The Jesus Cow

by Michael Perry

  Harley looked closer at the photo. Mrs. Van Hoof had stevedore arms and a butcher’s hands. “There’s a woman could throw a hay bale,” said Billy, who had moved in to peer over Harley’s shoulder.

  “After several visions,” continued Sloan, “she promised that on August 15, 1950, the Virgin Mother would appear in the sun with a message.”

  Sloan swiped the screen again. “And this was the result.”

  The photo was taken from an airplane. Acres of cars parked in endless rows across a pasture. People streaming in from all directions to surround a farmhouse nearly identical to Harley’s. “Look at them,” said Sloan, pointing at the people who were swarming the house like bees a hive. “Eighty thousand souls. Some claim a hundred thousand. In one day. They trampled the fences. Flattened the flowers. Wore the grass down to dirt in an afternoon. Reporters counted six trains, a hundred and two buses, and seventeen thousand automobiles. License plates from nearly every state. The governor called in the state police.”

  Sloan handed the tablet to Harley so he could study the photo more closely. Even in monochrome the Wisconsin countryside looked parched, with exposed sandy patches and a scrubby stand of oak. And as far as the eye could see, people. Pilgrims. Diffuse and patchy in the outlying areas, but clustering ever tighter and ever more densely the closer they were to the house, which was small and unremarkable, and shaded at one end by the trees. Even in the stasis of the vintage photograph, Harley could feel the invisible power drawing all of the people toward the house of apparition.

  “All those people,” said Sloan. “And that was a half century before the Internet.”

  “Anybody ever see anything?” asked Mindy.

  “Nah,” said Sloan. “A few scorched retinas, and somebody thought they spotted her in a box elder.”

  “That is a crowd,” said Harley.

  “And all for the promise of a vision,” said Sloan. “Whereas you—you have a calf. A living, breathing calf.”

  Billy perked up. “That’s what I told him!”

  Harley rolled his eyes and dropped his head into his hands.

  “Born on Christmas Eve!” said Billy. “In a manger! I told him!”

  “Bingo,” said Sloan.

  Billy drew himself up proudly. “Framing the narrative,” he said.

  For the first time all night, Sloan Knight smiled. Then he returned the tablet to its sleeve and nodded toward the calf. “Harley, you’ve got a multimillion-dollar animal there.”

  “Multi?”

  “Easily.”

  Sloan let Harley absorb that in silence for a moment, then spoke again.

  “If.”

  “If?”

  “If we work fast. If we work big. If we start now.”

  “But those people out there”—Harley waved in the general direction of the road, where a low hubbub could still be heard—“they really believe. They really hope. I don’t know . . .”

  “We’d do a Jesus Cow app, of course,” said Sloan, as if he hadn’t heard Harley. “That’s a no-brainer. We can have the beta online in under twenty-four hours. We’ll set up a secure visitation corral, priced on a sliding scale based on proximity and length of visit—from flyby to petting privileges. For real high rollers you can sell chances to feed the calf. For those who can’t make the trip, a webcam setup, just like they have at Lourdes, only ours will be pay-per-view. That way you’re monetizing the whole wide world.”

  “But . . . monetizing? That’s twice now you’ve said that. Aren’t we putting a price on belief? Commodifying faith?” Harley had picked up the word commodifying at a poetry reading during college.

  “No, we’re leveraging faith.”

  “Well, I’m kinda—”

  “Harley, I’m about the free market. Faith will take care of itself.”

  “Well, that’s not very—”

  “Thoughtful? Respectful? Introspective?”

  “I just want to keep it under control, kinda maybe strike a balance . . .”

  “Aaaannd how’s that workin’ for ya?” said Billy.

  “Look,” said Sloan, after a pause. “You can do this or not. But the fact is, you’re in a bind. You have to let the people see their calf. Because the minute that face appeared in public, it became their calf. You can show it for free if you want, or give it away in the fire department raffle, but the one thing you can’t do is hide it or get rid of it. They’ll storm the barn. They’ll run you out of town.

  “Bottom line? You don’t own that calf, that calf owns you.”

