I took my eyes off his cow for just long enough to read the temper in his eyes and face, and I knew that I’d have to do something I didn’t want to do. If he got me into a fight and kept me from keeping his cow on the move, or if he really knocked me out as he said he was going to do, he’d have a dead cow on his hands.
It seemed I needed help from somebody to decide what to do. I’d had my mind made up that I’d never fight that boy again, and I’d made a promise to myself that I wouldn’t. Also I’d asked Somebody Else to help me keep from it, and He had up to now.
Was I going to fight Shorty, dive into him when he wasn’t looking, and land a one-sock punch on the same jaw I’d socked once before and knocked him out with it? Or let him knock me out? Or while we were fighting, let his cow die?
If only Mom would hurry up with the bottle of kerosene and milk so we could drench her. A little kerosene and milk poured down her throat might get her started to belch, and she’d be saved—till the vet came, anyway. If he could only get here in time!
I didn’t even have time to say a prayer, but I thought one of the quickest ones I had ever thought in my life. And almost in a flash of a second it seemed I had an answer. What He made me think of was: Pretend to be a coward. Pretend to be afraid! Keep running round and round the cow. And every time you circle her, sock her and dodge Shorty’s fists, and we’ll keep her on the move.
“Don’t you dare hurt me!” I cried to Shorty in a tearful voice. “Don’t you dare!”
And I started to run in circles around his cow, hitting her when I had a chance and using a crying voice as I begged him not to hurt me. I whacked his cow just enough to keep him mad at me, and all the time she was moving and getting nearer the top of the hill. And also all the time I was wishing Mom would come, and she didn’t. I was wishing the vet would come, and he didn’t.
“You coward!” Shorty cried. He kept lunging for me.
And then I stumbled and fell.
In a flash he was on top of me and whamming away. And that’s where I changed from a scaredy-cat into a tiger. In a second I was fighting back, with all my savage temper boiling. And at the same time I think I must have been praying too, not wanting to really injure Shorty but to hurt him just enough so that I could get to my feet and keep on saving his cow.
“You can take that—and that—and that!” I said.
And all of a sudden he started to cry and to beg me to stop, which I was glad to do.
I got to my feet as quick as I could, just as Mom got there with the pint bottle of chalky-looking drenching medicine. “There wasn’t enough kerosene in the can,” she said. “I had to find some.”
Boy oh boy, my mother was better than any veterinarian could ever have been. Some girls are scared of even an innocent fishing worm, but Mom wasn’t any more a helpless woman than the man in the moon.
In no time at all she had her thumb and the first two fingers of her left hand in Babe’s nostrils. Then she was lifting the cow’s head and pushing the neck of the pint bottle into the side of her mouth. She poured the mixture of kerosene and fresh milk right down Shorty’s cow’s throat.
In a minute now, I thought, if it’s going to work, she’ll start to belch, and she’ll be saved.
Behind us, Shorty cried, “What are you trying to do to her? What are you giving her?”
“Kerosene!” I answered. “We’re trying to save her!”
“Kerosene!” he exclaimed angrily. “That’ll kill her!”
But it didn’t. Also, it didn’t seem to help her a bit.
Mom, who had been as cool as a veterinarian up to now, suddenly seemed worried. “It’s not doing any good. Look at her—she’s gasping for her very life! We’ll have to tap her. It’s our only chance.” She turned to Shorty. “Here, Guenther!”
And Shorty, seeing Babe gasping and panting a thousand times worse than Dragonfly had panted and gasped that other day leaning against the linden tree, seemed to finally believe that we were really trying to help.
“Hold her halter a minute while I try to get a little more down her throat. Bill, you run down to the cabinet for the trocar. We’ll have to tap her!”
“The trocar?” I asked and frowned. “What’s that?”
“Don’t ask questions. Go get it. It’s a stylet. You know. Didn’t you ever see it in the cabinet? There by the iodine. Bring the iodine too!”
A sickening sensation came over me. “Does it have a round smooth handle and a triangle-pointed tip?”
