Dave watches, too, irritation in his face.
“I think it’s time we took the bull out,” he says.
Bulls are always removed from the pasture before late summer to prevent late calves. But any cow not already in calf when the bull is removed will not get in calf that year. That means a year of feed and veterinary expenses with nothing going into the bank account to balance it out. If it happens more than two years in a row to the same cow, a decision has to be made about whether or not to keep her in the herd. It pays to be fertile.
There is another consideration as well. By mid to late summer, female calves are like precocious twelve-year-olds, capable of reproduction but in no way prepared for it. An early unplanned pregnancy could have lasting health consequences for the heifer. But robbing from the cradle means nothing to a bull, who just reads the signs and acts on them.
This male, for example, knows a female in heat when he smells one. And we can be thankful, I suppose, that the cow in question is a mature lady. A late calf would be an annoyance, nothing more. Certainly Dave will not intervene. You don’t stand between a 2500-pound bull and his woman. Some battles are not worth fighting.
The female, however, did not appear completely compliant.
“Maggie, you vixen you,” I say and Dave laughs.
“Typical female,” he says. “Not tonight, dear. I have a headache.”
“That’s lame,” I say. “I don’t think cows get headaches.”
“Maybe not, but if they get a stomach ache, it’s four times worse than a human’s.”
I groan. “That’s lamer yet,” I say.
We watch the bedroom scene unfold before us.
Maggie is playing coy. When the bull approaches, she walks away. He follows. She moves again. Catch me if you can, she says. Done, he says.
With solid force, he launches himself on top of her, hind legs taking the brunt of his weight as he thrusts forward.
There is none of this up and down, in and out nonsense; one forceful penetration is all it takes. A violent shudder and it is over.
The bull dismounts and the cow walks away, her private parts gaping. Bovine erotica, I think, and shiver.
I feel Dave’s eyes on me. I turn and catch the question in them.
“Do you want to?” he asks.
“Yes,” I say, surprising myself. No coyness here.
“Where? Here?” he asks.
The plastic seat sticks to my legs. “No,” I say and point to a stand of poplar trees, their branches a canopy over the grass below. “It will be cooler there.”
“We don’t have a blanket,” he says.
“That never stopped us before.”
“True. Remember the time in the garden?”
“Yes,” I say. “That was a long time ago.”
It had been in our pre-children days, later in the season when the corn was ready for picking. Dave came out to the garden where I was working and the idea occurred to both of us at the same time.
“Remember how hot it was?” I ask now. The air between the tall rows of corn had been sauna-like. It took our breath away. I can remember how heavy the air had felt and him on top of me. From beneath him I had looked up to see thin strips of blue sky between the corn stalks. Slivers of sunlight penetrated my body.
We had had an argument the night before, I remember, and the still unresolved dispute had given an edge to the act of love-making. There had been as much violence as tenderness in the act. Yet it had put to sleep the remnants of our anger.
The poplar trees today are a somewhat cooler alternative. We use our clothing as a blanket. An unsatisfactory arrangement. In our haste, we didn’t think of zippers that dig into flesh or the discomfort of cowboy denim hardened by grime. Nor are there enough clothes to adequately cover the ground beneath us. Blades of grass sharpened by weeks without rain cut into bare skin.
I look at my husband’s body, the lines where tan meets skin that never sees the sun. I kiss that line below his neck. So familiar, I could find it in the dark. He tastes of clover and salt.
Our bodies fit together with the ease of a learned habit. We have danced this dance so many times before, I think, although the metaphor is inappropriate. Dave does not dance. Except here between my legs. Here his movements are sure, knowing when to slow the pace, when to speed it up, when to lead and when to follow.
The edges are gone, I think. They’ve been washed away by time and children, like land eroded by wind and water. Everything is smooth; we slide easily towards orgasm.
A blast of ’80s music brings our slide to an abrupt stop. Dave and I freeze as if stillness could camouflage flesh against the colours surrounding it. A blue sedan hurtles past in a cloud of dust.
“Talk about coitus interruptus,” I say, wanting to lighten the moment but needing to ask the question. “Did you recognize the car?”
“No,” he says.
That’s good, I think. It could have been one of our children. Never mind poor Sam’s ears; he might have been blinded for life.
Dave begins to dress, pulling his jeans and shirt out from under me and shaking them free of grit before putting them back on. Before I have even stood up, he is heading back towards the truck.
Cows, calves, and bull—not a voyeur among them—have returned to the shade. Dingo is back in the truck box waiting for the ride home. Dusk draws in, blurring the edges of the day.
I dress more slowly, mindful that the car could return, yet unable to summon speed or energy. I feel as if I had watched an action movie that, despite its promise, fizzled badly at the end. Anti-climax is exactly the right word for it, I think, and reach for my underwear.
When I get to the truck, Dave is already inside, hands gripping the wheel.
“Time to go,” he says.
“Yep,” I say.
