Bum Steer

by Nancy Pickard

  Slight stopped the truck, leaving the lights on, and we both got out and started running.

  “Oh, Jesus.”

  It was one of the heifers, who was giving birth at the moment she was dying.

  11

  Little hooves and legs were emerging from between the hind legs of the heifer, though she seemed senseless of it.

  “The head’s still stuck inside her,” Slight said. “We gotta hurry, or he’ll suffocate! Come on!”

  I followed him, running, back to the truck where he had me help him lift down an apparatus made of a metal Y-fork, winch, and chains. He directed me to help him force the Y part of it over the cow’s rump and then to attach the chains to the forelegs of the calf. He was not satisfied with the result—we couldn’t lift the dead cow to get the Y on well enough to please him, but he started frantically winching up the chain anyway. As Slight strained and groaned with the effort, I held my breath, partly because the rich, awful animal odors of death and birth were overwhelming to somebody like me who’d never smelled them before. But I also held my breath from sympathy and suspense—I desperately wanted to take hold of those little hooves myself and pull until the calf popped free … and breathed.

  “Damnation!”

  The Y slid off the cow’s rump, making the chain slump and the winch useless. I got to the cow before he did this time. Together we pushed and shoved until we had it pressed onto her again. I lost all awareness of how bad the animals smelled or how primitive we looked and sounded as we grunted with the effort; now all of my senses, my civilized city senses, were focused on push pull lift strain. This time I straddled the cow and grabbed onto the apparatus where I could get a handhold, trying to increase the resistance against the winch.

  He started winding the chain again.

  “Come on uh you little bastard uh come on uh you little sucker.”

  An agonizing minute of intense struggle passed in which only a couple of lengths of the chain wound up into the winch and the calf moved only a couple of inches out of its mother. “Come on!” he yelled. My fingers grew white and numb with their puny effort to hold on. Another minute passed, filled with the sound of Slight’s grunting and cursing. The calf wasn’t moving at all; I was afraid it was already dead. “Come on!” I screamed. “Come out, come out! Please! Come on!”

  Another half-minute later, the calf’s head popped free, another minute and Slight had most of its body out, and then, unbelievably fast, the whole animal emerged. Slight dropped the winch onto the ground and ran to the calf, which lay sopping wet and limp on the ground. “Oh, God, it’s dead,” I cried. “Poor little thing, poor little thing.” He removed a handkerchief from his pocket as he fell to his knees beside it. Quickly, roughly, he wiped its nose, eyes, and mouth clean. Then he began to beat on its back with the flat of his gloved hand. “Help me, Jenny!” He ripped the chains from its forelegs, and between us, we stood the calf up. Slight whacked its back, its side, its chest. It convulsed into breath! One breath. Whack. Two breaths. Whack whack. Three breaths, four, five, six, it was breathing on its own …

  “Hold him, Jenny,” Slight said, and then he ran off.

  I tried, God I tried, but the calf was slippery with blood and feces and surprisingly strong, and I didn’t know how to hold him securely. He slipped out of my grasp and tottered away. I made a grab for him, he slipped away from me again, and now, already stronger on his feet, trotted drunkenly but quickly away from me. I felt simply desolate with failure until I saw that the baby was only trying to get to its mother. He nudged her, looking for an udder to nurse.

  I began to cry.

  “Don’t cry, Jenny,” Slight said gently, coming up behind me. He put a bloody arm around me. “She never knew what hit her, and we’re going to take care of him. Help me now.”

  He’d gone for a rope from the truck, and together we put it around the calf’s little neck and led him away from his dead mother to the pickup truck. Slight had lowered the gate to the truck bed, and now he lifted the calf and put it in there. The calf’s little hooves skittered on the metal truck bed, and down he flopped onto his front knees. Slight handed me the keys.

  “I’ll stay back here with this little one.”

  “What about the winch?”

  “I’ll come back for it.”

  I followed the ruts back to the gate—which I opened and closed by myself—and then I followed the dirt road back to the house. When we arrived, I helped Slight lower the baby from the truck and lead him into a straw-filled pen in the huge old stone barn.

