The Jesus Cow

by Michael Perry

  You ain’t prayed in so long. He said it aloud. Softly, and to himself. There was another line that came on the heels of that one, but he couldn’t recall it.

  He looked over the railing again. There was the desire to fling himself over, that barely repressible urge. He quailed at the idea of his body going smack, but the image he received of his easy double gainer through the silent air was beautiful and calming. He wondered how amazed folks might be, having watched his stolid movement through life thus far, to know how close to the edge he sometimes ran.

  You ain’t prayed in so long. Once. Twice. Three times he said it. Then he went silent, and let it echo in his head: You ain’t prayed in so long. Now it was the strapping, strong woman again. Her tone was gentle, but bore reproach. She spoke gravely, and with disappointment. You ain’t prayed in so long. Soft, like she was shaking her head. You ain’t prayed in so long.

  And then the next line came to him.

  Why bother with fancy now?

  She sounded stronger on that one.

  CHAPTER 30

  Carolyn Sawchuck was laying on the horn of her Subaru, stiff-arming it with grim determination. Once again her egress had been blocked by pilgrims. Ever since the calf had gone public, Carolyn’s pump house hideaway had become more like a panic room. She had been forced to paper over the windows to spare herself from prying eyes. She had put out a rack of dream catchers with an honor box for payment but twice it had been ripped down by fundamentalists who viewed it as a pagan danger on the order of incense or books about wizards. She counted herself among those citizens of Swivel ready to see that calf go.

  The morning had begun badly. She had failed to order Zebra Cakes and, after a rigorous oil-pumping session, had found herself sneak-buying a midnight box at the Kwik Pump, where she had run into Billy, who was buying an emergency tin of cat food. “Those will go straight to your thighs, Carol,” said Billy.

  “I am proud of my thighs!” said Carolyn.

  “That was never in question,” said Billy. In truth he had to admit she had never looked fitter. This was a mystery further confounded by those Zebra Cakes.

  Carolyn finally navigated the gauntlet of tourist believers and drove down to the food pantry. The village sewer had backed up yet again, flooding clear into the back room where all the canned goods were stored. Now that the weather was warmer, these episodes were even more odorific. Meg had said she’d meet Carolyn for the cleanup, and as Carolyn drove past St. Jude’s she saw Meg’s truck at the curb.

  INSIDE THE CHURCH, Meg knelt with her head bowed and hands clasped. She loved the peace of the church on a fresh sunny day such as this, when the grass was deep green and smelled of mowing, the trees were thick with leaves, and the weekday traffic of Swivel—usually only a pickup truck or minivan now and then but these days more active with tour buses and pilgrims driving in to see that steer—could be heard through the screens. There was something even more holy about worshipping, about kneeling before the altar, when the rest of the world was otherwise occupied. There was the sheltering sense of the cathedral, the stillness so lacking in the world these days, a sense that the momentum of time had been allayed. There was also something about the church with no priest presiding. No intermediation. Just her and her Lord.

  She chose a candle and struck a match. Her rough, cracked hands cupped the flame as she touched it to the wick.

  BACK IN HIS house, Harley heard Carolyn’s horn. Meg had called him about the sewer. He said he’d come down to help, and now he was in the shower. He had called Mindy to see if she could help out but she said she was busy with a project. He asked her if she needed any help, and she said no. That maybe if she got done early she’d come in and see him.

  “Bring me some of that lentil soup?” said Harley, hopefully.

  “Yeah,” said Mindy, “maybe so.”

  There was something in her voice—or not in her voice. Harley felt the old unease.

  MEG WALKED BRISKLY to the food pantry, where Carolyn was unstacking and swabbing off cans.

  “Hello, Carolyn,” said Meg, opening the broom closet and pulling out a mop.

  “Hello, Meg,” said Carolyn. “How was church?”

  “Peaceful.”

  “Mm.”

  “Klute Sorensen has been around again,” said Meg.

  “And?”

  Meg giggled. “Oh—I don’t know. He’s such . . . he’s so . . .”

  “Overmasculinized?” asked Carolyn.

  Meg giggled again. “That’d be one way to put it.”

  “Has he officially asked you out?”

  “No, he’s been pestering me to sell. Wants to put in a hotel.”

  “Big money?”

  “Big enough,” said Meg. “I wouldn’t ever have to crush another car. But after the giant cardboard check, he’d have to bring me a much smaller one from an actual bank.”

  “What do you think? Will you do it?”

  “Mm,” said Meg. “I’ve been praying on it.”

  “But no decision yet?”

  “No.”

  “So how do you tell?”

  “How do I tell what?”

  “When you get the answer to your prayer? You hear a voice? You get a feeling? Holy text message?”

  Meg smiled. “Oh, I don’t know. I’m not sure you do get an answer. The Lord has more important things to do than advise me on land deals.”

  “And yet you pray.”

  “It helps to settle my mind. To sort my mind.”

  “Those candles you light every day—what do they mean to you?”

  “They mean that in the midst of whatever cares or troubles or other distractions might surrounded me, I have to pause at least long enough to cup that flame until it takes,” said Meg, holding the mop in both hands but staring at the floor as if she were not speaking but rather thinking aloud.

  “I like that,” said Carolyn.

  It was quiet for a bit, then Carolyn spoke. “You know . . . about Klute . . . I shouldn’t be so hard on him. All that loudmouth grandiosity, you know a lot of it’s rooted in disappointment. Especially the way things have been going lately. The real estate going bust. And the way he’s been foxed by that Sloan fellow at every turn.

  “So much of my life has been spent in pursuit. In pursuit of a career. In pursuit of a life in arts and letters. In pursuit of tenure and an office and publication. But above all, I loved words. Books. Language. That is what drove me, even when I got sidetracked with grant applications and faculty jockeying and padding my CV.

  “The anger we see in Klute, the bullheadedness and lack of social grace, it may—as mine does—all trace back to disappointment, and the disappointment traces back to belief. Belief that all the hard work will result in some pinnacle moment. Some achievement of long standing. When in fact . . .”

  She paused, realizing Meg was just staring at her.

  “The thing is, the guy might be worth a shot.”

  “Sometimes,” said Meg, smiling, “you’re the Christian one.”

  Carolyn laughed.

  They worked in silence then, and Carolyn found herself filled with gratitude. She still missed the place in Central America now and then. She still longed for the thrill of seeing her name in print. She wouldn’t mind some companionship, heartwise and otherwise. But as she looked at her new friend—a rough-handed woman in coveralls who believed in what Carolyn could most charitably classify as fairy tales—for the first time since she could remember, Carolyn felt as if she was letting life come to her.

  “It’s a good life we have, eh, Meg?”

  “Yes,” said Meg, smiling as she swabbed the floor.

  “I could do with a few less pilgrims.”

  “Yes,” said Meg, and they were both giggling when Harley came in to help finish up the mopping and start sorting the food.

  “Mindy coming?” asked Carolyn.

  “No,” said Harley, trying to sound blasé. The two women looked at each other.

  “Something wrong?”
asked Meg.

  “No, I—”

  “Oh please,” said Carolyn, waving a hand between herself and Meg, “look who yer talkin’ to here.”

  Harley admitted then to his unease. To his sense that all was not well. That Mindy might be losing interest. That maybe—once again and to his shame—he was frittering a good thing away.

  “I can tell you one thing,” said Meg. “Something I learned from my dad. Do something nice once in a while. