The Waiting Place

by Sharron Arksey

  The animals were being herded by farmers on horseback. We don’t have horses; we use our truck and an all-terrain vehicle. But watching my neighbours ride past, legs in stirrups, horse hoofs clipping the ground in short staccato bursts, I could almost convince myself I was watching an old movie in 3D. Until, that is, I saw one of the riders pull a cell phone out of his jacket. A techy cowboy with one foot in the old world and the other in the new. I raised my hand in greeting as he rode past.

  Elaine Benson, Joan’s cousin, decided to sell the family herd after her husband’s death, and selected the Saturday of the Thanksgiving weekend as the date for a disbursal sale. By scheduling the sale for then, she was able to avoid the additional costs of feeding the animals over the winter. Her husband had died of lung cancer earlier in the year and neighbours had helped her calve out the cows last spring and also kept an eye on them for her in pasture over the summer. Although the Bensons had four daughters, none of them lived here.

  Glen and I attended not so much to purchase cattle as to see how the sale went and to see family members home for the weekend and the sale. Since they had just come off pasture, both the cows and their calves looked sleek and well-fed.

  Neighbours and relatives had set up the panels for an outdoor sales ring. These same volunteers brought the animals into the ring and opened the gates to let them out and later lead them back to the pens after the bidding was over.

  Mrs. Benson sat in a lawn chair surrounded by daughters, sons-in-law, and grandchildren. I thought she looked lost. Scuttlebutt was that her daughters were trying to persuade her to move off the farm and into town. My mother-in-law sat with her for a while.

  I was in the same grade as the youngest Benson daughter Gail, although we had not been close friends. We had both been members of the local 4-H club and competed against each other over the years.

  “That was my last 4-H heifer,” I heard her say when a solid red Angus-cross cow came into the ring and I watched as her burly husband gave her a hug.

  “Can we bid on this one?” I asked Glen.

  “I thought you wanted us to go into purebreds, not add more crosses into the mix,” he said.

  “I do, but at least this is a red Angus, not black. And it was a 4-H heifer, so it will be quiet. It’s been trained to lead.”

  “So you’ve done your good deed for the day,” Glen said as we unloaded the cow and its calf later that afternoon.

  “I guess,” I said. “At least we know it’s going to a good home.”

  “Says you.”

  I hosted the annual Thanksgiving meal for both sides of the family the day after the sale. Besides our parents, we invited Lynne and her family and my older brother Jon and his wife. Glen and I had decided that this would be a good opportunity to break the news about my pregnancy.

  I was glad that the morning sickness seemed to have receded. Even so, everything looked and smelled not quite right and I had no appetite for any of it. I made the pumpkin pies from scratch and the yellow-brown filling reminded me of calf diarrhea. It was impossible to think of eating a piece of pie after that; it was difficult even to watch others put it in their mouths.

  We had planned to make the announcement over dessert, but Dad beat us to the punch.

  “You’re eating too much of your own cooking, my girl,” he told me. “Getting a little thick around the middle.”

  At that point, I hadn’t gained any weight at all. In fact, I had lost a pound or two. And who wants to be told they’re gaining weight? No one. But it was a perfect opening for my husband.

  “She’ll get thicker yet,” Glen said. “She’s in calf.”

  My brother Jonathan’s two boys, Damian, 7, and Joel, 4, thought it was great that they would have a new cousin.

  “Is it going to be a boy cousin or a girl cousin?” they wanted to know.

  “We don’t know yet,” Glen said.

  “You mean like the baby comes out of Auntie Susan’s tummy and yells ‘surprise’?” Joel asked.

  “Sort of,” I answered.

  “Does Uncle Sam know?” Damian asked. My brother Sam lives in Vancouver.

  “No, not yet, but we’re going to phone him soon to tell him,” I said.

  The Triple As had other questions. Did we know what we were going to call the baby? Had we bought any clothes for the baby yet? Adam had some old toys he was willing to donate. Well, on second thought, maybe he was willing to lend them out if we promised to give them back.

  “That’s why you’ve been looking a little worn around the edges,” Mom said as she gave me a hug.

  Wonderful, I thought. I’m fat and frayed with more than six months still to go. Can life get any better than this?

  My friend Carol only had three more months to go and a two-year-old to keep herself occupied in the meantime. We dropped in to visit Carol and her husband Bill one evening a week or so later so that we could tell them our news.

  “I knew it!” Carol said. “No beer. No wine. I told Bill weeks ago that you were pregnant.”

  Carol didn’t go back to work after her first child and, with the second one on the way, she had no plans to return anytime soon.

  “Are you going to quit work?” she asked.

  “Haven’t even thought about it yet,” I said. “But probably not.”

  Carol was big into early child development and she had recently attended a seminar on attachment.

  “What’s that?” I asked.

  “Bonding with your child.”

  “But don’t all parents bond with their child? Isn’t it instinct, like a cow licking its calf?”

  “You’d be surprised. We’ve gotten so into the ‘things’ we want to give our kids that we’ve forgotten the importance of just being with them,” Carol said. “When you have your baby, you’ll have to come to our parent-child sessions.”

