I say all of this now so that you might understand the environment in which the calf club wish was born, and also so that you might see the situation in which it existed for a while -wobbly and uncertain but grounded in a kind of realism similar to the animals and the people who were its basic source.
The idea itself, however, came from a new person in our midst. In the late winter and early spring of the seventh grade a new and dynamic agricultural representative began to visit our two-room school. He was young and athletic and brimming with vigour. He was one year away from the completion of his degree and had interrupted his formal studies for a year of “in-the-field” practical experience; and we were to be part of his field. He was almost contagious. We had always had visits from agricultural representatives but they were for the most part men who were older and gave the impression of wishing they were somewhere else. One used to wear a suede jacket and a pair of grey trousers covered with cigarette ashes and other interesting stains. He would sit at the desk in the front of the room and ask if there were any questions. There would seldom be any, so he would ask one: “Well, then what will we talk about?” Then he would look out the window rather longingly, as would we, hoping for, if not a discussion topic, a sort of mutual deliverance. Another used to show slides of “common North American weeds.” He seemed to come later in the year, in May or June, and always in the afternoon. Each slide bore the name of the weed which was illustrated, and he would read the label aloud to us in a ritual which we came to call weed parade. “Common Ragwort,” he would say, or “Scottish Thistle” or “Wild Onion” or “Broad-leaved Dock.” He would always glance surreptitiously at his watch and drink from a thermos bottle of coffee laced with whiskey. In the drowsy hot afternoons as weed followed weed and their names became more slurred and the vapours from the whiskied coffee rose around us, we would find it almost impossible to stay awake. But our new man changed all that.
First he said that in addition to our present vegetable garden clubs we should start a calf club. He had been doing research, he said, and all we needed was a minimum of ten heifer calves produced by a pure-bred sire. These would be born the following spring so it was not too early to begin thinking of their conception. The mothers could be “any cow of high quality.” Such quality would hopefully be transferred to her daughter. We would need a paper signed by the keeper of the pure-bred sire, indicating the breeding date and the hopeful conception of the desired calf. We were to check our cattle at home and speak with our parents. We were interested in dairy cattle so we should not select a beef-type mother. Neither should we “cross” breeds if we could help it. We should not breed a cow with heavy Holstein characteristics to an Ayrshire bull, for example, because the breed characteristics would become confused. His research had shown that the predominant strain in the area was Ayrshire and there were two Ayrshire bulls approximately ten miles apart and subsidized by the Department of Agriculture. These bulls, he said, were not being “utilized to their full potential.” We copied it all down in our scribblers to refer to at a later time.
On our way home I considered all the cattle that we owned, thinking of their backgrounds and their breeding and when they were due to give birth that spring. I was already a year ahead of myself in searching for my candidate for mother of the year. I settled mentally on a large and consistently gentle cow whom we called Morag. She was basically white with cherry-red markings and long and sweeping elegant Ayrshire horns. She possessed almost all of the “high-quality” requirements which had been mentioned and she would deliver her current “ordinary” calf quite early in the spring. She had always conceived quickly and easily following the births of her other calves, and I could not believe my good fortune.
When I entered our house my father was fixing harness in the kitchen. He was not in a good mood, I realized, but I was so enthusiastic that I told him all about the new agricultural representative and our potential calf club, falling over my words in my excitement.
“Oh,” he said with something like vague annoyance, “I’ve heard all that before. Those agricultural representatives are all the same. They just talk and talk and talk and never do anything. They come in their fancy cars in the middle of the haying season and expect you to drop everything and talk to them. Almost everything they say is common sense anyway: ‘Plant early and you will harvest early.’ ‘Rotate your crops.’ ‘Use lime.’ ‘Heavy rainfall results in a high yield.’ ‘Turkeys are needed for the Thanksgiving market.’ Who doesn’t know that? What they say is all baloney.”
“Well,” I said, thinking I had best keep on. “It would just be one cow. I was thinking of Morag after her calf is born. There is a pure-bred Agricultural Society bull at MacDougall’s five miles away. We could breed her there in the summer.”
“Not me,” he said. “I’m not dragging any more cows on the end of a rope to one of those bulls. I kept one of those Agricultural Society bulls here myself about fifteen years ago. More trouble than he was worth. Took up too much space in the barn. Had to haul feed and water to him all the time because he was too dangerous to let out. Then if he didn’t get exercise he wouldn’t breed properly. And people always came with cows at the damndest times. Seven o’clock on Sunday morning. Anytime there was a wedding or a funeral. Anytime you were leaving the house you’d be sure to meet someone with a cow and have to go back in and change your clothes and go handle the bull for them. Bull got so he wouldn’t let anyone else around him but me, so I could never leave the house. People would come with their cows and if I weren’t home they’d complain. Not that they didn’t have a right to, I suppose.”
