Breaking Clean

by Judy Blunt

I began talking again, more for my own sake than hers. The calf was big. The little cow lunged forward when she felt my hand on her back, but settled down and began to strain against the intrusion as I slid the other hand along the calf's foreleg and into the birth canal. The head was right there and a thumb against its nose produced a satisfying flinch. It was alive. But the other foot was not where it belonged. I shifted to the other hand and groped for the second front leg, turning sideways and pressing against the heifer to wedge my hand flat along the calfs neck to his shoulder and down. The angle of the shoulder blade told me that the leg was flexed and not extended straight back. That could have been big trouble. My soothing tone disintegrated as her uterus seized like a vise, pinning my arm. The calf's left foot was somewhere under his chest, and every push drove his knee hard against the bony arch of the cow's pelvis. I eased my arm out and rinsed in the bucket, rolling my sleeve up to my shoulder. To straighten the leg I would have to go deeper, deep enough to cup the toe of the foot and bring it forward over the ridge of bone.

  The only songs I knew by heart were old Simon and Garfunkel. We started out with "Bridge Over Troubled Water." My voice shook and I took a few deep breaths. The little cow stood fast, hams trembling as I pushed in, palm up, under the calf's chin, but the fact that she was standing meant the weight of the calf rested right where I needed to go. By the time I had worked my way down to his brisket I had forgotten the words to "Troubled Water" and started on "Sounds of Silence." The heifer shifted, nearly squatting with the power of her contractions, and I switched from song to Lamaze, focusing on the root of her tail, breathing deep and slow to control my own pain as hundreds of pounds of pressure crushed my arm between the calf's body and hers. As each spasm ended, I pushed farther into the cow, triggering another.

  By the time I had the foot in my left hand, the heifer and I were locked together in an intense cycle. I heard nothing but panting, felt nothing beyond the thud of the calf's heartbeat on the inside of my wrist, the heifer's pulse answering, pounding against the back of my hand. In some dim part of my mind I knew that in a matter of seconds I would have to quit, pull out and change hands, or go for help. With my free hand I reached in and grabbed the calf's nose and shoved with all my strength, pushing him back against the tide as I pulled his left foot forward. When it happened, it happened all at once. The cow paused for breath, the uterus relaxed, the calf slid back and the hoof cupped in my fist popped over the pelvic bowl. The heifer tensed to push. I made a fast shift, grabbing the leg with my good hand, jerking it straight before it could slide back down. It was done.

  I fell back against the fence, crouched against the rails cursing my own weakness as the shakes took over. My right arm was coated with blood and mucus and numb to the shoulder, and I worked at it, flexing and rubbing until nerves began to sizzle and heat swelled in my fingers. If the umbilical cord had been pinched or broken when I pushed the calf back, I had about two minutes to get him to fresh air before his heart stopped. The calving chains still hung from my right hand. I made a pass through the bucket with them and worked a loop over each rubbery hoof, pulling a noose snug on each foreleg. The calf puller rested just outside the fence, and I hauled it over and lowered it into place.

  The puller is designed to fit a standing cow. I had a side theory that cows were not designed to give birth that way, any more than women were designed to give birth flat on their backs with their feet in the air. I hooked the cable to the chains on the calf's feet, then winched up the slack, already reaching, one-handed, to hit the release on the head-catch. When it sprang open the heifer staggered sideways and knelt in the straw, held only by the lariat on her hind foot. There was no resistance when I grabbed her front leg and rolled her on her side, leaping back to grab the long end of the puller before the whole damned mess came unraveled.

  The cow and I worked together, her pushing, me pulling as hard as I dared, but by the time we got the head clear it didn't look good. The legs were stretched tight by the puller and the head sagged down to the straw, eyes open, tongue hanging swollen and limp. I could put more pressure on the cable, maybe enough to break the calf's legs or pull him in half. I could work the handle left and right, up and down, hoping to change the angle enough to jar him loose faster. I could scream every foul word I knew. I could run to the bunkhouse and kick the hired man out of bed. I could get John up and tell him to calve his own goddamned cows. I could drive seventy miles to town and sit in a bar and smoke like a whore.

