Billy Ray's Farm

by Larry Brown

  I had to kind of gird my loins on the way back over there. Sometimes you can’t understand why everything has to go wrong. Maybe if I’d found her the day before. Maybe if it hadn’t been snowing or maybe if I hadn’t written all day and could have gotten over there earlier. Maybe if the boys had told me there were a couple more acres of woods the heifers could wander off into when they got ready to get in trouble. Or to go even further back, maybe if Billy Ray never had bought the damn things in the first place. You can run all that stuff through your head over and over, but it doesn’t accomplish anything.

  I drove as close to her as I could, then started carrying the stuff through the fence. Going down through the bushes with it I had to bend over and collide with branches. I had to keep my gloves on to keep my hands from stiffening up.

  The come-along is a heavy, cumbersome tool, made out of cast iron and a steel cable and a couple of high-strength metal hooks. The idea is to hook one end of it to something that won’t move, like a building or a tree, and hook the cable to what you have to move and then work the ratchet handle, which is made of thin conduit pipe that will bend if you overload the three-ton capacity. That’s six thousand pounds. You can get your truck unstuck with it, or pull a tree out of a pond, as I’ve done several times. I knew it would pull the calf out but I didn’t know what it might do to the cow. But if I did nothing she would lie there and die.

  It might have been a little easier if I’d had my chain-saw to clear some of the brush, but I had neglected to bring it. She was facing with her head to the left and I tied the log chain around a little tree and stretched the cable out. I had a big four-foot nylon fish stringer that was about a quarter inch thick. I tied it onto the calf’s feet, above the hooves, making two overhand knots at the ends so that I could put the hook of the cable into the middle of it. Part of the amniotic sac was dried to the calf’s head. I pulled that away. He’d been dead long enough that the hide beneath it was dry and fluffy. I ought to go ahead and say now that I talked to myself and the cow for the next hour and forty-five minutes, and anybody who could have walked up behind me and heard that might have thought Larry needed an emergency trip to the funny farm.

  When the cable first tightened, the calf moved a little, maybe an inch. Some steam started coming out of the heifer and then all my cable was gone, and I had to unhook it and make a smaller loop around the tree with the chain. I took off my gloves and ran my fingers up inside her to see how much space there was between the birthing walls and the calf’s body. I couldn’t get my fingers in up past my wedding ring. There was nothing to do but keep pulling on the ratchet, keep taking up the slack, over and over.

  The heifer was groaning and moaning. Once in a while she’d lift her head and roll her eyes. I couldn’t rightly imagine the amount of pain she was going through, so I tried not to think about it. A similar feeling used to come over me when I was with the fire department and working to get somebody out of a crushed automobile. Just do the job as fast as you can. But that ground was cold, just like the air, and there was a good chance she’d been right there ever since sometime Monday, and if she’d been real unlucky, maybe Sunday night. Had she had a drink of water in all that time? Hell no.

  The calf came on out maybe three or four more inches, and then I was out of cable again and right up next to the tree I’d hooked to. So I had to find another one, move everything again. I knew that the natural movement of a calf being born is out and down, since the cow is usually standing. The angle I had was straight out. So I moved to another tree about four or five feet above that one to try to pull the calf at something more like a forty-five-degree angle. I didn’t know if that would work any better because I figured that most of the fluid that’s supplied to ease the birth had either already dried on the outside or was backed up inside, behind the calf. All the lubrication was gone and after I tied the chain again and started moving the ratchet handle, the calf didn’t move but the heifer did. She started sliding across the ground toward me, pulled by the force of three tons. I felt like just sitting down and crying. I knew I was going to kill her. Billy Ray was off with Eli at the Dixie National at Jackson and didn’t even know any of this was happening. All he was going to come home to was some more bad news. It didn’t seem right for anybody to have such terrible luck.