FIVE
Susan. That is my name. Born Susan Angela Connor. Now Susan Davidson, married to Glen Davidson, son of Joseph Davidson. Nobody calls him Joseph though. He is Joe to everyone. Except for Glen and his sister. They call him Dad. Ha. Laugh until you cry.
Funny thing. It’s my dad who’s named David. My brothers are the real David’s sons.
My initials, now that I’m married, are SAD. The strange things you think of when you’re trying to focus on other things. No sex, no alcohol, no drugs. So SAD. Perhaps I should have kept my birth surname. Then I could be a sad SAC. That’s going from bad to worse.
Things that come in fives: Five fingers on your hands. Five toes on your feet. Things we want our baby to have. Please let it come with the right number of fingers and toes. And with all five of its senses: sight, hearing, smell, touch, and taste. Five vowels in the alphabet: a, e, i, o, u. Ignoring “y.” Five cents in a nickel. The five Ws—who, what, when, where, why. Five days in a school or work week. High five. Fifth wheel. Five gold rings. The Dionne quintuplets. Cancel that. Think positive.
Five is halfway to ten.
“He left his wife,” Lynne told me when we met for coffee one Friday afternoon in early November. I had come in for a doctor’s appointment. “I don’t know what to do.”
“Do you need to do anything?” I asked.
“Well, I feel guilty,” she said. “Maybe he left her because of me.”
I wanted to hit her over the head with the coffee urn. A spoon in the eye might have worked. But the coffee urn would have made a bigger splash and drowning her in liquid caffeine seemed appropriate. Call it a wakeup call.
She felt guilty because her married lover left his wife, but I hadn’t yet heard her say that she felt any guilt for having an affair herself.
I asked her once this fall what was wrong with her marriage.
“Nothing,” she said. “Sometimes it’s not about what’s wrong with what you have. It’s about what might be right with what you don’t,” she said.
I to
ok a few moments to follow that through. It was convoluted, although it did make a certain amount of sense in a “grass is greener on the other side of the fence” kind of way. It’s not, of course, but the possibility that it might be is enticing.
“Has he asked you to come with him?” I asked.
“No,” she said. “He hasn’t.”
“Would you go with him if he did?”
“I don’t know.”
Neither did I.
My doctor said we could know the baby’s gender if we wanted. Glen and I both said no. Bill and Carol knew she was having a girl this time round, but Glen and I were looking forward to the surprise at the end of the pregnancy. Although, how much of a surprise could it be? There were only two options—a boy or a girl. Twins would be a surprise all right, but we already knew that I wasn’t having twins. Besides I knew a woman who badly wanted a girl because she already had a son and didn’t plan a third pregnancy. When the tests indicated another boy, she went into a funk that lasted the next five months. Then it turned out that there had been a clerical error; it was a girl after all. A happy ending, but I just remember all those months of sadness. Better not to know.
We had selected an upstairs bedroom as the new baby’s room and I wanted to paint it yellow, the colour of sunshine. If my baby is a girl, I will paint the trim white. Blue if it is a boy.
Mom offered to help me paint. She thought we should start right away.
“We can wait a while, can’t we? It’s only November,” I said.
“Yes, but after November comes December and with Christmas and everything, there will be no time then. And as you get further and further along, you won’t feel much like doing it. Believe me, I know.”
So I bought the paint and she and I spent the greater part of a week getting the job done. It took us longer than we had thought it would because the walls were covered with several layers of wallpaper, which I wanted to remove before painting.
Peeling off the wallpaper was like going back in time, decade by decade and pattern by pattern. A green with gold flecks that I thought hideous. A floral pattern in greens and pinks. A geometric maze of blues and purples. Splashing on the paint was easy after that.
“Pregnancy is divided into three parts,” Mom told me as we rolled the paint onto the walls. “The first three months are the blah months. You may have morning sickness. Food doesn’t taste quite right. The second trimester is the golden time. You begin to show. Life is wonderful. And then the last three months are the heavy months when you are carrying the weight of the world in your belly and you cannot wait for it to be all over.”
The finished walls were brighter than I had imagined when I looked at the colour in the store, but not overwhelmingly so. It would do.
It was during that week of painting that one of our herd bulls began to limp.
“I think we’re going to need to buy a new bull,” Glen said at supper. A bull with an injured leg is just as bad as a bull with a low semen count. We started thumbing through the sale catalogues as they arrived in the mail and browsing online, searching for a suitable replacement.
There are many things to consider when selecting a new bull, everything from scrotal circumference (size really does matter) to historical data on the animal’s birth, weaning, and yearling weights.
One of my jobs at the vet clinic is to assist the vet with breeding evaluations. I hold the animal while my boss handles the tape measure. Or vice versa. Whichever works best. It’s a good gag line at parties. How was work today? I measured a bull’s balls.
Glen and I took a drive to look at some bulls included in a purebred sale early in December. One of them, a solid black two-year-old, took an interest in me and followed me all the time we were in the bullpen.