  We locked the calf in, then we stood back and stared at our little orphan.

  “We’ll bottle-feed him tonight,” Slight said, “and then we’ll see if we can get one of the other cows to take him tomorrow. It doesn’t always work, but this little guy’s been lucky so far, so maybe it will.” He turned toward me. “Thank you for your help. It would have been hell by myself, and I might not have managed to save him. You do good work, Jenny Cain from Massachusetts.” He smiled. “But you look a god-awful mess right now.”

  My leather jacket, wool slacks, and silk blouse were ruined, and I couldn’t have cared less.

  “You think it was hunters?”

  “Sure.” He walked me out of the barn. “We got this place posted everywhere you look, and we don’t allow anybody to hunt on it except a few friends now and then. But you can’t keep out somebody who really wants in, especially at night. God, I hate poachers.”

  We had reached the truck again. I was so exhausted I couldn’t even speak, so I touched his arm to get his attention, and then I pointed at the shattered window behind the passenger’s seat.

  “That shot must have hit a rock,” he said.

  “I’m going to change clothes,” I mumbled.

  As I stumbled toward the house in the dark, I heard him yell, “Carl!” several times. I walked on in and started upstairs. His voice carried clearly, “Carl! Goddamit! Where are you when I need you!” In the upstairs bathroom, I stripped off my ruined clothing and stuffed it, with no real regret, into the metal wastebasket under the sink. There was no dry cleaner in the world who was going to successfully get that much cowshit out of green suede, white silk, and gray wool, and no way I was carrying it back home in a sack anyway. My flat leather shoes I saved, planning to resurrect them later.

  I then stepped under the shower.

  When the water stopped running red and brown, I soaped myself down, rinsed off, and then wrapped a towel around me. I ran to the room where my luggage was, put on my sweat suit and tennis shoes, and combed my hair off my face and let it hang wet on my shoulders. I was back downstairs before either Slight or Carl returned. Then I had to wait for Slight to wash and change before he could drive me to my motel I was, by that time, so deadly weary I felt as if I had been shot, and that all of my life’s energy was draining away out of some bullet hole in me, and I was just too darned tired to feel it.

  Thirty-nine dollars a night bought me a plain and clean room at the Rock Creek Motor Inn five miles from the ranch. Slight let me off at the motel office with the admonition to be dressed and “ready to ride in the morning.” He said he was going back to the ranch “to round up Carl and go look for the fools who mistook a truck for a buck.”

  I called Roy Leland from my room.

  “Any news, Jennifer?”

  “I helped deliver a baby calf from a dead heifer.”

  “What? Did somebody murder a cow, too?”

  “No, Roy.” I laughed, then stopped. Much more slowly I said, “Well, I guess you could say that. Uh, have you and the other trustees decided what you want me to do, Roy?”

  “Is it dangerous for you down there, Jenny?”

  Roy said it in a shocked tone of voice; clearly, the idea had not previously occurred to him. Knowing me as well as he did, it probably should have. But then, although Roy’s a very smart businessman, he’s a bit obtuse about people, seeing all of us mostly as means to ends. I hoped he wouldn’t order me home, not yet.


  “No, no, and I’ve got plenty to learn here.”

  “Find out anything about that damn will yet?”

  “One of the hired men, Quentin Harlan, seems to think Benet banned his relatives because he resented their lack of interest in his business.”

  “Huh,” Roy snorted, but then everybody knew he had a longstanding feud with his sons over the management of United Grocers. “Benet didn’t know when he had it good!”

  I reported everything I knew to that point.

  At the conclusion, Roy said, “Well, I—the trustees that is—think you might as well stay over, come back on Monday, like you had planned. But listen, anything else gets killed out there, I don’t care if it’s a goddamned squirrel, I want you on the next plane out of Kansas City.”

  “That’s a deal, Roy.”

  I thought I would collapse after that, but found, instead, that I was too keyed up to sleep. The motel didn’t have a coffee shop, but across the highway there was a Pizza Hut that looked pretty good to me.

