The Angel on the Roof

by Russell Banks

  So we’re just pulling into the driveway in Larry’s old bucket-of-rust Taurus—he’s driving, and I’m enjoying the view, so to speak, as there was an almost full moon, and the woods and fields and the roofs of the houses and barns were covered with silver-gray light like frost—when Larry says, “Shit, the cow’s out!” This was not a small thing, nor was it a thing that hadn’t happened to us numerous times already, especially with that particular cow. We raise and butcher all our meat. Or we used to. And there are bears up there on Spruce Hill and wild dogs, which I did not especially want to see eat our cow before we did. Besides, cows can get into all kinds of trouble on their own, break their legs on old fencing or fall down an open well or quarry, and by the time you got to it it’d be dead and rotted and useless to butcher for meat.

  She wasn’t a fancy cow, a Hereford or Black Angus or something, just a cow-cow. But she was important to us, as we never had much for cash income, except summers, when Larry could get work house painting or the odd job that came his way from the tourist industry, from summer people and the such. Come winter, that cow was food on the table for us and the kids. Protein, was how I looked at her, and consequently, since we only raised one at a time, Protein was the name I gave to all our cows, so as not to get too attached to the beast. So as not to forget the reason for its existence, I explained to the kids.

  Although it didn’t really work for them. They always ended up thinking of the cow as a member of the family, practically. To them, Protein was a word like any other and could be turned into a name as easily as Bossy or Elsie. Or my name, even, or Larry’s. For that reason we butchered our animals only on days when the kids were in school or up to my mother’s or sleeping over at a friend’s house. To spare them the actual dispatching and final departure of the cow. If the kids didn’t have to watch it in person, they had no problem with killing animals and butchering them, and they could talk about how they missed old Protein even as they sat at the table chewing on one of her steaks. Kids are like that. They can hold contrary opinions or opposite feelings in their heads without the slightest sense of illogic.

  The barnyard gate was wide open, which is how Larry knew the cow was out. Typically, in a hurry to get to the Spread, he’d probably neglected to latch it after he fed and watered her. I’d been inside, putting the kids down. “Hold your horses, for Christ’s sake, I’m coming!” I told him when I got into the car.

  “Just ’cause it’s still light out don’t mean it ain’t late,” he grumbled.

  “No, Larry, it doesn’t,” I said, and sighed so he could notice. “It certainly does not.” I don’t think I was any more pissed at Larry than usual, but it did feel different to me that night. Heavier somehow, like the force of gravity was dragging my feelings to the ground and staking them there. Although I didn’t pay any heed to it at the time. I’d gotten used to him long ago. Larry’s not a bad man, not as-such, anyhow, and he wasn’t behaving that night any differently than the way he always behaved. Impatient, distracted, self-centered, and critical—that was Larry for as long as I’d known him. But sentimental, too, and, for a man, weepy. Sorrowful is a word I would use. I think that’s what kept me around so long. His sorrow. And I think he knew it.

  I went into the house to check on the kids, while Larry went to the barn and in the moonlight, too late now, closed the gate. I watched him from the window of the darkened kitchen. He made sure this time that it was latched. He moved slowly and deliberately, as if he needed to keep telling himself where he was and what he was doing there. The movements of a drunk man. The kids were all in bed asleep, except for Lydia, who was watching Letterman and had to be reminded that she had school tomorrow so get the hell to bed. “Right now!” I said, and she skulked off, angry and wounded, the way only a thirteen-year-old girl can be. Larry hit the car horn a couple times, and I went out to shut him up so the kids wouldn’t wake. He had the motor running and the car turned around in the driveway, heading out.

  “Where’re you going?” I asked him.

  “The cemetery. She’s probably gone there again, same as last time. Cows are stupid. They keep going back to the same place they got caught last time. Get in,” he said. “It’s dark, I’ll need you to shine the headlights while I catch her.”

  “You bring a bucket of grain?”

  “Yes, I brought a bucket of grain.” Sarcastic.

  “Flashlight?”