  From his position at the door, Billy cleared his throat and reached into the pocket of his coat. “This might tweak your thinking,” he said, and sailed an envelope toward Harley. Tina Turner flinched when the letter within spilled out in midair and floated to the straw.

  “So you’ve already had a look,” said Harley, shaking his head as he retrieved the paper.

  “Yahp,” said Billy. “Hand-delivered by Vance Hansen. I made him climb up the outside of the silo with it. Between a fear of heights and these snazzy bandoliers, that boy was a whiter shade of pale.”

  Harley read, and the barn went quiet, save for the sound of Tina Turner sniffing at her calf again, then tentatively licking its wound.

  Harley recognized the letterhead of Klute Sorensen’s Clearwater attorneys, but the letter was also undersigned by Vance Hansen and the village board president. Harley was being notified that in light of his ongoing refusal to cooperate with the village and the recent developments involving the calf, Klute Sorensen and his development corporation, in concert with the village proper, would be suing Harley for a list of offenses that went on for several pages, from actions negatively impacting property values to willful violations of the village parking and permitting rules and failure to collect state and county sales tax. There was verbiage regarding condemnation, foreclosure, and garnishment of future earnings.

  Harley placed the letter on the straw and shook his head. “A quiet life. That’s all I wanted.”

  “Low overhead?” said Billy.

  “Low overhead,” said Harley.

  Tina Turner stopped licking her calf and stared at Harley.

  Sloan stood silent in the shadows.

  After a moment, Billy shrugged in his parka, shifted his orange rubber clogs, cleared his throat, and spoke.

  “Undevelopment.”

  “Not now, Billy.”

  Billy snatched the letter from the straw and snapped it in the air. “Growth and progress, progress and growth! People like Klute Sorensen hammer it and yammer it nonstop. Buy, bulldoze, and build! Undevelopment—buy, bulldoze, don’t build—now that would be a revolution. You’d be the antideveloper. You’d honor your father. You’d honor the land. And you’d be the hero of underdogs everywhere! A man of the people—the good people!”

  Harley couldn’t recall ever seeing Billy so animated. “But . . . I’d have to take advantage of good people to do it.”

  Sloan stepped forward. For the first time, he seemed impatient. “Harley, you can’t help everybody. You can help yourself, you can help me, and you can help some of the good people. Your friend here is more committed to the good than I am—I’d be happy just to cash in. He’s giving you a way to cash in and do some good and kick a bully in the nuts.”

  “But—” Harley pointed to the lawsuit.

  Sloan took the papers from Billy’s hand, gave them a quick glance, then smirked. “This is the legal equivalent of a Hallmark card. I put our attorneys on it, they’ll pound so much sand up Klute Sorensen’s ass he’ll be able to crap out his own private beach. And that village attorney of yours will have his polka-dotted boxers handed to him by a team of lawyers the likes of which his wet dreams are made of. Let’s just say they’ll be getting a truckload of certified mail from unfamiliar zip codes. Zip codes where Klute Sorensen has no more pull than a two-legged cockroach.”

  Now Billy spoke. “Your father worked all his life to hold this farm, only to have it shaved away bit by bit. And what didn’t g
et shaved got grabbed.”

  Billy paused, then spoke again. “Undevelopment. You’d be the hero. The weird, rich hero.”

  Billy went silent then, and leaned against the door. Sloan took a step back into the shadows toward the manure spreader. Mindy had been silent the entire time, her hand light atop Harley’s.

  Tina Turner nudged her calf. The calf rose, shook off the straw, and turned to suckle.

  Harley watched the rhythm of the calf’s throat as it swallowed the milk. He thought of his father. Thought of how so much he’d worked for had been bulldozed. Thought of his mother dying, knowing the farm would be lost.

  He sighed, and turned to Sloan.

  “Yeah. I guess. Okay.”

  Sloan immediately produced his cell phone. “First thing we do is insure that calf and cow,” he said.

  “Well, I’ve always worked with Ken down there at State Farm.”