  12

  What I really wanted was a drink, but coffee would do, even hot chocolate—something to put my hands around, something warm and comforting to grasp. Like my husband. I realized with some guilt that I had not thought about Cape Cod Bay for the last couple of hours. And it flew right out of my head again when I trotted across the two-lane highway, after looking very carefully in both directions. So far in this day I’d survived a murder rap, a ride in a small airplane, and an alleged hunter’s bullet; I wasn’t about to let some trucker squash my good record.

  When I opened the door to the restaurant, the hostess inquired, “One person?”

  “Yes.” I looked around the room, which had the usual red Pizza Hut booths and salad bar and smelled of pepperoni. A surprising number of the booths and tables were occupied, but then, this was probably the only open restaurant for miles around. “I’ll be darned, there’s someone here I know.” I pointed to a booth that was occupied by a young woman in a fringed, suede jacket. “I’ll sit with her. I’m only having coffee.”

  “I’ll bring it over,” the hostess promised.

  I slid into the booth across from Lilly Ann Lawrence before she realized I was there. She looked startled at first, then apprehensive, then guilty, then proud and defiant, then stubborn, all in a row. Her mobile face betrayed the full range of her conflicting feelings. It was like watching a young actress desperately try out for every role in a play. Finally, she settled on wary.

  “How’d you know where to come, Lilly?”

  “I called that lawyer and pretended to be your secretary, and I told him you’d walked off with all the papers and I needed a mailing address for the ranch.”

  I laughed, a response she didn’t seem to expect.

  “So, how was the ball, Lilly?”

  “Screw the ball.”

  “You didn’t go?”

  She shook her head.

  “What about your parents? Screw them, too?”

  She sat in silent rebuke of my limited adult view. It was odd, but I felt as if I knew this girl well. Our words, their underlying tone of blunt familiarity, had the quality of long acquaintance.

  The hostess brought my coffee, for which I expressed such heartfelt gratitude that she laughed. After the woman walked away again, I said, “You can’t go to the ranch with me, Lilly.”

  “I told you I know that.”

  “Then why’d you come?”

  “I just want to see it.”

  “The ranch? You could do that anytime, if all you want to do is stand across the highway and stare at it. So why tonight, Lilly?”

  “You know why,” she said sulkily.

  “Sure, I know why. How’s this? You were afraid the pumpkin might turn into a coach and you might turn into a woman?”

  “That’s bullshit.”

  I thought about it a minute and then grinned at her. “Yeah, I guess it is. Although, what do you think those things are if not initiation rites? Listen, Lilly, putting on glass slippers for a night beats having to stalk a lion or having a bone stuck through your nose.”

  “I’d rather stalk the lion.”

  “That’s too bad—they still save most of the best lions for the boys. Well, anyway, it’s done. What will your parents do now?”

  “What do you mean, do?”

  “I mean, will they disown you? Lock you out of the house? Lock you in the linen closet when you go home? Cut the fringe off all your suede jackets?” She smiled a little at that, a good sign; maybe she did have a bit of perspective about herself. “I mean, what will they do to punish you?”

  “Oh,” she said casually, “nothing.”

  She tore a large hunk off her pepperoni pizza and began to eat it. Suddenly I was very hungry. I unwrapped my knife and fork from the paper napkin in which they were rolled and cut off a piece myself. I ate a couple of bites, holding the piece in my hand, before I said, “Nothing? Won’t they be furious?”

  Lilly shrugged. “They’ll get over it.”

  “They’ll get over it,” I said in a tone that mocked her own. She flushed. “I’ll bet you have no idea how lucky you are. You get to keep your principles and your parents, too. Not many revolutionaries get to do that, you know.”

  She glanced up, looking pleased. “You really think I’m a revolutionary?”

  I wasn’t going to let her preen on it. “I think you’re a pain in the ass.”

  She looked deflated, but that quickly reverted to defiance. “Are you going to send me back?”