He began to gather up his harness from the floor in preparation for the evening chores. I felt that perhaps I should point out that all of our best cattle were still descendants of that long-departed bull but it somehow did not seem a good day for that kind of logic. After he had gone to the barn, my mother said: “He is not having a good day but you realize he did not say ‘No.’ Ask him something definite and volunteer to do the work yourself. He is getting tired. You know that if he gives you his word, he will always keep it.”
It was true. Whatever uneven moods my father was prone to, he possessed a memory which did not permit him to forget anything and he was always true to his word. In retrospect, it does not seem that we were certain of many things, dwelling in the realm of fluctuating weather and fickle seasons and aggressive insects and indifferent soil; but of those traits we were sure, and we clung to them as the uneasy swimmer to his certain log.
In the barn it was growing dark. My father moved about the animals with a tired familiarity, leaning against them, pushing them with his shoulder as he moved towards their mangers, talking to them in a sort of abbreviated private language, pulling manure with his fork from beneath them, tightening their halter chains, distributing their feed so that it was within their reach.
“Okay,” he said before I had time to speak. “I didn’t say you couldn’t, just that I wouldn’t. If you raise the fee, you can have the cow.”
It was, it seemed, fair enough.
The fee was probably part of the reason we had stopped using the Agricultural Society bull in the first place. Another was that it took valuable time in a period before the widespread use of trucks and artificial insemination. “He,” the bull, had gone too far away and it was no longer considered worth it. It was expensive, as I mentioned, and there was also a feeling that paying money for the simple breeding act was a bit too much – as if it were somehow unnatural, a kind of perversion or animal prostitution in which we cared not to be involved; as if there were an uneasy idea that no one should have to “pay for it.” There was also the shrewd and pragmatic observation that after a few years of such selective breeding most cattle already contained “good” if not exactly royal blood and further exalted matings were perhaps a waste of time. It was probably a reaction to such spreading ideas that the agricultural representative had come among us in the first place to plant the seeds of the calf club wish.
After the birth of Morag’s “ordinary” calf, there followed the long period of waiting. If she were to deliver the magic calf by early next spring, she would have to conceive in the middle of summer. It took nine months from conception to birth – “just like people,” as we used to say. “Cattle are the only animals that take the same length of time.”
As the spring passed and the early summer approached, the hectic pace of our lives increased. School drew to a close and during the last few weeks we attended it irregularly. We were needed at home and whatever we had learned during the year was already in our past. Feverish preparations for the approaching haying season began: the repairing of machinery, the sending away for parts, improvements to the barn and also a myriad of other activities involving gardening, canning and the making of cheese. The short intense summer was upon us and we had no time to lose.
Meanwhile the animals grew sleek and fat and were distant from us most of the time as we prepared to gather in their winter sustenance. In the early weeks of July we began our haying in earnest; cutting the most mature fields and leaving them to dry, then raking and finally pitching onto the wagons, then driving into the barn and pitching off and returning again and then again. Always threatened by broken harness and nonfunctioning machinery and always fearful of the sudden spectre of rain.
On the evening of the fourteenth of July I noticed the signs in Morag when I was bringing the milk cows home from their pasture by the sea. She was coming into her breeding cycle and it caused a restlessness and tension not only within herself but among the other cattle as well. It was late in the evening when I first noticed it and there was nothing I could do that day. That night the radio told us of the approaching rain squalls which were to hit on the following day.
“Goddamn it,” said my father, “and us with all that hay out.”
We had just recently cut a new field so much of it was still undried. In the morning we were up at five, moving feverishly about our tasks, racing against the weather. At the morning milking Morag’s situation was truly obvious, although my father did not notice. He was not around the cattle much but busy harnessing the horses and shouting directions to animals and people alike. The clouds were already bunching, although they still seemed far enough away, hanging over the ocean and visible from a distance.
“Hurry up,” he said, coming into the barn where I was milking the cows. “It’s going to rain. We haven’t got all day.”
“I think we should keep Morag in the barn today,” I stammered quickly, fearful lest he should get away before I broached the subject.
“What for?” he asked and I could see that he was so harried and preoccupied that he had given my words but little thought.
“She’s in heat,” I said. “She began last night.”
For a moment his eyes seemed to cloud over with non-comprehension, but then they cleared and became filled almost with panic, as he understood the significance of my words. It was as if he were trapped by his memory and his word. Trapped by them at this, his busiest time.
“But there is no time today,” he sputtered. “We have other things to do than just worry about this one goddamn cow.”
