She couldn’t see much: straw on a raised platform with large black stones beneath it, Arnie’s overalls and the black pants of the three Jews and Pastor Nabo to her right, unidentifiable legs of two men in front of her so close that she could have reached a hand in and untied their shoes. Robbie’s legs, which would be skinnier than any of the others, weren’t visible—he must be lost in the crush at the door. She could see nothing of the calf but heard its anxious bleating over the men’s voices.
“What a gift, what a blessing.” Pastor Nabo choked on the words. “Brother Arnie—I can’t believe—here, in your manger—Let us pray!”
Nabo intoned Jesus’ name, and started to thank Him, but one of the Jews interrupted. “You may mean well, my friend, but this calf is speaking the sacred Name of Ha-Shem in Hebrew. She is calling on the Holy One in language so ancient and so sacred, it would be a sacri—it would be a mistake to invoke your Christ’s name on her. She is set aside for the rebuilding of the Holy Temple, and, as such, she must not have her mission compromised by other gods.”
The man’s voice, as thick with emotion as Pastor Nabo’s, briefly silenced the others. Lara heard someone directly in front of her mutter, “Damned Jews, trying to tell us how to worship.” Another voice said, “Later, Kurt, later.”
The men started filing out. As the crowd thinned, Lara could see the calf’s red legs dancing uneasily around her raised pen and then Robbie’s jeans as he climbed up on the platform next to the heifer. All the visitors were gone. Robbie and Arnie were alone in the building.
“Don’t you do anything to that calf!” Arnie shouted. “That calf is set apart, she’s sacred. You cannot touch her or spoil her the way I know you’ve been doing. You come along with me now, boy.”
“But, Dad, do you think she was really saying the secret name of God? To me, it sounded like ordinary bleating, you know, the noise they all make when they’re nervous. And this girl, she’s so lonely, it’s made her act—”
“And you know better than the Jews what ancient Hebrew sounds like, I suppose?” his father said. “Don’t go talking like that: this heifer is going to make our fortune. You come along now.”
Robbie’s legs turned around and stepped down again from the platform. He was moving slowly. Lara pictured him slumped over, the way he’d been when Myra was yelling at him.
The work lights that had brightened the pen went out, and the calf bleated again, “Yeh-heh, yeh-heh,” as Arnie shut the door. Lara heard him cry, “See, there it is again. She’s repeating God’s secret name. She’s bound for glory!”
The gap between the ground and the wall was narrower than Lara’s shoulders, but the dirt was soft from all the sluicing the Schapens gave the pen; it didn’t take Lara long to scoop out a shallow trough with her filthy fingers. She stretched her arm under the wall. Her fingers closed on one of the black stones; grabbing it, she pulled herself all the way inside.
The day had almost spent itself while she’d been watching and waiting. Without the work lights on, she could barely make out the heifer on her raised platform. The dimness turned the heifer’s red-orange hide to black. The animal heard her and moved restively.
Lara wished she could turn on the lights, but they’d show through the skylights and bring Arnie on the double. She got to her feet, stubbing her toes against the boulders that surrounded it. As her eyes adjusted to the murky pen, she saw the railing around the platform and the calf’s manger full of hay.
“Hey, girl, it’s okay,” she whispered to the heifer, reaching an arm up through the railing to scratch her flank. “I know you’re not supposed to have any females near you, but, dang it, you’re a female yourself, you must miss all the other girls in the herd, not to mention your mom.”
The calf bleated again, the “yeh-heh, yeh-heh” that had so amazed the men, but then lowered her head and rubbed against Lara’s outstretched hand. Lara grabbed the railing and hoisted herself up to the platform. She swung a leg over the rail and climbed inside the enclosure.
Her heart was racing. If Arnie found her here, she was worse than dead. The thought only made her want to raise the stakes. Arnie thought he was everyone’s boss, he thought he could gloat over her mother’s illness, over Chip’s death, but she, Lara, could destroy his precious heifer, bring him down to earth in a hurry.
