Hell's Bottom, Colorado

by Laura Pritchett

  I wonder if anyone realizes how much I see. If anyone notices how I watch Dad and Jack laugh as they give up boxing and wave and whoop at the cows, how my mother stands in the corner preparing the syringes. How Billy, sitting quietly on the tailgate of the pickup, looks like he might be remembering who he is and what it’s like to smile.

  I wonder if they see me, sitting on the cement rim of the stock tank, in shorts and sandals and with a clipboard on my lap. This is where I always sit, where I watch and keep the records with my pen. Straight columns, even and perfect. I am the record keeper.

  “Leanne,” Dad says. “This is X-1-5-1. Polled.” He looks to see if I have heard over the din of bawling heifers, moaning bulls, barking dogs. I meet his blue eyes and nod.

  “X151, polled,” I breathe into my notebook, concentrating so that my writing is clear.

  “What’s ‘polled’ mean again?” Jess yells from where she’s sitting on the fence.

  “Means they were born without horns,” Dad says as he sticks a needle in the cow’s neck to vaccinate her. “It’s good, because we’re breeding it out.”

  “Why?”

  “Well, would you rather be chased by a bull with horns, or without horns?”

  “Oh.”

  “Bull,” Dad says, scratching his head, concentrating. “But it’s going to be a steer.”

  Under the category marked “Sex,” I make a note of this.

  “595 pounds.” He squints at the numbers on the scale and then glances at me. “Got it all?”

  I nod, then shift my weight on the stock tank and lean back on the wooden plank that runs down the middle. Closing my eyes, I turn my face toward the morning sun that’s just risen above the top of the cottonwoods clustered around the house and barn, and the bright light pours down, seeping red through my eyelids. I dangle my left hand in the stock tank, swirling my fingers against the water. The warmth of sun and cold of water meet somewhere in my body and make me tingle all over.

  Every year, the cycle starts here, with my hand in the water. After pregnancy-checking comes calving season, then we move the cattle to spring pastures, then haying, then weaning, then castrating, and then pregnancy-checking again. Some of the cattle are sent to slaughter, some we keep, some we sell. The records remind us, in case we forget, who mothered who, whose calf froze to death, which cows gave birth to twins.

  Years layer up and weave together; bundles of images swirl together in my mind. I remember how turquoise the sky can be, how the cottonwoods drop golden leaves, how a calf being born slides from its mother and falls into a spring snow. From today I will remember Dad on the chestnut horse rounding up the calves, memorize Mom’s slap on Billy’s shoulder, capture Jess’s singsong chatter to no one, absorb the heat and the sky and the smells. I will remember this warm fall day and the summer that came before and the winter that is about to come. Someday, when I leave here, I will close my eyes and remember, and I hope it will be enough to hold my heart together.

  After the heifers have gone through, the older cows are chased in. Billy and Jack flap their arms at them until a few wander into the narrow alley that leads them to the chute. Jack sets an old manure-stained pole through the fence behind them so they can’t back out, and then prods the first cow forward by twisting her tail over her back. She goes reluctantly into the squeeze chute, and Billy pulls the lever that catches her head in the metal bars. Behind her, the other cows stand, chewing their cud and blinking long eyelashes over deep brown eyes.

  Just in time, Grandpa Ben’s old blue pickup pulls into the driveway. He wanders up to us and hangs his arms over the top rail of the corral.

  “Bunch of lousy-lookin’ cows ya got here,” he says to Dad but winks at me.

  Dad smiles. “You just wish yours looked this good. Now get over here and help us.”

  Ben sighs and shrugs, and climbs over the corral fence. He wanders over to the box of shoulder-length latex gloves sitting on a rusted toolbox and pulls one on. Then he shuffles up to the rear of a cow and lifts her tail. “Ready,” he says, and slips his hand up her rear end. The cow jerks and thrashes, but Ben’s arm stays still. Silently, he feels around inside her. “Ninety days, I reckon,” he says to me as he removes his gloved hand, now slick with slime and traces of blood.

  I write this down under “Number of Days Pregnant,” and shake my head in wonder. Ben is famous for his speed and accuracy. I wonder what he feels, how he feels, as his fingers glide around the very beginning of a baby.

  “You want to give it a try?” he says, and when I glance up, I’m surprised to find he’s looking at me.

  Yes, I do. That’s what I want to say, but the image of me in sandals, tank top, and glasses standing behind that great big cow makes me shy. I could do it, maybe, take the glasses from my face and rest my head against her. Slide my hand inside and feel the very thing that I’ll name someday, some white-faced calf that’s going to trot towards me, all curious, when I go for a walk alone out back. It will brace its front legs and stare at me, half scared, half playful, and I’ll laugh and tell it about its mama and how I stood tiptoe and touched its unborn body, and how my family was working behind me, tossing complaints and laughter into the air, watching me all the while.

  But before I can answer, Jack yells out, “Here comes Crooked Nose!”

