The Jesus Cow

by Michael Perry

  Twenty-some years, and still she came in every morning to light that candle for Dougie. Even as she murmured in prayer, she recalled herself standing at the altar, a young bride with no idea of what life would hold but that God and this blessed church would provide.

  HARLEY HAD NO plans for Christmas. In fact, he did not care for Christmas. He did not hate Christmas. He was not at war with Christmas. As with the old water tower, his sentimentalism was in play: he liked the nighttime glow of the lights and decorations other people put up, he liked to buy a bag of angel foam candy in Farm and Fleet and eat it all in one sitting (There y’go, Mom, he always thought), and he enjoyed going to the community choir Christmas concert at St. Jude’s when his work schedule allowed it. But as for Christmas Day itself, he could do without it—particularly in the way it disrupted the daily normalcy of things. He simply didn’t care to turn on the radio and hear music he didn’t normally hear, or find his comfortable news and sports talk shows were holiday themed rather than re-chewing the usual well-worn issues of the day. Once Harley found a groove, he liked to ride it, and Christmas Day was a pebble in that groove. There was no mail delivery (although based on his feelings about the mail—or at least the nature of the mail—he’d been getting lately, perhaps that was a blessing), the feed mill was closed, the filter factory shut down, and no one seemed to be where they were supposed to be. Everything was thrown off. All in all he preferred any given Tuesday. Thus, even as Margaret Magdalene Jankowski rose from her prayers and prepared to help Father Carl set up for the service to follow, Harley welcomed the chance to shrug into his chore coat and step outside to feed and water the beefers. In the chores he found the comfort of the everyday.

  Plus, he had to check on that calf. Harley regularly recalled his father—in a rare moment of low-key speechifying—invoking the word “husbandman” and urging Harley to take the term to heart. It wasn’t enough to own animals, his father said. You had to walk among them daily, get keyed into their rhythms so you’d notice if anything was amiss. Harley would never be the husbandman his father was, but he did once pick up on a beef steer with a bad hock while simply watching the animals loaf, and by calling the vet was able to intervene in time to keep the animal on track for the abattoir, ultimately a zero-sum proposition for the steer, he supposed, but still the right thing to do, and he was quietly proud of himself for catching it.

  So before he threw hay bales down from the mow, he walked through the beefers. The barn thermometer was tickling single digits, and a stiff breeze from the west had left patches of the barnyard snow scoured and thin, broken here and there by dark brown knobs of deep-frozen cow pies. The beefers were hunched and bunched behind the corrugated steel half shed that served as a windbreak, dispassionately chewing their cud, neither grateful nor ungrateful for his husbandry as far as he could tell. After a quick head count to verify that everyone was in attendance and upright, Harley turned his attention to the stock tank. Finding it full and unfrozen—meaning both the plumbing and deicer were operational—he turned on his heel and stomped through the deeper snow in the lee of the wind and let himself in the barn door.

  Even after he switched the lights on it took a moment for his eyes to adjust from the wintry white light to the darkness of the barn. The calf was resting against its mother, both of them fold-legged atop the straw. Maybe I—, thought Harley, hoping that somehow overnight the image might have disappeared, but then, Nope, there it is.

  And indeed the face of Jesus was in clear view, all but the bottom fringe of beard, which was tucked into the straw. “Jaypers!” said Harley, unconsciously uttering the severest oath he had ever heard his father utter. He had harbored some hope that here on the morning after, the image might have been less distinct.

  Tina Turner got to her feet and lowed at him hungrily. “Yah, okay,” said Harley, shaking his head as he turned and climbed the haymow ladder. Unhooking the door that swung out over the barnyard, he pitched down a dozen bales, then dropped a single down the chute above Tina Turner’s manger.

  Most people these days used round bales, the ones that resembled giant cigar stubs or were wrapped in white plastic and looked like elephantine marshmallows. You spiked them with a tractor and they’d feed the cows for several days. But Harley stuck with the old-school bales, the ones that were a packet of hay contained by two loops of knotted twine. They were more work, but he still liked using his dad’s old John Deere baler. Billy would drive the tractor while Harley stacked bales on the wagon, the roar of the engine rising and falling to the rhythm of the plunger. Harley found this mechanical harmony soothing, and evocative of a time when everything made sense. Or was at least containable. Plus he figured lugging those bales every day was his equivalent of a gym membership.

