“I’m sorry about what happened,” he said, “but I warned you.”
“Where are you? The barn or the house?”
Pause. “The house.”
“I’ve been looking all day and I haven’t seen Condon’s wife or Sorley’s wife and kids. Or McIsaac or his family. What happened to them?”
“They left.”
“Are you sure of that?”
“Am I sure? Of course I’m sure. Diane wasn’t the only one to get sick. Only the latest. Teddy McIsaac’s little girl took ill first. Then his son, then Teddy himself. When it looked like his kids were—well, you know, obviously really sick, sick and not getting better, well, that was when he put them in his truck and drove away. Pastor Dan’s wife went along.”
“When did this happen?”
“Couple of months ago. Aaron’s wife and kids took off by themselves not long after. Their faith failed them. Plus they were worried about catching something.”
“You saw them leave? You’re certain about that?”
“Yes, why wouldn’t I be?”
“Trench by the barn looks a lot like something’s buried there.”
“Oh, that! Well, you’re right, something is buried there—the bad cattle.”
“Excuse me?”
“A man named Boswell Geller had a big ranch up in the Sierra Bonita. Friend of Jordan Tabernacle before the shakeup. Friend of Pastor Dan. He was breeding red heifers, but the Department of Agriculture started an investigation late last year. Just when he was making progress! Boswell and Pastor Dan wanted to breed together all the red cattle varieties of the world, because that would represent the conversion of the Gentiles. Pastor Dan says that’s what Numbers nineteen is all about—a pure red heifer born at the end of time, from breeds on every continent, everywhere the Gospel’s been preached. The sacrifice is literal and symbolic, both. In the biblical sacrifice the ashes of the heifer have the power to clean a defiled person. But at the end of the world the sun consumes the heifer and the ashes are scattered to the four compass points, cleansing the whole Earth, cleansing it of death. That’s what’s happening now. Hebrews nine—‘For if the blood of bulls and goats and the ashes of a heifer sanctifies for the purifying of the flesh, how much more shall the blood of Christ purge your conscience from dead works to serve the living God?’ So of course—”
“You kept those cattle here?”
“Only a few. Fifteen breeders smuggled out before the Department of Agriculture could claim them.”
“That’s when people started getting sick?”
“Not just people. The cattle, too. We dug that trench by the barn to bury them in, all but three of the original stock.”
“Weakness, unsteady gait, weight loss preceding death?”
“Yes, mostly—how did you know?”
“Those are the symptoms of CVWS. The cows were carriers. That’s what’s wrong with Diane.”
There was a long ensuing silence. Then Simon said, “I can’t have this conversation with you.”
I said, “I’m upstairs in the back bedroom—”
“I know where you are.”
“Then come and unlock this door.”
“I can’t.”
“Why? Is somebody watching you?”
“I can’t just set you free. I shouldn’t even be talking to you. I’m busy, Tyler. I’m making dinner for Diane.”
“She’s still strong enough to eat?”
“A little…if I help her.”
“Let me out. No one has to know.”
“I can’t.”
“She needs a doctor.”
“I couldn’t let you out if I wanted to. Brother Aaron carries the keys.”
I thought about that. I said, “Then when you take dinner to her, leave the phone with her—your phone. You said she wanted to talk to me, right?”
“Half the time she says things she doesn’t mean.”
“You think that was one of them?”
“I can’t talk anymore.”
“Just leave her the phone, Simon. Simon?”
Dead air.
I went to the window, watched and waited.
I saw Pastor Dan carry two empty buckets from the barn to the house and travel back with the buckets full and steaming. A few minutes later Aaron Sorley crossed the gap to join him.
Which left only Simon and Diane in the house. Maybe he was giving her dinner. Feeding her.
I itched to use the phone but I had resolved to wait, let things settle a little more, let the heat go out of the night.
I watched the barn. Bright light spilled through the slat walls as if someone had installed a rack of industrial lights. Condon had been back and forth all day. Something was happening in the barn. Simon hadn’t said what.
