Peninsula Sinking

by David Huebert

  Dad stands up in front of everyone and tells Dale to pay close attention because he’s going to give him some words to live by, namely: “Never take a sleeping pill and a laxative at the same time.” Dad grins wide—three upper teeth floating in a pudding of black—and I do my best not to think too hard about what he’s said. Then Dad gives his characteristic double-eyed wink and says in his joking-but-not-really tone, “By the way I slipped some Cialis in your cocktail so I expect some grandbabies in nine months’ time.”

  A gush of wind through the barn and I will the thunder to crack but it doesn’t. Dale and I look at each other and then I look away quickly, hoping nobody noticed but knowing everybody noticed.

  Uncle Stan walks in swinging his hips and calls out that the meat’s ready so form a line before Dale gets to it. Everyone gathers out back holding out their plates for slabs of tasty pink with Stan’s famous maple syrup glaze. The smoky flesh slicking onto paper plates as Dale and I smile wide for the well-wishers. The word “grandbabies” sharp in our ears.

  The storm holds and the storm holds and around one the storm breaks. A warm-cored, non-frontal synoptic with sixty-kilometer-per-hour winds leaving it just a gust or two outside of level one. Meaning the storm remains nameless, another anonymous tropical. Most of the guests stay in the old barn drinking the rest of the hard liquor or stumbling over to Uncle Stan’s for a midnight pork feast while Dale and I spend our wedding night lying awake with the music of the storm punctuated by Angie and Lloyd ruddering headboard into wall. Dale and I clutching each other and listening to the boom and howl and skittle of the storm and beneath it the wails of drunk love like ghosts in the wall. Angie and Lloyd in the room right over ours and hard to say which one of them is doing the moaning. “Jesus,” Dale says at one point. “What is he, a goddamn jackrabbit?”

  Then we hear a worrying boom and Dale sits up straight in bed but when Angie starts cackling we realize it was just the mattress sliding off the old plank bed and Dale and I start to laugh too. Laugh and clutch each other tighter and then the storm really musters, crackles and clangs across the field and the cows take up a chorus, belting and screaming, their voices like glue, yoking the pattering raindrops.

  Dale asks if I want to go see them and I say sure. So we put on rain gear and squelch out through the blasting night and down to the big barn where the cows are still howling and kicking at the walls. The lights are on and Dad’s already down there walking from stall to stall with the curry brush. He looks at us with his toothless grin and says we’re morons to leave the house. He’s got the Sailor Jerry out and we pass it around before walking through the stalls giving the cows grass and rubbing their backs, murmuring gently in their ears.

  “What a honeymoon,” Dale says on our way back up to the house. He says it was a lovely honeymoon and I tell him yes, tell him it was perfect. Tell him and almost mean it.

  Dale asks for the Honey Nut Cheerios and I slide them down the table. It’s been two days since the wedding and the power’s still out. The deadstock truck hasn’t been able to get back yet so those two dead Holsteins remain behind Uncle Stan’s pig barn, a yellowing horror of bloat and gas. A tree fell on the back pasture fence but there was no real damage to the property or the livestock. Just a troupe of soaked wedding guests unable to get taxis or drive home so all of them slept in the barn or the house or over at Uncle Stan’s. In the morning a ham breakfast for fifty people and then everyone drove home stopping to haul the scattered branches and tufts of hay bale off the dirt road.

  Dale pours a full bowl of Cheerios, fuller than usual, then asks about my period. I tell him everything’s normal and he nods, slurps at his milk. Even smiles with his eyes a little as he looks at me over the rim of the bowl. When you’re trying to get pregnant, and especially when you’re struggling to get pregnant, your period becomes a subject at breakfast table conversation. You find yourself telling your long-term companion things you never realized you’d been keeping secret. Like the fact that when you were thirteen the family collie, Oedipus Rex, used to snatch your sanitary napkins out from the bathroom garbage. Used to strut them into the living room for public munching and sit there snarfing until you walked in to find your father just standing there looking down at the dog. Standing there frozen and when he saw you he looked up and said he was sorry and he always did his best but he simply had no clue how to deal with this.

