There are no biological secrets for farm children. When the bull jumped on the cow’s back, we maneuvered in close, one eye on the thrusting bull, one eye on a means of escape should he turn on us. “They’re breeding,” Miranda said, sighing. “That’s good, right, Mom?” Everything looked routine at first. The cow was in strong heat. She stood eagerly, the bull mounted and thrust, and I could see the bright pink stick of his penis. But upon looking closer, I saw that it wasn’t like a normal bull’s, not straight but curved sharply to the right. When he thrust, it was not hitting home but brushing bizarrely against the cow’s flank. I biked home with Miranda and Googled “bull penis deformities,” which nobody should do on a full stomach. This guy had a lateral penile deviation. It might have been congenital or caused by injury, but in either case, none of the cows had been bred. It took a few weeks to acquire another bull. So Posy was calving in the cold of late November instead of the good fall grass and gentle sun of September, as we had intended.
* * *
I walked through the barn with Mary. The wind had built to a gale, with sharp snow in it. It was a little more comfortable in the covered barnyard, which we had built the year before with a grant from the USDA. It was airy, deeply bedded, and had lights. We had added tarps as walls to break the wind. The USDA will give you a roof and a cement pad to keep the runoff out of the water, but it won’t give you walls, because that would be a production advantage, keeping your cows warm. The tarps were free, and they worked.
There were five dry cows and heifers. Four of them stood around the bale and ate. But Posy was by herself, lying down, standing up, pacing, stopping for a mouthful of hay every once in a while. She was in early labor. Her udder had changed in just two hours. It was so tight now it looked almost translucent, her little heifer teats standing straight out at the corners, a bit of blood on the ends from burst capillaries. She was a beautiful cow, shaped like a fat triangle, and so ripe with her calf. Mary sniffed in the bedding, alert. Then Posy swung her head toward us, saw the puppy, and tensed up. She wasn’t in the deep part of labor yet, when the rest of the world disappears. And this was her first calf. I didn’t want to worry her, so I took Mary home.
When I got back to the barn, Posy was deeper into her labor. She lay down and then stood up. I sat quietly in a corner to watch. The small feet—one hoof brown, one hoof white—poked out of her, retreated, poked out again. The contractions came over Posy, closer and closer, stronger and stronger. The other cows wandered by and snuffed at her, then returned to the hay. Posy did not want their company. She smelled the straw where the birth fluids had dripped. She wanted that spot to herself. Finally, she lay down and did not get up again. The other cows left her alone. She was completely inside her own self. Her neck stretched out with effort. Her mouth opened, and her pointed tongue curled up to touch the roof of her mouth. She let out a deep moan. The little feet advanced again and did not retreat. I had a terrible impulse to interfere, to grasp those feet and pull. I knew better—as long as there aren’t complications, it’s safer for the cow and calf, to let birth happen at its own pace—but that was my instinct.
The colors of birth are blue, white, and red. It is a wet event. The calf is a strange and perfect package, tight and efficient, wrapped up in its sac, pointed toward the exit. Every once in a while, the calf would move a foot. I wondered what Posy was thinking. First calves come slowly, the Old Testament business of the firstborn, who wrenches open the womb. Did Posy think she was dying? Did she think her body was expelling some large, important organ? Maybe there were no thoughts. Steadily, the package advanced. Now the head was out, tucked between the knees. Another tremendous push, and the shoulders were born. Then a slight rest, panting, and one more massive effort, and the calf slid out, whole, separate, and free. The cow lay unmoving, openmouthed, panting, panting. The calf moved first. It wriggled and unfolded, seeming to bloom from a wet arrow into a calf. It bleated. One ear flopped free of its head, where it had been pinned by the funnel of birth. The cow’s consciousness returned, and with it the recognition that there was another being on the straw behind her. Some ancient piece of understanding clicked into place. She mooed the low sonorous moo that is heard only at births. She stood, and the cord between them snapped. Then she turned and, with surety and purpose, began to lick her baby. She licked with vigor, as though the calf were the most delicious thing she’d ever tasted, as if she wanted to imbibe it.