  I swore and hauled on the winch, going up on my knees to shove the handle toward the cow's hind legs, both of us straining until the calf finally burst free in a wash of thick fluid. He wasn't dead, quite. I squeezed his brisket between my palms and found a heartbeat. But when I ran my hand in his mouth to clear it, there was no gag reflex. I pulled the chains out of the grooves they had made in his forelegs, jerked the loop off the cow's foot, then grabbed the calf by one hind leg and dragged him backward to the oil drum I kept in the warming shed. I rolled him up on it until his head hung down and his lungs drained. John would have picked him up by the hind legs and held him upside down. I hated not being able to do that, but physical strength was one difference I couldn't ignore. I slapped on the calf's ribs until he sorted out a ragged job of breathing, then dragged his limp body over where his mother was struggling to stand, her back legs as wobbly as a newborn's.

  When she caught scent of him, her ears snapped forward, and I felt my throat swell. Cows have a language for their newborns, eager, anxious groanings and mutterings they make at no other time. I watched her nose him over, his ribs rising, falling in a shallow pattern, then begin to wash him with tentative swipes of the tongue. He would live or die by morning. If he lived he'd be crippled for a few days, bones bruised from the bite of the chains. We'd have to milk the cow out and feed him by hand until he could stand. If he died we'd peel his hide and make a jacket for one of the orphan calves in the barn, convince the cow it was hers.

  Blood and mucus had dried to a thick glaze on my arms, pulling and flaking like another skin as I set the pen in order and dumped the water down a floor drain. It would take a brush, hot water, soap. I rolled my cuffs down over it and grabbed my coat and watch. Quarter to five. The calf still hadn't moved when I hit the main light switch and let myself out through the warming room door and into the spring night. The moon was bright. I squatted in the square shadow cast by the shed, easing my shoulders against the rough boards. There was movement on the path to my right, and the red end of my cigarette wobbled in my fingers for the second it took to place the sound and settle back. I took another drag and closed my eyes, waiting for hot breath to hit my cheek. "You goddamn ignorant dog," I whispered. Katie plunked herself down and made both ears available, grunting with pleasure as I described her own humble faults and those of her ancestors. I lit another cigarette off the end of the first and closed my eyes again, drifting.

  There was a level of tired I learned to welcome, a place where everything rose and passed without mattering, hairpins or harness rings, benign sex or winter storms. Words skipped across this flat place without sinking. Hate and love filled the same space, the same need. From here I could observe myself objectively, peacefully. I could change, but I ignored the old rules at my own peril and on my own time. I was the daughter of a good rancher, wife of another, daughter-in-law on a corporate ranch. I could do it all—I could play their game until I dropped—but I would never own a square foot of land, a bushel of oats or a bum calf in my own name.

  When Katie lifted her head, I opened my eyes. The yard light was flashing on and off. John was awake. I stood for a moment limbering the chill from my legs, then started for the house, already thinking the routine of breakfast, remembering the flashlight still in the calving shed, set down on a straw bale so long ago. Days. Hours. The breeze had died in the predawn chill, but behind the barn the creek full of spring runoff roared on and the stars flared against the imperfect black to the east. Nothing out here stood still. Walking this prairi
e at night I could believe something rippled just beneath the sage, something immense and quiet. I could imagine the land crouching, pushing up a new hill each night, snaking a network of roots and rhizomes through the soil, then settling back innocently as the sun rose. Who would notice? At first light John would step out to have a look at the day, and the change would niggle at the edge of his vision. There would be a moment of searching, checking the clouds, checking the set of gates, the lay of buildings, of meadows and fields. Something. Something his mind would not register, could not imagine. He'd hold for a second, then stretch and pull on his gloves. And the day would begin.

  Afterword: Leaving Home

  It has taken me thirty years to recognize the infinite patience of the land we lived on, how a way of life can consume people from the inside out. Always we waited for next year, hope whispered on the east wind, snatched away by the west, trusting as blood turned to dust that the rains would come. And they did. Sometimes too late, when the wheat stood like straw, other times in a wide swath that buried crops in a mire of roots and mud. But always they came, just enough to stir the imagination of more.

