Coop

by Michael Perry

  Ours was not a loud family, but once Sunday morning breakfast got rolling, the action was steady, with the sifting sound of cereal sliding from the wax-paper lined boxes and the high-tension ping of spoons against the rim of Corelle Ware dishes. I loved to look at the pictures on the boxes while I ate, and dream of the day I would save enough box tops to get a real jet airplane. When at an early age I began to learn to sound out words, my Sunday morning cereal time was the source of great strides in reading comprehension. I’d read the boxes side upon side. By the time I was in kindergarten I could spell niacin and riboflavin with dispatch. In my sullen years, I would arrange three cereal boxes in the manner of a cubicle and seclude myself for a good read.

  If I can continue to support my growing family on a freelancer’s wages, I will have my wife to thank. Early in our courtship Anneliese picked me up for a date in a battered Honda and apologized, saying she was too cheap to spend money on a new car. Unbeknownst to her, I found this comment the equivalent of a red satin nightie. Although she eventually sold the car and upgraded to our current $1,000 van, her frugality remains constant. In the shower today I bumped into a gigantic thirty-two-ounce bottle of shampoo (as a middle-aged bald man walking, I find thirty-two ounces of shampoo to be profligate in the extreme). I also noticed that the special unsecret ingredient in this shampoo is placenta. Anneliese goes in for some alternative concoctions, but even so this seemed a bit much. Upon closer inspection I saw there were several price restickerings on the bottle, with a final markdown to $2.29, and then I understood. Still, I skipped the placenta extract and went with a mini-bottle I scored from a Super 8 outside Wichita. Free, and it put a fine sheen on my scalp.

  Matrimonially speaking, being of one mind on money matters really smooths the sheets. While other spouses go ballistic over nasty surprises on the credit card, I am reduced to waving the Visa bill and barking, “$7.95 at Goodwill?!? That’s the second time this year!” When the winter winds whistling through our overworn upstairs windows forced us to turn on the baseboards and spiked the electric bill, Anneliese talked my contractor cousin out of a couple sheets of pink Styrofoam and trimmed them down to fit. Now our entire upstairs is bathed in the soft pink glow of love and free insulation.

  Like most well-worn tropes, the idea that a man looks to marry a dead ringer for dear old Mom is probably only half accurate at best, but when I go to the kitchen sink and find plastic bread bags air-drying on the faucet handles (the twist ties are stored neatly in the drawer beside the repurposed plastic picnicware), I will admit to the ol’ déjà vu. Right this moment there are dented cans of off-brand black beans in the pantry, and I recently came through the front door to find my way impeded by a twenty-five-pound bag of garbanzo beans. I am not kidding, and apparently my future holds a lot of hummus.

  Once a man came to load one of our cows for the sale barn, and before Dad could get out there, the man had whipped it until there was blood on its back. Before the man was out of the yard, Dad was on the phone to the shipper. Don’t ever send that man again, he said. Another cattle jockey came in the barn carrying an electric cattle prod. “You won’t need that,” Dad said. The man said something about how good it worked. “You won’t need that,” Dad said, a little more deliberately this time, and the man returned the prod to the truck. If a cow was being stubborn, we were allowed to smack her on the flank with an open hand, but that was more for the sound effect than anything. We could also tap them with a broom handle on the spinal ridge where the tail attached, or twist the tail—although often as not the tail-twist made them slam on the brakes.

  I recall striking only one cow in anger. All told, I tried to hit her three times, but the last time I whiffed. Her name was Belinda, and she was a “rooter.” If you turned your back on her while cleaning the manger, she’d “root” you from behind, jamming the rock-hard brow ridge of her skull under your coccyx and boosting you headfirst into the wall. Sometimes it hurt and sometimes it didn’t, but it always got your full undivided attention, and it consistently tripped my rage trigger. Once I was busting hay bales, and she rooted me right off my feet. I whipped around, balled up a fist, and punched her right between the eyes, hard as I could.

