The Jesus Cow

by Michael Perry

  Dougie had been Meg’s first and only boyfriend. In the years immediately following his death, the thought of “seeing” someone else was frankly unthinkable, and she had thrown herself into the salvage business beside her father. When he had taken ill and she found herself running the business, her busyness had rendered a social life moot. By the time both of her parents were gone, she had settled into the rhythm of work and church and quiet time alone and found herself quite satisfied. In surprisingly short order, a decade had passed.

  Lately though, she had been having doubts. What if she was conveniently deceiving herself? The doubts hadn’t come on their own; she had been goaded out of her comfort zone by Carolyn Sawchuck.

  AS MEG DROPPED the crusher on a Ford Festiva, Carolyn Sawchuck was returning home from her oil-collection rounds. She was feeling the usual sense of relief that came with not having to drive up yet another driveway to face yet another skeptical farmer or leery shade-tree mechanic. Even though many of her stops were made at the request of someone who had torn off one of her phone number strips in the Kwik Pump, she still felt keenly her outsider status, conferred both by her relatively recent arrival (small towns count by generations: a decade was but a moment) and the fact that she was an overeducated oil-collecting earth mother in a Subaru with a dream catcher hung from the rearview mirror and a COEXIST sticker on the bumper.

  It had been far worse in the early days, when she made cold calls and was greeted with frank suspicion, scowls, and once, a shotgun. By now she had been at it long enough that while her customers still thought her a tree-hugging oddball, word had spread that her checks never bounced, and in fact, several of her regular customers had taken to scrounging on her behalf. As a result, Carolyn Sawchuck’s collection rates were climbing.

  Unbeknownst to Carolyn, some of her customers were enhancing the volume of their contributions by mixing in everything from paint thinner to stale gasoline. There were times she arrived home light-headed, unaware she was hauling liquid dynamite.

  All she knew was she was wearing out that bicycle.

  MEG HAD COMMENCED the terminal crimping of a Chevy Malibu when Klute Sorensen’s Hummer nosed through the open gate. The approach was unusual, because usually whenever Klute visited he came barging in, driving with his usual confidence and disregard, bailing out of the four-wheeler while it was still coming to a rest in order to aggressively renew his long-standing offer to purchase her land.

  But today he paused behind the wheel for a moment, as if collecting himself. And when he did step out, he smoothed the lapels on his suit coat and instead of the usual bluster his expression and posture were that of a grade-schooler about to recite a poem.

  Meg let him stand there while she finished flattening the car. This mild shunning was the furthest Meg would depart from her gentle Christian center. Klute had tried to buffalo her from the beginning, thinking that he could push her off the property by proxy, and if not push her off, bribe her off. He had also spoken ill of Harley, whom Meg knew to be a harmless—if adrift—fellow, and whose father had always been a square dealer with her father.

  But now here was a different Klute, obviously nervous. Had he a hat, Meg thought, he would have been holding it at waist level and rotating the brim through his hands. As the sound of ripping tin, snapping plastic, and powdering glass reverberated around them, Meg nodded at Klute. He responded with a ghastly ingratiating grin, which, coming from a man accustomed to neither ingratiation nor grinning, unfurled like a matched set of slow-motion cheek cramps.

  When the pop-off valves tripped and the car crusher jaws relaxed, Meg shut down the machine and turned to Klute with a smile.

  “Not selling, Klute.”

  “Oh! I, heh-heh, I, I’m not here to, I, I . . .”

  “Perhaps you’ve come to hand-deliver one of Vance Hansen’s ‘smart growth’ letters?”

  Klute flushed and ducked his head. With a shock, Meg realized he truly was nervous.

  “Klute, I’ve never seen you so . . . schoolboy.”

  Klute stubbed his foot at the frozen ground. “Meg, I’ve treated you poorly.” He was looking right at her now, and it seemed that once he’d started talking he didn’t dare stop. “I’ve tried to push you around like I try to push everyone and everything else around. I listen to these damned—darned—CDs all the time, and sometimes I think they get me all ginned up to the point where I think I can just twelve-step right over the top of everybody and everything.”