What if she stole the heifer? She could hide it in the X-Farm, feed her sunflowers. She swung back over the enclosure rail. Using the pale light from the screen on her cell phone, she tried the door. It was padlocked on the outside. If she was going to take the calf, she’d have to come back with a screwdriver to undo the padlock.
The cell phone gave her a new idea. She scrambled back into the pen, tucked Chip’s cap into one of the back pockets of his pants she was wearing so her face would be recognizable, and took a picture of herself with her left arm draped around the heifer’s neck. Holding the phone at arm’s length, she turned and kissed the calf on the nose and snapped the shutter again.
The calf butted her in the chest, sending her sprawling into the straw. Lara laughed with excitement. “Want to play football, do you, missy?” She got up, grabbed the heifer’s shoulder, and had flung a leg up over her back when she heard voices outside the enclosure and the sound of a key in the padlock.
She froze with terror. She couldn’t get out of the pen and under the wall before the men came in. She dove into the manger and pulled the hay over her head. It was a tight fit. She was terrified her shoes were showing, but she couldn’t afford to sit up to check. In another second, the lights came on inside the room.
The heifer was bucking and snorting around her small pen. Lara had alarmed her by trying to climb onto her back, and she was further startled by the return of the men. Lara heard Pastor Nabo cry in ecstasy, “She’s full of the Holy Spirit!”
The hay was tickling Lara’s nose; she sneezed several times before she could work a trembling hand through the grasses to squeeze her nostrils together, but it seemed that the calf was making enough noise to muffle the sound.
Through gaps in the manger slats, she could see a little bit of what was going on. Arnie unfastened a gate in the calf’s enclosure and the men climbed onto the calf’s platform. Lara couldn’t tell how many there were, especially when a couple of them leaned back onto the manger. If she goosed them, maybe they’d think the Holy Spirit was descending on them.
“Now that the Jews have gone, we can invoke the God they have ignored to bless this holy animal.” The pastor’s voice shook with emotion.
“Pastor, we don’t want to jinx her in any way.” Arnie’s voice was uneasy. “Until the Temple is rebuilt and the Temple sacrifices begin again, she’s kind of a Jewish calf. If we baptize her, maybe something will go wrong with her.”
“Brother Schapen, I respect your fears, your concerns, but the Lord is not controlled by superstitions. We can’t ‘jinx’ a calf He’s put His special mark on any more than we can create her ourselves. The Lord Himself knew the Jews were a stiff-necked people. We’ve seen this time and again in our dealings with these men from Kansas City. They won’t accept Jesus as their Savior. They only want to rebuild the Temple for their own worship, not to hasten the Lord’s return.”
“Yeah, Arnie, Jews or no Jews, since when do we let a bunch of guys from Kansas City tell us how to run a farm or raise a calf?” Chris Greynard’s father said.
“But they were the ones who knew what the calf was saying. None of us would have known it was repeating the sacred name of God.”
“Secret name,” Pastor Nabo corrected. “The secret name of God. The Jews have special knowledge that comes from dedicating their lives to the Law instead of the salvation that comes through Christ Jesus. The Lord spoke to them first through the Law. Since they refuse the salvation that could be theirs, they only know half the story. And the half they refuse, the cornerstone that they reject, is our Savior Jesus Christ. We cannot reject Christ. We must invoke His blessing. If you’re afraid of the presence of the Lord, Brother Sc
hapen, maybe Brother Greynard should take charge of this calf.”
Arnie said sulkily that the calf had been given to him, to his farm, and he didn’t need anyone else to take care of it. “But if we’re willing to disobey the Jews over this prayer, maybe we should let women into Nasya’s pen. You know my mother is a holy woman, Pastor, and it seems hard that she can’t go near a calf on the farm she’s looked after for over sixty years.”
“I think we all know the answer to that, Brother Schapen,” Pastor Nabo said. “We know that when Jesus spoke to us through His apostle Paul, He told women that they were to be subservient to men. We don’t allow women to preach in our churches, and we don’t want them desecrating this heifer. Let’s invoke the Holy Spirit on this animal, my brothers in Christ.”