  When Harley stepped off the bottom rung of the ladder, Tina Turner had her head through the slats of the pen, and was straining toward the hay bale. Harley flicked open his lock blade, snicked the twine, and using one foot, swept several flakes of hay within reach of her looping tongue. Her udder was rotund with colostrum, and Harley noted a fleck of foam at each corner of the calf’s mouth—a good sign; he’d been feeding. The calf was standing now too, facing Harley head-on, sturdy as you please, all the wobble gone out of its knees. Harley eased around one side of the pen, once again hoping the image of Christ would be indistinct, or that from another perspective it might appear to be a road-killed muskrat or some such—anything, really, as long as it was more benign than the Holy Savior of Man—but then the calf turned to suckle, and there it was, a hairy Rorschach open to only one interpretation: Jesus Christ.

  Back outside in the cold, Harley elbowed his way through the cluster of beefers now tearing at his pile of hay bales. One by one he lugged the bales to the bunk feeder that ran along one side of the barnyard, cut the twine, and kicked the flakes along the length of the feeder. When the last bale was split and distributed, he stood in the feeder and watched the cows eat. There was always a comfort in this moment. He found simple satisfaction in the sound of the cattle snuffling and grinding the hay in their molars, switching their tails in contentment. There was the feeling that he had done something tangible and good. Christmas? Maybe so, he thought, but it was hard to imagine any other gifts so thankfully received.

  OVER AT ST. Jude’s Meg rose to change into her dress and assist Father Carl.

  Christmas, she thought, looking at the abstract brass Jesus. Happy birthday.

  In his office, Father Carl pressed a button, and the tape-recorded bells rang out the joyous message.

  CHAPTER 7

  In the little hut—originally the pump house, in fact—at the base of the water tower, Carolyn Sawchuck was pedaling her bicycle and reading Soulful Declensions, a book of essays she had written and published at the peak of her academic career, when things were really going her way. Despite her late night atop the tower, she had risen early today, awakened by the rumble of Meg’s junk truck. Bless my friend Meg, she thought, and found herself taken aback by her unconscious use of the word bless, but even more so the word friend. She hadn’t used either word in a long, long time.

  The bicycle was clamped into a wind trainer, one of those roller mechanisms that converts a standard bicycle into an exercise bicycle. The trainer in turn had been modified to spin a small pump. A short hose connected a thirty-five-gallon plastic carboy to the pump’s intake valve; the other end of the pump was attached to a longer hose that snaked across the floor and out a small hole in the wall that was stuffed with insulation.

  Carolyn pedaled steadily, her book propped on a rack mounted on the handlebars. Outside, a sign on the pump house door said ACCEPTING NO VISITORS. Carolyn had screwed the sign to the door the day she moved in. The first time Billy saw it, he chuckled, elbowed Harley, and said, “Who’s offering?”

  “Nice,” said Harley. “Be nice.”

  Billy grimaced. “That woman has halitosis of the soul.”

  ABOVE ALL AND through it all, Carolyn Sawchuck considered herself A Woman
of the People. She had focused on becoming A Woman of the People as a second act after being A Woman of Arts and Letters failed to pan out after four underappreciated (and undersold) books, a pair of Guggenheister awards, a fat curriculum vitae’s worth of grants and fellowships, two poetry chapbooks, and an endowed chair at the state university in Clearwater. Until the abrupt end it was a satisfying academic arc, although even at its apex Carolyn was not the sort of person for whom satisfaction was a natural state.

  It was the vacation home in a Central American expatriate artists’ community that put her on the path to a commoner’s ruin, what with it being burned to the ground by the very same Marxist collective revolutionaries to whom she had given safe harbor and free copies of her recent treatise on “Indigenous Empowerment in a State of Transitory Postmodern Meta-Contextualism.” Wishing to demonstrate her commitment to the cause (and also unload a few boxes of poorly translated and even more poorly selling chapbooks), Carolyn had set up a fund-raiser based on a sparsely attended poetry reading and free beer, after which (and it was never clear if this was the result of the free poetry or the free beer) the revolutionaries burned her retreat to the ground, and—essentially—the grant money that had served as a down payment. They also unloaded her iPad on eBay.