After she had finished her cleaning, I walked to them, to check. If it were a bull calf, the joy would be dimmed by knowing he wouldn’t be with us long; if a heifer, the joy would be full. A heifer is milk, the opposite of death, and she would get the best of everything—the most attentive care, the best grass and feed. And if all went right—if she grew and thrived and got pregnant and had a calf of her own—she would live a long and productive life. I walked up to the wet creature, one ear still pinned, body slick and steaming in the cold air, and felt between her hind legs, and found the four nubs of her future. A heifer. It was cold, and the wind was blowing so hard that the drafts in the barn were like confined storms. The heifer shivered a little at the cruelty of being squeezed out of her floating waterbed to this harsh, frozen world, eighty degrees colder. I let Posy work on her for a while longer. She and her tongue would do better than I and my towels. Then I went to find blankets and to add straw bedding to the calf pen.
It’s always hard to separate them. I’d felt the cow’s labor in my own body, a faint echo, the mammalian sisterhood. When she pushed, I felt the floor of my pelvis release. When she opened her mouth, the tip of my tongue found the roof of my own mouth. As the shoulders emerged and the vulva stretched, I felt impossibility, desperation, inevitability, then resignation to the fact that the only way out is through. And so I had to close my eyes when I took the calf away because I’d feel that too—the longing, the not-rightness of it. I couldn’t avoid it. It had to be done. I picked the calf up and slung her legs over my shoulders, the wet noodle of her umbilical cord cold against my cheek. I lured Posy into the barn, using the calf as a magnet. She followed with that low, grunting maternal moo. I put the calf down in front of a stanchion, and Posy put her head through to sniff her. I locked her in, ready for her first milking, then picked up the calf and carried her away to the blanket in the calf pen, where another heifer calf was napping, only three days old.
Back at the house, I reported the birth to Mark and the girls. Mary examined the smells of birth on my clothes, intensely curious. It was hard to tell what the emotion was behind the sniffing, but it was eager. Mark went out to milk Posy, and I gave the girls their dinner, then we switched places: Mark got them ready for bed, and I went to take care of the calf. Mark had left a gallon of colostrum in the milk house and covered the sleepy calf with a blanket, half buried her in a thick layer of clean straw.
Mary was with me again, not tethered this time, just trotting free at my heels. She was young enough to be scared of the dark and not stray too far from the den of our house at night. In the nightly audio war against the coyotes, Jet was on his own. Mary barked her tiny bark from the doorway. But the combination of the spot of light from my headlamp and that intriguing smell on my pants gave her courage, and she came along. She was growing up.
Two bottles of colostrum steamed in a bucket of warm water in the milk house. They were thick, and the usual yellow-orange was tinted bright red, full of blood from the burst capillaries in Posy’s swollen udder. There were drips of it around the edges of the bottle. I carried it inside my coat to keep it warm, and the colostrum dripped stickily down my hand. Mary, who knew she was not allowed to jump on people, jumped straight in the air next to me, trying to get closer to that smell.
When we got to the back of the barn, the calf was standing and had shed the pile of straw and her blanket. She looked alert now. I climbed over the rail of her pen, and Mary flattened herself to go under. The calf was too young to be frightened of dogs or anything else. Mary sniffed warily at the calf, then rooted t
hrough the straw and found a frozen black puck of meconium, her first feces, the remnant of everything that had happened in the womb. The word “meconium” comes from Greek and means poppy juice. When a calf is born unobserved, you can tell it has sucked by the color of its feces. A calf with a belly full of colostrum will drop bright orange blobs. These too were scattered around the pen, compliments of the other calf. They were half buried in straw, and when Mary discovered them, she found them even more interesting than the black puck.
