So that evening he went along to the Christmas lottery held in a vast barn, dimly lit and smelling of vermin. A rope hung over each of its two giant beams, dangling smoky lanterns. There was a crowd of men and boys inspecting the prizes in the gloomy corners, a pig sulking in a pen of hurdles, sacks of wheat, live hens in coops, a row of dead hares hung on the rail of a wagon. Amid silence a man plunged his hand into a corn measure and drew forth a numbered ticket; another man drew from a similar measure a blank ticket or a prize ticket. Each time a prize was drawn a hum of interest spread through the onlookers, but when the chief prize, the fat pig, was drawn against number seventy-nine there was agitation, excitement even.
“Who be it?” cried several. “Who be number seventy-nine for the fat pig?”
A man consulted a list and said doubtfully: “Miss Subey Jones—who be she?”
No one seemed to know until a husky alto voice from a corner piped: “I know her. She’s from Shottsford way, over by Squire Marchand’s.”
“Oh,” murmured the disappointed men; the husky voice continued: “Day afore yesterday she hung herself.”
For a few seconds there was a pained silence, until a powerful voice cried: “It’s a mortal shame, chaps.”
The ceremony proceeded until all the tickets were drawn and all the prizes won and distributed. The cackling hens were seized from the pens by their legs and handed upside down to their new owners. The pig was bundled squealing into a sack. Bags of wheat were shouldered and the white-bellied hares were held up to the light. Everybody was animated and chattered loudly.
“I had number thirty in the big chance and I won nothing. And I had number thirty-one in the little chance and I won a duck. Number thirty-one was my number, and number thirty in the big draw; I won nothing in that, but in the little draw I won a duck. Well, there’s flesh for you.”
Some of those who had won hens held them out to a white-faced youth who smoked a large rank pipe; he took each fowl quietly by the neck and twisted it till it died. A few small feathers stuck to his hands or wavered to the floor, and even after the bird was dead and carried away it continued slowly and vaguely to flap its big wings and scatter its lorn feathers.
Pettigrove spent most of the next day in the forest plantation south of Tull Great Wood, where a few chain of soil had been cultivated and reserved for seedlings, trees of larch and pine no bigger than potted geraniums, groves of oaks with stems slender as a cockerel’s leg and most of the stiff brown leaves still clinging to the famished twigs; or sycamores, thin but tall, flourishing in a mat of their own dropped foliage that was the colour of butter fringed with blood and stained with black gouts like a child’s copy-book. It was a toy forest, dense enough for the lair of a beast, and dim enough for an anchorite’s meditations, but a dog could leap over it, and a boy could stand amid its growth and look like Gulliver in Lilliput.