The Jesus Cow

by Michael Perry

  He had failed to anticipate how opposed the young calf—which he suddenly realized he had not named, having instead come to think of it as the Jesus calf—might be to having its hair colored. Tina Turner turned defensive and rousted Harley with her snout, rooting at his tailbone with enough force to send him stumbling forward. Placing the calf in a soft headlock he dipped into the polish again and took a swipe at the Christ-likeness. Then he found himself suddenly freezing at the idea that he was quite literally attempting to wipe out the Son of God. It wasn’t the sort of thing you did lightly, no matter how long it’d been since you cracked your Bible. But then he heard the sound of the F-250 outside the barn door and redoubled his swabbing.

  In the end it was a pretty poor job. The polish tended to clump, and it was nearly impossible to work in down to the hide. His hands were black and there were smudges all over his pants. Tina Turner was becoming actively aggressive. The calf was unsteady.

  Harley backed off for a look. He had hoped for better. It appeared the calf had been rubbed against the underside of an oil pan. Still, Christ’s face was no longer recognizable, even at a squint. He capped the shoe polish and dropped it in his back pants pocket.

  Hearing the truck door slam, he turned for the door, then stopped. Reaching overhead and using one glove like a hotpad, he unscrewed the lightbulb above the pen until it went dark, stopping before it came out of the socket. There were still two other lightbulbs lit—one down by the silo room and one near the doorway—but by extinguishing the one directly overhead, Harley had created enough dimness and shadow within the pen that when he stepped outside the pen the smudge began to look like an actual black patch. Harley figured he had bought himself some visual wiggle room.

  “I’ll just have to keep her moving,” said Harley.

  “And maybe not so much talking out loud to yourself when company’s here.”

  He stepped out of the barn door.

  “BEEN WRENCHIN’?” SAID Mindy. Harley was confused, and then she pointed at his pants and hands, both smeared with black.

  “Oh—yah!” said Harley, deciding in the instant to lie. “Yah, manure spreader chain was froze up.” He hoped this sounded self-reliant. He also quickly pulled his gloves from his jacket pockets and tugged them on.

  “So let’s see these beefers of yours,” said Mindy. Harley was still adjusting to her straightforward nature. But he was also invigorated by the idea of a woman who might carry herself at this level of independence in all respects.

  “Guess we might as well start out here,” said Harley, leading her down the path to the feed bunk.

  “You chew?” she said from behind.

  Harley rotated his head and looked at her confusedly. He couldn’t tell if she was asking or offering. The idea of a woman chewing tobacco wasn’t out of the question; when Harley was in high school Swivel hosted a Swedish foreign exchange student who would take a delicate pinch of Skoal in her upper lip. This, combined with the fact that she was a classically blond and blue-eyed Scandinavian wonder who spoke broken English with a lisp rendered her so Nordically exotic the local boys nearly choked on their Copenhagen. Their after-school dreams were feverish with Scandinavian nymphets wafting through wintergreen-scented mists. Harley himself recalled a certain weakness behind the kneecaps over the whole deal.

  “Nah,” said Harley to Mindy. Unsure of the scale against which he was being measured—or if he was being measured at all—he hoped this wouldn’t count against him. “Why you asking?”

  “You got a can in your pants,” said Mindy, pointing at his back pocket.

  The shoe polish! With a start Harley realized it was still in his back pocket and approximated the same outline as a tin of dip. He also realized she had implicitly revealed she was studying his butt.

  “Oh, ha,” he laughed nervously, “No, no . . . no, that’s just shoe polish.”

  “Oookay,” said Mindy, and then nothing more, all her amusement implied.

  “Yah, I, I was . . . ,” Harley floundered.

  “Y’don’t seem like a real shoe polisher,” said Mindy, the grin right there in her voice, something Harley began to feel was there quite a bit.

  “Yah, my dad . . . he . . . I was cleanin’ out a drawer . . .”

  “So these are the beefers,” said Mindy, pointing at the cows and changing the subject in the most obvious way.

  “Yahp,” said Harley, limp in his relief.