  Carol talks as if she’s reading from a textbook. She didn’t used to be that way until she had her first baby, or at least I never noticed it. Motherhood made her a student of all things maternal. A student and then a teacher. Whether people like me wanted to be taught or not.

  What “things” did I want to give to my child? I’d never thought about it, although I suppose when the time came, I would be just as caught up in the sports teams and technological gadgets as anyone else.

  “If we had a little boy, what would you want him to have?” I asked Glen that night after we had returned home.

  “One of those made-to-scale John Deere tractor toys,” he said.

  In any community, there are the haves and the have-nots. Where I live the “haves” own green tractors. The “have nots” make do with red. I married up, although Dad would disagree. He has always preferred his red tractors. To hell with what the Joneses are buying.

  Later I realized I had asked Glen what he would want to give a son and not what he would want to give a daughter. Why was that, I wondered. God forbid after all this time I was buying into the male descendent thing.

  Carol’s question about whether or not I would continue working after the baby was born also plagued me. I didn’t know. I thought that economics would dictate the final answer. Although our crops had been good this year, so had almost everyone else’s in the country. That meant that the price per bushel went down. Even with the best management practices possible and a nod from the heavens, the price still went down. How’s a person supposed to get ahead that way? I knew few farmers’ wives who could afford to stay home with their young children. Carol could count herself lucky.

  But there was something else deeper down that bothered me. I wasn’t sure that I wanted to quit work. It wasn’t just about the pay cheque. It was about wanting the validation that work gave me. Was that a mark against me right from the start?

  Mom told me not to worry about it.

  “Take your time,” she said.

  Our harvested fi
elds were full of both Canada and snow geese. I heard their calls throughout the day. It is impossible to deny the season when geese are flying overhead.

  I am not a poet; my Grade Eleven English teacher told me I lacked the “soul of a poet,” whatever that is. But whenever I hear geese in flight, I want to write poetry.

  The lonely cries, the v-shaped formations, mating for life. There is more than one poem there. How the geese’s departure coincides first with the colours of autumn and then with denuded trees and piles of browning leaves. And how their reappearance in the spring coincides with colour’s return. Cycles and circles.

  And if I wanted to inject humour, I could write about prairie pigeons with their propensity for pooping everywhere.

  As the last of the leaves fell from the trees in our yard, I hung Halloween decorations from the bare branches. White ghosts shivered in the chill air. I carved a pumpkin. I am no artist. The face on the finished product was askew and, in attempting to give the mouth some teeth, I had accidentally cut too far. There was a huge gap where a front tooth should have been, giving my jack-o-lantern a disreputable air. Jack was a down-on-his-luck pumpkin with no money for a dentist.

  I wanted to be ready for the few Halloween kids we’d get. I think I inherited that interest in decorating from Mom. She divided the year into colours and decorated her house accordingly. My dad and brothers teased her, accusing her of going overboard, but I didn’t agree with them. Mom decorated with colour, not with things, and the result was never cheesy. I’m not sure my efforts are as successful as hers, but I make an attempt.

  “Next year we can take our kid out trick-or-treating,” Glen said as he watched me fill the treat bags and took a chocolate bar for himself.

  “You think so? She’ll only be about six months old. She won’t know what candy is.”

  “More for us then,” he laughed. “So you think it is a girl?”

  “No, I don’t know whether it’s a he or a she. The ‘she’ just came out.”

  Truth was, I was spending a lot of time pondering the he/she thing. I never knew which gender would pop out of my mouth.

  Halloween’s imminence signaled a change in the weather, which wasn’t surprising. I don’t remember too many years when October 31 was sunny and mild. It was the kind of weather that invited lazy afternoons under the covers and Glen and I took advantage of it one day. We had just barely begun the foreplay when I heard a knock at the kitchen door. I peered out the bedroom window, wondering why the dogs had not barked to warn us of company.

  “It’s my mom,” I said and scrambled back into jeans and sweatshirt. It took long enough for me to get to the door that she had turned to go back to her vehicle.

  “Mom,” I called. “Sorry, I was upstairs and didn’t hear you.”

  “I came for coffee,” Mom said.

  Partway through our first cup, Glen came into the kitchen, stretching as if he had just woken from a nap.

  “Is there enough for me?” he asked. He stayed for one cup, then made his excuses and left.

  “I came at a bad time, didn’t I?” Mom asked.

  “No, not at all,” I said.

  “I’m a married woman. You think your dad and I haven’t had afternoon sex?”

  The thought of Mom and Dad being caught out in an act of connubial bliss almost made me laugh. But then I thought she might be setting the scene for one of her stories. I knew just what to do to stop her.

  “Gosh darn, Ma, you’re hurting my ears,” I said and covered them.

  The “gosh darn” line was my younger brother Sam’s; I’m not sure where he got it from. Our mother insisted that her children accept that parents were people, too. That they had the same anatomical parts as everyone else and that they used them in the same way. Bathroom noises were a part of being human and you wouldn’t be here if your dad and I weren’t sexually active. She drew parallels between the mating rituals out in the pasture and those in the human world.

