The Waiting Place

by Sharron Arksey

  As I drive past our driveway, I remember the dog has not been fed yet this morning. So I stop, back up, and drive into the yard. The Border Collie comes rushing out from behind the barn, yipping loudly, tail held high. How often have I seen that black and white streak and thought “skunk” before realizing it is our dog. He isn’t moving as quickly as he used to; arthritis and age are taking their toll. How quickly age catches us, I think.

  When I bring the dog a plate, he comes up beside me and waits until I turn away before lowering his head to the food. Strange dog. He has always demanded privacy at meal times.

  The tea cups are still on the kitchen table and I carry them to the sink; I consider washing them but decide against it. They can wait.

  The cattle see me as soon as I park at the gate. They follow me across the pasture to another fence. You let the cattle into a small paddock, leave them to graze it down and then move them again. The experts tell us it is an environmentally sound practice, but it just seems like common sense to me. Common sense is undervalued these days; at least until scientific research data proves it true. Then it’s gospel. The old becomes new and then old again.

  I unlatch the gate and open it wide. The cattle come, even without me calling to them.

  At the end of the line comes the bull, more than a ton of mature testosterone in a leather hide. The bull moves strongly, scrotal sac swinging back and forth between its hind legs.

  “Good bulls die young,” I can hear Joe saying. A variation on the paving of paradise. You don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone. Or Murphy’s Law, perhaps. The good die young, the mediocre stumble on.

  Only after several years does a bull’s genetic inheritance make itself known in its progeny. This one has proven himself over time while managing to avoid the pitfalls of illness or accident.

  Years ago we spent thousands of dollars on a yearling bull with a pedigree to match its price tag. Joe wanted that bull so badly, its purchase a symbolic measure of the farm’s success, and we were all proud of it. Lynne posted photographs on the farm website. We got one year’s worth of calves out of that bull, but it died in its third year. The autopsy showed a massive internal infection. The one set of calves he sired contained many keepers and we still have cows in the herd that we can trace back to him. But we have never again spent that kind of money on any animal.

  If Joe were here, he would be calling to the cattle. Cows cows cows. The words would hang in the air like boldface capitals, fading as they fell to lower case letters in a smaller font.

  I always tell Joe that he doesn’t need to yell to get their attention. We don’t need to chase them. We can just take our time and they will do what we want. It is what they want, too. Who doesn’t want the green grass on the other side of the fence? Or water when the trough is dry? Feed them and they will come is not just for people. With one to lead, the rest will follow.

  Sometimes, though, the animals do not understand the rationale behind human directions. They will balk or suddenly move at right angles. It is then that Joe’s impatience shows. It is almost always guaranteed to cause friction between us, him yelling at me for being too slow or not in the right place at the right time, me yelling at him for being in such a hurry.

  But you can’t wait, can you, Joe? Move the cattle so we can get on with the haying. Finish the haying so we can take out the bulls. Take out the bulls so we can wean the calves. Your life is the work and the work is the cattle.

  Joe has followed me here, I think. I can hear his words even if I cannot see him.

  When his dad was undergoing cancer treatments, Joe spent more time outdoors on the farm than ever. The kids joke about so-called happy places. The farm was Joe’s happy place. His hiding place, too. He hid from his father’s death there.

  More than forty years we have been married and we have never been away from the farm for more than three days in a row. Joe gets nervous when he isn’t at home. He worries that something might go wrong without his supervision. His misses the morning light through our east bedroom window.

  “We’ve been gone long enough,” he says. “Let’s go home.”

  We are always good house guests; we never outstay our welcome.

  Joe was delighted that Glen wanted to farm, continuing the link to the land that is several generations deep. Granted, Glen’s preference is grain farming. He doesn’t share his dad’s love for cattle, at least not to the same extent. But at least he is devoted to the land itself. Farming without that passion is unwise. You have nothing to sustain your spirit when things go wrong. And Susan’s enthusiasm for her animals is more than enough to make up for any shortage on Glen’s side. The farm will be in good hands when they get married and take over.

  I already recognized Joe’s passion when I started dating him. We’d start each summer evening with a truck ride to check the cattle. And after we were married, the boundaries between house and farm blurred. Both are home.

  I remember once a cow died giving birth in January and we knew the calf would not make it without heat. So we brought it into the house, laid it on blankets on the kitchen floor and rubbed it down with towels until the chill was gone from its young hide. We kept it inside until the next day when it had enough strength to find its legs and wobble unsteadily to its feet. Lynne decided we should call it Wobbly and Wobbly she was until the day she died ten years later. If I close my eyes, I can see Joe and Lynne kneeling on the floor beside that calf.

  “Is she going to be all right, Dad?”

  “She’s going to be just fine, Lynne.”

  Such confidence in his voice, something a daughter could wrap around her shoulders to keep her warm. I could use that confidence now.

  We never discussed what we would do if work became impossible, did we, Joe? But I can imagine the conversation. “Let me go,” you would say. No heroics. At least I think that is what you would say. Perhaps I am fooling myself. Perhaps it is me who would say those words while you would want to continue the fight. I am confused. I do not know. Why did we never talk about it? Were we afraid? I’m afraid now.