  For more than a century, the people living this marginal lifestyle have warmed to their own mythology and basked in the admiration of the world. We are ranchers, cowboys—a special breed. We are feeding the world in the face of all hardship: The latchstring is always out. Our investment in this image of independence and generosity is visceral. The truth is more complex, however, and not nearly as popular. Farming and ranching is a business, and people living in the wide-open West are just as concerned with turning a profit, making a living and raising their kids as any other group is. It's always been that way Where the romantic idea of cowboy life paid off was the point at which it set us apart from other businesses: we didn't have to make a profit to be doing a good job—we were in it for deeper, more soul-sustaining reasons, like freedom and autonomy

  When public opinion turned, it seemed to happen overnight. Third- and fourth-generation ranch kids like me received no introduction to the land and the forces that govern it. The land was simply there, a network of place names we came to know like the names of the people around our dinner table. In the daily talk of work and range planning, my parents did not speak differently of the deeded land they owned outright and the public lands they leased. But by the seventies, stories began to surface of hunters and streamside anglers who stood their ground and argued their right to access. Terms such as "multiple use" and "environmental impact" became common. As the pressure grew, families who had tended those acres since the turn of the century and before began to bristle at the invasion. These are lands passed down in families. These are leases that sell just like deeded land; the new owners pay the same amount per acre of leased land as they do per acre of deeded, and when the lease is transferred, they continue to pay the annual fee. Asking a third-generation rancher what of this land is his and what is merely leased is like asking the parent of a blended family which children are adopted, which are his own. The correct answer, stated with dignity, is, "We don't remember."

  America's love affair with the mythical West has held strong for more than a hundred years. We need to believe in it, for if a frontier exists just over the horizon, those of us asleep behind bolted doors in cities are not trapped. We can imagine that somewhere a community of our own awaits us, a life on the land under the big sky. Since the 1980s, tens of thousands of families have relocated to the inland west, searching for the promised land and changing it irrevocably as they go. Like the first pioneers, more than half pack up their disillusionment and leave after a couple of years. They move to small towns and find them staggering under increasing burdens of unemployment and poverty, crime and alcoholism. They're dismayed when the modern-day Shane drives through town with a lip full of chew, a rifle rack in the back window of his pickup and a bumper sticker that reads: "This Land is MY Land— (Yours is in California)." They go to court to stop the Cartwright boys from running cattle on Forest Service land or leasing their mineral rights to an international conglomerate that wants to punch a gold mine or a gas well in the North Forty. They discover that the cowboy hero will shoot any wolf, coyote, bear or bison that threatens his livelihood, as he always has, and some that don't as well. A varmint's a varmint. But now he posts the land against human trespassers as well, and spends as much time defending his business as he used to spend running it. The latchstring is no longer out. There are two dreams being destroyed here, and on both sides the outrage is palpable.

  As the new century begins, I am fortunate to still have my family on the land where I grew up. I can drink coffee in the kitchen where I learned to bake bread, bathe in the same shallow cast-iron tub of sulfur and salts, visit the lopsided outbuildings where I once fed chickens, scouted new litters of kittens and roped milk pen calves. I can ride through a herd of cattle descended from cattle my grandfather knew. When I'm done, I get in my car and drive back to Missoula, secure in my sense that the landscape of my childhood remains intact, in place. For fifty years my parents have held the line, grubbing a marginal existence from marginal land, preserving the heart of ranching tradition even as the lights of the community winked out around them. They've paid dearly for my privilege.

  In August of 1986, I left Phillips County with a new divorce and an old car, with three scared kids and some clothes piled in back. We followed the sun west for hours, climbing mountain passes, crossing river after river, until we spanned the final bridge into Missoula. The kids started school the next morning, and within days I started my freshman year at the University of Montana, the four of us holding hands and stepping together into a world of mountains and shopping malls. Even the air smelled different—the rotten-egg stench of pulp mills blowing in from the west, or, as often, the clean, rich redolence of the Clark Fork river. I savored the mornings most, when the chill lingered and the air lay crisp with dew and the fragrance of alpine vegetation. Missoula lives under a canopy of trees, and I found myself half ducking the first few weeks, conscious of feeling something always hovering overhead, turning to look up and up through the limbs of giant firs, sprawling maples and oaks. And, of course, there were people. More people than I'd ever seen before.

