Stone comes up. Bone comes up. Metal comes up. In Wickett's Piece the same object comes up every autumn, in a different corner, and I have taken it away five times.
I contract plough. Nine farms, about four thousand acres between them, and I do most of it in a six week stretch after harvest.
Ploughing turns the top nine inches over and lays it upside down. That is the whole idea of it. It buries the trash and it brings up what was underneath, and what was underneath is whatever has been working its way about in that ground since the last time anybody turned it.
So you get finds. Everybody who ploughs gets finds.
Flint mostly. Broken bits of clay pipe. Horseshoes, hundreds of them over a career. Bone, which is nearly always sheep and cattle and which you learn to tell apart fast. Shell cases on the two farms nearest the old range. Coins now and then, and a man with a detector who is very pleased to hear from you.
You learn a field by what it gives you. Middle Barn gives flint. The one behind the church gives clay pipe and always has.
Wickett's Piece gives me the same object every year.
It is a doorknob.
I want to get that out of the way because if I build up to it you will have decided it is something else.
Brass, or brass over something. About the size of a small orange. It is the round Victorian sort with a squared collar and a section of spindle still in it, about two inches of square bar snapped off ragged. There is a scratch across the top of the collar that goes from about eight o'clock to two o'clock and there is a dent in the ball itself the size of a thumbnail.
I know those marks the way you know a chipped mug in your own kitchen.
The first year I did not think anything at all.
You pick things up out of habit if you are getting down anyway, and I was getting down to clear a wrap of baler twine off the leg of the plough, and it was lying on the turned earth, and I put it in the toolbox on the tractor and forgot it for a month.
I found it again when I was looking for a shackle and I put it on the shelf in my workshop, on the beam over the bench, where things go that are not rubbish and are not useful.
The second year I picked it up in Wickett's Piece and I thought, there is another one.
I got home and the shelf was empty.
I am going to lay out the five of them, because the order matters.
Year one: the top corner by the gate. Put on the workshop beam. Year two: the bottom, near the stream. I noticed the beam was empty. Put it back on the beam. Year three: the middle of the field, more or less dead centre. This is when I stopped putting it on the beam. Year four: the top corner by the gate again. Year five, which was last October: the bottom by the stream.
After year three I started taking it away properly.
Year three I put it in the bin. The wheelie bin, in a carrier bag, on a Tuesday night with the collection Wednesday morning, and I watched the lorry from my kitchen window, which I do not normally do.
Year four I drove it to the tip. Not the bit where they take metal, the household waste bit, the big skip, and I threw it in overarm and I heard it land.
Year five I did something I am not proud of and which I have not told anybody until now.
I drove to the coast. That is a hundred and ten miles each way and I did it on a Sunday and I told my wife I was going to look at a machine. I went out on the pier at Weston as far as you can go and I dropped it in the water at high tide.
I stood there a while.
I have thought about the obvious answers for five years and here they are, with what is wrong with them.
There are a lot of Victorian doorknobs in the ground in this country. There are. But there is only one with a scratch from eight to two and a thumbnail dent and two inches of ragged spindle, and I have photographs of it now, on my phone, every year, and I have laid them side by side and the marks are the marks.
Somebody is doing it to me. I have gone at this hard, because it is the only explanation that is a person. It would mean somebody knowing which of nine farms I am on in a given week, which field, and roughly where in it, and getting there before or during, on a field that is overlooked from the lane on two sides. And doing it for five years, for no benefit, and never once being seen, and never once saying anything.
It came up with the plough and not off the surface. Three of the five were in the turned furrow with soil on the underside, and one of them, year three, I actually saw come over the mouldboard.
I have not been able to make myself stop ploughing that field.
It is forty acres of decent grade three and the farmer is a decent man and I have done his work for nineteen years, and there is no version of a conversation where I say I would rather not do Wickett's Piece and it does not become a thing about me.
So I do it, and in the last week of September I start dreading it, and I do the field last of everything on that farm, and I do it fast.
Last year I did it in one long day so I would not have to come back the second morning. Ten hours. And I did not get down off the tractor once, not for twine, not for anything, and I finished in the dark with the lights on.
I found it in the yard.
On the step of the workshop, on the concrete, at ten past nine at night, with soil still on it.
There is one more thing and I have gone round and round on whether to put it in.
The scratch and the dent are the marks I know it by. There is a third mark now and there was not before, and it came somewhere between year three and year four.
On the collar, on the flat, there is a set of four short scores. Not deep. About a centimetre long each, roughly parallel, the way metal marks when it has been under something heavy that dragged.
I have looked at those four lines for two years.
I know they are drag marks off the mouldboard. That is what they are. Anybody who works with steel in soil would tell you the same and they would be right.
But I turned the sums over one evening at the bench, which is a stupid thing to do and I did it anyway.
Year one to year two. Year two to year three. Five of them now, five autumns, and four gaps between them.
Four lines.