Billy Ray's Farm

by Larry Brown

  Since that time I’ve been able to form a larger picture of Madison Jones the writer. I’ve found that he writes vividly, eloquently, and that his novels share the same virtues that all the best novels do: They possess a relentless forward drive of narrative while allowing the reader to witness the ordinary things of life with great clarity, weather and seasons and the land that lies around the characters. I love the way he describes the countryside, the small towns of the South, the way sun and rain and the different aspects of night and day affect the look of them. A spring storm or a cool fall day are rendered equally visual and accurately. I’m drawn to his streets full of shade trees, his desolate town squares where yellow lights shine in the gloom of night.

  Another part of his talent lies in the ability to create internal conflict in people who know right from wrong, but are caught up in the events around them and swept forward in their momentum to the point where drastic actions can result. The passions of life. Madison is able to make his readers worry about what’s going to happen next, so that his books are hard to put down, and stay in the mind until the next session of reading can come along. Mainly he gets you involved with his people and their struggles. Like all the best writers, he allows you to lose yourself so deeply in his work that the words on the paper begin to assume real life, the people breathing and moving and acting on their own, as if this story was simply found somewhere, fully formed, and not written page by page, month after month or year after year. He pulls off the great illusion the best writers of fiction strive for: He makes you forget that you’re reading. This kind of writing is the best kind because it makes the reader stay up too late, causes him to put aside other things that need doing, makes him keep turning the pages long after he should have gotten up and gone to bed.

  I think, as writers, this is what we strive for, this is why we often make ourselves miserable, trying for the right words and the right scenes, trying always constantly to stay ahead of ourselves, to tell a story that other people will want to read, to linger over and appreciate, to try and form images with words that are like pictures on a screen in the mind’s eye, and most of all, to share a part in lives that are not our own, but that we, for a while, can live in as if they were. And if there is some joy and sorrow and understanding that can be shared in that, if the reader can feel what it’s like to be in this human being’s shoes, then we have succeeded, and that makes all those long days and nights facing a blank page and wondering where it all will come from worth it, no matter how long it takes. The steady progress of his prose compels you to read on until the end, to find out what will ultimately happen to these people that you have grown to care about so much.

  His tragedies spring sometimes from the simplest things, the ties between family, between lovers, between friends. His work has such a sturdy and unshakable foundation that everything is entirely logical and believable.

  Madison Jones has been in this business a lot longer than I have. A Buried Land was first published in 1963, about the time I was twelve years old, not too long before his friend and admirer Flannery O’Connor passed away. In The Habit of Being she praises his work and talks about how good his novels are, and it is incredible to me now to learn these things, to learn that he would come to visit her and that they would sit and admire her ducks and geese and peacocks at the same time I was rolling on my steel skates up and down the sidewalks of Memphis.

  I think about the time that writers like Eudora Welty and William Styron and Ernest Gaines and Cormac McCarthy and Ellen Douglas and Madison Jones have already spent laboring in the fields of fiction, and how these people decided long ago that writing was what they wanted to do with their lives, and in realizing this I am heartened, and encouraged, and fully satisfied that the path I have chosen for myself is the right one, and that it is a worthy life, and I am thankful to the people who have come before me for setting this example, for being who they are.

  WE WENT BACK to Chattanooga and the conference again in April of 1995, and this time we took our daughter, LeAnne, thirteen by then. Madison didn’t look like he’d changed any. He still had the same short-clipped beard and his voice was again a most pleasurable thing to be able to listen to.

  We usually took our relaxation in the evenings in a hospitality room the conference people had set up for the writers on the top floor of the same hotel we’d stayed in before, where there was a full bar and plenty of chairs. There was another Madison there that year, Madison Smartt Bell. I’d met him at Goucher College several years back, had dinner and drinks with him, and we had begun a good friendship. Madison Bell liked to play the blues on some of the guitars that were kept in the room, and I sat with the two Madisons in real comfort for several nights, content to talk and sip a little bourbon and just enjoy the company. There’s never much time to relax at a conference and after you talk to folks all day, it’s nice to be able to sit back and relax with some of the people who do what you do for a living, who stay alone in rooms by themselves for large portions of their lives and craft stories and novels.

  By the time that spring rolled around, I had been to many other hotels for many other conferences in many other cities, and I wasn’t as starstruck as I used to be. I’d found out that other writers, no matter how famous they were, were just people like me, people who told stories for a living. In that hospitality room there were plenty of stories to hear, told by those who tell them best.

  I got M.A. and LeAnne to come up one night, and we introduced LeAnne to everybody. I told her, “Honey, I know you can’t appreciate this right now, but you’re in a room with a lot of people whose names are going to go down in history for the books they’ve written.”

  I remember her grinning in her shy little way, and talking to people for a few minutes, and then saying goodbye to everybody. Then her mother took her back down to our room so that she could watch a movie. And then I remembered that I didn’t know anything about any of them when I was thirteen, either.