The small luminosity of my watch counted off an hour.
Then I heard, faintly, a sound that might have been a closing door, footsteps on the stairs; and a moment later I saw Simon cross to the barn.
He didn’t look up.
Nor did he leave the barn once he’d arrived there. He was inside with Sorley and Condon, and if he was still carrying the phone, and if he’d been idiotic enough to set it for an audible ring, calling him now might put him in jeopardy. Not that I was especially concerned for Simon’s welfare.
But if he had left the phone with Diane, now was the hour.
I pecked out the number.
“Yes,” she said—it was Diane who answered—and then, inflection rising, a question, “Yes?”
Her voice was breathless and faint. Those two syllables were enough to beg a diagnosis.
I said, “Diane. It’s me. It’s Tyler.”
Trying to control my own raging pulse, as if a door had opened in my chest.
“Tyler,” she said. “Ty…Simon said you might call.”
I had to strain to make out the words. There was no force behind them; they were all throat and tongue, no chest. Which was consistent with the etiology of CVWS. The disease affects the lungs first, then the heart, in a coordinated attack of near-military efficiency. Scarred and foamy lung tissue passes less oxygen to the blood; the heart, oxygen-starved, pumps blood less efficiently; the CVWS bacteria exploit both weaknesses, digging deeper into the body with every laborious breath.
“I’m not far away,” I said. “I’m real close, Diane.”
“Close. Can I see you?”
I wanted to tear a hole in the wall. “Soon. I promise. We need to get you out of here. Get you some help. Fix you up.”
I listened to the sound of more agonized inhalations and wondered if I’d lost her attention. Then she said, “I thought I saw the sun…”
“It’s not the end of the world. Not yet, anyway.”
“It’s not?”
“No.”
“Simon,” she said.
“What about him?”
“He’ll be so disappointed.”
“You have CVWS, Diane. That’s almost certainly what McIsaac’s family had. They were smart to get help. It’s a curable disease.” I did not add, Up to a certain point or As long as it hasn’t progressed to the terminal stage. “But we have to get you out of here.”
“I missed you.”
“I missed you, too. Do you understand what I’m saying?”
“Yes.”
“Are you ready to leave?”
“If the time comes…”
“The time is pretty close. Rest until then. But we might have to hurry. You understand, Diane?”
“Simon,” she said faintly. “Disappointed,” she said.
“You rest, and I—”
But I didn’t have time to finish.
A key rattled in the door. I flipped the phone closed and pushed it into my pocket. The door opened, and Aaron Sorley stood in the frame, rifle in hand, huffing as if he’d run up the stairs. He was silhouetted in the dim light from the hallway.
I backed away until my shoulders hit the wall.
“Tag on your license says you’re a doctor,” he said. �
��Is that right?”
I nodded.
“Then come with me,” he said.
Sorley marched me downstairs and out the rear door toward the barn.
The moon, stained amber by the light of the gibbous sun, scarred and smaller than I remembered it, had risen over the eastern horizon. The night air was almost intoxicatingly cool. I took deep breaths. The relief lasted until Sorley threw open the barn door and a raw, animal stench gushed out—a slaughterhouse smell of excrement and blood.
“Go on in,” Sorley said, and he gave me a push with his free hand.
The light came from a fat halide bulb suspended by its power cord over an open cattle stall. A gasoline generator rattled from an enclosure out back somewhere, a sound like someone revving a distant motorcycle.
Dan Condon stood at the open end of the pen, dipping his hands in a bucket of steaming water. He looked up when we entered. He frowned, his face a stark geography under the glaring single-point light, but he looked less intimidating than I remembered. In fact he looked diminished, gaunt, maybe even sick, maybe in the opening stages of his own case of CVWS. “Close that door back up,” he said.
Aaron pushed it shut. Simon stood a few paces away from Condon, shooting me quick nervous glances.