  “Can you hear me, Joe? I’m talking to you.”

  The cows are drinking at the pit. I close the gate and walk back to the car.

  I am almost there when the cell rings. It is Lynne.

  “Is there any change?”

  “No,” she says. “Where are you, Mom? It seems to be taking you a long time.”

  “I’m just about to drive back,” I tell her. “I moved the cows and watched them for a bit. Counted them. Dad and I were going to do that together this morning.”

  “Yes, you said that,” my daughter says. “So you’re coming right back?”

  “Yes, getting into the car now.” And to prove the point, I open the driver’s door.

  “All right, see you soon,” she says. “Susan was able to get hold of Glen. He’ll be here in a few hours.”

  “Good,” I say. “We can all be together.”

  “Mom?”

  “Yes?”

  “Are you all right?”

  “I’m fine, Lynne.”

  I am the child telling lies to her parent.

  ~ Susan ~

  Joe surprised everyone, most of all the pessimistic doctors, by recovering from his stroke. When he regained consciousness, his first words were garbled and anxious.

  “Did you move the cattle?” he asked. Joan assured him that she had. He sank back into a more natural sleep and the doctors said he had turned the corner. It was not an overnight recovery, more a slow and steady progress towards some kind of normalcy. Not quite what it had been, but closer.

  It wasn’t easy for Joe to move to town, even though he accepted the good judgment behind the decision. But a man on his deathbed who still worries about feeding the cattle doesn’t leave the farm behind when he leaves the yard.

  That’s one of the reasons why I flared u
p a few days ago when I read a newspaper article telling farmers to leave their emotions out of it when making business plans.

  “Listen to this crap,” I said to Glen and read the entire article to him.

  “Easier said than done,” he said.

  I guess anyone who owned a family business would find it hard to walk away. Especially if the business had been in the family for several generations.

  The list on the fridge was messy with crossed out lines and scribbles. Near the top of the list, my nephews had drawn a stork carrying a baby in a diaper, with the words Wah Wah Wah issuing from the infant’s mouth. The bottom of the diaper was worked in with brown crayon, an indication that our baby had enjoyed his first bowel movement on the flight. Their mother had not been pleased with them.

  Crib and/or cradle (J&J)

  Sheets and towels and baby facecloths

  Receiving blankets

  Diapers and a diaper bag

  Car seat (bucket)

  Baby bouncer

  Sleepers

  Onesies Twosies Threesies Foursies (My nephews again)

  Change table

  High chair

  Baby bathtub

  Soothers

  Rattles

  Breast pump

  The change table and high chair were coming as family gifts; Joan and Joe were giving us a crib. I still hadn’t got around to that damn breast pump, but I promised myself I would pick one up before I started mat leave.

  Our senses of smell returned with the thaw when it came. Frozen things have no aroma, but the warm sun made the barnyard pungent once again. When I returned to the house, I lifted my hands to my nose and sniffed the calf smell that lingered there. I hated to wash it off.

  Cows are motherhood in a leather hide, I thought. Pregnancy made me feel like my cows: bulging stomach, awkward and ungainly gait, swollen udders with distended veins visible beneath the skin.

  Now it was time to start introducing the heifers, and select cows, to the male of the species. When we saw that the female was in heat, we would bring her in with a specially selected male.

  Dad, who is a trained AI technician, used to inseminate cows artificially on the farm. He would manually insert bull semen into a cow when she was in heat.

  Frozen semen is thawed and put inside a special insemination gun. When the farmer noticed that a cow was in heat, he would immediately call his AI tech. Insemination must be done twelve to twenty-four hours after the animal goes into heat to ensure that the sperm arrives at the fertilization site a few hours before ovulation.

  Apparently AI was originally used because there was less chance of injury to the cow with an insemination gun than with a raging bull. Buying the semen is less expensive than feeding and caring for a bull all year long. And semen can be tested for a sexually-treated disease that a herd bull could unknowingly transmit.

  And finally, you get to breed your cow to a quality bull with the traits you are looking for. It’s all win-win as far as I can see.

  I have been trying to persuade Glen to get a few more purebreds so that we can try some AI breeding, but so far at least he hasn’t been enthusiastic. I’m going to keep working on him. I’d be willing to take the training so that I could do the AI work myself.

  In the meantime, we’re doing it the old-fashioned way. We put the boy and girl together, and watch for signs that sex has occurred. When we notice that the cow’s tail is held out at a crooked angle or that there is fluid discharge from her vulva, we release the animals and send them back to their pens. A cow’s cycle is about twenty-one days, so if she shows signs of being in heat again three weeks after the mating, you know you have to try again.

  It’s rather like being a peeping tom, keeping an eye on our cattle to see if they’ve engaged in sex or not. Bovine voyeurism, I call it.

