by Josh Weil
From the radio on the dash a woman’s soft, sad voice sang a cover of a half-remembered song.
All along route 33, the lights of houses pricked the dark like chips of stars fallen from the night sky to the night earth. Osby drove past them, thinking of Germany. When he was little, his mother used to show him a black-and-white photograph of her father, his grandfather, in a long wool coat with tin-looking buttons, smoking a cigarette and grinning at something the soldiers next to him must have said. A month after that picture was taken a German hand grenade blew the man to shreds. Now, watching his headlights chase the blackness in front of them, Osby tried to remember whether there had been anything in his grandfather’s face that hinted at his death.
From the speakers on the door the woman’s soft, sad voice sang her cover of the half-remembered song. Ahead, the high beams tore at the dark.
He wondered how his father’s face had looked when he had made that phone call to Eula Geller’s house.
Above Harts Run, the church on the limestone hill was invisible in the darkness under the big hickories. There was only a small red light up there, flickering. Osby watched it, thinking of the girl in the pamphlet, starving in a place even further away than Germany, a place where no one even spoke his language. His headlights clutched the road. When he was past the church, something tugged his eyes to his rearview mirror and he saw, up there where the church should have been, two white lights splintered by the trees. There, then gone. There, then gone.
In the cab of his truck, the air was all piano and guitar and the breathing of the woman on the radio waiting for her turn.
In the morning, Osby spent an hour opening doors and airing out rooms, shoving back curtains, clearing boxes out of the hallway. By seven, the windows were throwing hard, clear light over the place. It looked better to Osby, a little less like a storage shed, a little less like the Old House. He was late getting out to the pastures and he worked fast, running around the front of the truck to crank the hub locks into four-wheel drive, jumping out to swing open the gates, driving almost straight up each hill, the bale on the back of the truck shedding flecks of hay. When he’d get near the top, he’d lower the spike, drive forward a few feet, let the hay slide off. He’d hop out, jog around behind the truck, cut the twine and give the bale a shove, watching it unravel in a long trail as it rolled down the hill. He’d take a few minutes to look over the cattle as they came for it, trying to stifle excitement whenever he thought he saw a limp or a swollen jaw. But it never turned out to be anything worth getting worked up about. Even the heifers were calving easy.
Half the cows had given birth and it was time to put some weight back on them, bring them in again for the bulls. With putting out the extra bagged feed, it was full into day by the time he got to the last herd. The jeep trail running through the pasture was still churned up from the funeral. Osby shook three bags of shell corn into the feeding trough, scanning the bright, sun-flooded trees along the top of Bowmans Ridge for the glint of a headstone. He didn’t see anything. The heifers lumbered toward him, shouldering each other as they crowded around the feed. He watched the calves, standing back in a clump, waiting for their chance to suckle.
He was about to get back in the truck and drive over to the Raines brothers’ last logging site—they had left him branches and end chunks to collect: two days worth of chainsawing and splitting, but enough wood to last through winter—when he stopped and ran his eyes back over the herd. A cow was missing. No. The six calves were all there, and the couple heifers who looked ready to drop their young were still bulging, their sacks still swollen beneath their tails. Then, in the distance, Osby caught a glimpse of brown. It was the brown of dead leaves on a forest floor, lumped way down in a gully at the lowest corner of the pasture where the fence line came up against a snarl of bare-branched cedars and blackhaw. Osby stood watching that brown shape. The stagged yearling, he remembered, the late-born steer that had been too young to bring to auction that fall. His dad had planned on selling it with the calves that spring. Dead? What would have killed it, though? Coyotes or a mountain lion might get a newborn calf, but not a year-old steer.
Suddenly, its legs kicked out, jerked, pawed at the air and mud. It was on its side, its head flailing, smacking the ground over and over. He knew then that it wasn’t any coyote or mountain lion that had done it, wasn’t anything that stag could have run from or Osby could have shot.
By the time he got to the eroded side of the gully, it was still again, its eyes rolled upwards to look at him. Quick breaths blew bubbles in the froth at its mouth. Every few seconds its ears twitched. A shudder rippled over its face.