  Finding a job that fits around kids and classes is hard. After a year of trying to adjust our lives to unpredictable schedules and late-night shifts in restaurants, I settled into the construction trades like coming home. Dale Thorn, an industrial arts instructor returning to the university, became a dear friend and teacher for the years he spent in Missoula. Under his tutorship, I learned painting, power tools and the ABCs of woodwork. In 1988 I began my apprenticeship with Cliff Cain, owner of Custom Wood Floors. A master craftsman who had apprenticed in Hollywood, Cliff found the patience to humor my schedule, and the integrity and compassion to pay me union scale, even though I was in a position to demand neither. He took my trade schooling the next step.

  For years, I sanded and finished hardwood floors around classes, and worked full-time summers and holidays, balancing my trade and my education as best I could. By my junior year at the university, a reputation for intensity began to precede me into the classroom and onto the job site. Scholarships would put me through, and I went after them with deliberate, humorless attention to detail. I strode into classrooms with my hair stuffed under a baseball cap and my sweatshirt dripping sawdust, trailing the reek of acetone and formaldehyde. I sat in the front row where I could hear the lecture over the residual ringing in my ears.

  Summers the kids spent with their father, I ran a bootleg painting crew manned by graduate students in addition to full-time floor work, jamming sixteen to eighteen paid hours into every day, banking time and money against the start of the school year, when I had to cut back and be a mom and a student again. By then I was ready to slide back into my kid routine: home by 5 p.m. to arrange supper, shopping, errands, laundry and music lessons; my own homework and class preparation from 9 p.m. until midnight or later; and up again at 6 a.m. to read the
paper and get the household percolating through the single bathroom and off to two or three different schools. When I left the house in the morning, I carried my toolbox, a backpack full of books and a stainless-steel thermos of coffee so black it threw daggers. I did not own a purse. I did not own a dress. I did this for eight straight years. And gradually, in the hours before dawn and after dark, I found my voice again as my children slept. I began to write.

  In June of 1997,1 made the long drive to south Phillips County accompanied by a tinge of sadness. Second Creek School had been without students for years, and with no children waiting in the wings, the decision had been made to close it permanently. All its contents were to be sold at auction. In addition to its own thirty-year accumulation of books and materials, it held all the books, desks and materials we'd moved over from South First Creek School in 1965, as well as collections from the long defunct Robinson, Rock Creek and Fourchette Schools. The sale would mark the end of an era. The First Creek Community Hall was falling into disuse and disrepair. The 4-H Clubs had folded or moved to Malta. With the rural schools closed, the Regina and Sun Prairie communities had little to offer young families.

  I turned south onto the Midale Road, rolling my eyes at the latest road-improvement project. Some land-managing arm of government had thought to string wooden signs south like a trail of bread crumbs, every reservoir and creek, every branch and fork in the road posted with place names, arrows, mileage. Public lands were suddenly popular, and in an effort to accommodate visitors, the boggy gumbo grade had been fortified with gravel in a few places, too. Our end of the county had made a name for itself with big-game hunters, some miracle of water, forage and isolation combining to produce a number of trophy mule deer and elk. Varmint hunters had been welcomed, too, as a means of slowing down the prairie dogs in the absence of enough natural predators. South Phillips County, alone, supported 26,000 acres of prairie dog towns, occupied by around a half a million prairie dogs. By the early nineties, the combined efforts of state and federal agencies had succeeded in planting a small, fragile population of black-footed ferrets among the prairie dogs on the CMR Wildlife Refuge south of John's ranch. From my home in Missoula, I'd kept an idle ear to the ongoing soap opera of the endangered species experiment, the chest-thumping among local/state/federal officials over who was in charge, the tiny ferret radio collars tracked to mounds of coyote crap as the big predators ate the little predators, the official intervention when the plague began decimating the prairie dog population—once considered nature's way of controlling overpopulation. Now, with the ferret project at risk, officials set about dusting prairie dog towns with insecticide to kill the fleas that carried the plague that killed the dogs that fed the ferrets . . . and on and on.