“Just wave him away,” the owner said. “He won’t hurt you, but he can be a pest.”
If the black pest thought he was going to influence our choice by being extra friendly, like a youngster in an orphanage scoping out prospective parents, it was doomed to disappointment. We did not want a black bull.
But we disagreed over which animal we might want. I had my eye on a smaller full red bull; Glen preferred the looks of a rangier animal with red and white markings.
“Yours would be a good heifer bull,” he said. “But we want a herd bull.”
He was right.
SIX
Things that come in sixes: Six packs. Sides on a cube. Legs on an insect. Six geese a-laying. Six feet under. There have to be more, but my mind has gone blank. Focus, Susan, focus. I can’t. I am going into panic mode.
Why did I want this in the first place? Blame sex. Sex got me into this. I swear the first male appendage I see, I’m going to stick it somewhere and it won’t be anywhere that would make a baby.
Glen is back from his shopping expedition. His hair looks shorter.
“Did you get a fucking hair cut?” I ask.
“I’ve never heard her swear in public before,” Glen says to the nurse.
“Time and a place for everything,” the nurse says as she flicks a clump of hair from the collar of his blue plaid work shirt.
Six is half a dozen; maybe I can think of things that come that way. A half dozen eggs. A half dozen donuts. A half dozen roses. Six of one and a half dozen of the other. Sixth sense. At sixes and sevens.
Why is six afraid of seven? Because seven eight nine.
We went to the bull sale, but didn’t get the animal we wanted. It went for more money than we could afford.
My family used to participate in auction sales, but not so much these days. We raised purebred animals and sold them as breeding stock. I remember days spent hauling the bulls or heifers to the sale site, usually in the winter when it was cold and the trip was often on icy roads.
We would unload our animals into a big barn where they would be placed in a specially-assigned pen. For the next day, we would feed and groom them. Someone always stayed near the pen in case a potential buyer had any questions about the animal. Questions about birth weight and lineage. Genetics are important. Disposition is, too. Since my head was full of those details, I was often the family member given this job. But we always had a paper folder on hand in case we needed to refresh our memories on a certain point.
The first animals to go into the ring were determined by the sale’s organizers to be the best animals of the sale and were almost always guaranteed the highest prices of the day. One of us would accompany our animal into the sales ring. We would be lined up in order of sale and moved forward until it was our turn. Then we would lead our animal into the ring and a door would slide shut behind us to prevent the animal from escaping. The idea was to lead the animal around the ring several times, then position it in the centre of the ring so that buyers could get a good look at what was on offer.
I did not enjoy my time in the sales ring. It’s one thing to lead an animal around in a show ring where there is plenty of space to manoeuvre. It is another to stand in a cramped space with bid takers yelling and the auctioneer barking into a microphone. Even the most docile of animals found it stressful.
And yet it was important that they remained passive in the face of this barrage of light and sound. If an animal got away from its handler and acted out, which often happened and wasn’t surprising when it did, buyers would hesitate to bid. No one wanted to buy an animal that was difficult to handle, one that could prove dangerous on the farm. Totally understandable, but unfair to the animal, I always thought.
I preferred it when buyers would come to the farm and see our animals in their natural setting. Less stress on everyone, animal and human alike.
When the sale was over, the winning bidders would line up to pay for their purchases and the (former) owners would head back to the barn to greet the buyers when they returned and offer them a drink to celebrate the transaction. Now that the work was over, there was time to socialize. A
nd my brothers and I would almost always slip into the pen to say goodbye to the animal, which would soon be loaded up and trucked to its new home.
In the end Glen and I bought a two-year-old bull privately from a breeder who lived a couple of hours away. It was an excuse for another Sunday afternoon drive. This was a full red bull to suit my preference, but with a build that Glen preferred. Best yet, the price was right.
By that time, we had moved all the cows home to the yard. We keep the cows out in pasture as long as we can. Even after the green grass is gone, we keep them there, hauling bales of hay out every morning. But once there is snow on the ground, and once we get within a month or so of calving season, we move them home where we can keep a closer eye on them.
The first snow arrived in mid-December, later than usual, although none of us were complaining. Climate change seems to be showing itself lately in extreme weather but the past few months had been storm-free.
That morning of the first snow, I followed Glen out to the barn and stopped to pick up a handful of snow just to see what it felt like. It was the perfect consistency for snowballs, wet enough to make the flakes cling together. I scooped up more snow and made one in my hands.
“Glen!” I called.
When he turned around, I pasted him in the chest. Within seconds we were in the middle of an all-out snowball fight, moving closer to each other so that our aims would be truer. I started the fight, but I knew I would not win it. When I took a step backwards, my feet slipped and I fell heavily.
Winded, I lay there looking up at a sodden grey sky, arms splayed out, fingers clutching at snow.
Glen came running.
“Are you all right? The baby?” he asked.
I lifted my right arm and aimed another snowball at him.
“You little …” he said and pinned me to the ground with his arms. We were both laughing.
The Waiting Place Page 5