  “No, her name is Twisted Snout!” Jess sings out.

  “X-4-2,” Dad says, nodding at the cow’s ear tag.

  I duck my head, then look at Ben. He’s still waiting for an answer. He’s giving me a chance, I know, to join them. He thinks I’m lonely, left out. But what I’m hoping my crooked smile tells him is that maybe it’s possible to love something the most from here, because from here I can see it all.

  Maybe he knows. When he and my grandma Renny moved apart, he told me that it’s somehow true that the thing you love the most can hurt your heart the worst. He said life is the fixation of points of interest and the flux of experience and what you come away with are the important stories and moments in your mind. He reckons that’s how we survive the ache of it all.

  I crinkle my nose at him and shake my head no. Then I turn to face the others and wave my arm toward them as if I am thrusting their comments away. “It is not Crooked Nose and it is not Twisted Snout. Her name is Pablo,” I inform them. “Pablo Picasso.”

  This cow’s nose was twisted when she was born and is curved slightly to one side. She looks crooked as she stands straight in the chute, blinking her eyes patiently as Dad rubs ointment on an area that looks like ringworm. She jerks her head only slightly when he clips the fly tag off her ear, and stands still while Ben feels inside her. She is one of the tamest, oldest cows of the bunch. I scan the corral until I find some of her calves, now grown and having calves of their own. There’s Soft Eyes, her first, and then Snot Nose, Crooked Hoof, Wild Mama.

  When Dad opens the chute, Pablo Picasso doesn’t even move. Dad has to pat her on the butt to get her to step out, and he laughs and reaches forward to scratch her ears as she meanders away.

  “We’ll sell Crooked-Pablo-Twirly-Nose after weaning,” Dad says. Then, more quietly, “She’s getting old.”

  I watch her go, thinking of how I’ll have to put an “X” on her line, meaning she is no longer in the records. It’s a little like what I thought at my Aunt Rachel’s funeral—how hurtful it is that some of us are just absent, missing everything the future holds.

  Dad and I take a break to irrigate the south pasture. It’s late enough in the fall that we shouldn’t even bother, but after the long summer of irrigating we can’t seem to break the habit yet. I follow him out of the corral when he waves for me to join him. Even though we should hurry in order to get back and help, we wander slowly through the tall grass that spreads itself out below the blue mountains rising to the west. Dad walks with a shovel on his shoulder, I follow behind, and the dogs circle and play, pouncing on each other and rolling in the grass. The sun lights up the standing water in the fields, and the ditches sparkle as I hop
over them, watching my dad watch his cattle.

  The cows that have already been pregnancy-checked are out grazing now. Dad mumbles greetings or questions to each cow as we pass her. “Hey now, my big lady,” he says to Big Mama, who always looks like she’s pregnant, even when she’s not. He nods at Elf Ears, who had her ears frozen as a calf, so they stayed stunted and small. He tisks and shakes his head at Sad Cow, who perpetually moos and blinks her mournful eyes. Perhaps this time she is missing her adopted calf of last year, who is being kept in a pen near the house. Her own calf died at birth, suffocated because the afterbirth wasn’t licked off the face in time. I remember standing above a still body, steam rising from it into the cold spring air. Dad pulled out his large pocket knife, bent down, and began to cut away the hide from the still-warm body, pulling the skin from white flesh, miniature muscles. We put the hide over a shivering calf he got at the sale barn, then looped orange baling string under the calf’s belly and tied it in a big orange knot on top. The calf looked so silly, like a present wrapped in death’s skin—a gift for the mama cow. But Sad Cow kicked at it. The calf bawled softly and jogged to her bag of milk and Sad Cow backed away, kicking again. It ran to her once more, and she sniffed, her nose running over the dead calf’s hide. The calf walked under her, buried his head into her chest, and moved down her side to her bag of milk. Sad Cow looked at us, my father and me, and then at the calf, and stood still as it put its mouth around her teat and sucked.

  Dad looked down at me and winked, and I pulled out the notebook from my coat pocket and made a record, wondering at how this ordinary life is sometimes laced with miracles.

  I wait until Dad moves the plastic dam farther down the ditch and shovels dirt on top to keep it in place. We watch as the water backs up and seeps into the field, curls through the grass, and spreads through the pasture. On the way back to the house and barn, I listen to him whistle, some slow tune that makes my chest swish open and my throat get tight. There will be times when I’ll need to remember this day, I’d like to tell him. And when I do remember, I will have made time stand still.

  I reach out and hold his hand. He looks down at me, surprised, and stops whistling long enough to smile, and then we walk on home, listening to his song, the drone of cows getting louder.

  “Must be the bull I wanted run through,” Dad says to me when we hear an animal thrashing in the chute. “Needs some shots.”

  “Vile Bull,” I say.

  He nods, agreeing. “Wild as sin.”

  As we turn the corner into the corral, I see the bull blowing snot as he rages against the metal sidebars of the chute. His sides are heaving and his eyes are white-rimmed and wild.