  There followed a crash course in the intricacies of the Central American insurance industry, and when the ash and paperwork settled Carolyn was left with a scorched adobe shell and an underwater mortgage that had been of sketchy provenance in the first place.

  It was possible she might have survived this personal setback had she not subsequently suffered a professional setback precipitated by a “think piece” she composed for the literary blog Haute Ignorati in which she impugned a female freelance writer for selling out the sisterhood by penning a style magazine article entitled “Six Sexy Steps to Steamroll Cellulite,” having failed to take into consideration that said female writer was a self-insured single mother who composed her cellulite article on a card table and pawnshop laptop in a one-bedroom apartment overlooking a Shopko loading dock as opposed to on a fresh MacBook in a writing den constructed from sustainable bamboo and tenure.

  It developed that the cellulite scribe was a bit of a bootstraps feminist in her own right, and returned fire. In the ensuing online strafing session, Carolyn was shocked to find herself cast and cornered as a tone-deaf member of the privileged class and in violation of an obscure subsection of the university speech code, which Carolyn herself had helped compose. The professional conflagration that followed made the Central American incident seem a jolly marshmallow roast by comparison, and when the final faculty review session concluded, Carolyn found herself endowed with a modest severance package but otherwise hopelessly outcast on all fronts.

  THE PUMP GAVE out a gurgle. Carolyn stopped pedaling, and dismounted. One corner of the small room was taken up by a number of five-gallon buckets. Carolyn selected one, fitted a funnel to the mouth of the carboy, emptied the contents of the bucket within, and returned to pedaling and reading her book.

  CAROLYN DIDN’T ALWAYS read her own books. In fact, she did so infrequently. But when she did read her own books, it was to reassure herself. To reassure herself that it was the outside world that failed to understand. That her poor book sales had no relation to the quality of the content. There was also the idea that the printed pages validated the work. So many talked of writing; she had done it. The fact that her words had languished in small print runs was secondary to the primary fact that she had put her ass in the chair, as she once heard some would-be rough-boy corduroy-blazered creative-writing workshopper say. Half the men in these workshops tended to project a combination of infantile sensitivity coupled with sublimated machismo. The sort of fellow who would be post-coitally teary but secretly hoping the woman would get out of bed and fix a nice snack. Carolyn often countered this image by conjuring up a mental picture of the guilty individual perched atop a pedal-powered monster truck.

  There were those in Swivel who saw Carolyn as a bitter woman, and little she did dispelled this. Publicly she had always maintained that she came to Swivel to live “the simple life,” a pronouncement that probably did more long-term damage than the burn barrel ruckus, implying as it did that the citizenry were by default de facto simple.

  In truth she was more befuddled than bitter. She had done all the right things, sat on the proper literary panels, carefully doled out career-enhancing book reviews (always reserving the long knives for those outside the winner’s circle and off the foundation board), and right there on the dust jackets and back covers were the testaments—the “blurbs” as they were called in the coarser trades—all these eminent pacesetters testifying to her wisdom and perspicacity and artistic essentiality, and yet, and yet . . . she wound up in a defunct water tower pump house riding a bicycle to nowhere.

  In the wake of losing her position with the university, Carolyn had retreated to Swivel, where the cost of living—if not the tone of living—was more suited to her means, and rented a modest apartment above Reverend Gary’s Church of the Roaring Lamb. It was her intent to simply lay low for a year, do some writing, then begin the reentry process. In the meantime, she took it upon herself to uplift and enhance the citizenry by offering memoir-writing workshops and selling dream catchers on consignment at the gas station.

