by S Doyle
The calf was strong but I was stronger. I made it to the end of the pen and Jake was waiting. He knew he was going to have to lift the calf up and over. He did, then I was over, and me and the calf were moving again.
I had almost made it the barn when Jake came up behind me. He had to unhook his karabiner to get around me, then quickly rehook. He made his way to the barn, dropped the calf, and started out again. I made it to the barn, took the noose off, and started out again after him.
We had done this two more times. He had brought back three calves to my two but that was because he had to wait for me at the pen, to help get my calf over the fence. I was on my way back to the barn with another one, only this one was being even more stubborn. I was fighting the wind and fighting the damn animal.
“Move it, asshole!”
Like that might work. All it did was cost me precious hot air. Then the damn rope slipped from my hands. My fingers were getting so numb I had no strength left, so I had wrapped the rope around my hand. But it unraveled and the calf took a step away.
I reached for it, but the foot of line at my belt kept the rope just out of reach. I needed to grab it now before the calf moved again, otherwise I would lose sight of it. I unhooked myself and grabbed at the rope.
The calf took another step back, then another. I followed and lunged for the rope. This time I secured the end of it, wrapping it several times around my hand. Only a gust of wind hit me in the face and I could feel myself moving. Although I wasn’t sure in what direction.
I reached for the line all around me and felt nothing. I tried to move forward and reached again, but nothing. I looked in front of me, behind me, but I saw nothing.
Don’t panic, don’t panic.
I shouldn’t have unhooked myself. Okay. But I needed to think. The pen was directly east of the barn, which means I had been heading west. I knew the winds were coming out of the north, which means the gust most likely took me south. If I continued to head in a northwest direction I would eventually hit the barn.
Visibility was zero, but I wasn’t talking miles. The barn literally had to be a hundred feet in front of me.
But each step got scarier. The calf was no longer fighting me, but that might have been because she was getting weaker in the cold. I was moving in a total whiteout, and every time I reached my hand out to feel for the line, there was nothing.
Snow started to seep through my winter gear. I could feel it in the back of my neck and down my back. I stopped for a moment and once again tried to get my bearings. What if I was going in the wrong direction? What if I had gotten turned around?
Why didn’t I bing a compass? What if I let calf go? Would I have a better chance of making it on my own?
This was bad. This was serious.
“Jake! Jake!”
I was screaming. As loud as I knew how to scream, but there was no way he could hear me. Not over the wind and bleating cows.
“Jake! Jake!”
Another gust of wind pushed at me, so hard it knocked me off my feet. I could feel the snow at my back even as it covered my face. In another five minutes I might be fully covered by it.
I thought about my dad. I thought about how hard this all was. But then I thought about Jake and what it would do to him if he lost me this way. I was the only thing Jake had left.
I pushed myself up and I moved forward, dragging the calf behind me. I had no idea if forward was right or not, but it was the only direction I could think to go.
Jake
I got back to the barn and hefted the calf over my neck, my shoulders screaming with pain. I set it down and swatted it on the ass. I fell to my knees and dropped to my elbows and took a few breaths.
I didn’t want to think about it. I certainly didn’t want to say it, but I was pretty sure I was done. Mentally, I counted what Ellie and I had carried in my head. We weren’t close to filling the barn. Maybe only half capacity.
But it was getting too dangerous out there. Hypothermia was legit and could happen so damn fast. And Ellie was at least a hundred pounds lighter than me…
Ellie. I didn’t unhook around her. I came straight from the pen to the barn and I didn’t pass her. That wasn’t possible. Unless she was in the barn already.
I hopped up on my feet. “Ellie!”
Nothing but crying calves and horses. I took the goggles off my head and searched again. “Ellie!”
Think. Would she have gone back to the house? Without telling me?
It was so damn cold, maybe on her last trip she’d called it quits.
Ellie wouldn’t quit.
Right? I knew that much about her. When it was important, when it mattered, Ellie dug in. Hard.
Last I left her, I had taken a calf over the pen fence. She had the rope and was moving back. I got another calf and started back after her. Which meant if she had gone back to the house I might follow the line close enough to get a visual. I put my goggles back on, hooked myself to the line heading to the house, and started out knowing, full on knowing in my gut, this wasn’t right.
She would have waited for me at the barn.
Which meant somehow, at some point, she had unhooked herself from the line that led from the barn to the pen.
The damn calf got away. The calf got away and she unhooked herself and went after it.
That’s what she would have done. I made my way back to the barn, unhooked my line, and rehooked myself to the pen line. As fast as I could I moved against the wind and the snow.
“Ellie! Ellie! ELLLLLLIE!”
I waited and listened. There was nothing. Nothing but wind and…
There it was. A crying calf. Off to my right. I unhooked the karabiner and moved toward that sound. “Ellie! Ellie”
She was exactly ten feet away. I know because I counted.
She was facedown in the snow, the damn rope still wrapped around her hand. I lifted her up to sitting.
“Ellie! Ellie!”
