Free I Refuse by Per Petterson Page A

and tossed the soil and the gravel and the stones up over the edge, each to their own side: Tommy to the north and Jim to the south, and as the trench was quite deep, they had to go at it hard, and soon they were exhausted. But still they kept going, and gradually as they were hacking and shovelling away the rhythm of it was easier to find, the sensible solution already existed, hidden in the work, in those specific movements, and was only waiting to reveal itself, and waiting for their hands and arms. And they felt it coming and moved towards it and fell into it and let their bodies swing for every stroke, first the tip of the spade into the pile and then a step back and a quarter-turn with their arms rising until the spade was over the edge where it stopped and sent the mass flying, and the spade did half the job with its own weight and speed, and their hips did their part of the job, and the knowledge of this came from the work itself and not from any particular place in the brain that stored these things from the day you were born, and every spadeful and every swivel of the hips balanced the load between each part of the body, and no one part did the job alone, and the body did not even want to stop.
    ‘Are you OK,’ Tommy said. ‘Can you do it,’ he said and Jim said:
    ‘Sure, I can, if you can,’ and Tommy laughed and said:
    ‘Hell, this is just such fun.’ And then he said: ‘Are there any lights on in the windows.’ Jim stood up and looked to both sides and then down the road, but all the windows were dark, only the line of outside lamps was lit.
    ‘All dark,’ he said. ‘The windows anyway.’
    ‘Perfect,’ Tommy said, and started hacking again, and there was another landslide of soil and gravel, and the stones slid down between his legs, and he kept on and on and swung his pickaxe and didn’t want to stop, and his hips yielded and straightened up again, they yielded and straightened up, as though he had ball bearings inside them, and they yielded and straightened up, and the gravel was streaming down between his legs after every swing and the stones came tumbling, and his hips yielded and straightened up, and Jim came behind him with the claw and scraped the pile towards him in long, greedy lunges until it was heaped up in a good mound, and he used his arms, and his shoulders too, and his back he used and raked the trench clean and flat to the walls, and with their spades they tossed the gravel high up over the edges, and the spades were down into the gravel before the last load had landed, yes, that’s how fast they were working, and suddenly Jim stood up and said:
    ‘We could sing like the phone company men do.’
    ‘Don’t stop,’ Tommy said, ‘we’ll get all stiff,’ and Jim bent down and thrust the spade into the gravel, and shovelling the gravel and stones, he said:
    ‘Yes, but it would be pretty good.’
    ‘We might wake someone up.’
    ‘We don’t need to sing that loud, just enough to help us with the digging. I mean, we’re down in a trench. No one will hear us anyway.’
    ‘OK. Why not. It has to be one that really fits, though,’ Tommy said, ‘or else it’ll just be a shambles, and we’ll lose the rhythm and get tired,’ and they thought hard as they hurled the gravel over the edge, and their hips swung back, and they thrust down the spades, and full of gravel and soil, they let it fly in even higher arcs, all the time wondering which song that might fit. They tried several Beatles songs and one by the Hollies, but they couldn’t get the rhythm right, and then they lost the beat, and Tommy said:
    ‘It won’t work. It’ll just be a shambles.’
    ‘Yes, maybe it will,’ Jim said, and then he said: ‘But listen to this one.’ And he began to sing:
    Where’er you walk on hill and fell
    A winter’s day, a summer’s night
    and thrust the spade into the gravel, and swivelling round with the spade at knee height, he tossed the gravel out of the trench, up over the