  So Dale asks about my period and I tell him no baby and he says okay, reaches out and touches my arm. Usually when I tell Dale I got my period he looks at me like I’ve just snapped off the big section of a wishbone which is also his penis. But now he seems tender and sweet, which makes me suspect something is wrong and then feel terrible that this is where my mind goes.

  I play Scrabble on my phone while Dale finishes his breakfast. Then he hobbles over to the sink and puts his cereal bowl in without rinsing it. Dale’s legs are two different lengths so his walk is more of a hobble but he is a good man with a big heart. If anything too big. Not sure why but I imagine his heart as a football. I think if I pulled it out of his chest and tossed it along a patch of turf, it would bounce in the same warped, unpredictable way.

  “Out of milk,” Dale says. “Want to go see Guinan?”

  Why did Dale go suddenly antsy about marriage after ten years living together on Dad’s farm? Presumably it had something to do with the conception troubles. After two years of trying I got myself checked out and Doctor Spencer said I was “better than normal” and so it stood to reason that Dale’s sperm was the issue. I tried but couldn’t tell Dale this so I told him the doctor had said I had an abnormal uterus and it was unlikely. Dale went dull-eyed and said “let’s just keep trying” and I was worried he’d break up with me and find someone more fertile which would have been messy and wrong. But he didn’t break up with me. Instead, he waited a week or two and said about marriage. We were watching P.S. I Love You and he said, “Let’s do it,” his eyes wet with wonder. He said we should get married and I said as long as we don’t do engagement photos or a garter toss. Dale grinned and said that was too bad because he’d really been looking forward to tossing his garter. He’d had a good feeling Uncle Stan would be the one to catch it.

  The big, boxy Limos are out in the front pasture as we walk down to see Guinan. Twenty-five cows and a dozen calves and the bull, Warf, is out too, feasting alone in the back corner. We’re traditionally a dairy farm but Dad has always kept some beef cows for hobby breeding and extra cash, hence the Limousines. They’re technically called Limousin after the French region but my father always called these exotics “Limos” or “Limousines” so that’s how I think of them. As a girl I’d wished that they were extra long, with a third set of legs.

  Limos are known for their lean, tasty beef and for being ornery or, in Dad’s words, “European.” They’re naturally horned but Dad takes those off, the horns, when they’re infants, castrating the calves at the same time. They’ve got an angular figure and colouration ranging from buttermilk to earthy red to pure black. Dale and I recently watched that Herzog movie and I was struck by how much the 20,000-year-old rock paintings in the Great Hall of the Bulls look like Limousines—same big, square shoulders, same earthen, monochrome coat.

  The Limos bound over to the edge of the fence, a few of their tails raised and bent from being recently bred. Dale hitches over to the fence on his uneven legs and feeds some grass to the new calves, Zorn and Deanna. Dad gives all his cows names from Star Trek—he started with the original series and now he’s up to Next Generation.

  As we walk into her little room beside the chickens, Guinan trots over, her udders bulging and her wet snout alive with snorts. Cat Stevens and Margaret Catwood are already purring around our ankles. Dale gets the curry brush and rubs Guinan’s flank as I grab the bucket and give Guinan’s huge Holstein udders a few soft pats to let the milk down. Most of the cows get milked on the mechanical milking platform but we keep Guinan for the fami
ly and take the milk naturally because nothing tastes better. By the time I’ve put a few long squirts into the bucket Cat Stevens and Margaret Catwood are howling around my ankles so I tilt the two teats I’m holding and the barn cats sit back and open their mouths as the spurts siss through the air—the milk splashing off their skulls and chins and the cats with their eyes closed lapping at the air.

  A week after the wedding Dale and I head into the city to return some wedding gifts and when we get back it looks like there’s been a flash storm. There was no warning and no trace of it in Halifax but the county road is slick with rain and there’s a post-storm shudder in the air.

  As we grind down the farm road I see the vet’s truck and what looks like a mound of sandy dirt in the middle of the front pasture. A mound of sandy dirt with some black patches. A mound that grows dimensions as we get closer. A mound that congeals into a huddle of immobile bodies, a cluster of lifeless Limousines.

