by Lois Greiman
Casie honestly didn’t know what to argue about first. “Guests! Here? More … Are you nuts! I’m not taking in more than one overprivileged princess.”
For a moment Emily stood absolutely motionless, but then she nodded solemnly. “No. You’re right. Of course. We’ll just … we’ll just concentrate on Sophie.”
Casie scowled. For the life of her she wasn’t sure what had just happened. “Well …” She sighed and narrowed her eyes at the girl. “I do need to pay rent.”
“Rent?”
“For the apartment.”
“Oh. Sure.” Her expression was atypically bland. “In Saint Paul.”
“But there should be enough left over to buy feed and hold the wolves at bay for a while.”
“That’s all I was thinking.”
Casie gave her a wary glance. “But I’m not doing this alone.”
For one protracted moment something raw and elemental glowed in the girl’s amber eyes. It looked as poignant as hope, as painful as optimism, but in a second it was gone, replaced by businesslike understanding.
“I know. I’ll help out in any way I can.”
Casie gave her a jaundiced glare. It was entirely possible that she had just been played.
“I’m a good worker,” Emily said. “You know I am.”
“Yeah, well …” Casie tried to ignore the funny little niggle of something that sparked in her chest. It couldn’t have been happiness. So it was probably that pesky insanity problem again. “I guess nobody—”
“… never drowned in her own sweat,” Emily finished and they laughed, though Casie knew far better than to be hopeful. In another five days of tilling gardens and mending fence Emily Kane would probably hate her guts.
“Hey.”
Casie awoke with a start, panic bursting inside her. “What? What’s wrong?”
“I’m not sure, but—”
“Emily?” She was trying hard to get her bearings, to still the wild thundering of her heart. Nightmares were nothing new to her, but they’d been fairly absent since she’d returned to the Lazy and fell into bed physically exhausted every night.
“Yeah. It’s me.” Emily shifted her weight in the hazy rectangle of light that outlined her from the hallway. “Who were you expecting?”
“I just … What’s wrong?”
“I think there’s something funny with one of the yearlings.”
“What?” She was trying to catch up, but it was as dark as pitch outside her window, leaving her entirely unable to guess the time. At midnight she’d found four new lambs and had subsequently applied iodine to their navels to prevent infections. After that she’d fed the bums, the lambs without mothers, but the newest of the set in the basement was still not nursing well, making a thirty-minute job take hours. The lack of sleep had left her mind muzzy, her muscles slow to respond. “What time is it?”
“I don’t know. About five thirty, I suppose.”
“Five—”
“I had the predawn check, remember?”
“Oh …” Geez, where was her head? After Jaegar’s last visit, Casie had decided that if Emily was clever enough to manipulate her into starting a dude ranch, she was clever enough to pull her weight. Truth be told, Casie had been pretty sure the pint-sized teenager wouldn’t make it through a week of night checks, but it had been nearly ten days since they’d agreed to take Sophie in. Ten days of grueling preparation punctuated with regular backbreaking chores and horrendous sleep schedules. In less than a week Sophie Jaegar would arrive. “Yeah. Predawn check. I know. But you don’t have to worry about the yearlings. Just the pregnant moms.”
“I was just walking past the heifer pasture … you know … on my way to the calving barn.” Calving barn was a euphemism for the building that held ten times more junk than most underdeveloped countries owned.
“Yeah?”
“And I saw that one of the young ones was lying flat out.”
“They do that sometimes,” Casie said, but she was already swinging her feet to the floor. It was as cold as January against her bare toes.
“But she was separated from the others like you said wasn’t normal and she didn’t get up when I climbed through the fence.”
A number of pretty serviceable curse words swerved through Casie’s mind, but she managed to steer them back on the highway and speed them out of sight. Swearing was just a manifestation of an overabundance of emotion, Brad said. “She didn’t get up at all?”
“Not until I got right up to her. Then she ambled away a few steps and lay back down.”
Casie was already pulling a pair of less-than-sterile jeans over her long underwear. The pants had once belonged to her mother. It was entirely possible that they had been Clayton’s before that. But couture was not exactly her main concern at five thirty on a frosty April morning. “What do you think was wrong with her?”
“I don’t know. I’m a city girl,” Emily said, and for the first time Casie recognized the taut angst in the teenager’s voice.
“Okay, well …” She pulled a sweatshirt from the chair near the darkened window. “You’d better come along, but really, it’s probably nothing.”
They only had one flashlight between them and that one was a weak representative of its breed. Nevertheless, it did its feeble best to illuminate the frosty night.
Jack appeared in its watery light, blinking and dancing ahead of them, overjoyed by this new adventure.
It only took them a few minutes to reach the pasture. The heifers were mostly on their feet now, eyeing them with suspicion, ready to run. Emily handed the flashlight off to Casie, who swept it sideways.
“Did you see her ear tag?” Casie asked.
Emily shook her head. Her striped stocking cap had a braided string falling from the top that jiggled when she moved. “I don’t think she had one.”
Casie would have liked to disagree, but Clayton’s livestock management techniques had suffered considerably in the last couple years. With his wife’s death and his own failing health, it was entirely possibly that ear-tagging newborns had not been high on his list of priorities.