The men on the platform knelt. The poor calf was trembling in distress at having so many men close to her. All the while the pastor prayed, she moved anxiously around, bleating her pitiful “yeh-heh, yeh-heh.” Every time she made the noise, the men around her cried, “Praise Jesus!” and “Hallelujah.”
The pastor’s prayer went on and on. He beseeched the calf to bring the day of the Lord, the day of Rapture, close to them. He besought her to go willingly to her solemn sacrifice, and recounted the Temple sacrifices from the Bible. He praised the calf for her holy virginity.
Lara’s left leg was cramping. She wanted to scream in pain, and in annoyance with the pastor for being so full of himself that he couldn’t shut up. She needed to get home. Robbie would be waiting for her at the tracks and think she’d stood him up. Dad would be so pissed off; she didn’t even want to think about that. Behind those thoughts was something deeper, scarier, that revolved around the calf itself and the way Pastor Nabo was praying. Temple sacrifices, purity, the virginal cow—the words evoked images of blood and rape that sickened her.
Lara felt her face wet with tears but knew she couldn’t cry out or even move. She clamped her teeth down on a mouthful of straw and held onto it for life. When the pastor finally finished, when the men climbed to their feet and left the enclosure and Arnie turned out the lights. Lara slid from the manger as quickly as her cramped and shaking legs would take her. She flung herself under the depression in the ground and crawled past Arnie’s milking barn, then ran across his sorghum field to the road. She’d get her truck tomorrow. She couldn’t face going into the dark sunflower field now.
Lara trudged slowly to the train tracks. Robbie had said he would meet her there at six-thirty. It was a little after seven, and there wasn’t any sign of his truck. He must have gotten tired of waiting. She walked on into the house on leaden legs.
It was only after she’d stood under the shower long enough to use all the hot water, as she tried to flush not just the cow shit but Pastor Nabo’s hot, blood-filled words away, and after she’d put Chip’s fatigues into the washer with a double cup of soap and another of bleach, that Lara realized she was missing her cell phone. She remembered now: she’d been holding it when the men came into the pen. She must have dropped it in the golden calf’s manger.
Thirty-Three
A SHOT IN THE DARK
WHEN JIM GOT HOME, the kitchen light was on, but his daughter’s truck wasn’t in the yard. He could hear the washer working through a spin cycle, so she must not have been gone long. He called her name, and then dialed her cell phone for what seemed like the twentieth time in the last hour only to get her voice message, the perky voice she reserved for her friends. Her own father didn’t get that happy, lively Lara these days.
Susan was coming home. When he went in to visit her this evening, the doctor said they would discharge her on Saturday. That should be making him happy, his wife under his roof instead of in the hospital, but instead he felt scared.
He needed his daughter in the house to keep him from feeling so alone, so overwhelmed. Even though the hospital bills frightened him because their insurance plan didn’t cover psychiatric care, he was more terrified still of how his wife might act when she returned. The drugs and whatever they’d been doing with her in therapy had made her more coherent, but she talked to him, her husband of twenty-three years, in dull monosyllables, and her eyes were dead in her gaunt face.
He went up the stairs and looked into the master bedroom. He hadn’t gone into it since he took Susan to the hospital two weeks ago. The mass of papers was still strewn across the room, and everywhere he looked he saw where she’d scrawled words onto walls and furniture, words about peace and war and death that didn’t fit together in any way he could make sense of.
He would have to get all that cleaned up, the walls scrubbed, fit all that into the next two days while bringing in the corn. The ball of tension between his shoulder blades grew. Lara would have to suck up her resentment against him and Susan and help out.
He went back down the stairs to the front room. He and Susan had used it as their bedroom when they got married, and then, when Gram got too old to manage the stairs, they’d moved her in here and taken over the main bedroom upstairs. Since Gram died, they used the front room only at Christmas, to set up the tree and open presents.
He found the bottle of bourbon Chip had given him last Christmas and poured two inches into one of his ever-so-great-grandmother’s crystal glasses, which stood in an old-fashioned breakfront in the corner. It was cold in the room, because he kept the doors closed and the heat shut off to save on fuel, but he sat down at Abigail’s walnut folding table. He lifted the glass and offered a toast to his son, then drank the bourbon quickly as if it were medicine. He gasped from the burn in his gut—he almost never drank, and never that much that fast.