“Come here,” Condon said. “We need your help with this. Possibly your medical expertise.”
In the pen, on a bed of filthy straw, a skinny heifer was trying to birth a calf.
The heifer was lying down, her bony rump projecting from the stall. Her tail had been tied to her neck with a length of twine to keep it out of the way. Her amniotic sac was bulging from her vulva, and the straw around her was dotted with bloody mucus.
I said, “I’m not a vet.”
“I know that,” Condon said. There was a suppressed hysteria in his eyes, the look of a man who’s thrown a party but finds it spiraling out of control, the guests gone feral, neighbors complaining, liquor bottles flying from the windows like mortar rounds. “But we need another hand.”
All I knew about brood stock and birthing I had learned from Molly Seagram’s stories about life on her parents’ farm. None of the stories had been particularly pleasant. At least Condon had set himself up with what I recalled as the necessary basics: hot water, disinfectant, obstetrical chains, a big bottle of mineral oil already stained with bloody handprints.
“She’s part Angeln,” Condon said, “part Danish Red, part Belarus Red, and that’s only her most recent bloodline. But crossbreeding’s a risk for dystocia. That’s what Brother Geller used to say. The word ‘dystocia’ means a difficult labor. Crossbreeds often have trouble calving. She’s been in labor almost four hours. We need to extract the fetus.”
Condon said this in a distant monotone, like a man lecturing a class of idiots. It didn’t seem to matter who I was or how I’d got here, only that I was available, a free hand.
I said, “I need water.”
“There’s a bucket for washing up.”
“I don’t mean for washing. I haven’t had anything to drink since last night.”
Condon paused as if to process this information. Then he nodded and said, “Simon. See to it.”
Simon appeared to be the trio’s errand boy. He ducked his head and said, “I’ll fetch you a drink, Tyler, sure enough,” still avoiding my eyes as Sorley opened the barn door to let him out.
Condon turned back to the cattle pen where the exhausted heifer lay panting. Busy flies decorated the heifer’s flanks. A couple of them lighted on Condon’s shoulders, unnoticed. Condon doused his hands with mineral oil and squatted to expand the heifer’s birth canal, his face contorting with a combination of eagerness and disgust. But he had barely begun when the calf crowned in another gush of blood and fluid, its head barely emerging despite the heifer’s fierce contractions. The calf was too big. Molly had told me about oversized calves—not as bad as a breech birth or a hiplock, but unpleasant to deal with.
It didn’t help that the heifer was obviously ill, drooling greenish mucus and struggling for breath even when the contractions eased. I wondered whether I should say anything about that to Condon. His divine calf was obviously infected, too.
But Pastor Dan didn’t know or didn’t care. Condon was all that was left of the Dispensationalist wing of Jordan Tabernacle, a church unto himself, reduced to two parishioners, Sorley and Simon, and I could only imagine how muscular his faith must have been to sustain him all the way to the end of the world. He said in the same tone of suppressed hysteria, “The calf, the calf is red—Aaron, look at the calf.”
Aaron Sorley, who was posted on the door with his rifle, came over to peer into the pen. The calf was indeed red. Doused in blood. Also limp.
Sorley said, “Is it breathing?”
“Will be,” Condon said. He was abstracted, seemed to be savoring it, this moment on which he genuinely believed the world was about to pivot into eternity. “Get the chains around the pasterns, quickly now.”
Sorley gave me a look that was also a warning—don’t say a fucking word—and we did as we were instructed, worked until we were bloody up to our elbows. The act of birthing an oversized calf is both brutal and ludicrous, a grotesque marriage of biology and crude force. It takes at least two reasonably strong men to assist at an outsized calving. The obstetric chains were for pulling. The pulls had to be timed to the cow’s contractions; otherwise the animal could be eviscerated.
But this heifer was weak unto death, and her calf—its head lolled lifelessly—was now obviously a stillbirth.