“What’d she look like?”
“Are you messing with me?” Em asked.
In a world gone commercial heavy on Angus beef, Clayton had held on to his Herefords. Every last animal was brown with a white face. He’d been known to say on more than one occasion that if folks in New York City could tell the color of a critter’s hide by the taste of their steaks, they were better cattlemen than he was.
“Well …” Case swept the beam of light across the yearlings and sideways to the sloping hill beyond. The animals were in a tight bunch, every red eye focused on them, every beast ready to bolt. “… they look okay to me.”
“Do cows get stomachaches?” Em asked.
“Are you projecting?” Emily had had a touch of the flu for several days, but it hadn’t seemed to slow her down any.
“I was just wondering.”
“Well, they can bloat if they get too much rich feed.”
“Like chocolate cheesecake?” She’d been digging through Kathy’s recipe boxes again. And although Casie knew they should focus on the ten million farm tasks that needed to be done, it wasn’t in her to discourage anyone from creating baked goods that did nothing to improve her health but so much to improve her mood.
“Like alfalfa,” she corrected, forcing her mind away from the Amarillo coconut pie the girl had concocted on the previous day. “Excess gas builds up in their rumens or something and—” she began, but suddenly the triangular beam of light swept across an unidentifiable lump. She swung the flashlight quickly backward. The hazy ray settled on a dark form lying on the eastern slope of the hill.
“Oh no,” Casie said.
“What is it?” Emily’s voice sounded high pitched and tense as she squinted into the distance.
“Looks like a cow.”
They made their way through the darkness, circumventing the prone creature until they stood behind her, b
ut the blackness was not making their task easy. Nevertheless, they could hear grunting noises issuing from the animal.
They crept a few inches closer, straining to see. A small heifer lay flat out on the ground. She was facing downhill. Her tail was cocked up. Beneath it, a bone-white projection was covered in a gauzy, blue-veined sac.
“She’s in labor,” Casie said.
“What?” Emily turned toward her, her face a pale oval in the darkness. “I thought you said the yearlings were too young to be moms.”
Which was true and probably why this tortured animal was now lying in a position no right-thinking bovine would adopt. “I said they hadn’t been exposed to a bull.”
“So this is like, what … a virgin birth?”
What this was was trouble, Casie thought, and scowled as she focused the light on the cow’s hind end.
“Case?” There was no longer any humor in the girl’s voice. “We’re not going to just leave her here, are we?”
Seconds ticked away in the blackness.
“Case?”
“Chinese takeout,” Casie said suddenly.
“What?” Em’s voice sounded dubious, as if she’d finally realized that Casie had slipped over the razor-sharp edge of sanity and into the dark abyss beyond.
“A warm work space. Clean fingernails.”
“Now’s not the time to lose it, Case.”
“Those are the reasons I want to go back to the city.”
Emily shifted from foot to foot. Spring or not, the temperature still dropped below freezing with disturbing regularity. “But not immediately, right?”
For a moment she almost said yes, almost marched back into the house to pack her modest bags and say adios to it all, but finally she shook her head and heaved a sigh. “Right now we’re going to get her up and chase her into the barn.”
In the end, chasing her into the barn wasn’t nearly as simple as it sounded. Casie shouted, Emily flapped her arms, but it was Jack nipping at the heifer’s hocks that finally sent the frenzied animal shuffling uncomfortably through the gate. Once she was mixed with the older cattle, the job became increasingly more difficult, but finally she stood alone in a fourteen-by-fourteen-foot pen that had been built into the corner of the barn for just such an occasion. Her eyes were rimmed with white, the hair on her head and neck wavy where it was soaked with chilly sweat.
“Now what?” Emily looked a little skittish herself in the dim overhead lights. Skittish and tired. Her breath could be seen as a frosty bubble. From over the fence that separated the cattle from the machinery, Angel watched them with mild curiosity.
Casie shook her head. “I don’t suppose you can rope, huh?”
“Rope? Who do you think I am?”
“Assistant wrangler of the Lazy Windmill?”
Emily looked a little sick as her own words came back to haunt her. “Roping didn’t fall under the job description. I’m strictly managerial.”
“Then I’m going to change the job description to include—” Casie began, but the heifer was already dropping miserably onto her side.
Despite the animal’s discomfort and nerves, nature insisted that she lie down and strain. Which she did in a moment.
The women remained silent, watching, but little happened. One small hoof would exit a few scant inches, then slip back inside when the contractions ceased.
“Is something wrong?” Emily looked fidgety and panicked. “I think something’s wrong.”
“Shh,” Casie said, but she thought the same thing.
“What’s the fetal mortality rate in cattle?”
“I’m not exactly a bovine midwife, Emily.”
“I bet it’s high.” Em’s voice sounded strained. “In people, it’s eighteen point seven percent in populations without medical assistance.”
Casie dragged her gaze from the heifer for a second. “How do you know that?”
She shrugged. “I just know things.”
“Well …” Casie shook her head and turned miserably back to the heifer. “She’s not a person.”
“But she still needs help. What about Brad?”