  “Well, you are forceful.”

  “I know,” said Klute. “And I’ve been thinking that has to change.” He paused. “A little.”

  “You still can’t have the place.”

  “Right now I don’t want to talk about that.”

  “What do you want to talk about?”

  Klute had begun to ease in the face, but now he looked stricken again, as if he had just inhaled—and was now trying to swallow—a chilled slug.

  “Well, I thought you . . . I . . . we might work better as a team.”

  “Klute, I’ve run this business alone ever since Dad died, and I don’t see any reason to do it any differently.”

  “No . . . well . . . not the business . . . well, I mean, maybe the business, but I was thinking more maybe we could go somewhere and talk about how . . . what . . . the . . .”

  And it was right then, as he trailed off, that Meg realized Klute Sorensen was asking her out on a date.

  And then Carolyn Sawchuck arrived.

  When Carolyn saw Klute, she frowned. Since she and Meg had become friends, they had often discussed Klute’s visits, and his bullheaded attempts to get Meg to sell out. Carolyn had taken her lumps in feminist circles, but that had done nothing to impede her bristling when a man tried to shove a woman around.

  “Well, hello there, bulldozer breath,” said Carolyn as she stepped out of the car. Meg hid a smile, but Carolyn was surprised when Klute said nothing in return. She had expected him to hurl an insult, or storm off, but instead he just stood there, like he wasn’t sure what to say.

  “Hello, Carolyn,” said Meg, unwilling to embarrass Klute, no matter that he might have deserved it. “Can you please allow Klute and me a moment?”

  What’s this all about? wondered Carolyn as she returned to the Subaru and backed over to the elevated container in which Meg stored her oil. As she drained the oil into a series of five-gallon buckets, she could see—but not hear—Klute and Meg in conversation.

  “WELL, THE THING is,” said Klute, swallowing and looking as if he wasn’t sure what to say next, “the thing is, we have a lot in common.”

  “Okay?” said Meg in the form of a question. She didn’t agree, and she wasn’t sure she wanted to hear, but she was curious.

  “Well, both our daddies were successful.”

  Meg looked around at the mangled cars and ancient crane and yard full of dirty slush.

  “After a manner of speaking, yes.”

  “We both know what it is to strive for our own success.”

  “Out of necessity, yes. Although your definition—”

  “We’re both on our . . . we don’t . . . neither one of us . . . we’re—”

  “Single?”

  Klute blushed brick red.

  Now Meg became brisk. “Yes, Klute, I do see overlap in some respects. And there are times when it might be nice to share the company of someone over a meal. But you can’t just go from ramming around demanding things in that Hummer to pussyfooting around with dinner invitations.”

  Klute racked his brain. All those CDs packed with punchy phrases carefully crafted to close the sale, but he drew an echoing blank.

  Meg let him gawp a minute, then was surprised to feel a twinge of pity. Harder men had softened, she thought. Who was she to stand in the way of repentance? Did not Christ forgive his persecuters? Perhaps, she thought, Klute was going all Saul of Tarsus.

  Carolyn reappeared, the oil loaded. She rolled down the window, and ignoring Klute, said to Meg, “See you Tuesday at th
e pantry?”

  “Yes,” said Meg. Both women looked expectantly at Klute. In the past, he had disparaged the food pantry. “Those people don’t need free food, they need jobs,” he had said when they came to the village board meeting to obtain permits. “You keep feeding ’em, they’ll never feed themselves. Teach a man to fish. Et cetera.”

  But today Klute stood mute until Carolyn drove out the gate. Then he turned to Meg. “So you’re not saying no . . .”

  “I’m saying all things considered, over the course of time you’ve given me a hundred reasons to say no, and none to say yes. But sometimes, well, comfort the afflicted, the Lord works in mysterious ways . . . et cetera, well, sometimes we are called to those things we least expect.”

  “So?” said Klute, hopeful enough that he managed not to take umbrage at the implicit skewering he had just absorbed.

  “So I’m going to have to think about this.”

  Klute’s face was red again. But it wasn’t an angry red. I have to get some different audiobooks, he was thinking.

