“Well, for once you did somethin’ right, I must say,” his father began. “You did me a favour by laying in bed this morning.”
Carl didn’t say anything.
“Yup, it’s just a good goddamn thing it was me got the cows this morning and not you.”
His father was no taller than Carl now, but his bulk, his anger at Carl that often exploded into belittling verbal abuse, was still threatening. Carl wasn’t that afraid of his father anymore, but he knew better than to stand up to him; someday, maybe, but not yet.
“You know that heifer with the black over one eye?”
“She had her calf,” Carl said, knowing that was it.
“That’s right.” His father wiped his nose with the back of his hand. Carl noticed the hand was dirty, streaked a kind of rusty brown. “She was tryin’ to have it when I found her.”
“I thought she wasn’t due yet.”
“Yeah, well so did I. I shoulda known better. I shoulda kept her in the barn. You gotta watch these first-calf heifers. They get bred out in the pasture and then you gotta punch ’em and try to guess when they’re comin’ in. Yeah, it’s just a damn good thing it was me that found her,” his father said. “You wouldn’t a known what to do.”
“I would’ve known enough to get you,” Carl said.
“Yeah, well, what if I wasn’t around to get? You ever think of that?”
“I’ve thought about it,” said Carl.
“It was too big,” his father said. “I had ta pull for all I was worth to get it outa her. I think I hurt her a little.”
“The calf dead?”
“Yeah, long dead.”
“The heifer all right?”
“I dunno. She might be ruined.”
His father turned away from Carl and hit the switch that started the vacuum motor. Then he picked up a milker. He drew the washrag out of the pail of warm, disinfected water and gently, soothingly washed the teats of the first cow in line. He pitched the rag back into the pail, splashing Carl with the water. Then his father swung the strap around the cow, slung the milker under her, and lifted each teat cup into place. Then he washed the next cow in line and grabbed the other milker.
“Look, tonight you go out there and find her,” he told Carl. “If she’s still down, get’er up. Bring her in, yuh understand? But take her easy, real easy. She’s had a tough time, that little heifer.”
“Where is she?”
“Over by the line fence, in the swamp pasture.” His father looked at Carl with his heavy face. “Goddamn it, you know how much a cow and calf are worth?”
“No.”
“You wouldn’t.” his father said. “Well, don’t just stand there with yur finger up yur ass. You goin’ to school?”
“Yeah.”
“Then go, goddammit,” his father told him.
His mother looked up when Carl opened the door to the kitchen. She was helping his baby brother, little Harold, button his jacket.
“Hurry up, you’ll miss your bus,” she said. Her patient, tired face looked up at him.
His kid brother, Billy, came clumping down the stairs, and then his younger sister, Janey, came regally down and sat at the kitchen table.
“Janey, hurry up and eat,” their mother said.
“I’m hurrying, Ma,” Janey said, but she took her time.
His mother would drive Janey and Carl’s brothers to the Catholic grade school in New Dresden. Carl, just fourteen, had started the public high school in Sioux Lake.
He just had time to wash, change out of his barn clothes, dip some toast in coffee, then run out to the head of their long driveway to catch the bus.
On the school bus he felt better. On the bus, and in school, he was away from the farm; away from the work. He was away from his father.
He had hated parochial school. His sister Janey was hating it now. But he liked the public high school. He was sort of coasting along this first year there on what he had learned from the nuns. He was unlearning some things too, such as not bothering to stand up when the teacher called you. Some of the girls had tittered when he first did that. Now he slouched in his seat and was a little bit of a smart aleck. It was what he had learned from the other students. He liked high school, too, because of the girls. They were tougher, more exciting, than the girls at sister school. And they dressed in exciting ways – in tight jeans, for instance, that hugged their cute little behinds. He was learning a lot about girls in the boys’ locker room, where he got into shorts and a jock-strap for gym class in the morning and into sweat clothes for wrestling practice in the afternoon. Like most farm boys, he was out for wrestling, and like all of them, he had been surprised at his own strength when he went up against a town kid, some kid from one of the swell houses around the lake, whose father worked in a suit in the city and who would have been better at something like basketball – “pussy” ball – where you could be flashy and didn’t need any strength. Some of the farm boys went out for football, too, but Carl was too light for that. He was out for one of the lighter weights in wrestling.
There were girls from those swell houses around the lake whom Carl wanted to “breed.” That’s how farm boys put it. There was one girl he wanted to hump like a bull if he ever got the chance. He’d know what to do. He’d seen some pictures in a guy’s locker, one of which showed a woman on her back with her legs spread and a man about to shove it to her. Another was a close-up, not of a woman exactly, but of what a woman had between her legs.
“Ever seen that, you farmers?” the guy said, looking directly at Carl, “except on a cow?”
Carl stepped off the bus that afternoon, weary from wrestling practice. His neck was stiff and his shoulders ached from a practice match he’d had with another farm kid. It was never an easy match with another farm kid. The kid had almost pinned him, but then Carl had won on points.
