The Jesus Cow

by Michael Perry

  DEDICATION

  For the quiet ones.

  EPIGRAPH

  After the fall

  There is love after all

  —RAY WYLIE HUBBARD

  CONTENTS

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  Part One

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Part Two

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Part Three

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Also by Michael Perry

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  PROLOGUE

  On Christmas Eve itself, the bachelor Harley Jackson stepped into his barn and beheld there illuminated in the straw a smallish newborn bull calf upon whose flank was borne the very image of Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.

  “Well,” said Harley, “that’s trouble.”

  PART

  ONE

  CHAPTER 1

  There is no better vantage point from which to survey the village of Swivel, Wisconsin, than from the tip-top of its historic water tower. Carolyn Sawchuck has made the climb every Christmas Eve for five years running. Right about the time Harley Jackson was discovering his surprising calf, Carolyn was reclining against the vent cap that crowned the tower. Reaching into her backpack, she withdrew a slender thermos and poured herself a steaming capful of EarthHug tea. Then she settled in for a look around.

  The water tower—a classic witch-hatted four-legger—stands on an elevated patch of land tucked within the armpit angle formed by the interstate off-ramp and County Road M. The rare visitor who chooses to exit the freeway and follow the gentle decline of County Road M into the dwindled heart of Swivel itself will be greeted by an outdated and optimistic green-and-white population sign declaring 562 citizens, when in fact a real estate death spiral and lack of local industry has drained the census well below that. There was a time when the state two-lane ran smack through town and on holiday weekends the burg could muster up a bustle, but when the bulldozers pushed the new four-lane through they bypassed Swivel and left it to wither.

  And yet, life persists. Across the road, the halogen-lit Kwik Pump is open 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. Even now, near midnight on Christmas Eve, its logo glows against the sky on a long-stemmed sign visible from the interstate, advertising the only local attraction capable of convincing tourists to switch off the cruise control and visit—and even then only for as long as it takes to top off the tank. Over the years the Kwik Pump had displaced all four of Swivel’s gas stations, two of its three cafés, and the last lingering grocery. There had been a lot of grumbling, but these days the grumblers filled their tanks and stood in line with everyone else for lottery tickets, loss-leader milk, and heat-lamped breakfast burritos.

  Just past the Kwik Pump was a small trailer court, then St. Jude’s Catholic Church. Then came the railroad tracks, after which County Road M widened out into Main Street, which wore on its flanks the older, larger houses; the Solid Savings Bank; the Sunrise Café; the old Farmers Store (long since closed and converted to apartments); a former Laundromat now serving as Reverend Gary’s Church of the Roaring Lamb; and, at the intersection of Center Street and Main, the Buck Rub Bar. The elementary and high schools stood in a field at the far dead end of Main (County Road M hung a left and continued into the country), and the northernmost and southernmost borders of Swivel were marked by the respective steeple-mounted and fluorescent-lit crosses of the Lutheran and Methodist churches.

  The first time Carolyn Sawchuck climbed the water tower she hadn’t been sightseeing—she’d been trying to solve a problem. To that end, her backpack contained bolt cutters, a headlamp, a can of WD-40, Vise-Grips, miscellaneous wire and pliers, a mini-crowbar, and a fat coil of oil-resistant hose. The weight was considerable, and halfway up the ladder she had to stop and catch her breath. Three-quarters of the way up, her quadriceps felt as if they’d been marinating in napalm. At the catwalk, she dared to look down and her breath departed with such force she feared she would be found frozen to the railing come dawn. But the problem had to be addressed. So she had pulled out the bolt cutters, snipped the padlock on the climbing guard, gone headfirst into the safety cage, and, rung by knuckle-whitening rung, climbed to the very summit.

  Carolyn chose to make her initial climb on Christmas Eve for one primary reason: to avoid detection. Daylight hours were a nonstarter, obviously. An outsider might have chosen the dead-of-night wee hours, but Carolyn knew Constable Benson whiled away the night shift making slow passes through town with regular loops back to the Kwik Pump for coffee refills and chitchat with whoever was running the register. While he was no crack invigilator, there was still a chance he might sweep the old water tower with his spotlight out of habit (more than one drunken Buck Rub patron had tried to scale the tower after closing time, and spray-paint-toting high schoolers also, although this was most likely to occur during homecoming week) and catch Carolyn halfway up or down. In this regard, Christmas Eve just prior to midnight offered several advantages. Nearly everyone in town was either asleep, groggily eggnogged, or rushing to make midnight mass. And rather than making small talk at the Kwik Pump or cruising quiet streets, Constable Benson would be at the corner of Elm and Main with his vintage radar gun, picking off speeding Catholics.

  She’d been terribly worried about getting caught that first time. Fearing a winking headlamp would betray her, she worked by feel, spritzing WD-40 over the rusted hinges of the vent cap before prying it open with the crowbar. Then she clipped the lamp to the rim of the vent opening so it illuminated the tank interior but was not visible from below. Next she pulled out the hose, one end of which was clamped to a short length of PVC pipe plumbed in the shape of a “T.” The other end was duct-taped to a corn-cob size bolt of steel rebar, which she fed into the overflow tube that ran down the center column to ground level. The weight of the rebar drew the hose downward and kept it from kinking; when it hit bottom, Carolyn dropped the rest of the hose and the PVC “T” inside the tank. Then she extinguished the headlamp, replaced the cap, and—with great relief—turned to descend.