  Eight or ten of them under the big oak which is missing a large, blackened limb. I park the truck and slide out the door into the hideous haze of the Limousines’ death-gas. Then I see Dad talking to the vet while he saws through the leg of a cow. Taking a Gigli saw to the animal’s thigh and working through that death-stiffened limb in the open field. A dead Limousine cow and the red-headed vet in knee-high rubber boots tells me pantingly that he has to saw open the leg to determine the cause of death. Tells me he’ll also have to take tissue samples and perform a necropsy to make sure the animals were not diseased. The vet tells me it’s just an insurance issue and largely a formality but I am not listening as I look down at about fifteen tons of dead and reeking animal. There are nine of them—Jarth, Liva, Farallon, Yareena, Lutan, Kayron, Regina, Aquiel, and Toreth. Nine soft giant creatures lying dead in the grass where they ate and bred and lived and I can see in Dad’s face that he is angry but also wounded.

  The vet gets in his truck and me, Dad, and Dale head inside to make coffee. Dad stirs cream into his cup and sits there for a long time before taking a sip. Finally he sniffs hard and says what a bitch this will be what with the paperwork and having to get the deadstock truck back. I tell him yeah, I know what he means. I know what he means.

  Although Dad uses artificial insemination for the Holsteins he keeps a bull, Warf, for the Limos.

  You might think the life of a lone bull on a farm with twenty to twenty-five cows would be glorious. The moaning suggests otherwise. The moaning suggests torture. The bull only gets put out for two or three months at a time during summer. Otherwise there’s not much point, financially, in exercising the bull and you can’t have him around the cows. So what we hear all winter is Warf lowing forlornly, bleating out his pain and longing. The lonely, sex-starved bull getting no relief and sometimes fucking the wall of his stall until his penis is chafed and bloody.

  The next night I drive Dale to the airport and when we get there he kisses me gently, his eyes whispering “maybe you’ll be ovulating when I’m back.” Dale is a millwright, and though I’ve asked him many times I’m still not sure exactly what a millwright does. Even the word seems unhelpful and old-timey. Dale works fourteen fourteen which means getting on the same Seaboard Air flight every two weeks, the flight they call the gasoline limousine, the flight that lands in Edmonton where the men line up for the shuttle north to Fort Mac, where they line up to swipe into their weird little hotels and then line up to swipe their cards for dinner, for break, for the gym or the little private movie theatre. Dale works fourteen fourteen and I stay home and fix little metal mouths onto cow nipples. At night I watch Star Trek with Dad and work on my meteorology blog and plan our trip to Arizona that will probably never happen while wasting pregnancy test after pregnancy test. When he’s home the milking gets a little easier and I spend half my life on my back, holding my legs up like a strung turkey.

  I put Dale on the gasoline limousine and when I get home the sun is fully down and I can feel the great slurs of the Holsteins lolling through the darkness in the front pasture. The lights are on in the barn and Dad’s down there blasting Van Halen so I park the truck and head down to join him. Dad’s in the back changing a tire on the tractor, screaming along to “Smokin’ in the Boy’s Room.” He can’t hear me over the music so I pick up his bottle of Sailor Jerry and wait for him to reach for it. He lets his hand dangle where the bottle should be for a long time, then looks up at me beaming, his teeth like strange square stars in the blackness of his mouth.

  I ask him how’s it going and he says, as he has every time I’ve asked him this question over the past thirty-one years, “Not bad for an old fella.” Then he rises up off the mat he’d been kneeling on, turns off the Van Halen, and asks if I want to help him bring in the girls.

  So we bring in the girls. Open the back barn doors and breathe the rich tannin smell of the pasture as it washes through. The smell you get used to but never stop smelling. The smell you miss when you’re in the city the way you’d miss your nose if it weren’t there when you glanced down at your chest.

  We head out into the pasture where I ring the bell and Dad shouts the cow call, “co-boss.” I’ve never asked what it means and I don’t ask now. Although they usually stay out all night or come in on their own around 6 p.m. they know what’s going on. The girls troop through with their bellows and groans and their big dark tender eyes. Eyes in all their varieties of brown, rich and nourishing as the hum of manure.

  Dad and I close their stalls and start to brush them off. When they’re all in and settled we sit down with the Sailor Jerry and Dad raises the bottle and says, “To the poor creatures who died today.” We both take a drink and then sit there for a while thinking of those cows hunched under the tree, of the vet sawing through Farallon’s massive thigh.