  He didn’t answer. I got into the car beside him. “What about your gun? You got your gun?”

  “No. Why?”

  “Get your gun, Larry. Jesus!”

  “Why?”

  “To shoot her, for Christ’s sake! Get your gun! Get your fucking gun!” I don’t know why I was hollering, but I was.

  He got out of the car and went into the house and came back a minute later with his twelve-gauge. “I don’t see the point of shooting her,” he said, laying the gun on the backseat.

  “You need to shoot her, Larry, because you keep forgetting to latch the gate, and she’ll be back down there tomorrow and the next day and the next, until the board of selectmen finally decides to shoot her themselves. And we’ll be out five hundred pounds of beef this winter. Our freezer will be empty, Larry,” I said through gritted teeth. “Don’t you get it?”

  He mumbled something that I took to be a concession and drove out to the road, turned left, and headed down the mile-long hill to the bottom, where we turned onto the narrow, unpaved lane that leads to the town cemetery. The moon had dropped behind the mountains now, and it was pitch dark. It was spooky, in a way, being in a cemetery at night like this. The headlights carved out some space in front of the car, but everything else was lost in blackness, until suddenly a leafy tree branch would drop in front of the windshield or a tombstone loomed up beside the car.

  “We’re never gonna find her here this late,” Larry said. “I’m thinking we should wait for daylight.” He was dead tired and still feeling the booze, I knew, and so was I, but no way was I going to let that cow wander around all night, I told him. Who knows where she’d be by morning? She could easily stroll from the cemetery onto Spruce Hill Road and get creamed by a semi hauling logs to Montreal. She could fall into the river and drown. Either way, she’d end up useless to us, I told him. A total loss cow.

  Larry says, “Katie, is that her?” He stops the car, backs it up a few feet, and half-turns it off the road, so the headlights splash light uphill a distant ways into the graveyard. There’s all kinds of gravestones up there casting these huge, long shadows against the grass and across the gravestones behind them. And here comes the cow, Protein, meandering her way between the granite stones and grave markers, munching on the fresh, dew-wet grass as she goes, swinging and swaying her big, bony hips, and totally ignoring us, like she’s exactly where she belongs and we’re not. She’s nearly full grown but still a heifer, with big black and white splotches across her back and haunches and a mostly white head. I can see why she likes it here. The grass is thick and bright green and plentiful compared to the grass at our place. Also there’s flowers that people have put on the graves, and she’s eating them as well as the grass. It’s peaceful here, unmolested and quiet, except for the occasional diesel moan of a truck climbing Spruce Hill on its way to the Northway and beyond. If I was a cow, and somebody’d left my gate unhitched, this is where I’d be, too.

  Larry got out and told me to keep the lights on her. Then he opened the trunk and took out the bucket of grain. I slid into the driver’s seat. The cow strolled slowly into the light, when, for the first time, she looked up at us. Holding the bucket like it was a peace offering, Larry walked tippy-toe toward her. “C’mon, girl, come an’ get your supper,” he sort of sang to her. “Supper, girl. Supper.”

  She ignored him and went back to munching on the abundant graveyard grass. Larry tried a few minutes longer to get her attention, but she wouldn’t even raise her head. Finally he returned to the car, and I rolled down the window.

  “What?” I said.

&n
bsp; “I can’t get her to eat from the bucket.”

  “Try setting it on the ground out there in front of the car a ways, and then step back into the shadows. Try that,” I said.

  He did as instructed, and after a while, ten minutes maybe—during which time I smoked a cigarette and Larry stood in the dark next to the car, watching silently—the cow at last edged up to the bucket and stuck her snout into it and began eating the grain.

  “Get the gun!” I said to him.

  “What?”

  “Larry, get the fucking gun!”

  He came over to the car, opened the rear door, and took out his twelve-gauge. “I don’t need the damn gun,” he said. Then he carried it into the glare of the headlights and stood next to the cow.

  “Shoot her, Larry!”