  What she saw below surprised her.

  Carolyn Sawchuck was not from this town. Never would be, by the standards of some locals. She had arrived out of the blue, and if not against her wishes then arguably against all she had hoped for. Certainly the trajectory of her first forty years—overachieving student, social activist, published author, and ensconced academic—had given no indication that she might land atop some podunk water tower. Her integration with Swivel’s populace hadn’t gone smoothly and remained incomplete. But on that first Christmas Eve, as she prepared to climb down, she had been caught off guard by what she saw spread before her: a modest grid of low-key streetlights casting a vaporous glow across the settlement as a whole—everything softened by drapings of snow, the stained-glass windows of St. Jude’s
illuminated from within, a twinkling sprinkle of Christmas lights salted throughout. There was something in the perspective that softened her view of Swivel. Carolyn Sawchuck was not pliable in any sense. But she sensed the value of this calibration.

  And so it became tradition that her annual surreptitious Christmas Eve climb culminated with a cup of tea at midnight as Carolyn looked over the town that somehow, despite its bad luck, looked beautiful, and despite her best intentions, she had come to think of as home.

  Sipping her tea, Carolyn considered the structure beneath her. It hadn’t held water for years now, having been decommissioned in favor of a modern spheroidal model. By rotating ever so carefully upon her perch, Carolyn could see the new tower, well lit and shiny on the opposite side of the interstate where it stood on higher ground amidst a haphazard scatter of houses known as Clover Blossom Estates. At its very top a blue Christmas star glowed and an American flag waved. Unlike the old tower, which was silver and bore the name of Swivel in simple black block letters, the new tower was painted in the school colors of green and gold with blaze orange accents.

  Carolyn shook her head. She far preferred the original tower. It had once been her dream to restore it, but these days it stood unadorned and unlit, and it was showing worrying wear. Her gloves had snagged on more than one rusty rung on the way up tonight, and she noted that when she lifted the vent cap, the hinges were stiffer than ever.

  The first year Carolyn looked inside the tank, it was dead empty. The second year, a small black puddle was visible within the bowl-shaped base. Now, five years later, the tower was far from full, but when she shone her carefully shielded headlamp inside she saw the black puddle had grown, rising to touch the sides of the tank.

  That black puddle was Carolyn Sawchuck’s greatest secret.

  THE TEA WAS cooling quickly in the cold air. As water towers go, the old Swivel tower wasn’t all that tall. Forty feet from base to vent. Because it stood at an elevation, there had been no need to place it atop longer legs, for which Carolyn was thankful. There were limits to her bravery. Still, there was no doubt the climb was much easier now than it was the first time. For one thing, on these annual maintenance trips her pack was a lot lighter—no coiled hose, no rebar, no plumbing supplies. And Carolyn Sawchuck herself was thirty pounds lighter than she was five years ago. You don’t lose thirty pounds by climbing a water tower once a year. Carolyn Sawchuck had shed most of that weight by putting thousands of miles on her bicycle.

  Thousands of miles, she thought, looking over the little town spread before her.

  Going nowhere.

  But she couldn’t summon the old bitterness.

  CAROLYN CONCLUDED HER survey of Swivel by studying Harley Jackson’s barn. The lights were on, which gave her pause. She knew Harley worked twelve-hour shifts and often did his chores at a late hour, but this was later than usual, and she had also seen a yellow rectangle of light bloom and eclipse as someone—by the size of him, it appeared to be Harley’s friend Billy Tripp—passed through the doorway. It was odd that the two men might be meeting in the barn at this hour. She was ready to climb down, but didn’t want to get caught halfway if the pair reemerged and spotted her—a fair possibility, as Harley’s barn was less than one hundred yards away.

  In fact, the land beneath the old water tower was owned by Harley. His house and barn stood on a 15-acre remnant of his father’s original 160-acre farm, which predated the interstate, predated the housing boom and bust, and predated the hectic present in every sense. Over time the farm was annexed into the village, sliced in two by the four-lane, shaved off lot by lot to meet property taxes and satisfy the bank and—just before Harley’s father died—all but the residual patch sold off in one big chunk to Klute Sorensen, the developer of Clover Blossom Estates, who then—in exchange for a fat sheaf of tax breaks—donated land for the new water tower.

  I’ll wait a bit, thought Carolyn, studying the illuminated barn windows. She tipped back the last of the tea, which was threatening to freeze up, and recapped her thermos. It had begun to snow. She could hear the choir at St. Jude’s.

  Carolyn checked her watch: 12:05.

  It was Christmas in Swivel.