“That’s it—now hurry!”
I hurried, but I didn’t run toward the barn. I ran toward the toolshed, where I’d had the thing only yesterday, using it to make a triangular design on a piece of leather.
“Not that way! To the barn! In the cabinet!” Mom called.
But I yelled back over my shoulder, “I saw it in the toolshed yesterday,” and away I went.
At the toolshed I stumbled over the empty kerosene can lying there and yanked open the toolshed door, which I was glad I had forgotten to close and lock last night. And in a second I was on my way to the barn for the iodine.
I found it right where I remembered it to be and went out the door, again up the lane past Old Red Addie’s grunting noise at her trough, squealing and whining for her already late breakfast, along the garden fence to the pignut trees, and into the middle of all the excitement.
To my absolute surprise, Shorty was using my stick and was trying to drive his cow around at Mom’s orders. He was half crying. “Daddy’ll lick me,” he sobbed. “Don’t let her die!”
Mom quickly took the trocar out of my hand, saying, “This is our last chance.” I also heard her say under her breath, “Please help me do it,” and I knew she wasn’t talking to me.
Nobody knew how hard it was going to be for Mom to press that trocar against Babe’s left flank, just about seven inches east of her left hipbone and, with a quick hard jab, thrust it in. But it was the only thing left to do. Even while Mom was swishing iodine on the trocar and on the spot she was going to shove the trocar into, I kept thinking, Maybe if we save her, it’ll be easier for Shorty’s family to become Christians than if we don’t.
Poor Mom, my thoughts kept telling me. This’ll be one of the hardest things she ever had to do. Mom always had such a tender heart and couldn’t stand to see anything get hurt. Once when she had accidentally stepped on a little chicken and smashed it, she’d cried and had been sad for half the day.
I saw her face was set, and I knew she was making herself do it. “We saved Jersey Jill this way once when you were just a little boy, Bill,” she said. “You wouldn’t remember.”
I didn’t know where she’d gotten the cloth to put the iodine on with, till I saw a torn place in her apron. It was one of her prettiest kitchen aprons, too, I remembered—and that was a silly thing to remember at a time like that.
And then I saw Mom’s face go white as she took the trocar and measured the distance from the hipbone out to just the right place. “I’m—I’m—afraid I just can’t do it.” She gave me a helpless look. “Your father did it to Jersey Jill. Maybe you—”
Maybe me?
I cringed.
I hated to hurt anything, too, although I had operated on a snake once to try to save Warty, Dad’s favorite toad, which we thought the snake had swallowed. If I was going to be a doctor someday, I might as well get a little experience on a cow. I might as well!
And I knew I had to act quick. Old Babe’s knees were buckling. In a few more minutes she’d be dead. I knew it!
I let loose of the halter I’d been helping Guenther hold, took the trocar from Mom’s hand, found the spot, and gripped the handle hard with both hands, knowing what a tough hide a cow had. I’d have to press the sharp point clear through. I hoped it wasn’t too dull from the cured cowhide I’d pushed it through yesterday.
I tensed my biceps, which wouldn’t be much help, because I had to push down rather than pull up. And then I jabbed! Hard!
9
There hadn
’t been anything in What to Do Before the Doctor Arrives to tell the average farmer what to expect one-sixteenth of a second after he has jabbed a triangular-pointed trocar through the tough cowhide of a live cow’s left flank and into the paunch itself, which is not only full of ladino clover but is as tight as a dirigible full of gas.
I’d have been a little more careful to get out of the way quick if I had known that in a flash of a second there would be a noise like a train rushing past when you are standing a few feet from the tracks and a terrific roar of wind, which you not only hear but you feel, and it almost blows you over.
Also, there wasn’t anything in the chapter I’d read that said an odor would come screaming out with the gas, worse than the smell of the worst polecat a boy ever caught in a trap, and an entirely different kind. And I wasn’t prepared for what else came out.