  There was nothing I could do but keep working, but after a solid hour of pulling that handle and moving the chain to different trees, all I accomplished was to get the cow turned a hundred and eighty degrees and the calf halfway out. And it looked like he wasn’t going to come out any farther. I couldn’t tie the heifer’s head to a tree because that would kill her. Or pull the calf apart. I didn’t know what else to do. I thought about going back to the house and calling the vet again, get him out here, maybe go get one of my older friends who knew something about this, but in another way I didn’t want anybody to see this, and I didn’t want to give up and admit that I couldn’t do what needed to be done. So I sat down and smoked a cigarette and rested. I looked everything over. The heifer was lying within two feet of a big cedar tree with her rear end pointing toward it, the same tree she’d had her head almost up against when I started working. I said, Hell, if you could get her up against that tree with the calf in the open, maybe the tree would stop her from moving and the calf would come on out once you put the force on it again. Any vet reading this will probably see a lot of things I did wrong, but I was just trying to figure it out. All she was doing by then was lying there and shivering, so I moved everything around again and found a little cedar back up on the bushes and laid it all out straight, hooked to it, and slid her up against the tree. When her hind end came to rest against it, she stopped moving, and the calf stretched out tight. I talked to her. I told her, This is it, baby, I’m either going to kill you or get that dead thing out of you, and I may do both. I was scared to pull so hard. I didn’t know how much pressure that little dead body could stand. But everything got very tight, and it was hard to move the ratchet. I worked it slowly, one notch at a time. Then it all jumped loose and I saw that my big fish stringer had snapped in two.

  I never have a whole lot of sense in a situation like this, generally run around in a panic, but this was a rare occasion and I had realized before I left the house that the fish stringer might break, and I had gone into the utility room and untied a big yellow braided nylon rope that stays tied to my wire mesh fish bucket. I tie it to my boat when I’m fishing to keep what I catch alive until I’m ready to dress them. The yellow rope was in the back of my pickup and I ran back across the pasture to get it. I made the same loops, tied them to the calf’s feet, and hooked it all up again. The heifer let out a bawl when I tightened it up and I worked the handle a few more times. It couldn’t have felt good to her, but it must have been some kind of relief when the calf slid out all black and smoking, the hindquarters wet and shiny, the beautiful little feet streaked with white and looking soft as cheese. The placenta rolled out immediately, followed by a couple of quarts of bloody fluid. We both just rested then.

  After a while I got up and pulled the calf away from her. It was a little heifer, and if anything it was bigger than the red bull we’d lost a few weeks before in the barn. That chilly wind was still blowing and although the sun was shining down on that little glade, the dead calf gave me a feeling of gloom so deep I didn’t have much hope for her mother. I didn’t figure she’d be able to get up, and without a helicopter there was no way to get her up out of those woods.

  It was getting close to three o’clock by then and it would be dark in a few more hours. I dragged the calf over to the fence, under the wire and up to my pickup. I let down the tailgate and got up in the bed of the truck to lift it inside. It wasn’t as hard to load up as a grown deer. All my stuff was still down in the woods with the heifer and I had to make a couple more trips to get everything out.

  The lives of cows are fickle and uncertain. One day they may look fine and the next day be dead as a hammer. They can stumble in a creek and never ge
t up or out. They’ll find a bag of fertilizer stuck back in some place you thought they couldn’t reach and eat that, fall over dead. Get out in the road and get hit by a car. This particular accident is doubly unfortunate for the owner of the loose cow, because not only are you out the money the cow was worth, but also liable to have to pay for fixing somebody’s vehicle. Hitting a cow at about forty miles per hour will mess a car up real good. So I was already having a pretty bad case of what I call the Dead Cow Blues. She probably wasn’t going to get up. It was going down to freezing that night and she was going to have to lie there shivering and shaking, suffering, all night long. And she might have to stay that way for three or four days. Unless. Unless I went home, loaded up the .357, and put a bullet into her brain.

  But it wasn’t my cow. It was Billy Ray’s cow, and he didn’t even know what was going on.

  The first thing to do was dispose of the calf. I drove down on the Cutoff Road, stopped in the bottom next to the bridge over Potlockney Creek, and dragged the calf out of the pickup and into the tall weeds beside the road. I knew the buzzards would clean the calf up in a few days. I took my rope off its feet because even though the calf was dead, the urge to go fishing would always come again.