I saw her body startle, my voice finally penetrating the cold. I hauled her up to standing and then dropped her over my right shoulder.
“Calf,” she moaned. “Calf.”
“Fuck this.” I took the rope and pulled the calf behind us. I made it back to the line, ten feet from where I left it. I hated wasting the time it took to get to the barn first, but I couldn’t be certain if I tried to head directly for the house I would make it.
I dropped the calf off, shut the barn door, hooked myself to the house line, and moved as fast as I could. I could feel her like dead weight on my screaming shoulder. I saw the house and almost cried out.
I got us both inside and shut the door. The warmth was almost too much. Not stopping, I moved us through the back of the house to the stairs. I took them two at a time and made my way to my shower. It was bigger.
I turned the hot water on and sat Ellie on the toilet seat. She didn’t fall, but she was out of it. I slapped her face a few times.
“Ellie, I need you to wake up for me. Listen to me. I have to get you in the shower.”
Her eyes drifted closed. “Jake. So cold.”
I started removing her clothes. All of it. Her mask, her coat. I got her on her feet to remove her snow gear, then sat her down to get her out of the boots. As damp as everything was, it was only helping to keep the cold locked inside.
Then her shirt, her sweatpants. Finally her bra and panties. I shoved her into the shower and she slid against the wall until her ass hit the tub. I undressed and followed her. Then I moved her so her back was to my front and the hot water was hitting her directly.
It felt like a hundred little pin pricks all over my body. I knew it was the same for her because she started writhing in my arms and crying out.
“Hurts,” she cried.
“I know, baby. I know. But we have to get your temperature up.”
It was like holding a block of ice in my arms.
Finally, eventually the hot water did its thing. I could see her skin turning pink and her breathing was sound
and even. Her head was on my shoulder and I knew I wasn’t going to lose her when she started crying. Soft cries that shook her whole body.
“You’re okay,” I crooned.
“I’m naked,” she sobbed.
Yeah, like that was important, but it was to her so I lifted her out of the shower and wrapped a towel around her and sat her back down on the toilet seat. I hadn’t taken off my boxer briefs to spare her that, but truly as soaked as they were I wasn’t hiding much.
I grabbed a thermometer from my vanity, rinsed it off, and stuck it in her mouth. It was an electronic one and after a few seconds it beeped.
95.7. Not great but probably better than she had been.
“We need to get some hot liquid into you. Can you stand?”
She looked at me and shook her head. “I’m sorry.”
I left the bathroom, took off my wet briefs, found sweatpants, a sweatshirt and some socks. I got dressed and made my way downstairs. I needed sugar and heat. Hot cocoa. Instant. I threw the powder and water into a mug and put it in the microwave.
Our power was gone, but the generator was working. Normally I wouldn’t have wasted energy on the damn microwave but I needed fast. After a minute and a half it dinged. I took a sip, burned my tongue and figured that was a good thing.
As fast as I could without spilling it, I took it upstairs. She was still sitting on the toilet, only now she’d started to shiver.
Which was actually a good sign. It meant she’d gone from frozen to cold.
I got on my knees in front of her and slowly fed her sips. She was through about half the mug when the shivering stopped. Another few sips and she could hold the mug on her own.
I pulled her wet hair off her back and took the mug out of her hands when it was empty.
“You unhook yourself from the line?” I asked her.
“It got away from me. It was so close,” she said quietly. “A couple of feet.”
“You unhook yourself from the line?” I asked again.
She nodded.
A rage, unlike any I had ever felt, swept over me. Any lingering cold I had in my body was gone in that moment. She had unhooked herself. She had lost sight of the line. She had kept moving with the damn calf tied to her arm.
I pulled her off the toilet seat until she was also on her knees. My hands were tight around her arms and I wanted to shake her. I wanted to shake her so hard so she would never ever do anything as stupid as that again.
“I could have lost you,” I shouted at her. “Do you understand that? You could have DIED!”
Her lip was quivering, but I didn’t care. I had so much feeling inside of me, so much of everything all at once.
And then it happened. I couldn’t shake her. I couldn’t beat her. So I bent my head and I kissed her.
I took her lips and her tongue. All of it. I took every ounce of my anger and fury and I growled it into her mouth.
I was kissing her. I was kissing her and this was Ellie.
Fuck!
I don’t know if I pushed her away or she pushed against me, but suddenly we were apart. Each of us breathing hard, looking at each other, neither one of us knowing what to say.
“Jake…”
I stood up. I took the mug.
“Get dressed. Something warm. You’re going to be tired, lethargic, but you can’t go to bed. I need you to get to ninety-eight degrees before you can sleep.”
Then I walked out of the bathroom, walked downstairs, and threw the mug against the fireplace as hard as I could.
Watching it shatter felt good.
Cleaning it up sucked.
Fourteen
Ellie
March
So that happened.
Jake and I didn’t speak the rest of the night. I didn’t have the energy for it, and he was still really mad at me. The snow let up eventually, but the cold lasted another brutal three days, getting as low as forty below freezing.