  Mindy immediately peppered him with questions. Where did he get them? What did he feed them? How long did it take to bring them to market? Which breed did he prefer? Why didn’t they have horns? Harley answered as best he could.

  “I just kinda raise ’em on the side,” he said. “It’s not really that complicated. Y’know, get ’em their food and water, check ’em now and then.”

  “Now and then?”

  “Well, every day,” said Harley. “You really do need to get out among ’em.” He hesitated, not wanting to sound too precious, but then he said, “My dad. He called it being a good husbandman. I’d say he was right. You want to know the animals. The way they act day to day. So you can tell early on when something’s not right.”

  “So you’re a firefighter and a husbandman!” said Mindy.

  “Amateur at both,” said Harley, kicking the dirt.

  “Husbandman—that’s kind of a male-centric double whammy, wouldn’t you say? If I get beefers, can I be a wifewoman?”

  “Well, it’s just a word,” said Harley, pulling back within himself nervously and thinking for a moment of a woman he’d dated in college, a motorcycle-boots-wearing feminist with a skunk streak bleached into her hair who jerked the intellectual slack out of him when he used the word gals.

  Mindy gave him a push on the shoulder. “Oh, don’t worry there, big shot.”

  Harley felt the familiar seep of nape sweat.

  HE SHOWED HER the whole deal: the pasture layout, the watering system and the heater that kept the water unfrozen over winter, the portable corrals, and the loading chute he used when he took an animal to the sale barn. She kept firing questions about fencing and grazing and grain supplements and galvanized water tanks versus rubberized, and solar-powered fence chargers, and all in all it was clear she’d done her research.

  After he showed her the small shed where he stored his father’s old Farmall tractor and John Deere baler, he figured maybe he’d get by without showing her the barn, but then she asked about the fencer unit and where he kept the hay, so it became inevitable.

  Keep’er movin’, he thought, as he opened the door. In the transition to the interior of the barn they could see only darkness. Harley flicked the wall switch and all but the light over the pen came on.

  “Oh!” said Mindy, as her eyes adjusted and she saw the cow and calf.

  “Milk cow,” said Harley by way of explanation. He was deeply relieved to see the calf lying with his holy side nestled against his mother.

  “You mind?” said Mindy, putting her hand on the stall gate.

  “I . . . yah, no, fine,” said Harley, his heart thudding.

  “Look at yewww,” said Mindy, kneeling down to scratch the calf between his ears. It was the most girlish thing Harley had heard her utter thus far.

  “You live here all your life?” Mindy was looking up from where she was cuddling the calf in the shadows.

  “Pretty much,” said Harley, sidling into the pen and subtly trying to put himself in a blocking position in case the calf got to its feet. “Went to the college in Clearwater for a while. Didn’t finish.”

  “But you’re happy?”

  Harley realized he didn’t really have an answer for that. “I’m . . . I mean . . . I guess, yeah.”

  Mindy looked at him with a friendly smirk.

  “Well, aren’t you a balla fire!”

  “Nah. Just kinda happy with things the way they are. Could be better, could be worse.” The calf was getting to its feet.

  “So you set the bar pretty high.”

  Harle
y tried to grin, but he was preoccupied with putting himself between the calf and Mindy.

  She jumped up and punched him in the shoulder. “Oh, I’m being too hard on ya! Let’s see the haymow!” She pointed to the rafters over the pen. “By the way, you’ve got a lightbulb burnt out.”

  “Yah, I was gonna . . . ,” said Harley, but she was already moving past him toward the haymow ladder.

  There was a tricky moment of protocol when Harley didn’t know who should go up the ladder first but Mindy resolved that by beating him to it. He tried to follow at a chaste distance without looking up but then did anyway, right in time to catch a chunk of alfalfa chaff across his cornea.

  In the haymow he stood with one eye watering and explained how the bales got up there on the elevator and that Billy helped by unloading the wagons, and that he stacked the bales in the same pattern his father had out of habit, and then he noticed Mindy was gazing up at the roof and he trailed off, instead studying her throat in profile, the tip of the northernmost tattooed ivy leaf visible at the base of her neck. The haymow was quiet but for their breathing, all the sound muted within the banks of tightly packed hay.