He walked down the long driveway to the house. In the late afternoon the sun was weak and far down in the sky, but there was light and quiet in the air. He felt the quiet, the pause, in the air. He felt apart, suspended, not in school or on the farm, but in between somewhere, somewhere suspended, in a kind of pause. It was always pleasant in this quiet pause at the end of day.
In the house his mother and Janey were making supper. Billy and Harold were in the living room listening to the radio serials he wished he could still listen to. They had their little chores – picking the eggs, feeding the chickens – but it was Carl now who did a man’s work for his father.
“Dad said you might have to start the milking,” his mother told him.
“Yeah, he out plowing?” Carl said. He began to fill up on cookies and milk.
“Yes, and he said he’ll keep at it till after dark.”
“Okay.”
“You know about that heifer you’re supposed to look for?”
“Oh, yeah, that’s right,” Carl said, remembering.
“Better get going then.”
“I’m going, I’m going,” Carl told his mother.
He changed into his old jeans and work shoes. Then he went out to the porch, where his and his father’s barn clothes were hung out to air, and got into his overalls. He buckled on his overshoes, then put on his hat and jacket.
“You going to eat before you start the milking?” his mother asked. She had opened the kitchen door.
“I better not,” Carl said. “He’ll be mad if I haven’t started.”
In the barn he laid out feed before the stanchions. The gutters needed shoveling out, but he would do that later. His first job was to get the cows. He went out the barnyard door, closed it, and walked down the cowpath to the swamp pasture.
The sun was just setting. It was chilly already. Carl walked down into a layer of frigid air as he descended into the swamp. This time of year the swamp was mostly dry, with only pockets of wet in places. The tall slough grass was getting brown and bent over from frost. There was frost nearly every night now. In spring the swamp formed a shallow lake, where migrating duc
ks landed, and in summer there were hidden pools under the clumps of willow, where ducks nested. It wasn’t till fall that the swamp could be used as pasture.
Only last week it had been Indian summer. There’d been days so warm, so lovely, so full of leaves in the air and leaves underfoot that Carl had wanted to stretch out in all that softness, the softness in the air and on the ground. But it was ended now. It was starting to turn cold and grey, the grey sky seeming to touch the ground. It was the grey season.
It was the season – and high school this year wasn’t making any difference – when Carl felt most hopeless. He was filled with the deep hopelessness of life, of his life on the farm, the only life he had known and might ever know. He saw his life as it was – without change. The only change was in the seasons.
It was always better when it snowed finally and winter had come. Then the country was like a picture in black and white: the white fields and the stands of black, leafless trees. It was like a block print he’d seen once in a book.
He found the herd in the middle of the swamp, still grazing in the waist-high grass. The cold air was settling in the swamp and a faint mist was rising. There would be a hard frost tonight. In the morning the swamp would be white with frost, white as if with snow.
“Come boss, come baaass,” Carl called.
The cows threw up their heads to look at him. A few started for home. The rest began to pull hastily at the long grass, their eyes rolling back to watch him. It was a little game they played. It was a kind of teasing.
“Go on, go home,” Carl said. A cow would start away, then stop to pull furtively at the grass. “Hey! Go home!” Carl said, running at them.
At last he had them bunched up and moving. A few held back, but he drove them into an udder-swaying run and they joined the herd. With the herd in a line on the path to the barn, he gave a count: twenty-six, barring the youngstock. The first-calf heifer was missing.
He began to push through the grass toward the line fence, where his father had left her that morning. She was still there. Her calf, the calf his father had pulled out of her, lay stiff, its eyes glazed, beside her, and she herself was on her side, her legs stiffly out, her tongue out, her eyes rolling back into her head. She was having another calf.
He looked toward the herd, strung out and plodding toward the barnyard. It was dark enough now he could just see them. He listened, and heard the tractor. His father was still plowing, away off in the field on the other side of the woods that bordered the swamp. He would keep working, by the lights on the tractor, until he’d finished the field.
Why wasn’t he here? It was like his father wasn’t here on purpose, like he was teaching Carl a lesson.
He looked at the heifer – her eyes rolled back – and knew he would have to help her. He would have to try, anyhow.
The heifer’s vagina was terribly dilated, split, and bleeding. The placenta was like a bubble coming out of her, and she had stopped pushing. The bubble was stuck. Inside the bubble, through the membrane of the placenta, Carl could see the nose and front hooves of the calf. “Well, at least you’re not back-asswards,” he told it.
He poked his finger into the membrane. He broke through and the fluid came pouring out. He took grass and wiped the slime from the calf’s nostrils, so it could breathe. Then he knew it was dead.
“All right,” he told the heifer. “We still got to get it out.”
He was shaking now, not only from the cold, as he took hold of the calf’s legs, braced his own against the heifer’s backside, and pulled. The heifer bellowed.
“I know, I know it hurts,” he told her.
He pulled more grass and wiped the slime from the calf’s legs. He took off his jacket and felt the cold and took hold of the calf’s legs again. He pulled and pulled, wanting the heifer to push. The heifer let out another bellow, and Carl said, “I know it hurts, but you gotta push, girl. C’mon now. Push.”