  “Thank you for stopping by, Klute.”

  “Oh. Yes, yes. I’ll . . . I’ll stop back by.”

  “I’m sure you will.”

  In the Hummer, Klute repressed his desire to stomp the accelerator with both feet. Again it wasn’t anger, but rather just a desire to flee. Unfortunately, he had failed to anticipate the logistics of retreat, and between the outsize Hummer and the cramped confines of the yard, he now found himself in the process of executing a laborious five-point turn in the shape of a child’s crudely drawn star. While heaving around to look back over his shoulder, he bumped the volume knob on the custom stereo, and the confines of the scrap yard reverberated with the booming narrator of Set Sale!

  “YOU ARE THE CAPTAIN!!!”

  Meg shook her head, smiled, and turned for the crane. She had to get that car loaded up.

  Right about the time Klute cleared the on-ramp it occurred to him that perhaps Meg and Carolyn were a couple.

  CHAPTER 15

  The day after giving Mindy her tour, Harley screwed the loose lightbulb back in and cleaned Tina Turner’s pen. As he forked manure into the spreader, the Jesus calf gamboled in and out of Harley’s way. It was already bulking up, growing strong and sturdy on Tina Turner’s milk. The shoe polish had faded more quickly than he expected. Jesus was looking gray in the face, but was once again clearly Jesus. He’d have to come up with something better than Kiwi black. Especially if Mindy was going to be around more. He held out hope that the calf would outgrow the image on its ribs, but so far it was expanding in proportion. Same visage as the day Harley first saw it, only larger now.

  It was good meditation time, cleaning calf pens. Physical labor always helped Harley sort his mind. There was a rhythm to running the pitchfork, a state of physical autopilot that perfused the brain but allowed it to cogitate independently of the task at hand. He was taking stock, thinking of Mindy, and how he had not felt such anticipation over a woman for a good long while. There was a roughness to her, a coarseness, and a good-humored independence that had him at once hopeful and on edge. Of course this conception was based on little more than initial impressions and his own desires, and was thus unsullied by reality.

  Harley might never have dated a woman were it not for a long-legged farmer’s daughter named Wendy Willis who asked him to the Sadie Hawkins dance when he was sixteen. Up until that day, he couldn’t imagine talking to a girl, but the Sadie Hawkins format flipped the roles. Harley stammered around but finally got to “yes,” and later, when Wendy kissed him beside her mailbox on Poleaxe Road, he figured there were joys here worthy of transcending all reticence. When Wendy turned her back to him in the high school library a week later and disappeared into the nonfiction stacks with Scooter Eckstrom, Harley felt he’d never love again, but three days later Kelly Motzer lingered near his locker applying Bubble Gum Lipsmacker and he found his sadness and reservations trumped. In short, he was hooked, and the following year (he and Kelly having fizzled) for homecoming he worked up the courage to ask Jenny Haskins out. That one lasted through basketball season and included several sessions of postgame kissy face in the darkened rear seats of the game bus, but by spring Jenny had lost interest. His senior year was fallow, and he arrived at the university in Clearwater with all of his virginity and most of his naiveté intact. This chaste state was due in part to lack of opportunity, bone-deep Scandinavian reserve, and the old shyness bugaboo, but it was also a product of his old-school Christian upbringing, in which sex was reserved for marriage and those who engaged preemptively were bound to recline long-term upon the coals of doom.

  Then, early in the first quarter of his college career, while struggling with his prerequisites, Harley left the library and wandered into the student center, where, in pursuit of beer (the backsliding had begun), he quite accidentally found himself in the middle of a straggily attended poetry reading supported with a cash bar. As he was not allowed to leave the premises with his bottle, he took a table. He had never been to a poetry reading before, and beyond a few childhood nursery rhymes knew nothing of the genre. His first impression of the proceedings was that most of the student poets acted as if they’d never before seen a microphone, and his second impression was that the proceedings would improve considerably were the microphone removed. Just as he was tipping the last of the beer down his throat and preparing to bolt, a woman stepped forward wearing calf-high motorcycle boots with a leather miniskirt and tights, a multitude of jangling wrist bangles, and a skunklike stripe of white through her otherwise jet-black hair. Standing squarely before the mic she read three poems in succession, delivering each in a level, nondemonstrative tone that at first listen seemed apathetic but upon closer attention seemed a fearless determination to let the poems speak for themselves. Contrasted against all the evening’s preceding verse (much of it rehashing the disappointments of spring break and the Mysteries of Man as Observed from the Seventh Floor Dorm with a Buzz On), Harley’s untrained ear found the skunk-hair woman’s poems woven as tough and tight as Kevlar.