  I was pretty morose driving home. Even if the vet came out, what could he do for her at this point? Could he give her a shot or would he advise me to dispose of her humanely? I was willing to do that if I absolutely had to, and I would have to if he said so, but I wasn’t going to shoot one of Billy Ray’s heifers just on my own judgment. Neither did I want her to just lie there and suffer and suffer and suffer.

  LeAnne, my twelve-year-old, had come in from school by the time I got home and I’d had no food in me all day long. There was a little smidgen of homemade brown whiskey that a friend of mine had sent over on a UPS truck from Alabama, and I got a shot glass of that and checked the messages on the answering machine. Billy Ray had called home the night before and learned of the missing heifer, and he was having another one of his fits, trying to place a collect call on an answering machine three times. Oh shit. I got them old Dead Cow Blues. I damn sure wasn’t going to call him up at the Holiday Inn in Jackson while he was getting Eli ready for the show and lay all that on him. I was going to tell him, just not right then.

  I told LeAnne she had two choices: She could leave the answering machine on and ignore Billy Ray when he called back again, or she could take the collect call and lie to him and tell him she hadn’t seen me, or had seen me but didn’t know what was going on. I’d already told her everything that was going on, what the heifer and I had gone through, the blood and the guts in the woods, et cetera. She was watching one of her sitcoms on satellite and fixing herself a sandwich and made an easy decision—said she’d just lie. I wish I could make decisions that way, in a snap, and not have to agonize over everything the way I do. I took the whiskey back to my room and called up Mary Annie. I often have to rely on her for cow advice since she grew up on a farm and I didn’t, and she has driven tractors and chopped cotton and had spent most of her young life, the part that happened before I came into the picture, chasing and doctoring and feeding cows.

  We talked for a while and the conversation wasn’t too cheery. The vet had doubts about the heifer ever getting up, just as I did. So, inevitably, the subject of maybe having to shoot it came up. I told her I hated to have to do it and she said she’d do it. We talked about Billy Ray and what he was going to say. I told her about the fit he was having on the answering machine. I thought it was pretty ironic that he could smell a rat all the way from Jackson. She told me to go back and check on the heifer and she’d talk to him, try to calm him down. I hung up and sat in my chair for a minute, looking out the window. There was no doubt in my mind that the heifer was a goner. It was probably going to degenerate into a situation where the only question was whether to let her die slowly on the frozen ground or put her out of her misery.

  None of that made me feel any better. I got the revolver out of the bedside drawer and put some bullets in my pocket and went back over there in the pickup. She was still down and shaking all over when I reached her. I figured she was dying. I thought about walking back to the pickup to get out the gun and shoot her. I thought maybe it wouldn’t be too bad if I leaned in close and averted my eyes. But what if it didn’t kill her? I know some guys who shot a cow in the head with a .410 slug one time and the cow tore down half the barn and ran off in the woods.

  What to do? What to do? Let her lie there and suffer, or stop the suffering? Call the vet? It was almost dark. I doubted he had any miracle drug that would make her jump to her feet. I wound up giving her a drink of water and going back home. I gave myself another drink of whiskey.

  MARY ANNIE LAID the bad news on Billy Ray that night.

  I had to get on the phone with him for a while and listen to all of it. He wanted to know why his luck was always so bad and I didn’t have an answer for him. He was a hundred and fifty miles away and he was supposed to show Eli the next day and he said he was coming home. I told him he couldn’t, that he had to show the bull because it was the third time and after that, Eli was ours. Don’t you come home, I told him.

  I’m coming, he said. No you ain’t, I said. Don’t you come home.

  It took a while but we finally got him calmed down a little. We told him we’d see him the next night and if the cow was still alive by then, there was still some hope left. I told him I’d go check on her the first thing in the morning. We hung up, and I could only shake my head over how truly bad his luck was. Two deliveries, two dead calves. Billy Ray’s farm wasn’t working yet.