  CHAPTER 2

  Well, that’s trouble,” said Harley Jackson, and although he was alone in the barn, he spoke the words aloud. In the manner of most long-term bachelors, Harley had grown accustomed to speaking within earshot of no one but himself, and was not at all self-conscious about the practice. In fact, he preferred his conversations thus. How pleasant to speak freely without fear of contradiction. Last thing you want, really: answers.

  Despite the barn, and despite a small herd of beef cows, Harley hardly considered himself a farmer. Lifelong bachelor, factory worker, member of the Swivel Volunteer Fire Department, that’s pretty much the list. Oh, and college dropout. He forgets that one sometimes. Not out of shame or deception, but because it was a long time ago. One semester short of graduation, he had been forced to withdraw, and he’d never made it back. Fifteen years now he’s been employed at the filter factory in Boomler, twenty minutes down the freeway, pulling twelve-hour shifts in a rotation leaving opportunity for other modest pursuits: He hunts some, fishes a little, tinkers on his truck, and like a lot of folks in the area, has taken to raising a few head of beef on the side. The beefers are more of a hobby than a moneymaker, really, although they do earn him a modest break on the property taxes.

  Once while they were having porch beers after the evening chores, Harley handed his friend Billy Tripp a bottle of Foamy Viking and asked, “Billy, what’s the secret to happiness?”

  “Low overhead,” said Billy.

  Pretty much, thought Harley.

  The calf in the straw was wet and wobbly kneed, woozily head-butting its mother’s abdomen, intuitively prospecting for the udder it knew to be south of its current location. Problematically, the calf had rotated north. This allowed Harley to inspect the flip side of the animal, upon which he was relieved to see nothing but the standard black-and-white patchwork. Bumping into its mother’s foreshank, the calf paused, tottered backward a half step, then turned to renew its search, and in making this turn it once again revealed the critical side of its hide, upon which could clearly be seen what appeared to be an above-average stencil of the Son of God.

  In his time, Harley had been a believer. A born-again believer. There was a time when the sight of this calf would have dropped him to his knees. Now he simply saw a complication in the even keel of things.

  Harley sighed, and again spoke aloud.

  “I better call Billy.”

  BILLY TRIPP OPENED Harley’s barn door and fully filled the frame. Well over six feet tall and burly with the stature of those men who carry a seventy-pound overage like seven, he arrived clad in grim sweatpants and a capacious parka, and notwithstanding the Christmas Eve snow stood shod in orange rubber clogs. He wore a beard the size of an otter.

  Billy was a decorated combat veteran whose wartime injuries had at one point put him flat on his back for the better part of a year. He and Harley were well along in their friendship before Billy shared the whole story. “Anybody who says they’re above it all has never been beneath it all,” he said by way of conclusion, then never spoke of it again. He lived surrounded by stacks of books and an innumerable census of cats in a single-wide trailer on a sliver of property purchased from Harley’s father during the years Harley was away at college in the city of Clearwater—an hour south of Swivel. Upon his return home, Harley resented the presence of the trailer at the far end of the pasture and by default its occupant, but one afternoon as he struggled to repair the frozen apron chain of his father’s manure spreader, the sky darkened and it was Billy blocking the sun. “As the worm gear turns, eh?” said Billy. The combination of literate humor and obscure manure-handling technology knowledge appealed to Harley, and a low-key conversation ensued. Now Harley considered Billy his best friend, although Harley never cared for the term, implying as it did that life
was a pageant. Like Harley, Billy was also a bachelor. The two of them liked to get together and not talk much.

  After a childhood of daily dairy chores, Harley had sworn he would never again milk a cow, but he retained a farm kid’s atavistic affection for fresh-skimmed cream over cornflakes. When he broached the possibility with Billy, who subsisted on a military pension and disability drawn on his injuries, Billy saw the milk as a means to defray his prohibitive monthly cat food expenses, and thus offered to split the milking chores. With this agreement in hand, Harley obtained a bred milk cow from one of the few remaining dairy farmers in the county.

  Billy was present the day she was led off the back of the cattle trailer.

  “Tina Turner,” said Billy.

  “Huh?” said Harley.

  “Tina Turner. We’ll call her Tina Turner.”

  Harley had tried in vain to make any connection, some resemblance of hairstyle or mannerism, a certain strength to the gait.

  “But I don’t—”

  “Not the point,” said Billy, seeing Harley there puzzling.

  “But why—”

  “Respect must be paid,” said Billy, his definitive tone making it clear he considered the answer self-evident and the discussion closed. Indeed, it was not uncommon in these parts to choose animal names for honorific purposes. Harley himself had once named a Holstein heifer calf after a high school girlfriend; sadly the relationship ended before the calf was weaned.

  Now, as the two men watched, Tina Turner licked her calf from stem to stern, clearing the last of the amniotic fluid. At the moment, Billy was unable to see the image of Jesus, his view being blocked broadside by Tina.

  Then the cow laid on an especially aggressive lick, and the calf stumbled into the open. The hair across its rib cage was slicked and whorled, but even thus distorted, there was no mistaking the image made manifest.

  “Y’got the Son a God there, bud,” said Billy. “With a cowlick.”