  But the motorcycle boots clinched it.

  Heart high in his throat, he lingered at the exit beside the Pepsi machine and as she walked—alone—to the door he said, “I liked your poems.”

  “Oh!” she said. “Thank you.” She seemed sweetly embarrassed, which Harley was not expecting, what with the bangles and skunk hair and motorcycle boots and all.

  “I mean, I don’t really get poetry . . .”

  “Neither do most the people in that place,” said the skunk-haired girl, nodding back toward the reading room. “At least you have the good sense to admit it. You want to go for a beer?”

  “Well, I just had—,” started Harley, and then he thought, What are you saying, idiot-face? and then he gulped and said, “Um, yah.”

  She took him to a creaky-floored joint hung with smoke, where they sat at a corner table beneath a large black-and-white photo of someone Harley assumed was a jazz musician due to the fact that he was smoking a cigarette and holding a saxophone.

  Later that night she took him back to her apartment.

  In the morning he prayed to be forgiven.

  That night he went to her arms again.

  HARLEY WAS LEANING on the pitchfork, studying that calf and recalling the skunk-haired girl (woman, he corrected himself, recalling her instruction on that point). Over twenty years gone. They had a strong six months, then they ran out of common ground and even poetry and motorcycle boots could not save them. He figured maybe Skunk-haired Girl had broken his heart, but he had to believe she did his head a lot of good. Expanded it, he supposed she would say. To this day he liked a whiff of patchouli now and again, and it was thanks to her encouragement that he had filled one of his humanities electives with a creative writing course on his way to almost getting his business degree. And on occasion he still attended poetry readings at the library in Clearwater.

  There had been other women. An emergency room nurse from Booml
er—that one ended when the hospital closed and she joined a traveling service. A second go-round with Jenny Haskins after her divorce—that one lasted two weeks longer than the original. He had met the most recent online, thanks to an algorithm that matched them up based on age, a professed interest in the arts, and your basic thirty-mile radius. That one ended in dramatic ignominy at the art gallery, but of all these and the others none had hit him quite like the skunk-haired girl.

  But Mindy: this was close. There was a force of impact here he hadn’t felt for years. What would it be like, he wondered, to swing by her repurposed granary now and then, for maybe a meal and whatever else followed? To rise in the morning and return to his own quiet house? Or, vice versa, to smile at her from his own pillow as she left his bedroom to begin her own day back at her place? What would it be like, he wondered, to sustain that life right into the future? To never go any more domestic than sleepovers? There were couples who managed it, he knew. And not just for the first two weeks or months, after which things went either solid or sour but rather to live apart happily for years. Then again, he thought, what would it be like to live together in all legal and domicile senses? To finish dinner and the dishes together, share in the evening chores, take to bed with an eye toward the day and the years ahead?

  And what would it be like to share that secret? he thought, staring at the Jesus calf. Rather than this shoe polish silliness, rather than a stupid secret, to have her at his side, fully in the know, helping him decide what to do about that calf? A normal person would have called the local TV station. A creative person would have maybe tried to sell the cow to the bank in lieu of all monies owed. A wise person would have taken that calf out back, and shot it, and buried it deep, said a voice in his head that sounded suspiciously like Billy.

  But Harley Jackson? thought Harley. Harley Jackson does what he does best: dither. Dither in love, dither in faith, dither in life itself. Dither over Klute’s lawsuit, dither over the Jesus calf. You can’t keep covering everything over with Kiwi black. Spring’ll be here soon, and that’ll force your hand. You can’t put a wall around the entire pasture like Meg does her junkyard.