  THE NEXT DAY I was up early. I grabbed a cup of coffee and hit the door, drove over to Tula and sprang down to the woods. I was fully expecting to see her stretched out dead, but when I got down close to her I could see that not only was she alive, but she had managed to move about three feet away from the tree. I ran and got a bucket of water from the pond, lying on the icy boards on the boat dock and dipping it full. I knelt next to the heifer and trickled the water into her mouth. Her tongue was long and gray and I could hear it going down her throat. The swelling in her side had gone down some and she actually tried to get up on her knees. I definitely wasn’t ready to shoot her then, and I even felt a little better about everything. But she was still down. I got down next to her and tried to roll her over onto her belly, thought she might be able to get up if I did that, but she was too heavy for me to move. I thought of cranes, tractors, slings. It was a jungle down there. By that point I was ashamed to call the vet since I’d let her lie there all night already. I knew that Billy Ray was coming in that night and I decided it was his baby, I’d let him decide what to do. But she did look better than she had the day before. I came home and worked for a while, then went back and checked on her again, gave her some more water. It crossed my mind to give her some hay, but I didn’t. I didn’t figure she’d be able to eat, stretched out on her side like that.

  We tend to have these long, involved family discussions in the kitchen where everybody gets to put their two cents in. That night when Billy Ray came home, it was pretty bad. His mother had told him to sell the three other heifers, had already told him to sell the other four after the first calf died, but sometimes he’s like me, stubborn as hell, and trying to talk to him is like trying to talk to a post. But he called up Rodney White and got him to agree to come over the next morning and pick up the other heifers and haul them to the sale in Senatobia and try to get part of his money back before they one-by-one slowly keeled over and died in childbirth. He mentioned his cow trouble to Rodney, who had been in the cow business a very long time, and Rodney told him to get six ounces of turpentine and a pint of mineral oil and mix it together and pour it down the heifer’s throat and it would thin her blood and she’d probably get up the next day. Suddenly the air was electric. Hope had sprung anew!

  I’d put a big ham in the oven just before I had departed for my last cow-checking of the day and it was on the table a
long with black-eyed peas and macaroni and french fries. The boys and LeAnne went ahead and started eating so they could go over to Tula and load up the heifers, haul them over here and turn them into the lot where they’d be ready to walk into Rodney’s trailer the next morning. The kid had already loaded his bull and pulled a trailer all the way from Jackson, unloaded him, and now he was hauling cows after dark. His mother and I just forgot supper for the moment and got into the T-Bird and hit the road to town, in search of turpentine and mineral oil.

  We had to go to Super D, of course, wandering up and down the aisles among the toothpaste and hemorrhoid ointment for something I was pretty sure they didn’t even sell. But we found it, in tiny blue bottles, the turpentine plainly marked HARMFUL OR FATAL IF SWALLOWED. Hell, this shit’ll probably kill her for sure, I told Mary Annie. But on the other hand, I thought, maybe it’s not harmful or fatal to cows. We grabbed the mineral oil and got out of there and drove home fast. I found an empty Wild Turkey bottle under the counter and mixed it all up in the sink. The boys took it to Tula and poured it down her throat by the weak glow of the same flashlight we had used on the little red bull we lost.

  I was apprehensive and uneasy in my bed that night, hoping our luck would change for the better. I dreamed of cows standing on their hind legs going in and out of the pasture in a rusted red trailer, with their horns and hooves poking out, waving like people you see pictures of on those topless two-decker buses in England.

  NEXT MORNING SHE was still alive. The water had frozen in the bucket and I tried to smash the ice with a stick, but finally had to beat it against a tree to break it and give her a drink. I walked over to the barn and gathered an armload of hay and offered it to her, and she became agitated and began drawing the hay into her mouth with her long gray tongue, grinding it on her back teeth, and I knew then that I should have done it sooner. Some of the stems were more like sticks and I pulled them out of her mouth and kept kneeling next to her, giving her a drink of water once in a while. I kept watching her eyes. I couldn’t read any pain in them, and there was no way she could express what she had been through. If I stopped feeding her, she would reach for the hay that was on the ground, pulling it in with her tongue. I sat beside her for a half hour, feeding her, then I gave her a final drink of water and piled all the hay up next to her where she could reach it, and left.