I jumped back out of the way, smacking into Shorty and bowling him over. The two of us landed in the clover not far from where Mom herself was, holding her nose with her apron. It was the only thing handy to hold it with while quite a lot of that wild blue cow’s breakfast, most of it being ladino clover, came roaring out as if it had been shot from a cannon and scattered itself all around everywhere.
For some reason, as I tried to untangle myself from Shorty—who was sobbing over his cow, thinking we had really killed her—I didn’t even wonder if maybe she had accidentally eaten any four-leafed clovers. Most people like to pretend it means good luck to find one.
But the operation was what doctors call a complete success. At least, it was so far. After the first explosion, which was like a volcano erupting and spraying green lava all around, the noise settled down to a hissing sound like steam escaping from a threshing machine engine. There was a rumbling noise inside old Babe, and she began to get smaller. In only a little while, I noticed that her eyes weren’t as bleary as they had been and she wasn’t gasping for breath or heaving, and I knew we’d saved her life.
Mom knew it, too, and said so, which is how I was sure of it myself. “She’ll act indifferent and just stand around for a few hours like she’s lost all interest in life, and then, if she does like Jersey Jill did, she’ll start eating again,” Mom explained. “We’re so glad she’s going to be all right, Guenther,” she said to Shorty. “It would have been a tragedy to lose such a fine cow. Blue is such a rare color. I think, when she gets over having lost her baby, she’ll give lots more milk, too, and be more satisfied.” Mom extended her hand, which I noticed was trembling, and stroked old Babe on the shoulder and patted her neck.
And Babe, hardly knowing she was alive yet, didn’t act scared or jumpy but just stood still like a statue.
I don’t know what happened in Shorty’s mind while Mom was saying those kind words and stroking his blue cow. But all of a sudden I saw him look at her as if he thought she was wonderful. Then he looked all around as though he had thought of something else or was looking for something.
“What made her get that way?” he asked.
“The clover. She gorged herself with dew-wet clover, and that formed gas, and—”
All of a surprising sudden, Shorty’s eyes focused on something away down at the foot of the hill in the clover field. Then he quickly dived for my ash stick that was lying a few feet away, grabbed it up, and, like a boy leaping into a race, was off on the fastest run I ever saw a boy his size start on.
He flew toward Jersey Jill, who was standing in knee-deep ladino clover with her head down, eating as if it was the best-tasting breakfast she had ever had and she didn’t care what might happen to her.
“Come on!” Guenther yelled back to me over one of his shoulders.
And that’s when I came to myself. I wasn’t worried, though, because I’d fed Jersey Jill some bran shorts and some dry alfalfa, which she’d been eating while I milked her. And besides, there wasn’t nearly as much dew on the clover she was eating as there had been on that with which Babe had stuffed her stomach a while ago. The sun was up high now and shining on everything. It was going to be a very wonderful day.
I left Mom and Shorty’s cow standing there and ran through the clover toward Jersey Jill. After all, I didn’t want Dad to come home and find so much excitement going on around the place when I was supposed to be the man of the house and of the barn and look after things.
But Shorty was serious. He’d seen what too much clover had done to his cow, and Mom had told him why, and he was going to save my cow by driving her out of the field. He was quite a ways ahead of me when I stopped and looked back at Mom to see what she thought, but I couldn’t see her face well enough to tell.
Shorty’s excited voice came up the hill to where I was as he cried out to Jersey Jill, “Get out of here! Don’t you know that stuff’ll kill you?”
A lump came into my throat, and I couldn’t see straight for a second. That boy who had caused us so much trouble for weeks and weeks, and who had hated me most of the time clear up to a half hour ago, might turn into a good boy yet.
I hurried after him to help him drive Jersey Jill back up to the gate and out, and also so that he wouldn’t seem like such a dumbbell for not knowing she wasn’t in any such danger as his cow had been—eating all that clover on an empty stomach.
I was thinking about who had really saved his cow, and it wasn’t any red-haired, freckle-faced boy It was somebody’s wonderful mother, who had had presence of mind enough to know what to do and had done it.
That round-and-round note Dad had written on the egg and left in the basket had told the truth.