The power of colostrum is temporary but vitally important. It would give the calf immunity to the pathogens that her mother had encountered in her lifetime. There is only a short period after birth when the calf can absorb that magic. The first hour after birth is best. Six hours is okay. In twelve hours, the open spaces in the calf’s digestive system that could absorb those big protective molecules would have begun to close. It made me think of that liminal time of childhood, the one Jane was exiting, that Miranda was firmly in, when the wall between real and imaginary is permeable. Through the wall fly fairies and spirits, until time seals it up and they become fleeting memories.
I straddled the calf with her head just in front of my thighs, the bottle in one hand, her chin in the other. I wet my fingers with the colostrum and pushed them into her mouth. She sucked them, stepping back as if surprised that something so good existed in a world this cold. I walked backward with her, my fingers in her mouth, until she had backed into the corner of the cinder-block walls. Then I lifted the bottle and pushed the big rubber nipple into her mouth, still holding her between my legs. I pressed down gently against her forehead so she would drop her neck and stick up her nose, to open her esophageal groove and send the colostrum to the proper stomach. Some calves take a few days to learn to suck, but this one was sharp from the start. She sucked, and sucked, and sucked. In a minute, she had downed a quart of colostrum, and the sides of the bottle were caved in with the pressure of her sucking. I pulled the nipple out of her mouth to let air into the bottle, and she resumed her feeding. It is astounding how much colostrum a newborn can drink. I imagined it filling and unfolding her stomach for the first time, like the air had filled and unfolded her wet lungs after birth. She sucked vigorously, a quart, then two, still going. She wouldn’t drink this much milk again, even when she was bigger.
After the calf started the third quart, still sucking hard, I heard something faint and then disconcerting. I looked down to find Mary chewing and tugging on the umbilical cord, which was fresh, fleshy, and attached to the calf. I shooed the puppy away with a growl and a stamp of my foot. Boundaries! She’d need to learn. There is prey, and there is pack. Calves were pack, part of us. In order to underline the point, I ignored Mary and fussed over the calf, stroking her forehead and cooing.
When the second bottle was empty, the calf was so full of warm colostrum that she trembled. Her tongue pushed the nipple from her mouth, and she collapsed into the straw. There was almost a gallon in that little belly. That was good. Without colostrum, there’s not much hope for a calf. With a little colostrum, it would be an uphill battle against illness—scours, navel ill, pneumonia. With this much in her belly, she could face all sorts of pathogens, and I would not worry about her in the night.
CHAPTER 15
Winter arrived, and we settled in for the long haul through the dark. The calves were growing, my flock was growing, the puppy was growing, the children were growing. The farm was growing. Slowly, we came back from the precipice of insolvency. We paid our bills, the mortgage, the taxes. We owned some of the land free and clear. We had assets but no comfort yet. The house was still dim and dark. As winter began to shift to spring, Elizabeth came to stay with us. She was dating a farmer named Paul who had worked for us and then started his own farm a few hours away. Elizabeth had a degree in philosophy and a strong socialist bent. She’d gone to work at Paul’s place as a summer farmhand after an unhappy stint at a chocolate factory. Elizabeth was smart, focused, and intense, and she was having a hard winter. She and Paul had butchered thirty-two pigs between frost and Christmas. There was only one other person on the farm during that time, and three people shouldering all the usual work plus the butchering was simply too much. They’d worked insane hours. When the last pig was cut and in the freezer, Elizabeth went down. She stayed in bed for ten days and spent them, she said, alternately reading and crying in a wet, messy, uncontrollable way. “You must have needed a rest,” I said. “It was not a rest,” she answered. “It was a breakdown.” It was brought on by too much work and too much stress, by trying to figure out all the details of partnership, farming, finances, the shape of their future lives, all of it rolled up into one big blunt thing that knocked her over. She was at our farm to get some perspective. She wanted to know what the view was like from where I stood, another decade on.