He nodded at the bottle as if it had confirmed something he’d said to it and poured out another inch. He tried to remember Chip’s face as he’d been on his last home leave, but all Jim could see was his son’s eager grin in the picture with George Brett. He tried to remember his own parents, who’d been dead for almost forty years now, but he couldn’t even say what color his mother’s hair had been. It was as if his parents and grandparents, and now his son, lived in the country of the dead, while the country of the living moved further and further away from them. And yet someday he’d move to that country, too, so it couldn’t be all that distant.
He’d been brought up to believe the dead were with Jesus, who wiped away all their tears, but it was hard to imagine. Hard to think that Jesus was any more real than the hobbits and gremlins Lara liked to read about. If you really exist, Lord Jesus, Jim prayed to himself, and if the dead are in your arms, take me to them now. I need my grandfather. I need someone who cares about me and the farm. I want my boy with me. Don’t leave me here with this sick wife and troubled daughter and our farm falling deeper and deeper into debt. Please, please.
The cold began seeping through his clothes. He took the bottle with him into the family room and stretched out on the couch, not bothering to take off his shoes even though his feet hurt. He lay there, holding the bottle, but not drinking any more, just staring bleakly at the ceiling.
After a time, he became aware of his daughter standing over him. He didn’t notice how pale she was or the tearstains on her face but sat upright, anger flooding him.
“Where in Jesus’ name have you been, Lara Grellier? I have called and called your phone and you have been acting like you’re the queen of England, too high and mighty to talk to me. If you can’t answer your phone when I’m calling you, then I am stopping the service on it tonight.”
“I lost it,” she whispered.
“Goddamn it, Lulu, I will not have you lying to me!” He slammed the bottle against the coffee table.
“I’m not lying. I—I dropped it after you called me. I mean, after the time I answered, and—and it was dark, so—so I couldn’t find it.”
He got to his feet and looked her in the eye. “Where were you? At the Fremantle house?”
“No.”
He drew his hand back to slap her and put it down in the nick of time. No matter how angry you were, you did not
hit people, especially not your wife or daughter. Nothing could ever justify that. But Lara had seen his hand and seen the murderous fury in his face.
She backed away from him and hugged her arms around herself. “You’re drunk, aren’t you?”
He looked down at the bottle of Old Grand-Dad and made an effort to swallow his rage, his fear, all the emotions that were pummeling him to the point that he didn’t know who he was anymore. “No, I’m not drunk. Can you please tell me where you were this afternoon? You weren’t with Kimberly or Melanie. I know—I called their mothers.”
She tried to speak but couldn’t choke out any words.
“Do you have a boyfriend I don’t know about?”
The thought of Robbie made her blush despite herself, but she shook her head. Jim saw the blush and said wearily, “Lulu, please just tell me the truth. If you’re sleeping with some boy, I won’t be happy, but I can deal with it better than I can you lying to me, okay?”
“I—Dad, I went over to see the Schapens’ special calf.”
This was so unexpected that he burst out laughing. “And did it perform a miracle while you were watching?”
“Dad, it isn’t funny. These Jews came from Kansas City. They come every month to inspect the cow—Robbie says she’ll lose her special power or whatever if she isn’t red all over or if there’s some kind of nick or anything wrong in her skin—and all these men from Arnie’s church were there. Dad, they got down on their knees to pray to the calf. They said they were praying to Jesus, but Robbie’s pastor, he went on and on, all about blood and stuff. I was hiding in the manger, and that’s when—”
“You mean you sneaked into Arnie’s farm uninvited?”
“Yes, yes. They don’t let any women come near the calf, Robbie told me, not even Myra—I mean, Ms. Schapen. And Myra and Arnie, they’ve put so many lies on their website, about Mom and Chip—you know, they say Chip is in hell! So I thought it would serve them right if I went right up and kissed their stupid calf and put a picture of it out on YouTube. Only, they came in, Arnie and the pastor and all these men.”
Bleeding Kansas Page 27