  “Don’t be ridiculous. You’re at least eighteen—aren’t you?—so you can do as you please. Which you certainly have done tonight.”

  “Are you going to call them?”

  “No, but I hope you are.”

  She turned her face to the window.

  After a few more sips of my coffee and a few more moments of her stubborn silence, I said, “Say, Lilly, what’s the story on that cat?”

  “What? Oh.” She laughed a little. “Daddy’s Little Darling?”

  “If you say so.”

  “That’s Spot, my Aunt Meg’s idea of a joke on my mother. My dad wants a cat, but Mom’s allergic to them, so Aunt Meg found that thing at an estate sale and gave it to Daddy, and they bring it out for company. I guess he thinks it’s funny.”

  “How very amusing.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Can he get around on his own, Lilly?”

  “Daddy? Oh, yeah, he’s got a specially outfitted car he drives and he can walk a little bit on canes, enough to get himself in and out of his chair, at least. He gets around okay. He was going to use the chair tonight to present me …” Sudden tears sprang to her eyes and she covered them with her hands. “Oh, shit. I don’t want to feel guilty.”

  “Then don’t sneak onto the ranch, okay?”

  Behind her hands, she sniffed.

  “Please. Don’t.”

  She wiped her eyes with her napkin.

  “Really,” I said. “You may not think you want your stupid old inheritance now, but you’ll be awfully glad you have it when you’re forty.”

  “I told you I wouldn’t!”

  “I guess I don’t believe you.”

  She glanced away. “Well, it’s true!”

  I shrugged. If she was going to do it, she was going to do it, like those hunters Slight couldn’t keep out. I hoped I wouldn’t catch her at it, because I didn’t want to have to decide whether or not to turn her in. In the meantime, rather than let her pizza go to waste, I ate the rest of it. Lilly wasn’t opening her mouth anymore, either to speak to me or to eat.

  I finished my coffee and then drank a refill. Still, she sat there silently. She could have left at any time, so I figured she must want company, even if it was mine. When I had finally finished consuming her dinner, I decided to take a chance, and to hope that she wouldn’t call my bluff.

  “Lilly.”

  She looked up.

  “If I see you on the ranch, I’ll report you.”

  She p
retended to stare at the trucks going by.

  I resisted the impulse to grab her shoulders and shake her until the fringe on her jacket shimmied. I said good-bye to her and walked over to pay her bill and mine. Then I left the restaurant and ran back across the highway to my room. Why, I asked myself, had I been so tough on the girl? The truth was that I felt a lot of sympathy for her, even for her desire to see the ranch she was forbidden from entering. So why the hardass act? The obvious answer—that she reminded me of myself, and that I wanted to force her to be smarter than I had been at her age—didn’t occur to me then.

  It did occur to me to wonder, as I brushed my teeth, what her family had found to do that evening, instead of going to the debutantes ball. Had they indulged their macabre sense of humor by taking potshots at pregnant heifers? Maybe wanting to add a stuffed cow to their collection of dead lap pets? Hard to imagine that trio traipsing across pastures, but Brady had said that Margaret Stewart’s husband died in a hunting accident, so it was possible there was at least one hell of a poor shot in the family.

  Nah, maybe they went bowling. I could just picture swishy Margaret down at the lanes with all the gals.

  But why was I connecting the cow killing with the murder of Cat Benet, anyway? Whatever the reason, I was too exhausted to think of it. My brain was fuzzing out on me. I hung up my toothbrush and went to bed. Under the covers, I wiggled my toes.

  G’night li’l doagies.

  13

  Next morning, I put on my sweat suit again, since it was the only thing I had left to wear besides my business suit. Slight Harlan took one disbelieving look at my tennis shoes, however, and said, “Nope. You’re not gettin’ on a horse in those. You’d rub your ankles raw, for one thing, and the horse’d laugh, for another. I’m taking you into town right now to buy you some self-respectin’ boots.”

  “I’m not buying boots just for one day’s ride.”

  “The snake’s aren’t all hibernatin’ yet.”

  “What?”