  “Lookit the frostcicles!” she said, in a near whisper.

  Harley tipped his head back. High above them the shingle nails protruding through the roof boards were furred with frost, stark and delicate against the rough-cut lumber. This was nothing new to Harley—he’d first seen them as a child when his dad sent him out here on winter days to throw down bales—but he had always loved to look at them, always had a fascination for how the outside cold traveled through the nail and how the nail pulled the moisture of cow’s breath from the air and transformed it into white velveteen spikes. It was the kind of beauty that resonated in his heart like a tiny bell, the kind of minute observation he’d jot down for his creative-writing journal in college but not the kind of thing you rhapsodized on down at the fire hall.

  Without warning, Mindy flopped onto her back, landing in a pile of loose hay left by a bale that had slipped its twine and broken apart coming off the elevator.

  “Doesn’t it fascinate you? Little beautiful things like that? Especially in this loud ridiculous world? And isn’t it the cheapest sort of heaven to be able to climb into a place like this and lie around like the rest of the world has been put on hold until you’re ready for it again?” Her eyes were sparkling like the frost.

  Harley agreed, although he didn’t know how to say so.

  “C’mon, lie down and look up!”

  “I . . . ah . . .”

  Mindy bounced to her feet. “Aw, I made you nervous. Sometimes I go too fast.”

  Harley desperately wanted to try something bold and uncalled for but he felt cast in caramel. He thought of flopping to his back but realized he had missed the moment and would look like a clown and might even knock the wind out of himself.

  “You!” said Mindy, like a command. “You wanna get together again?”

  She had one hand on the ladder, ready to descend.

  “Yah?” said Harley, and as weakly as he said it he never meant anything more powerfully.

  “Take me to the sale barn? Train me in on how to buy beefers?”

  “Yah.”

  “That qualify as a date?”

  “Yah. I guess?”

  CHAPTER 14

  Klute Sorensen fished around with one arm over the side of his bed until he located his smartphone, raised it against the black of the ceiling, and pressed the Home button to check the time. The screen glowed up overbrightly, causing him to squint, which in turn caused his breathing mask to ride up the bridge of his nose. He cursed.

  Three a.m.

  He cursed again. Then sighed. The only thing more mentally defeating than tossing and turning until after midnight was falling asleep and waking to discover he’d slept just shy of three hours. His brain felt like damp flannel stitched with dry rawhide. He wanted so badly to sleep. Just sleep. Sleep deeply, and sleep long. But lately, no matter how many exhortative audiobooks he cycled through his system, no matter how aggressively he drove the Hummer, the tenuous nature of his financial existence was worming its way into his mind-set. He found himself breaking out in cold sweats. Beset by tremors in his hands. A feeling of adrenalized worry hummed throughout his chest and the fringes of his liver. He’d catch himself clench jawed, drawing lung-bustingly deep breaths through flared nostrils and holding the air until the ribs of his upper back popped along their attachments like a rack of trick knuckles, then exhaling with such force his cheeks inflated like Satchmo blowing E-flat.

  Yanking the breathing mask away and switching off the machine, Klute swiped and tapped at the face of his phone. An app bloomed, and Klute tapped again. After a brief pause as the livestream buffered, a woman’s voice could be heard updating the vitals of several international stock exchange indices. Klute adjusted the sound down to a nearly inaudible two bars, placed the phone beneath his pillow, then lay down his head and closed his eyes.