  Grandma Renny must have come while we were gone, because she’s standing outside the chute now, egging the bull on. She’s snorting and shaking her head each time it does, acting crazy enough to make us all laugh. Dad rolls his eyes and escorts her away and says it’s time to get back down to business.

  “Hey,” Jack nods at me as I sit on the stock tank. “This is 5-3-1. Weight is 1,750.”

  I take my place to record the numbers. I’m still looking down when I hear Dad pull the bar that opens the chute. I expect to feel the rush of an animal going by, so I glance up in surprise at the silence. The bull has stepped out of the chute and stands next to it, then tosses his great head in the air. I see his sides inflate, the blow of snot from his nostrils. There is a moment of silence and stillness as we wait for the animal to move. I notice, in this brief moment, that the sun is being covered by an afternoon cloud, and in the shadow we form a tiny circle, composed of small specks. The bull, my dad and mother, grandparents, cousins, brother, and me, frozen for a second underneath a sudden dimness.

  The bull turns, not toward the gate, but into the corral where everyone is gathered. Though he moves away from me, I leap up and scramble over the closest fence at the same time I hear my father yell, “Whoa, everyone move!” I turn in time to see Jess crawl through the fence poles to the other side of the corral, Jack fling himself up onto a gate, Mom and Ben and Renny and Billy all throw themselves over the top pole of the fence. Dad turns toward me, the only direction he can, trying to gauge which way the bull is going to head so he can leap in the opposite direction, but it’s too late and the bull gallops into him and sends him flying. He lands on his hands and knees and his feet scramble in the dirt to get him to a standing position. He does stand, just as the bull is about to charge him again. As the bull lowers his head and brings it up to catch and lift him, my father leaps forward toward the fence. The bull’s head catches him, though, and my father’s back arches backwards with the force of the blow, backwards as his body is thrown forward. His hands clasp the top fence rail and he pulls himself over. As he falls to the ground on the other side, the bull backs up and charges again. Wood splinters, buckles, but holds.

  Already they are moving toward him, each member of my family rushing toward my father’s body, and I whimper a prayer for him to move. He does then; he raises his head and pushes himself to his knees, and I am again aware of the dogs’ barking, of Jack’s whip cracking against the bull, of Jess’s cries. The bull stands among these noises for a moment and snorts, tosses his head, turns, and calmly walks in my direction. He dips his nose in the stock tank and wanders past me, out of the corral.

  I lean against the fence that separates us and watch him go, then press my forehead against the wood. It is warm from the sun and smells like it has been warmed and cooled and weathered for layers of years. I exhale into it, then climb down and walk to my father. The others are gathered around him and are asking if he’s all right and he’s ignoring them, intent on passing his hands across his body, feeling for hurt areas or broken bones. There is a cut in his thigh that shows through his torn jeans, which he examines and then shrugs at. He stands up straighter, then, puts his hands on his back, and declares himself fine.

  Jack and Billy offer descriptions of the bull’s charge and explanations for it. Jess runs to the house and returns with a popsicle for Dad at the same time Mom emerges from the barn with a dusty bottle of peroxide, which she pours over the wound, causing fizzing bubbles to drain bloody into the denim. He scowls at her command to go inside and soap up the area and change jeans. Everyone laughs, and it’s over.

  They disperse, at his command—Mom turns back to the syringes, Jess and Billy follow Jack, Ben and Renny go to round up a heifer. I stay, though, and watch him. He is looking at my notebook, which is lying in the dirt below the stock tank, the pages flipping in the light wind.

  “Better get the records off the ground before they get stomped on,” he says. When I don’t move, he limps over to the notebook and bends, slowly, to pick it up. “One year I was going through the boxes at my folks’ ranch,” he says. “I found their records, which are just like ours—cow number, sire, year born, calves.”

  “Yes,” I say, knowing this story. “Weaning weights, sex, cause of death.”

  “Except my folks also kept a daily record of everything. Prices of corn, wheat, what they got for each animal they sold. Year after year, column after column. Good things, bad things. Dust storms, how many hogs died of cholera, the year electricity went through. Then I came across this one entry. January second, 1959. ‘Baby boy born,’ it read. ‘Twelve dollars to Dr. Blake.’”

  “Seven pounds even,” I finish for him.

  “That’s right,” Dad agrees. “Seven pounds even.”

  I take the record book, which he is handing to me, and I look down at the last page, filled with my writing. As his kiss brushes the top of my head, I know there is no way this moment can escape the record in my mind. I will hold it there with the others. It will be a reminder of how a heart feels on a warm fall day when the cows are run through.

  LAURA PRITCHETT grew up on a small ranch in northern Colorado. She earned her B.A. at Colorado State University and has done graduate work at Colorado State and Purdue University. After living in the Midwest for a number of years, she recently moved
back to Colorado, where she lives with her husband and two children.

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