  Are you familiar with the real estate between a cow’s eyeballs? For the purposes of simulation, drape a thin rug over a concrete block and then hit it bare-fisted as hard as you can. The vibrations reached clear up to my ears, and the numbness persisted for twenty minutes. As I huddled against the wall, cradling my useless arm and wondering how best to splint it, the cow regarded me placidly. My best pile driver, and it had less effect than the touchdown of an anemic horsefly. The next time she tagged me, I was sweeping up the manger. Wiser now, I whipped around and smacked her over the skull with the broom handle. Same net effect—she just blinked at me—but more trouble, because the handle snapped, and I’d have to explain that to Dad. Later when he asked me why I used a whole roll of black electrician’s tape on the broom handle I told him Belinda knocked me over and I fell on the broom handle. I think he knew, and just let it go, because that cow was flat crazy. Some cows would take a shot at you now and then, but she was one of the rare ones who would actually come after you. One summer evening all the cows came in for milking except Belinda. I grabbed the big rubber mallet Dad used to knock the feed loose from the side of the bin and went out looking for her. Rather than run off when she saw me, she waited until I got near, lowered her head to freight-train position, and came thundering at me.

  For the first minute or so, I fared pretty well. I’d run in a straight line until I could feel the thud of her hooves, then I’d cut a real tight turn. While she slowed down to change directions, I sprinted clear again. With every juke I kept trying to work my way closer to the fence and safety, and before long we had zigzagged our way to within about twenty yards of the woven wire, but I was getting winded, and that cow hadn’t lost a step. Finally, when I cut two corners not quite tight enough and she tagged me with a half-root, I realized I had to make a break for it. I still had the rubber mallet, but if I squared off to whack her, I risked getting trampled. Instead, I decided to fling it at her head in the manner of throwing an ax, hoping to clock her good enough to slow her down. Gripping the mallet handle tightly and running full tilt, I looked back over my left-hand shoulder, gauged the distance and, still on the run, pivoted halfway around and flung the mallet at her crazy-cow noggin with every bit of strength I could muster.

  And missed her completely.

  Oh, my goodness, I remember thinking.

  Sure now that she was emitting cartoon smoke from both nostrils, I made one last valiant sprint straight for the fence. She was at my heels and gaining when I launched into a full-out dive. Grazing the top row of barbed wire, I performed a credible tuck-and-roll and hit the soft ground on the other side. After a nice little rest, I went off to find Dad, and not long after that, Belinda went to market.

  Back in the day, most farmers kept a bull on the farm for the obvious purpose. We all knew a few stories of goring, trampling, and death. What Dad had instead was a cabinet mounted just inside the milk-house door. The cabinet door—which folded down to serve as a miniature desk—was imprinted with a silhouette of a fine bull, the words EVERY SIRE PROVEN GREAT, and the logo ABS, for American Breeders Service. Within the cabinet were a few stubby pencils, a few bright tags that read BREED THIS COW, and the American Breeders Service bull catalog.

  The ABS catalog was basically Playgirl for cows. It was filled with page after page of photographs of the ultimate bulls. These were the Greek gods of the bovine world. They were posed with their front hooves on a small mound of clean sawdust, and their tails hung long and were fluffed to a voluminous switch. The bulls were ornately named. One of the stars of my childhood was Fultonway Ivanhoe Belshazzar—one-third landed gentry, one-third literature, and one-third Old Testament. I always thought it would be fun to be the guy coming up with names for the bulls. I figure you’d want something relevant but exotic, say, Golden Turkish Alfa
lfa Rocket.

  When a cow was in heat (we learned early to listen for the urgent, high-pitched mooing and cows “riding” each other), we kids would go through the catalog page by page, studying each portrait closely. In addition to the photographs, each bull’s page included a chart delineating their specific genetic attributes relevant to the qualities they caused to arise in their female off-spring—which, after all, was where the farmer’s prime interest lay. Among the categories you might review were body depth, foot angle, thurl width, rump angle, teat placement, and udder cleft. We’d pore over the photographs, review all the data, and then finally pick our favorite. Dad, we’d say, this one here—Spanky Tango Cremora Blaster—he’s the one!