  It used to be Klute only listened to the business news app in the mornings as he shaved and showered and made coffee. At that hour the voices emanating from studios somewhere in the heart of New York City were focused on the opening bell here in America, anticipating the day in terms of “break-even spreads,” “volatility issues,” “basis points,” and “convergent data.” Even if the market was down, hopes were up, and Klute always caught some of that energy, even here in fly-over Boomler. By listening, he felt like he was part of the grand capitalist team. Sometimes he tried to imagine what it was to be one of the on-air guests, joining the show by cell phone from the back of a long black car crossing the East River, or from the top floor of some glass tower flashing with fresh-risen get-to-work-early sun, capably dispatching questions served up by an obsequious soft-balling host. Even when it played indistinctly in the background—as Klute knotted his tie while looking down on Boomler, or returned to the bathroom to dab at a razor nick—the continuous flow of all that beautiful business-world word jazz served as subliminal reassurance: the great machine of international commerce was rolling along, and Klute Sorensen had a ticket for the train.

  Lately though, he had taken to monitoring the streaming business news whenever sleep would not come. Even now, at 3 a.m., the mesmerizing chant of numbers and jargon—monetary aggregates . . . seven-for-one stock splits . . . the “Footsy” up ten . . . Hang Sen off three . . . analyst’s average estimates . . . nominal growth paths—soothed him like one of those white-noise generators used to calm infants. His mind stopped gnawing on his troubles, slowly succumbing instead to the soothing idea that the business of business was spinning the whole world ’round, and would continue to do so, come weather, war, or worse. Green or red, the numbers rose through his Tempur-Pedic pillow and soothed his mind. And then, with the soft sounds of unceasing commerce whispering in his ear, Klute Sorensen slipped into a state of disassociation, and—finally—sleep.

  In the morning he popped the phone into the speaker jack, pipped the volume to its uppermost level, and began his day with the world’s good business news echoing all throughout his gigantically empty house.

  MEG JANKOWSKI BEGAN her day by putting on her hard hat and crushing three cars. As a child, she stood in awe of the car crusher. She would watch with wide eyes as her father ran the hydraulics and the crushing plate pressed implacably down on the hapless vehicle as it shuddered and screeched and the windows popped until it was nothing but creases and pancake. Nowadays she was more businesslike. Because other salvage yards down around Clearwater operated at much higher volume, and were thus far more competitive, Meg survived by searching the back roads and working the fringes. She went the literal extra mile to drag cars out of the deep weeds, pull old corn pickers from the far borders of overgrown farm fields, and snag the remains of abandoned projects, stripping every resalable part from each before converting it into an iron puck. This operating philosophy was also a hedge against the intersection of international market forces and local bootstrapp
ers: A few years back, when China went on a steel buying spree, prices soared to the point that every knucklehead with a trailer dragged his “backup” car off its cement block perch and hauled it to the larger yards in Clearwater. The roads were filled with ramshackle rigs hauling rust-bucket car carcasses. Mostly, the one-off windfall came right back to town and was invested in the Buck Rub Bar.

  To further protect herself from cyclical fluctuations, Meg had also maintained her father’s tow truck service. There wasn’t much to tow around these parts (much of the towing was performed by people using their own resources, which is to say it was not unusual to see one junker tailgating another at the distance of a logging chain), but the presence of the interstate provided a reliable supply of work in the form of tourists with failed transmissions, folks who couldn’t locate their spare tire, or drivers ditched during snowstorms. She also had a standing contract with the fire department to help clear all accident scenes. Meg always crossed herself and murmured a prayer for the injured or deceased.

  She was tired this morning, having been called out at three a.m. to tow a Winnebago that had blown a radiator hose at mile marker 72, but even when weary, she enjoyed her work, approaching it with the same dedication she exhibited toward her church, albeit as a different order of devotion.

  She supposed it was the work that had kept her head occupied while her heart healed in the wake of Dougie’s death. In fact, it didn’t heal so much as learn to beat with a hole in it. Nonetheless, it was the work that provided her the momentum to persist. Each day there was something to be done, the work quite literally stacking up one car at a time, the towing calls coming at all hours without respect to day or holiday, but always there was the knowledge that the more she worked, the more she could give to the church and the food pantry. It had long been suspected by many around town that Meg was a secret millionaire, and as a longtime single person, she was a deep tither, but the truth was, once the insurance and taxes and upkeep and accountant and permits were paid, there was less remaining than many of Swivel’s gossips believed.