“What?”
“Your fiancé. He’s a nice guy, right?” Her expression was ridiculously hopeful.
“What difference does that make?”
“I mean, he’s a doctor, isn’t he? Maybe he can do something.”
“Are you serious?”
“I’m sure he’d want to help if he knew about the situation.”
“What are you talking about? Brad’s not a veterinarian. He doesn’t know anything about livestock, and he’s three hundred miles away.” Besides that, he’d find it beneath demeaning to work in a poorly lit barn in the middle of the night. But then, who wouldn’t?
For a moment, anguish shone as bright as summer lightning in the girl’s eyes, but she pursed her lips and raised her chin a notch. “Then I guess we’d better call a vet.”
“I can’t afford a vet.” Guilt made Casie’s voice rougher than she’d intended. “Remember that hundred-thousand-dollar debt?” she said, but the truth was deeper than that. The truth was, Clayton had insulted, ignored, or failed to pay every veterinarian within the tricounty area.
“Then what are we going to do?”
“I don’t know.”
“Well, what do you think the problem is?” All semblance of the cocky assistant wrangler had disappeared.
Casie exhaled and wished she were a thousand miles away. Somewhere warm. Somewhere easy. “I think the calf isn’t positioned correctly.”
“Like breach or something?”
“I don’t think so.” She took a half step closer and strained to see below the heifer’s cocked tail. It looked as if the rubbery, single hoof was pointing downward as it should be, but where was the other foot?
“Do you think it’s an occiput posterior?”
“Where do you get these terms?”
“Just tell me what’s wrong with it!”
“I think its head might be turned back.”
“Oh God.”
Casie tightened her grip on the flashlight. “We’re going to have to push it back in and try to get it straightened out.”
“We?”
“A week ago everything was we. You’re not changing your mind now, are you?”
“No.” Emily swallowed. “No, of course not. But I don’t … I don’t like blood.”
Casie felt a little sick herself. “Do you think I bathe in it or something?”
“I don’t think you bathe at all,” Emily said, but she failed to laugh at her own joke, failed to do so much as glance away from the distressed animal. The girl’s face looked strained and exhausted in the dusky light.
But there was nothing to be done about that just now. “Listen, you put Jack away,” Casie said. “I’ll get a few supplies and meet you back here in a minute.”
It took slightly longer than that, but they were both back in the barn finally. Judging by the one hoof still presented, the heifer hadn’t progressed any.
Casie handed the flashlight to Emily. Despite the hundred-watt bulbs overhead, the barn was cast in shadows. “Give me as much light as possible,” she said and pulled on a long plastic sleeve she’d found in the basement.
“Oh f … fudge!” Emily said, watching with growing agitation. Her voice sounded shaky.
Casie glanced at her as she squirted baby oil onto the sleeve like she’d seen Doc Miller do on more than one occasion. “You’re not going to pass out or something, are you?”
“How the hell …” She winced. “Heck … How the heck should I know? It’s not like I delivered calves every morning at the Java Bean.”
“What?”
“Where I used to work.”
“I thought it was the Jumping Bean.”
“Jes … geez, I’m so nervous I can’t even remember my last place of employment.”
“Well, try to relax,” Casie said. “You don’t want to spook the heifer any more than she already is.” Speaking soft
ly, she eased closer to the animal. But she might as well have been invisible for all the cow cared because at that moment another contraction tightened her uterus. She stretched out her neck and moaned raggedly. Steam wafted off her overheated barrel. Her legs stiffened and rose from the ground. Casie crouched behind her and waited for the contraction to pass. Then, silently praying for assistance, she slipped her hand along the calf’s placenta-covered leg.
“What’s going on?” Emily’s voice was strained but quiet.
Casie remained silent. In a moment she had found the second front hoof, but where was the head? Feeling around like a blind man in open sea, she felt the curve of the neck. “I think it’s bent back.” She said the words to herself.
“What?”
“Its nose isn’t positioned properly.” She’d raised her voice a little, but the additional volume didn’t bother the heifer. She was completely absorbed in the pain.
“Can you fix it?”
Casie had no way of knowing the answer to that question, but there wasn’t much she could do other than try. At that moment, the contractions came again, pressing her arm against the pelvic bone with powerful urgency. Pain squeezed through her. She opened her mouth in agony and twisted slightly but in a few moments it passed. She and the cow lay panting. But the clock was ticking. Stretching out on her belly, Casie pushed on the baby’s neck, trying to force the calf back enough to position it properly.
That was the beginning of an exhausting dance of pushing and waiting, of gasping through the pain of a contraction, then edging the little animal back a bit farther until finally … finally the nose was pointing toward the exit.
Casie raised her gaze to Em’s. “I think I’ve got it.”
“Really?”
“Come here.”
“There?” Her tone was fraught with angst.
“Hurry up.”
She scurried forward, looking like she’d rather be in hell.
“Put the light down and grab the legs.” God bless America, there were two visible feet now, two little rubbery hooves. Casie kept her hand inside the birth canal, carefully held the head in position, and took a deep breath. The air smelled of muck and blood. But she barely noticed. “Okay, pull.”