  Knowing now what I didn’t know then about my parents’ financial situation, I have come to realize Dad probably just went to the back of the catalog, to the discount section (“Bull in a Bucket”), and ordered the cheapest product available. And then, sometime within the next eight hours, the artificial inseminator would arrive, and he would walk into the barn and commit astounding acts.

  When you’re a kid growing up on a rural Wisconsin dairy farm with no television, the artificial inseminator is a combination science exhibit and freak show on wheels.

  We never missed it.

  The inseminator (we called him “the breeder man”) would roll into the yard in his pickup truck, and in the back he would have this stainless steel canister about the size of a beer pony. The canister was filled with liquid nitrogen, which kept the semen frozen at–321 degrees Fahrenheit. The ampoules were suspended on a rack. When he popped the lid on the canister, mysterious wisps of fog would boil up and spill down the sides, evaporating halfway down to the truck bed. Sometimes he would allow us to dip a length of string into the nitrogen. When we pulled it out, it was frozen solid and could be snapped like a twig.

  After extracting the semen, the inseminator placed it into a short syringe, which he then attached to a long, slender pipette. Next—and I’m not sure if this was standard procedure, or just our guy’s particular personal flair—he would place the pipette crossways in his mouth and grip it in his teeth in a sort of grimace. I remember this very clearly because we would be waiting inside the barn on the walkway and the inseminator would step through the barn door all backlit by the sun, and he would be wearing those tall rubber boots and holding that straw in his teeth, and I was always reminded of a pirate boarding a ship.

  I assume the cows had a similar reaction.

  Dad would hang a paper tag from the rafter behind the cow he wanted serviced. After locating the tag, the inseminator stopped behind the cow, drew on a shoulder-length plastic glove, and stepped across the gutter. After patting the cow to calm her, he grabbed her tail, hoisted it, and from then on the whole deal was very personal.

  I can’t say the cows ever appeared overly distressed by what certainly had to be a disruption in their day. They would pause in chewing their cud, kinda freezing in a “hunh?” sorta pose, and their eyes would bulge a tad, about like yours would at the point of realizing your taxes were due yesterday. Occasionally one would engage in a little do-si-do (who wouldn’t?), but all things considered, their reaction to having a stranger’s arm elbow-deep up the rectum was positively restrained.

  I have met a great number of artificial inseminators over the years, and they are nearly always cheery about their profession. Apparently a career spent operating at less than arm’s length from the place where the miracle of life and its base by-products intersect engenders a certain jocular pragmatism. One of our inseminators was pleasant enough, but at the feed mill there were rumors of his drinking. Perhaps so, said Dad, who abhorred alcohol in all its forms. But we had also just come through a stretch in which the allegedly drunken inseminator settled twenty-four cows on the first try, and twenty-three of those cows had heifer calves. If that man was drinking, Dad said, paraphrasing the apocrypha of Lincoln on Grant, we better find out what and get him some more.

  We observe our heroes and emulate accordingly. When my brother Jed was still in training pants, Mom found him with his arm wrapped in a plastic bread bag and jammed inside a roll of butcher paper. He had a green Tinkertoy rod crossways in his teeth and was patting the butcher paper to calm it before delivering the coup de grâce.

  There are chicken books in the bathroom, Backyard Poultry clippings on the bedside stand, and coop sketches scattered around my desk. Anneliese is in the spirit as well, quoting from Chickens: Tending a Small-Scale Flock for Pleasure and Profit and referencing the chicken tractors of Joel Salatin. But I am also prone to nattering on about where we’ll put the pigs, and how maybe we should fence off a patch for a pair of beef cows, and how I read in Countryside & Small Stock Journal that goat meat is gaining popularity, and also wouldn’t it be terrific to fence the yard for sheep and save the gas money? I know I said at the outset all I wanted was some eggs and perhaps a slice of homegrown ham, but here we are with thirty-seven fallow acres….