  But when you’re a teenager, the idea of your parents coupling—the images inspired by that idea—are unnerving. We preferred to think of our mother as the Virgin Mary, although we never stopped to consider what that might mean about our dad.

  So Sam, the youngest and silliest of us, began using his line whenever she verged too near uncomfortable territory. It always worked; she would laugh.

  “Your ears need toughening up,” she would say.

  It worked again today. Mom laughed and reached for her coffee. I knew she would not tell her story, but I think she was reliving it.

  ~ Sandra ~

  I hear a vehicle coming behind me and know without turning that it is our red Ford half-ton. I move over to the side of the gravel road, dusty prairie grass lightly flouring my shoes.

  “Want to come for a ride?” Dave asks as he pulls up beside me. “I’m going up north to check the cattle.”

  I hesitate.

  “You don’t want to?” my husband asks.

  “Yeah, sure,” I say and walk over to the passenger side, stopping briefly to pat our dog Dingo who is cadging a ride in the truck box.

  “You must have caught up on the baling,” I say. It is shortly after seven, more than two hours of sunlight still remaining in the day.

  “Yep,” he says. A man of few words, my husband. Over the almost twenty years of our marriage, our communication has become abbreviated, a shorthand at which each is now proficient. When Dave says “dog food” I know that he means “we are low on dog food, so pick some up the next time you go to town.”

  I watch the ditches and fields pass as we drive the four miles to the north pasture. Mid-July and the vivid colours of spring have lost their clarity. Mottled green leaves hang in a sun-drenched haze. The heat clings to the day with sticky fingers.

  The freshly-cut hay in the fields smells like honey with a hint of mint. I breathe it in with pleasure.

  “You were going for a walk?” Dave asks.

  “Yep,” I say, consciously echoing his earlier reply. I like to go for walks in the early evening. Not necessarily for the exercise, although that is an easy enough justification. More for the solitude. Thinking time, I call it. Although I don’t spend much time thinking. I just walk, senses soaking in the sky and the ground and the space between. The silence is a comfort, rather than a void that needs filling.

  “You didn’t have to come with me,” Dave says. “Sorry if I disturbed your walk.”

  “No problem. I would have said if I didn’t want to come.” To myself I admit this is what they used to call a little white lie, an untruth voiced in the pursuit of peace and good manners. I don’t easily give up my alone time.

  When we reach the approach to the pasture, I get out to open the gate and pull the posts out of the way, letting my husband drive through. Then I stretch the barbed wire back across the opening, hooking the loop over the end post to hold the gate in place.

  I get back into the truck and we drive into the pasture. It is a bumpy ride over ground gouged by the passage of many hooves. I look through the back window to see the dog lose its balance and stumble. It is back on its feet in seconds, shoulders braced against the next shudder of the vehicle, eyes scanning the horizon for any sign of movement.

  I’m not the only one who knows the sound of our half ton. The cattle recognize it, too. The pasture seems empty at first, but one by one, the cows start to come out of the bush where they had been seeking shade. The calves follow their lead.

  The summer has been kind to the animals, I think. Their bellies are full and their coats shine. The calves have lost the frisky legginess of the newborn and are filling out.

  We drive towards the centre of the open grazing area. Dave gets out. Dingo jumps out of the back, already at a run. He circles round the cows and calves, drawing them in ever closer to the truck. Dingo is an Australian cattle dog; herding cattle is in his genes. Soon Dave and I are
surrounded by cows and their offspring.

  “Help me count,” he says.

  I climb into the back of the half-ton to get a better view. We brought twenty-eight matching cow-calf pairs out to this pasture in May. Now we need to assure ourselves that none are missing. Perhaps there are some laggards still hiding in the shade. That would mean we would need to spend time searching. Less pleasant alternatives include a sick animal lying in some quiet corner or, worse, a dead one. There are hidden dangers in the pasture—unseen holes that can cause an animal to break a leg, noxious plants, even illegal snares left from winter trap lines. There are predators, too, to worry about, both the two and the four-legged kind. We once found a young heifer with its hind quarters savagely gouged. Nature is not kind. In that instance, the gun my husband wielded had been the kindness.

  Counting is not the easy task it should have been. The cattle mill around us, seldom standing still. It requires concentration.

  “I only get twenty-seven” Dave says.

  “I got twenty-nine,” I say.

  We count again.

  “Twenty-eight,” we both say at the same time. All present and accounted for.

  Dave begins to walk among the animals, checking that each cow has a calf at foot and looking for any signs of illness or injury. I return to the front seat and watch.

  I like coming out to see the cattle in pasture and am always glad when in spring it is time to move them out of the corrals in the farmyard. It is good to see cows when I look out the living room window or when I walk out to the garden or am cutting grass. And when summer is high and bees are buzzing in the hay crops, the season is complete.

  Life does not get any better than this, I think. A cow and its calf, endless days of green grass and summer sunshine, a herd bull for protection and fertilization when the time is right. I call it the summer of their contentment.

  The bull comes sauntering out of the bush, a late arrival. Tough life, managing his harem. The shade is his right and privilege. But something more than curiosity has drawn him out now, I see. I watch as the bull comes up on a cow, sniffing her from behind.