  He didn’t say or do anything. Just stood there slump-shouldered with the gun in his right hand, watching the cow chomp away on the grain in the bucket. Finally, she pulled her head from the pail, slurped her lips with her thick gray tongue, and looked at Larry as if to thank him.

  “Shoot her, for Christ’s sake!”

  “Why?”

  “Because we don’t have any more grain! Because I want you to! I don’t know. Shoot the fucking cow, Larry. Just shoot her!”

  He lifted the bucket, as if to check it for grain one last time, and the cow again stuck her muzzle into it. “All gone,” Larry said to the cow. “Nothing left.” Then he brought the barrel of the shotgun up and placed it next to the hard, flat forehead of the cow and fired. I jumped at the sound, as if I hadn’t expected it. Yet I had expected it. I’d been calling for it. But it was as if I had been calling from a dream, not reality. Her eyes bulged in astonishment and rolled back, and blood spurted from her head. Her forelegs buckled at the knees, and she fell forward and flopped onto her side and was absolutely still. She seemed enormous then, bigger than the car. Blood poured from the large hole in her head onto the dewy grass. The light splashed over the body of the cow, the spreading puddle of blood, and the grass.

  “What do we do now?” Larry said.

  I didn’t have a clue, but I said, “Your trouble is you just think one step at a time.”

  “You’re the one wanted her dead.” He got into the car on the passenger’s side and lit a cigarette. “Shut the motor and lights off,” he said. “We don’t need ’em now.”

  I complied, and we sat there in the total dark for a while, smoking and not saying anything. It was almost like the cow wasn’t there, like she was still up in the barn at our place, and Larry and I were sitting here in the car in the dark talking in low voices about the future.

  “We need a front-loader,” Larry said. “We can’t leave her here. The dogs or a bear’ll get into her.”

  He was right, so I started the car again, and while Larry stayed behind with the flashlight and his gun and guarded the cow, I drove into the village. By this time it was very late, two or three o’clock in the morning, not a car on the road, not a light. I knew whoever I called would be asleep, but at that moment it didn’t seem like I had a choice. I pulled up beside the pay phone at Chick Lawrence’s garage and got out and dialed Wade Whitney first, since he and Larry are old hunting buddies, but Wade said no, his front-loader was up on Adrian’s Acres, where he was digging a cellar. Then I tried Randy LeClair, but all I got was an answering machine. “Hey, Randy,” I said. “This is Katie Burks, and me and Larry was hoping you could give us a hand moving a dead cow. But I guess you’re not around.”

  I was trying to remember who else in town owned a front-loader, when I looked beyond the gas pumps and saw in the shadows exactly what I was looking for. Chick Lawrence had a loader! Because he used it mainly for snow removal, not excavation, I’d forgotten it existed. His house was next door to his garage, so all I had to do was walk up to it and knock, which I did. Chick’s a friendly guy and neighborly. He came to the door in his underwear, worried-looking, expecting an emergency, probably, a car wreck or something, as he’s got the only tow truck in town. He seemed to relax when I explained our fix. “Well, okay,” he said. “I’ll meet you over to the cemetery in fifteen minutes or so,” he said. “It sure is a nice night,” he said, looking up at the starry sky. Then he laughed, like he’d told a little joke. That’s a mannerism of his.

  I drove back to the cemetery and with the headlights of the car and a tap on the horn woke up Larry, who had fallen asleep against one of the tombstones. He stood and strolled over to the car snapping his flashlight. “Batteries’re dead,” he said, as if that explained everything. The cow was still there, a huge, black and white mound surrounded by a spreading puddle of blood.