  “I’m sure he does good work,” said Sloan, using his free hand to pull away hay bales and let himself out the door. “We’ll be using a little outfit run by a guy named Lloyd, out of London.”

  It was quiet in the barn then, just the sound of Tina Turner working her cud, and the muffled sound of Sloan on the phone outside the door.

  Billy nodded in Sloan’s direction. “If that feller ain’t the devil, they’re damn sure first cousins.”

  He was grinning as he said it.

  On the straw, the calf dozed, the bloodied face of Christ rising and falling.

  AN HOUR LATER, Harley’s kitchen was a command center. A bank of rechargeable radios blinked on the countertop, and a group of people were hunched over laptops at the table. A ring of uniformed private security personnel encircled the barn and house.

  “This is just the advance contingent,” said Sloan. “International Talent Management took the liberty of retaining them in advance—on our own dime—in anticipation of exactly these developments. The real help will arrive tomorrow.” The private security members were quiet and efficient and not at all the sort of potbellied mall walkers Harley had—rightly or wrongly—come to associate with the phrase private security.

  Dusk was falling. Out in the hay field and up and down the road, the mess of cars and people and TV trucks still remained and was still growing, but a large portable LED sign on a trailer had been parked between the house and barn, and the same message crawled past, over and over.

  …VIEWINGS TO RESUME ASAP…UPDATES AT JESUSCOW.COM…

  “I apologize for swamping your kitchen,” said Sloan. “The mobile command center will be here by tomorrow morning, and we’ll be out of your hair.”

  Harley didn’t know what to say. Sloan laid it out for him.

  “We’ve done a lot of work with the NFL and the movie industry. We’re used to setting up on location and running the show on the fly.”

  Harley stood there goggle-eyed.

  “Best thing for you would be to rest,” said Sloan. “Right now we’re mostly consumed with logistics. But by morning we’ll need you to sign off on some things. Including the surgery.”

  “The . . . wha?”

  “We’re bringing in a veterinary plastic surgeon from L.A.”

  “I was not aware of this profession,” said Harley.

  “Oh, she’s very good,” said Sloan, as if recommending a barber. “Her clients include the reupholstered shih tzu of a certain regularly rehabbed starlet, an Oscar-winning stunt monkey, and she is on retainer with several of the stars of Snow Dogs. Apart from cosmetics, she specializes in wound remediation.”

  Harley looked at Mindy.

  “My place, baby?” asked Mindy.

  “That’d be nice,” said Harley, looking around the kitchen and out the window, where the TV truck lights had everything halogen bright.

  “I’ll get my truck,” said Mindy.

  “No, no,” said Sloan. “Jack here will see to it.”

  “But—”

  “He’ll also make sure you aren’t bothered,” said Sloan. A large man in a dark suit and long coat stepped from a corner of the kitchen and ushered them out the door, where a black Suburban had already been started and was waiting.

  Outside it was dark. With Jack at the wheel, the Suburban made its way down the driveway, now clear of pilgrims. As Jack accelerated onto the county road, Harley looked back. His farmlet was a psychedelic mishmash of halogen-thrown shadows. Headlights beamed through the exhaust of several hundred idling cars in his hay field. Dark figures walked to and fro. The LED sign continued to scroll its message, over and over.

  I have no idea what is happening, thought Harley. No idea.

  In the darkness, Mindy squeezed his hand.

  PART

  THREE

  CHAPTER 24

  Klute Sorensen woke to the sound of a hedge fund manager in his right ear, discussing how his portfolio was up 28 percent for the year thanks to prescient bets placed on “key transportation and housing sectors.” I must have forgotten to set the sleep timer, thought Klute, who was having more trouble sleeping than ever now that he had thrown unrequited love into the mix. Since his tentative visit with Meg she seemed to be avoiding him, and he found himself alternately pouting and longing. It was easier, he thought, when I was only pursuing her property.