  Finally Dad says as he often does how strange it is that there are 1.5 billion cattle in the world. He says think about all those city folks that never get close enough to smell one. 1.5 billion of these quiet creatures living in secret on the far side of the city walls, a whole bovine underground that keeps their beef-and-milk world turning.

  “Or something like that,” he adds.

  We sit listening to the cows groaning and snorting, to the quiet suckling of calves. Then Dad pats me on the shoulder and says, “Well Laura: two more weeks, just me and the girls.” He grins. “Could be worse eh?”

  I tell him yeah it could, and although he needs to make it seem like a joke I also know he means it. And I mean it too.

  I remember five or six years ago walking over to my uncle’s place and finding him guiding a pig into a sow. I stood there for some time gasping and watching and struggling to believe that in this age of mechanized farming a man would still stand overtop of a pig and manually assist him with intercourse. My uncle was not even wearing gloves. I saw everything. I saw the black hairs on my uncle’s pinky. I saw the pig on his hind legs and his thin curlicued cock steaming in the December chill and my uncle reaching down and grasping that slick digit between thumb and forefinger, sending it in. I turned away out of embarrassment and pretended to be interested in some of last year’s shoats but the truth was they were no longer cute. My uncle trotted up to me, gloating in my discomfort, and said there was nothing to worry about, said it was perfectly normal. He said animals didn’t get embarrassed about that kind of thing and I thought but what about you? He said don’t worry, that I’d get to do that too when I was all grown up. I told him that was inappropriate on so many levels and he grinned as if this were a compliment.

  Dale has a lovely crooked heart and yet here I am. It was easy to find a man online. What was more difficult was finding a man who would go with me to the doctor’s for an STI test and then hand me the paperwork. I couldn’t trust anyone I know and so I ended up with Duke, the beetle-faced ex-navy man with clean medical records and stellar teeth. Nearly forty years older than me and he has to wear this certain type of sock that helps his veins to circulate but none of that affects the semen or t
he genetics. Duke has a good IQ score and no twins or heart conditions or dementia in the family and his eyes are the same pale blue as Dale’s. Eyes that I keep trying to meet as he works on top of me, eyes that I search for, trying to find Dale in them, trying to swerve this moment into some kind of love. But it’s not love. It’s not love and maybe it never has been. After Duke finishes he looks over my head and says, “Thank you.” Says it as if he’s thanking something holy, something much greater than me.

  It is relatively rare, in the era of modern medical science, for a woman to die in childbirth. But it happens. It happens that some trace amounts of amniotic fluid trickle through the woman’s placental bed and enter the bloodstream. Happens that this episode of amniotic fluid embolism goes unnoticed by medical staff and that the woman leaves the hospital after an apparently successful and routine pregnancy. That this woman complains later that night of abdominal pains and strange pressure. It happens that a man drives his wife back to the hospital with his brother in the backseat holding the brand-new screaming infant. Happens that the mother dies right there in the car of a sudden cardiorespiratory collapse. Asphyxiates and stops breathing. Loses her pulse there on the shoulder of the highway with her husband offering mouth to mouth and twelve-hour-old baby Laura wailing in her uncle’s arms. It happens that the doctor tells this man that there was nothing anyone could have done and the man knows this is supposed to make him feel better but it does not tame the storm rising in him.

  Dad is somewhat antiquated in that he lets his cows eat grass as much as possible—most dairy farmers just give them corn and alfalfa. Dad was doing all this stuff anyway but about fifteen years ago a niche market developed for grass-fed dairy, so Dad joined a cooperative and now most of our milk goes towards artisanal cheeses. But in spite of the whole organic-pastoral fantasy, we do not milk the cows by hand. We milk the Holsteins on the mechanical milking platform Dad had installed in the nineties, and though I’ve been watching it happen for twenty years I still find it strange to see those giddy cows lining up to get little metal leeches latched onto their udders. Sometimes I wonder what they’re thinking as the teatcups suckle them, draining their maternal fluid into the vacuum and onwards to the bulk tank. I wonder if they think about their children. If, maybe, they have faith that we are keeping their babies somewhere safe. That once they drain their milk we deliver it to their children, who are still living close by, somewhere just out of sight.