  I keep trying to rein myself in. It’s not far from champing at the bit and biting off more than you can chew. We have a smallish tractor here on the farm, and yesterday the battery went dead. No problem. I pulled the pickup truck beside it, hooked up the jumper cables, and—rather than rev the engine impatiently—went off to multitask while the battery charged. When I returned ten minutes later, the interior of the shed was a haze of toxic smoke and the battery was fizzing like a junior high science project. There are only two ways to hook up a battery—the right way and the wrong way—and the right way is color coded. So now I had to replace the battery. I couldn’t find the correct wrench, and the one matching socket I located was stripped. That meant I had to pry the battery loose using cheap vise grips and a screwdriver. The cold morning air rang with curses.

  I finally wrestled the battery loose and set off to trade it for a new one at Farm & Fleet. While there, I noticed a bin of cheap wrenches. No self-respecting handyman buys cheap wrenches, so naturally, I was interested. The wrench sets were in two separate bins, but the price was the same, so I just grabbed the nearest set. Back home, I was almost giddy at the idea of installing the battery now that I had the proper tools. I unrolled the bag of wrenches to select a half-inch, only to find every wrench marked with “mm” instead of “inches.” Two bins of wrenches, and I managed to pick the metric. The battery bolts (and pretty much everything else on the farm) are standard American.

  Good news is, you can fling a metric wrench forty feet, no conversion necessary.

  The dead tractor battery reinforces what experience has taught me over and over again: Don’t overreach, farmer boy. It will be miracle enough if I can build a coop that will keep my chickens dry. Tonight as I stand and watch the sun go down above our barren spread, I am reminded that for all my talk and bathroom reading, what we’ve got here so far is thirty-seven snowbound acres and a guinea pig.

  I don’t know if I was born again the night I read “The Hell-Bound Train.” Three years would pass before I professed my faith before members of our church. But there in the bathroom that night, that was my come-to-Jesus moment. This was when it hit me that any little boy who hung out cussing with Hardy Biesterveld would never breach the Pearly Gates. For the first night in my sheltered life I desperately craved sanctuary—from the cackling devil and his hellfire coals, sure, but also from myself. From the filth of my own weakness. I don’t recall, but I can’t imagine I strolled into school the next morning and told Hardy Biesterveld I was swearing off swearing. I do think I quit the cussing cold turkey, but as far as the rest of my scampitude, I reckon I just scaled back gradually. Didn’t dig my heels in, but dragged my feet some. I know we stayed on friendly terms right into adulthood. I just didn’t follow everywhere he led. And I’m glad I didn’t write him off. In the first place, that would have been snotty. In the second place, as the decades have unfolded, I have found great wisdom in the company of sinners—wisdom not always available via pristine living. And as a guy who equates sin with furtiveness and great
lashings of guilt, I have always felt a certain awe for sinners who lay it all out there full-force.

  On the twenty-fourth of May, 1974, I received a photocopied diploma affixed to a piece of green construction paper. Mrs. Kramschuster joined the two pieces of paper using rubber cement, and three decades later I can see the brush-swipe patterns where the cement seeped through, and the memories come flooding back. How the rubber cement swabbed on your skin with an evaporative coolness and slick like snot, but if you rubbed it together it dried out and became rubber, much as wet snot rubbed between the palms of your hands will become a serviceable booger. It reminds me of Hardy Biesterveld and how we would slobber rubber cement on our palm and then rub them together until we made our own off-kilter superballs. How we’d sniff the open bottle, the fumes putting a cool burn in our nostrils. And of course it reminds me of how we treated Mrs. Kramschuster. “THIS CERTIFIES,” the fancy script says, “Perry, Michael has completed the studies prescribed for the 3rd grade and is hereby promoted to the 4th grade.”

  Mrs. Kramschuster’s signature is Palmer-penmanship neat. We can imagine her relief.

  In the winter, darkness fell well before supper. By the time I followed Dad out for the evening’s milking, Orion was climbing from his kiva in the woodlot behind the barn, and the clear night air was tin-pail cold against my nose. The barn windows glowed an opaque yellow, and during the walk I anticipated the bare-bulb interior, bright with all the naked incandescence reflecting off the whitewashed walls and rafters. When I pushed through the milk-house door and into the light, the warmth—a thick sachet of alfalfa and manure—rolled around me with such fullness I felt I could tug it to my shoulders like a quilt.