I looked at Sorley, Sorley looked at me. Neither of us spoke. Condon said, “The first thing is to get her out. Then we’ll revive her.”
There was a movement of cooler air from the barn door. That was Simon, back with a bottle of spring water, staring at us and then at the half-delivered stillbirth, his face gone startlingly pale.
“Got your drink,” he managed.
The heifer finished another weak, unproductive contraction. I dropped the chain. Condon said, “You take that drink, son. Then we’ll carry on.”
“I have to clean up. At least wash my hands.”
“Clean hot water in buckets by the hay bales. But be quick about it.” His eyes were closed, shut tight on whatever battle his common sense was conducting with his faith.
I rinsed and disinfected my hands. Sorley watched closely. His own hands were on the obstetrical chain, but his rifle was propped against a rail of the stall within easy reach.
When Simon handed me the bottle I leaned into his shoulder and said, “I can’t help Diane unless I get her out of here. Do you understand? And I can’t do that without your help. We need a reliable vehicle with a full tank of gas, and we need Diane inside it, preferably before Condon figures out the calf is dead.”
Simon gasped, “It’s truly dead?”—too loud, but neither Sorley nor Condon appeared to hear.
“The calf isn’t breathing,” I said. “The heifer’s barely alive.”
“But is the calf red? Red all over? No white or black patches? Purely red?”
“Even if it’s a fucking fire engine, Simon, it won’t do Diane any good.”
He looked at me as if I’d announced his puppy had been run over. I wondered when he had traded his brimming self-confidence for this blank bewilderment, whether it had happened suddenly or whether the joy had drained out of him a grain at a time, sand through an hourglass.
“Talk to her,” I said, “if you need to. Ask her whether she’s willing to go.”
If she was still alert enough to answer him. If she remembered that I’d spoken to her.
He said, “I love her more than life itself.”
Condon called out, “We need you here!”
I drained half the bottle while Simon gazed at me, tears welling in his eyes. The water was clean and pure and delicious.
Then I was back with Sorley on the obstetric chains, pulling in concert with the pregnant heifer’s dying spasms.
We finally extracted the calf around m
idnight, and it lay on the straw in a tangle of itself, forelegs tucked under its limp body, its bloodshot eyes lifeless.
Condon stood over the small body a little while. Then he said to me, “Is there anything you can do for it?”
“I can’t raise it from the dead, if that’s what you mean.”
Sorley gave me a warning look, as if to say: Don’t torture him; this is hard enough.
I edged to the door of the barn. Simon had disappeared an hour earlier, while we were still struggling with a flood of hemorrhagic blood that had drenched the already sodden straw, our clothing, our arms and hands. Through the open wedge of the door I could see movement around the car—my car—and a blink of checkered cloth that might have been Simon’s shirt.
He was doing something out there. I hoped I knew what.
Sorley looked from the dead calf to Pastor Dan Condon and back again, stroking his beard, oblivious of the blood he was braiding into it. “Maybe if we burned it,” he said.
Condon gave him a withering, hopeless stare.
“But maybe,” Sorley said.
Then Simon threw open the barn doors and let in a gust of cool air. We turned to look. The moon over his shoulder was gibbous and alien.
“She’s in the car,” he said. “Ready to go.” Speaking to me but staring hard at Sorley and Condon, almost daring them to respond.
Pastor Dan just shrugged, as if these worldly matters were no longer pertinent.
I looked at Brother Aaron. Brother Aaron leaned toward the rifle.
“I can’t stop you,” I said. “But I’m walking out the door.”
He halted in midreach and frowned. He looked as if he were trying to puzzle out the sequence of events that had brought him to this moment, each one leading inexorably to the next, logical as stepping stones, and yet, and yet…
His hand dropped to his side. He turned to Pastor Dan.
“I think if we burned it anyway, that would be all right.”
I walked to the barn door and joined Simon, not looking back. Sorley could have changed his mind, grabbed his rifle and taken aim. I was no longer entirely capable of caring.
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