  “Watch where you walk,” I said, just as he was about to step in the blood. Then I told him Chick Lawrence was coming right over, and he seemed visibly relieved and leaned against the fender and smoked a cigarette and studied the stars. I kept the motor running and the lights on and stared straight out over the hood at that damned cow. I don’t know why, but at that moment I despised that poor animal. It was like she had done something unforgivable and had done it to me personally. It wasn’t just the alcohol, which had pretty much worn off by then. There was lots about that night that I didn’t understand. My telling Larry to bring the gun, for instance, and then hollering for him to shoot the cow. And I didn’t understand how it had come to this, to sitting around in a graveyard in the middle of the night waiting for Chick Lawrence to show up with his front-loader so we can haul a dead cow back up the hill to our place. I wanted to blame Larry, but I couldn’t. All he’d done was whatever I’d asked him to do. From the beginning, from when we first met in high school and started screwing in the backseat of his old Camaro right up to tonight, fourteen years later, Larry always did whatever I asked him to. The problem, I was beginning to see, lay in the asking.

  “Larry,” I said. “This is one of the lousiest nights of my life. And what’s worse, it’s typical.”

  “Typical.” He paused. “That’s what this is to you?”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s what I was afraid of,” he said, and that was the end of it.

  About twenty minutes later, here comes Chick and his big, yellow front-loader looking like some kind of prehistoric dinosaur with its head-high tires and great, wide-open mouth and its headlights like gigantic bug eyes flopping up and down as the vehicle made its slow, noisy way along the lane from the main road. He drew the loader up to the cow and cut the motor back to idle. He leaned out of the cab and called down, “How’d you come to shoot your cow here at the cemetery?”

  Larry shrugged his shoulders. “I guess one thing just led to another.”

  “I guess to hell it did,” Chick said and gave his little laugh. He backed the front-loader off a few feet and dropped the bucket to the ground, then came forward very slowly and with a surprising tenderness got the lower lip of the bucket underneath the cow. Gently he scooped the poor beast off the ground and lifted it, almost like a parent picking up a sleeping child. The body of the cow rolled heavily into the bucket and over onto its back so that it ended with all four of its legs sticking up in the air. It made a weird, almost comical sight, as Chick lifted the bucket into the air, backed around, and headed slowly away from the cemetery toward the main road.

  Larry got in beside me, and I drove the Taurus behind Chick, turned left at the road, and followed him up the long stretch of Spruce Hill Road to our place. There were no other cars or trucks out at that hour, which is a good thing, because we were a peculiar, slow-moving, suspicious-looking procession. The loader was making about ten miles an hour at best, and from my position behind it I could see around the cab and catch glimpses of the cow’s spindly legs and hoofs sticking out of the bucket, which Chick kept pretty high in the air, to keep the vehicle balanced and its rear wheels on the ground. Whenever the vehicle crossed a ripple or dip in the paving, the bucket bounced some, and the cow seemed almost to be alive then and struggling like it was prey to get loose of this monstrous mouth.

  Final
ly we got to the top of the hill and turned off the road into our driveway. I glanced behind us and saw that the eastern sky was turning pink and pale blue. It was going to be a nice day. Chick stopped the loader and called down to us, “Where d’you want me to put ’er?”

  Larry checked me, and I checked him back. We both wanted the other to answer Chick’s question. Larry’s eyes were sunk into his face and bloodshot, and his cheeks had gone all saggy, and he needed a shave. He looked more exhausted than I had ever seen him before. I must have looked the same to him. He exhaled through pursed lips, a silent whistle, and said, “Oh, Jesus, Katie. It’s over, then. Isn’t it?”

  “We got to let it go, Larry.”

  “Do we have to? Can’t we just do like before? Like we’ve always done?”

  I leaned out the car window and hollered up to Chick, “Drop her on the dock in front of the barn, where the winch and chain are. We’ll hang her up and butcher her there in a few minutes.” He said fine, and I thanked him.

  “Good night,” he said to me. Then laughed, “Or good morning,” and dropped the loader into gear and headed it in the direction of the barn.

  I turned back to Larry. “We better cut up that cow,” I said, “before it starts to spoil.”

  “I’ll do it,” he said, and he got out of the car. I got out, too, and we stood there, looking at each other over the roof of the old Taurus. “Katie, I’m really sorry. I’m sorry I couldn’t do things a different way … and better. I’m sorry about the drinking, too.”

  “I know you are. I am, too.”

  “How come it happened tonight?”