I’d invited Racey over to join us for tea. An hour before they were due to arrive, I pulled out a bag of flour, mostly white, that I’d sifted from the bag of hard red winter wheat that Barbara had ground fresh for the share the week before. The wheat had grown in Superjoy, in that good drained soil. I remembered watching it sprout in the late fall and come back, after it was grazed once, to grow to its full height, then turn brown, the heavy heads bending under their own weight. Once wealth was measured by the whiteness of food. Brown things, unrefined things, were for poor people, white things for the rich. In our house, white flour was for company, not because it was expensive but because it was refined, too easy to digest, and too poor in nutrients for everyday eating.
I put a pint of butter on the back of the stove to soften just a little. This butter and I were old friends too. I had milked the cows and separated the cream, churned the cream into butter, and packed it into pint jars. The preciousness of butter, of all fat, is lost on the world. This pound of butter was made from twenty pounds of milk, half a day’s production for one of our mid-lactation cows. When the butter was soft, I mixed it with sugar and a splash of vanilla from a nearly empty pint jar stuffed with fragrant whole beans and refreshed every few months with a slug of rum or bourbon. The beans came from our friend Rick, who had bought a train car full of them when the price of vanilla beans dropped. He parked it, waiting for the price to rise again. He brought us a whole brown bag of them and handed it to me in our kitchen. I opened it, and the room filled with their dark, blooming, spice-island smell. I suddenly felt like my kitchen was richly adorned, as if he’d handed me a bag of rubies.
I added the flour to the sugar and butter and mixed it into a thick dough that I pressed into a pie pan and pricked all over with a fork. For fun, I scattered a few pieces of lavender on the top, from a jar that the girls and I had gathered and dried the previous summer. Then into the oven it went.
Racey called hello through the kitchen door. Her belly was so big, it preceded her down the hall. Her baby was due in the spring. We poured tea and ate shortbread, and while the children scribbled in the corner, we talked. Three women, from three different farms, at three different stages of life, talking shop. I realized, a little startled, that I was the elder. When did that happen? Elizabeth was looking to me, to give her a preview of what was to come, in the same way that I had looked to Maryrose. Racey was looking to me too, to get a glimpse of motherhood. I wasn’t sure I was qualified, but who else was there? Elizabeth talked about the overwork and the way the farm always came first. She worked hard, but compared to her, Paul was a maniac. When he was stressed by a problem on the farm, he threw work at it. And worked and worked and worked. He would work beyond any reasonable person’s idea of how much one should work. This scared her. Given that she had hit her limit, she wanted to know, should she continue to work on the farm? Should she get an off-farm job? “Should we,” she asked, “get married?”
I was glad Racey was there too. She and Nathan had had their difficulties. Show me a couple who hasn’t. They had just finished building their barn and were rushing to finish their house before the baby came, before the spring work hit. They ha
d already moved out of the old one into the new house’s basement. It was a balmy 55 degrees in there, she said, and she couldn’t quite believe the luxury. She had lived two winters in a house so cold they couldn’t take off all their clothes at once. Two years without being able to take a shower whenever she liked, instead arranging a time with a neighbor. There were some glitches: the construction had created a mud pit through which she must wade, heavily pregnant, in order to leave the house or return to it. Also, the shower that she had awaited so long used an imperfectly repaired secondhand heater that shifted to cold without warning, so someone had to be stationed next to it and flip it back on mid-rinse. But the size of the improvement was immense. I asked Racey what she thought the best part of farm life was. “We become extremely easy to please,” she answered.
Most of the questions we talked over that day weren’t about agriculture or our challenging living spaces. They were almost all about the relationships. How do you share power, decision-making, and responsibility on your farm? How do you divide the work? How do you shape the thing you love without fighting over it? How do you find time for love? How do you have anything for yourself? How do you stop the farm from eating you up? How do you work in a professional way alongside the person with whom you share a bed and crazy amounts of emotional subtext? If you have employees who live and work closely with you, where is the line between boss and friend? And how to maintain peace with those people while also being an effective manager? How do you make boundaries and construct some privacy for yourself?
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