THE
CALF
The smell of the rain hung heavy in the
air. Papa and I walked down the dark, rutted cow path.
"It would have to happen on a night
like this," Papa said, spitting tobacco juice into the Johnson grass
alongside the dusty path. He reached into the baggy pockets of his overalls,
pulled out an old, long-handled flashlight and shone it into the weeds. "I
sure was countin' on sellin' that calf," he said quietly.
I nodded, glancing down at my watch. In
half an hour Gail would be waiting for me on her porch, smelling sweet like
Dove soap in her soft white sweater and her plain brown shoes, a bread wrapper
full of popcorn for the drive-in popped and salted and ready for us to eat held
under her arm.
"How long do you think this is going
to take?" I asked.
The old man turned and looked at me. He was
dressed in his old gray overalls, shiny and slick from wear, and the khaki
baseball cap he had worn when he had pitched softball for Cordova Road High
School many years ago. He looked at me and rubbed his chin, and I could hear
the scrape of his whiskers against his old, hard hands. "I figure it'll
take as long as it takes," he said, spitting tobacco juice into the
silvery, moonlit path.
"How did ya find out he was
gone?" I asked, changing the subject.
"Cow came up by the house at feedin'
time lowin' all sad and I figured something must be wrong."
The old man swung the flashlight from one
side of the path to the other. "Then he didn't come in for feed at all and
I went out callin' and he didn't come in ..." He seemed to spot something
in the mesquite across the draw we had been following, squinted at it for a
moment, then changed his mind and went on. "I was figurin' on paying off
the tractor this year, too," he said.
"Maybe he ain't dead," I said.
"Maybe his head is just stuck in the fence boards or he got caught in the
mud down by the creek or somethin'."
"Maybe," the old man said,
chewing his tobacco fast. "I hope like hell he ain't."
Overhead, thunder broke the silence of the
pasture as the dark clouds began to drift in. I glanced down at my watch. In
fifteen minutes, Gail would be on her porch.
We found the calf lying in the bend of the
wash where it began to slope down to meet the creek. Papa shone the flashlight
on its broad red back until he reached the shoulders where the typical blaze of
Hereford white was.
The beam of light glinted off of a pair of
green, watery-looking eyes, then found the bloody, sharp-nosed face of a
possum. The possum hissed once and was gone in a scuttle of toenails against
the gravel of the wash.
"Goddam varmint," Papa said,
pulling the baseball cap from his head and crushing it in his hands.
I slid down the gravel side of the wash and
knelt down by the calf. Its neck was twisted at an impossible angle and it
already had the curious, stiff-legged rigor mortis that cows always get when
they die. The hole where the possum had been was wet and dark in the now faint
moonlight.
"Must have just broke his neck,"
I said, standing up and dusting off my hands on the side of my jeans.
Papa squeezed his cap between his big hands
and spit the whole wad of tobacco into the darkness. "Got three months of
grain and two months of hay in him," he said. "And the son-of-a-bitch
goes off and breaks his goddam neck."
I could sense the slow anger building in
the old man.
"Yeah," I said noncommittally,
glancing at my watch. Then the clouds sailed over the moon and the pasture was
washed in deep, well-bottom darkness. I looked up the side of the wash at the
old man. The iron-gray stubble on his chin and the tobacco juice shiny on his
lips were the only light things in the darkness of his face.
"Goddam," he said, crushing the
cap between his big, hard old hands.
I looked up at him. "Still going to be
able to pay off the tractor?" I asked.
"Don't know," he said.
The pasture was silent, as if waiting for
the storm overhead to break and get it over with.
"We could get another one," I
said. "We could buy one pretty cheap down at the auction in town Tuesday
and have it raised up good and fat by spring."
The old man shook his head. "Somethin'
would happen. He would just fall in a wash again or the anthrax would get him
or he would drown in the creek."
"We could watch him real close,
Papa," I said.
He spit on the ground. "Somethin'
would happen. Somethin' always happens when you're poor."
As he stood there the rain broke, falling
softly at first, then getting harder and drumming against the dried, packed
dirt of the draw. For a moment Papa was silent, looking at nothing, and all I
could hear was the sound of the rain in the Johnson grass and the faraway
lowing of the cow and for that moment I was afraid.
Then he put the cap back on his head and
stuck his chin into the rain. "Guess we better go back up to the house and
get a rope and the pickup," he said, hunching his shoulders against the
rain. "We got to pull him out of there or he'll wash into the creek and
foul the water and kill the rest of 'em. We'll need the big rope at least,
maybe some chains. Reckon he'll be pretty stiff and hard to move by now."
I bit down hard against my teeth and he
turned suddenly towards me. "Less you got somethin' else to do?" he
said.
I thought of Gail and of the
wildflower-shampoo smell of her hair and the soft place where her neck curved
to meet her shoulder where my hand fit just right and of the salty taste of the
popcorn. Then I looked at Papa, small and old against the rain.
"Naw," I said. "I ain't got
nothin' else to do."
We walked back to the house in the rain and
it was very dark. Papa kept the flashlight off and in his pocket, and I thought
about what I was going to tell Gail.
-- Mike Babel, ARENA 1980, PERSONA 1982 Winner, Gates Thomas Award for Prose
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