Jersey Jill didn’t like the ash stick Shorty was using on her, so she let herself be driven back to the gate at the pignut trees, where to my surprise I noticed Babe standing alone. Mom was gone.
I looked all around, wondering, Where on earth?
Then I saw her blue dress and her kind of windblown gray brown hair as she ran past the henhouse and the chicken coops by the orchard fence and on past the kitchen door. I heard her calling to somebody, and right away I saw a flash of something yellow about three feet high out by the walnut tree. It was Charlotte Ann, my little sister, in her cute little yellow dress, going through the open front gate and out onto the road.
Open gate! I saw it and at the same time wondered, How come? I turned quickly to Shorty and asked, “You leave the gate open when you came through?”
He saw what I saw, and he answered, “It was already open.”
A sickening sensation came over me as I realized that there was only one way it could have been left open. Theodore Collins’s only boy, who had gone through it last night to go to see what had made the noise at old Babe’s corral, had neglected to shut it when he came back. That made two gates he had left open-not a very good record. I sighed heavily. Then I heard Babe breathing—still a little bit noisily—beside me, and I felt better, knowing she was going to live.
Just then I saw Mom catch up with Charlotte Ann, sweep her up into her arms, and start back through the gate and toward the house.
I guess Shorty saw them coming, too, because he said, “You have an awful nice mother.”
I remembered the phone conversation I’d had with his mother quite a few weeks ago, and I answered, “Your mother’s awful nice, too.”
Shorty still had my ash stick, and when I finished saying that, he did what boys nearly always do with sticks when they carry them. He took a swipe at the first thing he saw that was close by, which was a tall stalk of wild lettuce growing by the gatepost. He hit it so hard he knocked off three or four of its yellow-rayed flowers, leaving that many milky-juiced broken stems on which the flowers had been growing.
I didn’t find out till later that Charlotte Ann was another reason Mom had been a little slow in getting up to the pignut trees with her bottle of drenching medicine. She’d had to put Charlotte Ann into her own picket fence corral beside the house, so she wouldn’t follow her and get in our way and get hurt. And Charlotte Ann had managed to get out and through the open gate.
About fifteen
minutes later, when we didn’t need him, the veterinarian came, and we told him the story of what we had done.
“Who used the trocar?” he asked, looking from one to the other of us.
Shorty spoke up, saying, “He did,” motioning to me. “He saved my cow’s life.”
“You the doctor?” The vet looked at me the way Dad does sometimes when he especially likes me.
I felt myself feeling proud of myself. Not wanting anybody to see me grinning, which I could tell I was starting to do, I quickly said, looking at Mom, “I had a wonderful nurse.”
The vet himself grinned then and chuckled as he gave Mom a friendly look. He turned next to Shorty, who was snapping a rope onto Babe’s halter—Babe was beginning to act a little more as though she knew she was alive and was glad of it—and said to him, “And what did you do?”
A mischievous expression galloped across Guenther’s face as he answered, “I furnished the patient.”
Then I got another surprise. As you know, Poetry had never seen a purple cow. Well, I had never seen a blue one before, and it had been hard for me to accept Shorty’s quadruped as belonging to the cattle family. She was so wild and so just the opposite from Jersey Jill. But when the vet finished what he said next, I looked with real admiration in my mind at the four-footed animal I had just operated on.
This is what the doctor said to Shorty: “The Milking Shorthorn is one of the specially developed breeds. To have one of them be blue—and such a deep blue—is something! But it does happen once in a while.”
Mom spoke up then. “She lost her calf a month or so ago in a car accident, and she’s been a little nervous ever since. I understand the calf died right in front of her eyes. She’ll get over it in time, but it must have upset her terribly. She is a beauty, isn’t she?”
I looked at Babe’s very deep blue color, which she was nearly all over, and at the almost snow-white underpart of her, and for some reason she wasn’t nearly as bad-looking as she had been when we’d first seen her down at the mouth of the branch.
Sugar Creek Gang Set Books 25-30 Page 55