Osby crouched down at the edge of the gully, not wanting to come any closer and start the steer flailing again. A flicker of excitement licked the inside of his chest. He frowned it off, let worry cover it. He’d never seen a steer come down with grass tetany. It was always cows, usually pregnant or just after they’d dropped their calves. He’d had a bad run of Holstein-Charlay cows who had died from it over the years. His father always said it was because they were such big milkers. One year, it was so bad he and his father had just dug a pit and left it open, filled it with six cows before spring was over. But that was before they’d started using the mineral blocks instead of straight salt, and in a year when the hay didn’t have enough seed in it. He hadn’t had a grass tetany problem in years.
He watched the steer’s wild, rolling eye looking at him. His father would have just put a bullet in it.
Osby stood up from his crouch and it was as if unbending his knees released a rush of adrenaline from his legs to his chest. Sometimes, you could save them. Occasionally, if you got the Cowdex right into their jugular, then kept hitting them with it under the skin, you could keep them alive. Once, he’d seen the injection hit the blood just right, as if it punched the cow right in the heart, and she’d been up, kicking, wild with sudden life. He told himself to quit getting excited. Almost always, you had to put a bullet in them. It was bad. Tomorrow—hell, that evening —another could be down, and more in the morning. From the sudden cold? Something wrong with the hay? He tried to walk calmly back up the hill, but even the muscles in his legs were thrilled. This is it, this is it, this is it, kept going through his mind to the rhythm of his feet.
By the time he reached the truck, his chest was heaving and he banged his breastbone with a fist, trying to knock the air loose in his lungs. He drove too fast out of the pasture toward the house, the truck jolting over the frozen ground. It wasn’t until he was through the gate and past the junkyard that he remembered the Cowdex was stored in the Old House with the rest of the medicines.
When he drove up the old driveway, there wasn’t anywhere to park but behind his father’s Ford. Osby stared at the house, at the half-open front door. So what if his father had walked that path, gone in there, up those stairs? He unlatched the Sierra’s door, let gravity swing it open. In front of him, the rusted tailgate on his father’s truck was down. He stared at it, then flicked his eyes up to the Ford’s rear windshield. It seemed perfectly possible that his father’s squashed-looking, wrinkly head might be there above the headrest, close-cropped white hair prickling his scalp like cactus spines. Osby breathed hard out his nose, trying to unpack whatever was filling up his chest. The old man couldn’t even walk over, he thought. A quarter mile. Had to drive in comfort. Probably had the radio on. And the heat. All cozy, before he did it.
Osby shoved out the door, headed for the house. Passing by his father’s truck, he reached out, on reflex, to shut the tailgate. Instead he punched it, hard. One, quick, metal-rattling punch. The bang jerked his neck, as if it had been someone else’s fist slamming metal. He pressed his knuckles into the soft skin at his cheek, trying to smother the jabbing ache. A crow fled a nearby tree, cawing, leaves shaking behind it.
Osby headed for the front door, walking fast, trying not to notice the dead man’s boot prints still frozen in the mud. He shoved the door the rest of the way open, walke
d straight into the dim hallway and right to the steps, staring ahead of him as if his neck had cramped and his eyes had frozen. The medicines were all on the stairs: boxes and jars, cans, bags, drums, bottles piled up to the second floor landing. He shoved through them, knocking stuff a few steps down before it got caught up in other junk, his movements more and more wild as he neared the top, his breathing ragged. His head was down; his eyes locked on the piles on either side of the staircase. He didn’t look up to the landing, didn’t once check to see if the cops had left the door up there open or closed. Four steps from the top, he found the plastic packets of Cowdex and, on the next step, the needle and catheter coiled at the bottom of a rag-filled box.
No more than five minutes later, he was skidding heavy-booted down the red mud gully, the warmed jar of Cowdex in one hand, the catheter gathered in the other, the halter slung over his shoulder. This is it, this is it, the blood in his temples was beating again. This thing can’t live without me, he thought, and almost said it to the steer, his eyes locking on its: You can’t live without me. As if it had heard his thoughts, the stag heaved its neck up, eyes bulging, the white half of its face ruddy with mud. Its stiff legs started paddling again, smearing the pile of fresh shit that had run down around its hindquarters, their movement eerily disconnected from the rest of its body.
