryin’ for upwind. Soaked to the bone in jeans and an old gone soft sou’wester brought back from the seas by an uncle gone to the city to earn a crust. It no longer crinkled or held all the rain off but in shade it made me almost invisible and that was good enough. I sat for days watching rain trickle off leaves, form pools or soak into already sodden soil. Thinking of nothing, waiting, wondering occasionally only if and when the rain would stop. Then, hooves close by. A head peering above leaves, munching slowly at top leaves. Staring I was sure, straight at me. Waiting for a body shot. She moved closer, sniffing the air and I hoping the sou’wester didn’t stink of me, uncles, family. Then body, brown, golden, red. I shot straight for the heart from ten feet.

She shuddered, fell, tried to rise, big eyes staring into mine, lay quivering, short gasping breath, a hole big as my fist gurgling out blood, soaking into the rain drenched ground.

I knew what I had to do: lift her up, slit throat and hang from a tree for the blood to drain. Cut open belly, take out Liver, what was left of heart and maybe the kidneys.  Maybe my knife was blunt, but this took forever with the rain rivering down my back, washing blood of my hands, spreading clots everywhere until the clearing looked like a kids painting of sunset: red turning black to fill the page.

Maybe my heart wasn’t in it too, I could see the green leaves and grass in her gut, relieved she wasn’t carrying some half formed Bambi to haunt me more.

The job was done. I carried her, now it, down to the stream to wash out the innards, watching the streams of yellow, red trickle away, thinking where her essence had gone too, would go to now, which bugs’d feed on these trickles and fish’d feed on them and on. Hefted it on my shoulders and slowly walked back home. We ate well for a few days, I even saw a little bump in my daddy’s flattened gut for a while, but that rain kept on comin’ the crops sank into the mud and we turned back to flour, runty eggs and now fresher fat from the deer.

Next spring it finally stopped raining, life became a little sweeter as in some mad rush like it’d all been held back, everything grew big and wild again. Except my daddy, he’d gone, slipped off into the night with no note, nothing but I knew he’d gone off to his brother in the city to drink. I carried on for a while but you can’t make nothin’ from nothin’ no matter what people say. Tho’ I went back to that clearing where I’d killed that deer to see the flowers growing rich from the blood that’d fed ‘em.