There was another outbuilding. The bakery. Stepping inside was like entering a museum. The kitchen had a baking oven a baking table baking tools and a sink with a homemade wooden surround. Underneath it a space for a wastebucket and a basin. Next to the bakery was a small room with a bed and a bedside table with a pottycupboard. It looked as it always had since it was built in the middle of the nineteenth century. Bror wasn’t there.

The byre stood at an angle to the other two buildings. I hadn’t been inside since the last cow was led to slaughter. I walked her out. My pretty vega. White with large eyes blackrimmed as if outlined with kajal. She seemed to know what was up. Had no fight left to call out or struggle. She even licked my arm when I scratched the soft hairs behind her ears one last time.

Now my boots splashed through the wet grass as I was walking along golgotha lane as we called the path between the house and the byre. One byre window was boarded up but otherwise 138it seemed unchanged. I put the key in the lock and opened the door. The dungbarrow and the hay waggon stood side by side with the shafts pointing outwards. Above on the rafters was the hayloft with some old hay still lying about. The door to the animal stalls stood open.

We were late. Father was already mucking out in the pigpen. Had shovelled dung into a barrow. Spread straw on the floor.

More than a year had passed since my failed attempt to kill him with a hayfork. By now it might never have happened.

After forcing the slaughter of the horse and then the gilt and the bull calves and our oldest cow he seemed to be at a loss. He was looking forward to a da capo. To see me weak. Perhaps to hold my thin weeping body against his bulky one and comfort me.

Which is why I didn’t cry anymore. I hoped that my grieving dry eyes might save the animals but at work father was vicious. Took it out on the animals. The byre air stank with tethered hatred.

Bror grabbed a dungbarrow and pushed into the calves’ pen. Like me he was still short and slight but tough like a wolverine.

He worked fast. Filled the barrow and took it to the trapdoor that opened into the dunghill below the animal stalls. Upending the barrow added its contents to the midden below. We called it the family grave and joked about how our ancestors had leaped into it and died from the fumes.

The fresh dung was steaming hot. One barrowload after another fell onto the pile.

I was milking. It was my job. Our cows had no names on signs above their stalls but I had named them. I called them after the brightest stars. Vega rigel capella pollux sirius bellatrix.