Jake went out the next day to try and save more calves. He told me not to bother to ask to come with him, but the truth was I didn’t have it in me.
He came back three hours later with a grim expression.
We still didn’t talk.
It was now four days PK (post kiss). Jake was still sullen, only I’m not sure who he was more mad at, me or himself.
Today we were going to assess the damage.
He was standing in the kitchen, waiting for the coffee to brew, when I came downstairs. He stared at me for a few minutes before asking, “Can you do this?”
I shrugged. “I have no idea. I’ve never had to do anything like this.”
Death on a large scale. Animal carcasses filling the pen. We were going to count up what was left, and then Jake said he would have to hire equipment and a large truck to get the dead cows out of the pen. Then another machine to dig a mass gave.
Filled with coffee and dread, we made our way outside.
I’m not going to lie, as we crunched our way through the snow I felt the anxiety of that day rushing up at me. I didn’t want to be anywhere near snow. I didn’t want to come close to feeling that cold ever again.
Fear of the cold for a rancher in Montana was not a good thing.
When I shared this with Jake I got a very sympathetic… “You’ll get over it.”
I know, I know. You don’t want to hear about all the gruesome shit. The dead calves, the dead cows, the brutal work of clearing it all out.
You want to know about the kiss.
We couldn’t talk about it. I think we were both too raw from the experience in general. Jake had not been wrong. I could have easily died. There was emotional fallout from that.
I tried to tell myself the kiss wasn’t really anything.
Like on a scale of one to ten, maybe like a five. Sure, it happened. It was weird for us. But it had more to do with me almost dying than any feelings Jake had for me. Or I had for him.
Still, it was a pretty hot kiss. My hottest kiss ever. Sure, I had kissed guys. Four of them, if you want a running total, but nothing in my life had prepared me for that. That was… that was…
Intense.
Okay, so maybe it was more like a six on the scale. It was an event. It happened. It was powerful but it didn’t have to change anything.
Unless it changed everything.
We were at thirty-eight days. Thirty-eight days until my eighteenth birthday. Until I was legally an adult.
Thirty-eight days until Jake left.
“Stop,” I called out to him.
He turned around. “We have to do this, Ellie.”
“I know, but we have to do the other thing too and I want to do it first.”
He put his hands on his hips, then he turned around and started walking toward me. The crazy thing was, every time he did that now, any time he started moving toward me, I couldn’t help but wonder if he was going to kiss me again.
Fine. On a scale of ten our kiss was probably more like a seven in terms of overall life impact.
Instead of kissing me (which I knew he wasn’t going to do) he grabbed my hand and pulled me back toward the house. “If we’re going to do this, we might as well be warm.”
THIS. Suddenly that word had colossal meaning in my brain.
This could mean hashing it out, which is what I intended.
This could mean more kissing.
This could mean sex.
Because kissing led to sex. Because I wanted sex. Because secretly in that place I don’t like to think about too hard, I wanted sex with Jake.
There, I thought it. I don’t know how it happened. It wasn’t seeing him naked. It wasn’t any one thing. It was that day in and day out, he’d become the one person who understood me. The one person I wanted to see in the morning, the one person I wanted say goodnight to at night. When we watched TV on the couch, I wanted to cuddle. When we drove into town, I fantasized about holding hands.
When we went to Howard’s Christmas party, I’d pretended we were a real couple. Only in my
head.
Because I knew he didn’t feel the same way. Worse, not only did he not feel the same way, he knew how I was feeling. So embarrassing. I guess men have a sense of things when they know a woman wants them.
He’d been walking on eggshells around me for months, while I desperately tried to tell myself I didn’t care that he didn’t want me. I didn’t care that we were going to get a divorce. I didn’t care that I was going to have to do this all by myself.
We still had no foreman, because Jake had dismissed all of the candidates as either too inexperienced (young) or too creepy (which who knew what that meant) or too set in his ways (he didn’t do things like Jake wanted him to do them).
Javier and Gomez agreed to come back in May to help me out, but they were always going to be temporary, as neither one was willing to commit to full time. Probably because full time meant legal papers neither one of them had.
So all of this had been building up and building up. Then the storm happened and Jake kissed me and now we needed to talk about it. Because it was day thirty-eight and this was more important than a lot of dead animals.
This was good. I was angry. I was pretty sure this whole conversation would be better with pissed me than pathetic me.
We were inside the back room, going through the routine of taking off our coats.
“I need a drink,” he said.
“It’s eight in the morning.”
He hit me then with his expression. “Are we going to have the conversation I think we’re going to have?”
“Yes,” I snapped, my arms crossing over my chest.
“Then I need a fucking drink.”
The only place we kept real alcohol was my father’s study. A room we never went to because I think it hurt us both too much to be in there without him. Any bookwork we did was always at the kitchen table.
Across from the living room Jake opened the door to the study and made his way toward the bar in the corner. The same one Howard had gone to the night of Dad’s funeral.
“Make mine a double.”
Jake glared at me.
“Oh you get to drink, but I don’t?”