He pulled. He pulled and pulled, and the calf gave just a little. He caught his breath, took another hold, and pulled, felt the heifer push, and they pulled and pushed together until Carl felt something give inside the calf and thought it was coming, then realized he’d only dislocated the shoulder. But it was dead anyway and so he pulled again and pulled with the heifer not helping anymore, pulled until he thought his heart would burst. He had to stop.
“It’s no use,” he told himself. A wave of his old hopelessness washed over him. He wanted to cry.
He heard his father’s tractor in the distance. “God damn you!” he called to him. “Why aren’t you here?”
It was dark now. It was an eerie, whitish darkness, from the cold mist rising out of the swamp. He stood up to catch his breath. The air was so cold it hurt to take it in. He was sweating and cold at the same time. He looked across to the lighted house, like light far away in space. Below, where the barn was, it was dark. He wished he saw a light in the barn. That would mean his father was home finally and wondering where Carl was and why he hadn’t started the milking.
He knew what he would have to do now. He’d seen his father do it, and had thought he could never do it himself.
He stripped to his undershirt and the air was like cold metal on his bare arms. He got down on his knees behind the heifer, pulled her tail aside, and forced his right hand and then the length of his arm up into her, into that poor, distended, ripped opening, taut as stretched leather, until he broke through to the hot womb behind the calf. He was in up to his armpit. The heifer bellowed and kicked at Carl.
“Sooo, boss,” he told her soothingly. “I’m trying to help!”
She bucked and bellowed as he felt around inside her, felt the calf’s hind leg, the one bent and caught inside her. He worked at it, twisted and pushed, until it straightened suddenly, and just then the heifer jerked and emptied her bowels over Carl. He felt it hot and heavy on his shoulder and down his back.
He eased his arm out and stood up and shook himself. Most of the shit fell away. He pulled grass and wiped his arm and shoulder and what he could reach of his back. His undershirt was wet and cold against his skin. He took it off and used it to wipe the calf’s forelegs again. It’s no use, he thought, but he knelt again and grabbed the calf’s forelegs and pulled. He pulled and pulled, but it wouldn’t come. Then he sat down, not caring anymore, braced his feet against the heifer’s backside, pulled, and the calf came slithering out, slop, like an enormous discharge of waste. It was all waste.
He fell back on the grass. Presently he got up and went around to the heifer. He could just make out her head in the darkness. He felt for her eyes. They didn’t blink when he touched them.
“Aw,” Carl said to the darkness. He was so tired, he felt sick.
He lay on the grass, listening to himself breathing. The dark forms of the heifer and her calves were quiet. Then he saw a light and heard something coming toward him through the grass. “Carl?” his father called.
“Here!”
His father came up with a flashlight and stooped to examine the heifer. Then he went to the calf. Then he moved toward Carl. The light was blinding and his father was a dark shape behind it.
“She’s still warm,” he said.
“Yeah, she just died,” Carl said.
“Twins!” his father said. “Who woulda guessed it?”
“I should’ve gone and got you, Dad.”
“Naw, I don’t think that would’ve mattered. You weren’t late getting the cows, though, were you?”
Carl felt a rush of the old anger, the old helpless rage before his father’s questioning of his ability. There was nothing he could say.
“Anyway, it was my fault,” his father said. “I shoulda checked on her today. I mighta saved her.”
Carl began to feel in the grass for his shirt. He found it, it was wet and cold, but he put it on.
“Well, it’s been quite a day,” his father said now. “We lost a cow and two calves today.”
Carl felt the weight of that loss and wanted to feel it. H
e wanted to bear some of it for his father.
“Aw, well. Live and learn,” his father said, which was something he often said.
They started across the swamp toward the farm buildings. There were lights in the barn now. His father must have turned them on and let the cows in the barn before he came looking for him.
He stopped.
“What’s wrong?” his father asked.
“My jacket. I left it back there.”
“Here, take the light,” said his father. But Carl was already running back through the high grass in the darkness. He stumbled over the bodies of the heifer and her calves. He felt around for his jacket, found it, and put it on. He bent and touched the heifer. She was cold already, damp with the dew that was turning to frost in the darkness.
Then he was running back to where his father stood waiting for him. Together they walked to the barn to start the evening chores.
JESSICA WESTHEAD
WHAT I WOULD SAY
I haven’t been to a party before where they served pie, have you? But I guess that’s a silly question because of course you’d know the hosts, so you’ve probably – Anyway, it’s very good pie. It takes creative people to come up with a snack idea like that.
I said to Appollonia – that’s who I came with – “Would you have thought of giving out pie?” And she said, “Nope.” But of course Appollonia is not creative like you and me. Which she wouldn’t mind me saying, by the way. We all have our strengths and weaknesses.
Now me, I’ve got my chapbook. But put an equation in front of me and do you think I’d know how to solve it? Give me a break! I am a words person whereas Appollonia is a numbers person, which is a skill so many of us writers and publishers haven’t mastered. On the other hand, Appollonia is not a big reader. She has a subscription to Chatelaine, if that tells you anything. She also watches a lot of television. Let’s just say she has her shows.
The Journey Prize Stories 23 Page 5