  The citizenry had proved stubborn in their unreconstructed lack of cultural acquisitivity. In that first year she sold but one dream catcher, and that to a drunken fisherman who mistook it for a musky lure. Glen Jacobson, a local handyman (known also for his skills as an unlicensed plumber and electrician), showed up for the memoir workshop, but he ignored Carolyn’s instruction, insisting instead that she help him edit a sheaf of handwritten limericks stored in a manila folder that smelled of caulk. Carolyn adjudged the limericks juvenile and told Glen his first assignment was to find a word that rhymed with misogyny. Punching it into an online rhyming dictionary, Glen found himself recommended to androgyny, which he in turn Googled, and what he saw next made him so nervous he wrote no more, and thus the workshop terminated. On another cultural front, Carolyn got into regular shouting matches with Reverend Gary. Some of the disagreements were theological, but mostly it was over all the speaking in tongues after ten p.m. on Bible Study night.

  So it was, when Carolyn heard the old village water tower was slated for destruction, she had seen it as a cultural opportunity. More than that, a responsibility: if these people couldn’t recognize the treasure of their own history, she’d recognize it for them. And after years of navigating the world of government grants and foundation funds, Carolyn happened to know the governor had recently expanded a state program making funds and tax credits available for the renovation of historic landmarks—exactly the sort of thing about which these shortsighted Swivel knuckleheads were oblivious. She went into high gear, submitting the petition for landmark status, storming the village board meetings, and convincing Harley Jackson to let her assume the lease.

  Shortly thereafter, the governor reversed himself, announcing a series of budget cuts and putting the renovation program—and its funds—on hold, and Carolyn found herself stuck with a year-long lease on a rusty water tower full of nothing.

  CHAPTER 8

  With the chores complete, Harley found himself hungry. What he needed was eggs and bacon and good fresh-ground coffee, but what he craved was the instantaneous fix of a gas station pastry washed down with a Styrofoam cup of industrial drip, both available at the Kwik Pump. For that matter, maybe he’d go for a drive. It was one of his favorite things, driving nowhere particular in his pickup truck with old-school country music on the radio, slowly knee-steering along with the coffee in one hand and a pastry in the other. Nutritional napalm, and no way to navigate, but the sort of unobtrusive decadence that suited him. He closed the barn door, started his pickup truck, and made the short drive across County Road M to the Kwik Pump, where a neon sign in the window promised BEER SALES TO MIDNIGHT, and a banner hung with bungee cords ad
vertised a dollar-off special on twenty-four-packs of Old Milwaukee. Right below that was an official government-issue sign identifying the Kwik Pump as a deer carcass registration point. This was an accurate representation of the ratio of interests in the area, which ran about two to one beer to hunting.

  Harley parked before the propane cylinder exchange cage and left the truck idling, the heater blowing. Inside the door of the station, Harley stopped as he always did to read the community bulletin board, filled with homemade posters advertising housecleaning services, babysitting, dock repair, cabin winterization, taxidermy, bowling tournaments, cancer benefits, used snowmobiles for sale, and Pampered Chef parties. Down in one corner a piece of paper stapled to the cork featured a cartoonish rendering of a gooey-looking black teardrop falling toward a sad-faced cartoon Earth. A red circle/slash had been superimposed over the black teardrop. The caption below Earth said:

  TOP DOLLAR FOR YOUR USED MOTOR OIL

  &

  OTHER PETROLEUM-BASED WASTE

  I PICK UP, I PAY (CASH)

  (NONGOVERNMENT) (NO QUESTIONS ASKED)

  Below the caption was a fringe made of the same phone number printed vertically, over and over, each separated by a scissors snip. Harley noticed that several of the strips had been torn away.

  Harley knew that number. He dialed it whenever he needed to speak with Carolyn Sawchuck.

  MAKING HIS WAY through the ranks of foil-wrapped snacks, gallon jugs of window washer fluid, and artfully stacked rock salt, Harley approached the bakery case and chose a creme-filled, maple-frosted long john, then moved to the coffee stand, where he drew a twenty-ounce Kona Luna from the vacuum thermos. Then he turned around, bumped directly into a woman, and slopped fresh hot Kona Luna across her boots.

  “Oh, shoot, I—,” said Harley, before the woman cut in with a laugh.

  “Nothin’!” she said, pronouncing it NAH-thin! and waving her hand dismissively.