  I mixed another drink, eased again into my chair, and thought about how fine a thing it was to be able to sit with these people for a little while, these who are so much in rooms of their own, alone with their thoughts and the people who live on the page. I thought about how much alike we all were, whether we lived in Tennessee or Georgia, Alabama or North Carolina. What we had in common was that we loved the land and the people we came from, and that our calling was to write about it as well as we could, to find our own voices through the years of learning, and to bring forth whole people whose lives surrounded us, whose stories were told by us, and who, for whatever length of time it took to compose a piece of fiction, were us.

  It was a good evening. I sat in my rocking chair close to Madison Jones, and felt quite at home.

  Billy Ray’s Farm

  IT WAS FOUR O’CLOCK when I found the black heifer with the white face. She was lying down behind a brushpile below the two big sweet gum trees, and I thought it might be time. When she stood up I saw the long tail of the birth matter hanging down. She didn’t want me watching her, I knew that, so I backed off and circled around through the pasture, behind another brushpile. There’s a big patch of privet hedge that I need to cut again growing all around the sweet gums, but I could kind of see her through the branches. I lit a cigarette and peered around the side of the trunk and she was watching me, having pains, trying to push. It was hard to see if the feet were out or not. They might have been out an inch or two. We were worried already because it was her first one. You never know with a heifer. You might have to call the vet. She lay back down and stayed there for a while. I was torn between watching her and leaving her alone like she wanted me to. It was January 24th and there was still a little snow on the ground in the shady patches, under overhanging branches by the fence, and on the levee where it doesn’t get much sun. It wasn’t that cold. It was nearly fifty degrees.

  She started walking slowly away and I knew she was hurting and that I was making her hurt herself more by being so close to her. She kept trying to pu
sh the calf out and I decided it would be better if I went on and started doing the work I’d come over there for in the first place, so I walked back up the hill and got the broom out of the truck and knelt where the dry grass was thick and struck my lighter to it. The embers fell and the flames climbed the tall stalks of sagegrass and soon the fire was spreading and crackling and growing in a nice even circle. I kept it under control by beating the edges lightly with the broom. I figured Billy Ray would probably be over there by five.

  We’d been burning the pasture off a little at a time on the evenings when the wind was calm. We didn’t want it racing all the way across the hill and maybe catching the barn on fire. You burn that grass off when the worst of winter is over, the stuff that’s dead and brown, and it clears the way for the new grass that’s green beneath it. Throw some ammonia nitrate on it when the weather gets warm and it’ll come up lush and thick for the cows. Or the heifers, in Billy Ray’s case, five of them, all first-time mamas. I raised my head once in a while and checked on her, but she’d moved off behind another brushpile down by the pond. Billy Ray pulled in at five.

  He’d been looking for this calf for about two weeks. If he had classes and stayed over at the college a few nights a week, Shane and I would go check on the heifers. It was a family thing, taking care of these animals. Billy Ray stepped over the gap and wanted to know if he had a calf yet. I told him she was trying right now.

  Before he went off down there to look at her, he wanted to know how long she’d been in labor. I told him it had been about an hour since I’d seen her the first time and that she’d probably be all right, to take it easy and not get upset. I knew he’d want to call the vet if it didn’t pop out like an egg from a chicken pretty soon.

  He stayed down there for a while and came back and said he thought the feet were out. I said, Well, I guess she’s making some progress. We didn’t really know how long she’d been in labor.

  We stood around and talked for a while. Some afternoons I burned grass instead of cutting up downed limbs and piling brush, or chipping the mortar off the old bricks still left in the foundation of the house my cousin’s husband had torn down for me. I could always find some work to do on the place at Tula, and I was over there just about every day.

  He went back down and checked on her and came back up worried, said he thought he ought to call the vet. It was getting close to five-thirty and there was only about a half hour of daylight left. I told him to go ahead and call him if he thought that was best, but that he’d better get his coat and find a flashlight because it was about to get dark and cold again.

  He left and I tended to my little fire. It wasn’t burning very well by then, probably because the dew had started falling, so after a while I walked down to the pond to look at her. But I couldn’t find her. I didn’t see her up near the barn so I went back to my truck and cranked it up. The fire was just about out. Billy Ray came back with a coat, a flashlight, and a rope halter. He’d talked to Dr. Harland and the doc said for us to try and get her up in the barn and pull the calf if she stayed in labor over two hours. I pulled my truck up to the barn and we went down through the bushes to find her.

  She was lying down in some tall weeds below a tangle of downed trees and briars. We got her up and could see the hooves sticking out a few inches. She strained a few times and everything back there welled out a little, the nose trying to break through a ring of thick black skin that was already stretched tight. We both thought then that we might be in some trouble. I tried to get my hand on the calf’s feet but the heifer wouldn’t let me touch her. We headed her up toward the barn to try to get her in the lot.

  Billy Ray was worried and we kept talking about it. I was still more for the let-nature-take-its-course plan, even though those hooves looked pretty big. I knew she was suffering, having to walk with all that hanging out of her, but we took our time and got her up the hill and into the barn without too much trouble. Billy Ray had fed the heifers in there for a couple of weeks because it had been raining.