  And then there were the rumors he had heard about Harley and that damn calf. After the debacle of the fire department fund-raiser, Klute had been buoyant. Surely this was the straw that broke the camel’s back. Surely now sentiment in Swivel would swing his way. And yet, Klute had heard rumors that some bigshot group from L.A. had come in to run the show. Certainly the flow of pilgrims hadn’t slowed. Vance Hansen said he had hardly been able to make it home from the village hall last night for all the traffic. Of course Vance was timid and drove a minivan, thought Klute.

  Klute rose to shave and prepare for the day, which looked to amount to more of the same: berating Vance Hansen in an attempt to get Vance to do what Klute’s Clearwater lawyers should have been doing (the truth was, Klute could no longer afford them, but during his final consult he had snagged some letterhead) and figuring out some way to put himself in the path of Meg Jankowski without looking like a complete creeper.

  The hedge fund founder had finished his interview now, replaced by news at the top of the hour. It was the usual mishmash of war and worry. Then, right at the end, at the spot reserved for what was called “The Business of Entertainment” but was actually just an excuse to wedge celebrity gossip into the programming, Klute heard something that made him pause with his razor in midair.

  “And finally, Jim,” said a female newscaster, her delighted smile leaping right out through the speakers, “renowned Hollywood star maker Sloan Knight of International Talent Management has announced that he and the firm have taken on a four-legged client, having signed a comprehensive deal to represent a Holstein calf in rural Wisconsin that has been all over social media lately, thanks to a series of spots on its hide that many say resembles the face of Jesus Christ. In what’s being called a three-sixty arrangement, International Talent Management will handle all rights from film to live appearances, endorsements, and merchandising.”

  “Holy cow!” said Jim, with a fake-baked chuckle.

  “Yes,” giggled the female newscaster. “That’s what I call a beefy deal.”

  Jim segued seamlessly into precious metals futures.

  Klute stared into the mirror until the shaving cream began to burn. Then he slowly raised the razor and finished what he had started. When he was done, he toweled off his face and stared into the mirror again. The business news was still echoing all around him, but he didn’t hear it. Instead, he straightened up, looked himself right in the eye, and in a very quiet voice said, “Key housing and transportation sectors . . .”

  Then he called Vance Hansen and set up a meeting.

  It felt good to yell again.

  WHEN HARLEY AND Mindy awoke, Jack the driver was waiting with breakfast and a ride back to Harley’s farm for a meeting in the command center wit
h Sloan.

  “Good news,” said Sloan, as an assistant distributed cappuccinos. “The surgeon found the damage to the Jesus face to be mostly superficial. It was easily repairable on-site. We brought in a hair and makeup person to obscure the stitches. It’s all cleaned up now and you can’t see the difference.”

  Sloan went on to report that subsequent to the surgery, three independent veterinarians, a hairdresser, and one notary public were obtained to inspect the calf and then sign a certificate of authenticity. “Any knucklehead could stencil a Jesus face on a calf,” explained Sloan. Harley thought of his shoe polish trick as he signed the papers Sloan handed to him. He didn’t read them in their entirety, but he did see the sentence that said, “PricewaterhouseCooper cannot verify that this is the face of the Savior, but does verify that the calf and/or the image in question has not been in any way artificially manipulated or modified.”

  Before the veterinarian departed she implanted a tracking device. “With an animal of this value, kidnapping is always a concern,” said Sloan. Then, by way of explanation, he added, “Many of these measures are required by Lloyd’s.”

  The speed with which the operation grew was astounding. Two more busloads of security teams arrived, and cleared the property of people and vehicles. The team hired Meg to do the towing. This resulted in an unexpected financial windfall for her and—she tithed the very next day—St. Jude’s and the food pantry, and Harley had the first inkling of how all the things Sloan and Billy had predicted might just pan out. The calf might actually be used for good. By afternoon the wreckage of the fire department ticket booths had been replaced with turnstiles and ticket scanners. Weatherproof tents were erected and torpedo heaters brought in. The remainder of Harley’s hay field had been plowed clear and fitted with generator-powered lights, heated Porta-Potties, and parking attendants.

  The command center was now operating in a gigantic mobile home. A cleaning crew had been through Harley’s house in the wake of the command team’s departure, and frankly, Harley couldn’t recall it ever looking so good.