It made Osby feel powerful, seeing the steer’s muscles go crazy like that. His hands felt as skilled as a surgeon’s as he attached the needle to the catheter, the catheter to the jar of Cowdex. It was as if the adrenaline had cleared his veins, his arteries, his neurons, his marrow, everything that connected one part of him to the other. He was moving fast, but controlled, trying to get it done before the Cowdex got too cold. He wrestled the harness over the steer’s ears and muzzle and tied it tight to a nearby fencepost, yanking the head back so the neck was stretched taut, the ribbed throat like knuckles pushing out at the skin from the inside. The steer followed him with its bulging eyes as he came back around and knelt in front of it. He put one hand on the warm neck, took aim, and jammed the nail-sized needle into the jugular. The steer kicked, tried to thrash its head against the rope. Osby didn’t even notice. He was already standing, lifting the jar of Cowdex off the ground, focused on raising it just right, not too high, not too fast; if it flowed in too quickly, if too much of it hit the steer’s heart, he’d kill it. When the jar was drained, he jerked the needle out, gathered the tubing up, and stood back.
The steer lay there.
Osby watched it breathe steam through a bubble of saliva. Dark blood seeped around the needle hole. He stood perfectly still. The adrenaline that had bolted around in his body a minute ago seemed to have drained out through the catheter along with the Cowdex. Slowly, he wiped his face with the back of his hand. His knuckles smelled like the steer.
His heartbeat felt tired. The sun had risen high enough for its light to reach the corner of the pasture where he stood, and he felt it hit the back of his neck, saw the shadow of his head against the scrubby grass: a dark, squashed-looking bump.
Couldn’t even do that, he thought.
The steer breathed more evenly now, almost as if it were sleeping.
“Well,” Osby said, and finished the thought silently: we’ll try again tomorrow. The steer could eat, crap, piss, do anything but get up. As long as its head wasn’t downhill, it wouldn’t smother. He’d heard of a cow surviving for weeks like that. He couldn’t remember if it had died in the end, or not.
His father would have just put a bullet in it.
Standing there, watching the steer’s ribs swell with its breathing, he remembered his father sleeping in a chair at the kitchen table by the woodstove, legs spread, head back, mouth gaping, two partridge lying limply at his elbow, the barrel of his shotgun gleaming in his lap. Of course, it had been the Ruger, not the shotgun, that he’d used.
Osby watched the steer breathe. He’d come back tomorrow, give it an injection under the skin. He’d try it for a week, if he had to. He’d try it for two.
He’ll be all right, Osby thought, until he isn’t.
That night there was a new moon, and outside the world was unnaturally black. Osby sat on the couch, eyes closed, jeans rolled to his knees, his fat calves blue-skinned in the light from the TV. He’d filled a big pot with hot water and carried it, sloshing, to the living room. Now, feeling his toes wrinkle, he smiled. When he was a small boy, his mother used to sit like that, soaking her feet like that. On the TV, a woman won $250,000 and was going to risk it to try for half a million. He got up and walked to the bathroom, the warmth draining out of his feet in wet, dark stains on the cold floor. In the kitchen, the woodstove had gone out.
A few days later, down in the gully, Osby gave the steer its fourth injection, holding his breath while the medicine drained in, the way, when hunting, he’d still his lungs to steady the rifle. Afterwards, he held a bucket of water and listened to the steer’s noisy drinking. A few dry kernels of shell corn were embedded in the mud just out of the steer’s reach. A mound of cow shit had piled behind its haunches. Watching the heaving belly, Osby remembered last year when he and his father castrated the bull calves: his father standing behind each one, bending the tail over its back so it couldn’t kick, while Osby crouched, the bucket of water steaming, the knife wet with alcohol. Splash the scrotum with Creolin, slice off the bottom of the sack, reach in, yank the slippery balls down, cut the cords and toss the testicles. But this one, born late, this nine-hundred-pound-no-longer-calf lying at his feet, this one had only one testicle in the sack.