“Okay,” I said. “We will just keep her in and see what the day brings. I didn’t say I wanted to go with her now.”
“Okay,” he said, as if he were relieved of an earlier capricious promise. “Take the others down to the shore. We have to get going.”
What the day brought was a forenoon of furious activity. First we raked the driest hay and then followed with the groaning wagons. The sun shone erratically but the air was so humid that little actual drying took place. At times the clouds blotted out the sun and once we could actually see the rain falling out to sea, although it had not yet started to fall upon the land. All morning as we raced about, raising new blisters upon the calluses already formed on our hands, Morag moaned and bawled her passion from the barn. When we came in with the loaded wagons, we could hear her threshing about in the frustration of her captivity and her desire.
I would have liked to bring her a pail of water to ease her thirst, although I knew that was not what she really wanted -but there was no time even for that. On one or two occasions I thought I heard an answering call from what seemed like a great distance but I could not really be sure. She was safe in the barn anyway, I thought. Safe for me, if not satisfied for herself. Our work intensified, as did the weather which surrounded us.
When the storm finally broke, it announced itself first in two thunderous cracks and a jagged scar of lightning across the sky and then the rain seemed to hurl itself down as if pressurized forth from the hanging, laden clouds. Everything and everyone became immediately drenched and to save even the half-loaded wagon of imperfectly dried hay we had to shout to the horses and swing the reins over their already steaming backs. They broke into a gallop then, jolting the wagon behind them until they careened into the still, dignified safety of the waiting barn. Within five minutes it was obvious that the day’s haying was over and that at a future time we would have to begin again with what was now being so thoroughly soaked. But by then the hay would not be the same but only of the second grade.
The rain poured down all afternoon; rivulets streamed down the windows and the sides of the buildings and cascaded down the laneways, pushing erratic, insistent trenches through the softened earth. Nothing but the water seemed to move. The ocean was still and we were still ourselves after all our desperate activity. Even Morag’s passion seemed to lull as if she were cooled and covered by the soothing of the rain. It was late that evening before I could venture down to the shore to bring the milk cows home, and by the next morning Morag was ravenously hungry but otherwise in no way outwardly exceptional. The hope for the mid-April calf was gone and would not come again.
For two days it was overcast and there were sporadic showers and the cut and sodden hay began gradually to turn black. On the third day it cleared in the afternoon and by the fourth day the sun shone again and we began to pick up where we had left off prior to the storm. We did not pick up at the same place, for part of our crop was gone or greatly deteriorated. I set my sights on the approximate three-week future and rationalized that a mid-May calf would, after all, not really be so bad.
I was ready in August because I had mentally noted the earlier date. We were still at our haying, although many of the fields had now been cleared. We were all thinner and more irritable and beset by various nagging injuries which bore witness to the activities of our past days and weeks. A thumbnail torn off by a running rope, a back spasm caused by lifting too heavy a pitch, a swollen jaw caused by the unexpected disturbance of a wasp’s nest within the deepened grass, a purplish plate-sized bruise on the thigh caused by the kick of a horse irritated by flies.
When I recognized the August signs in Morag, it was in the morning and the day promised to be clear and hot. We were on the home stretch of our summer’s haying and things were not as desperate as they had been in the earlier month. I mentioned the situation to my father and he said that I should keep Morag in the barn that day. That evening, after we had done a reasonable day’s work, he said, I could be free to go on my five-mile journey. All day as we worked I was intent on my future mission. I was actually a bit afraid as the time drew closer, contemplating the twists and turns of the road I must go, and realizing even then how erratic it might be. From the barn Morag moaned and bawled, her voice sounding like the theme music for the day’s production. The answer seemed to come from far away.
In the evening after the other milk cows were stabled, I placed a halte
r on Morag’s head, looped an additional length of rope around her sweeping horns and prepared to set off.
“Don’t wrap the rope too tightly around your hand,” said my father, “because if she bolts she might pull your shoulder out of its socket.” He was on his way to finish the last hay load of the evening.
“Okay,” I said, doubling the rope within my hand.
The five-mile journey was a narrow dirt road which followed the erratic indentations of the sea. It was apparently the original path followed by the first settlers in the 1770s when they walked along the shore on their way to their new lands. Now it was almost a private road, rarely used by any automotive traffic because it was so narrow and so dangerous, but used by people on missions such as mine, by people on foot, or those on horseback; sometimes by lovers, sometimes by drunkards or a variety of others who did not appreciate detection. At times it clung to the cliffs and in certain places the edges of it had crumbled and fallen down into the sea some two hundred feet below.
As Birds Bring Forth the Sun Page 7