  The barn leaks. It’s an old barn, pretty ragged, but he’s tried to fix it up. He’s mowed yards since he was twelve years old, and worked as a butcher, and hauled hay, and laid sod, and worked on a hog farm. He’s saved his money, and all he’s ever wanted is to be a cattleman. And it’s always hurt me deep that he has such bad luck.

  We had just started trying to catch her and get the halter on her when a car parked on the road and Jory, a friend of ours, walked over to help us. And it was only a few more minutes until another car and a pickup parked on the road and a couple of dark figures started walking toward the barn. I told Jory I guessed the whole family was coming over.

  I got in the stall with the cow and tried to catch her, couldn’t half see with that lousy flashlight and she wouldn’t let me catch her. The mud was so deep you had to make an effort to pull each foot out every time you took a step. I didn’t know what the hell to do. I’d pulled dead calves and I’d pulled calves with seagrass rope in the wide open spaces of my father-in-law’s pasture. A cow is plenty big enough to hurt you, especially when she’s in pain, like this one was. Billy Ray had the idea to try and run her up in the loading chute, but it was plain that she didn’t want to go in there. We tried for a while but she just kept turning and moving away from us. I climbed back out to see who had come to see about us. Billy Ray has myriad personal connections via the telephone, like a banker or a real estate agent. There was no doubt that the news of our trouble had traveled fast, fanning out over Lafayette County through the phone lines. Some would come a-running.

  Mary Annie walked up with Mr. Leslie Stewart. Billy Ray buys his cow feed from him and I used to buy a lot of rabbit feed from him. All these old folks think Billy Ray is the salt of the earth. Mr. Leslie’s probably raised thousands of cows in his lifetime, still does.

  My wife was wading through the mud in her slippers and I shook hands with Leslie, thanked him for coming. He had a calfpuller in his pickup and Billy Ray and Jory went back with him to bring it out to the barn. I asked Mary Annie how Mr. Leslie had gotten into the picture and she said he’d just showed up at the house and said Billy Ray had called him about the heifer and he’d told him to try and get her up in the barn. Then after he hung up, he got to worrying about Billy Ray and told his wife that he was coming out here to see about him, that the boy worked so hard to try and have some cows and a farm. She said, You know how they all are about Billy Ray.

  They got back over with the calfpuller and we ran her up in the loading chute and blocked her front and rear with posts. Mr. Leslie put his hand up in there to feel for the nose. She was still straining to push it out, but he said she wasn’t going to be able to have it by herself, that the calf was too big.

  The problem was that this little heifer had been bred to a big Beefmaster bull. She was an Angus/Hereford cross, and she was only about four and a half feet tall. It’s just like a woman having a baby for the first time, but our situation was made worse by bone structure and genetics. A big baby was trying to come through a small passage. Mr. Leslie knew just by feeling of the calf that the mother was going to need some help.

  Shane showed up somewhere about then and Mary Annie left, so we still had five people to work on the heifer. Mr. Leslie had some little nylon ropes in his pockets, and he made some small loops and put one around each foot of the calf, just a little above the hoof. It’s always been a mystery to me as to exactly when an animal that’s getting born starts breathing. If it’s not breathing inside, how is it alive? This one was breathing and trying to lick his muzzle because we pulled on the nylon ropes enough to get a look at him. But it was nearly impossible to imagine his whole body somehow sliding through that incredibly tight ring of thick black skin.

  It was cold, and steam was coming out of her. There wasn’t a lot of blood. Shane and Jory were standing outside the stall, shining the light through the boards for us.

  The calfpuller is just a winch with a small cable that’s mounted on a piece of pipe
fitted with a wide yoke at the end. The idea is to get the cable around the calf’s feet, snug up the yoke to the cow’s butt and when everything’s good and tight, push down on the whole thing and pull the calf out in one smooth motion.

  The heifer’s deciding to lie down was the first thing that went wrong. Her back legs had somehow gotten folded up underneath her so there was really not much to push against, but when we started turning the winch the calf started coming out, big and red and slick and steaming. The amniotic sac parted and there he was, halfway in and halfway out, hung over a post we’d put behind her to keep her from backing up. And then the calfpuller jammed.

  The calf was alive and breathing, his eyes open, lying in the cold mud trying to raise his head. Everything was slick with mud and shit and the stuff that had come out with him. We were trying to do two things at once, tie the ropes up past his knees and unjam the calfpuller, and we only had one flashlight.

  Mr. Leslie said the calf was going to die and naturally that scared all of us. We grabbed hold of the feet and pulled on him, and she started again, trying to help us, but he was stuck tighter than a peg and probably in truth having the life squeezed out of him by the ring of skin he was trying to come through and the post his mother was lying against. There was nothing for footing but slimy mud and it was a bad feeling to pull on him as hard as we could and not be able to see him move even a quarter inch. It was like trying to pull a tree out of the ground. I had already imagined him romping on the spring grass and getting fat on all that milk.