“The other hasn’t dropped, yet,” he’d said to his dad.
His father just nodded: Well, get it out. He’d reached into the sack, into the groin, almost to the belly, working upward with his knife and fingers, searching for the nut. The calf had tried to rear, rolled its eyes, came as close as a calf can to screaming. He probably could have gotten the nut out, but he’d stopped, shook his head. “Gonna have to leave him stagged,” Osby said, knowing it wasn’t good. His dad wouldn’t like having a steer grow up acting like a bull, but infertile, the meat good only for hamburger or roast.
The stag wasn’t even worth that, anymore.
The vet had said it could have been the sudden cold, the young grass, old seedless hay, a urinary problem. He’d never seen grass tetany in a steer. In the end, “Keep up with the Cowdex,” was all he offered. “Or shoot it.”
Now, Osby watched it breathe. All the cows, even the heifers, were calving without a hitch. He hadn’t had to help one.
You can’t live without me.
Bullshit, he thought. He had no more to do with it than he did with anything else. He reached out and touched the stag’s flank. It was warm on his cold fingers.
That Sunday, the cows broke through a fence line into the woods on Bowmans Ridge. Osby walked beneath the trees, hunting them out, passing between beeches and elms no thicker than himself, grown over the same years he had, their pale trunks rising around the huge, dark stumps of the chestnuts logged long ago, before he was born, before the blight had rid the woods of every last one. He sat on a stump—black with age, big as his truck hood, solid still—and shut his eyes to listen for the moving of the cows.
He worked the rest of the day at fixing the fence. It was so clear and cold the trees looked sharp and the sounds had edges. Behind him, in the dead grass, a long row of new, dark postholes marked the fence line.
Later, stretching the wire from post to post to post, there was just the clacking of tree branches in the wind and the throaty cawing of crows. He glanced at the sky as he worked. High above, three of the black birds dove furiously at a red-tailed hawk circling in thin sunlight. A tilt of wide wings, a sideward glide; it dodged gracefully, unperturbed.
After a week, the Cowdex injection felt like a formality. Osby came to sit and keep the steer company. A few days ago, he started talking to it, whispering at first, looking around anxiously every now and then. Now he sat on the cold ground, arms wrapped around his knees
, telling the steer about the check he wrote to Save the Children the night before. “Two hundred dollars,” he said, shaking his head. He told the steer he knew it was a crazy thing to do, that his father was probably hiking down from the cemetery right now, revived by the magnitude of his son’s stupidity, that if he wanted to give something away, he could have helped someone in Eads County instead of halfway around the world. It felt good to say it out loud: Helped someone.
“Little Asian babies,” he said to the steer. “In China. Korea. Vietnam. Hundreds of thousands of ’em. Starving.”
The steer watched him with weak eyes. Absently, Osby picked a kernel of corn out of the grass and put it in the mud by the steer’s mouth. Its long tongue lapped it up.
“Two hundred dollars,” he said again and let out a burst of breath that was almost a laugh.
The steer blew air and snot out of its nose.
When he was too cold to stay sitting, he got up, said, “So long,” and climbed the muddy slope to his truck.
The weather chose to freeze, hard, on the one day he had to be away till late. By the time he got back from the farm auction in Ripplemead, the streams and ponds were frozen solid. He drove straight to the pastures, never mind dinner, hauled the crowbar out of the truck bed, and went to work. In the grainy flare of the Sierra’s headlights, shards of ice sprayed like sparks from a welder’s torch. Around him, the cattle, little more than movements in the night, stared. By an hour before midnight he had two creeks and one pond to go.
“Wendell,” Osby said, half awake, his mind wandering, some days later while lying back against the steer’s chest. It was a little warmer that afternoon, down in the gully, shielded from the wind. It was almost comfortable. His arms folded over his chest, Osby watched a small cloud drift across the blue sky. The stag’s warm body rose and fell underneath his head. It took a dump: the thick, heavy plops, the rush of piss. For the past three days, Osby had shoveled away the crap. Even so, the smell was bad on a warm afternoon.