  Once last winter Glen accidentally put the wrong bull in with a heifer, wrong because they both had the same mother. It was equivalent to having sex with your half-sibling. The bull was good to mate with heifers, but not this particular one, and Glen never thought of their shared bloodline. When I got home from work and realized what he had done, I was angry.

  “Sorry, Sus,” he said. “I don’t remember those things as well as you do.”

  The heifer bore a bull calf a few weeks ago and we made it into a steer. There was nothing identifiably wrong with the animal, but it had to be designated for slaughter because of the risk its genetic makeup posed to the herd.

  It made me wonder about our baby, what traits he or she would be born with, what strengths and weaknesses, what potential, what risks. All determined by one egg and one sperm from two separate donors united for a lifetime by one act of coitus. More to it than the shape of a nose or the colour of one’s hair. Hidden things that might never show at all, or might suddenly erupt in crisis. Scary stuff. Or wonderful surprises. Who knew which?

  Glen’s family is all on the tall side; his dad is an angular man with wide shoulders, his mother thin with short blonde hair that has faded to a pale gray. Lynne inherited that hair colour and Glen’s is a darker blonde. My family is both shorter and heavier, although none of us are what you would call overweight. Jon would come the closest. We all have dark hair and my brothers inherited my mother’s natural wave, although on them it shows as a tousled look that I rather like. Mom has coloured her hair for years now and says she does not want to know how grey it is underneath.

  I went for afternoon coffee with two of my co-workers, Karen and Diane, on one of those unpleasant March days, the wind a wet chill on our skin and the earlier thaw only an icy memory.

  “Did I hear Brian and Lynne went to the Dominican for a week?” Karen asked me.

  “Yep,” I said. “They pulled the kids out of school and all five of them went.”

  “Kinda strange to take the kids with them to the Dominican, isn’t it? I mean, it’s more of a couples’ destination.”

  “Maybe they needed the kids to run interference between them.”

  I regretted the words the minute they came out of my mouth, even though it was exactly what I had thought when I first heard about the trip.

  “What do you mean, interference? Is there trouble in paradise?”

  “Susan has dirt on Lynne, don’t you, Susan?” This from Diane.

  I denied it and said no more, but the damage was done. I had planted the seeds that would become a rumour.

  But when the bombshell hit, I never saw it coming.

  We woke one morning to news on the radio that a BSE-infected cow had been found in Alberta. Now one cow does not make an epidemic and one cow is not enough to close borders. Not yet anyway. But it did make us ask the question “What if?”

  And it wrecked an until-then perfectly fine winter morning.

  Glen went uptown to join the local coffee clutch at the gas station. There would be lots of discussion there about the issue, I knew. And many solutions suggested, some of them not politically correct. Those who cried wolf would cry some more and so it would go, one cup of coffee after another.

  When he came home for lunch, however, Glen had something else to talk about.

  “Did you know that Lynne had an affair?” he asked me.

  If I have time to prepare, I can lie my way out of a paper bag. But faced with a question requiring an immediate answer, I’m better off telling the truth. Any lie I tell would be so unconvincing it would make matters worse.

  “Yes.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me?” He was angry.

  “Because Lynne asked me not to tell anyone?”

  “I don’t care what Lynne wanted. This was important. You should have told me.”

  “Why?”

  “Why? Because I would have talked to her, I would have made her stop before it got this far.”

  Why is it that the men I know always think t
hat they need to fix things? What’s more, why do they think they can?

  “Maybe it’s none of your business,” I said to my husband.

  “Of course, it’s my business. She’s my sister.”

  “But that doesn’t give you the right to know everything about her marriage.”

  “Are you siding with her in this?”

  “Of course not. I’m just saying Lynne didn’t want me to tell her what to do. She just wanted someone to share this with. I was a sounding board, that’s all. And the truth is, I wouldn’t have known what to say to her even if she had asked for advice. I don’t know how things are between her and Brian. It’s not my job to interfere or to offer advice. Giving advice would be dangerous when I don’t know everything.”

  “She told him,” Glen said. “He’s devastated.”

  I laughed. Bad move, I know. But I could not picture a devastated Brian. An angry Brian, a pissed off Brian, yes. But not devastated. Something that unbelievable had to be comic.

  “Don’t confess,” I had told Lynne. “Some secrets are best kept hidden,” I had told her.

  “If you had an affair, would you confess to me?” Glen asked.

  Oh shit. The ground began to shift beneath my feet.

  “It’s a moot point,” I said. “I am not having an affair.”

  “But would you tell me if you were?”

  “Am I stupid?”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Just that a secret like that has the power to do immense harm. Confession might be good for the soul, but very bad for the marriage.”

  “I would want my wife to be honest with me. If I thought she wouldn’t be, how could I ever trust her?”

  “Is Brian glad that Lynne was honest with him?”

  “No, of course not. How can he be glad?”

  “So maybe if she had not told him, just carried on as she had decided to do, staying in the marriage, Brian’s anger and hurt feelings could have been avoided. Sometimes it’s kinder to lie. Or to not say anything at all.”

  “Is that the way you think, Sus? Because it’s not the way I think and I feel as if I don’t know you anymore.”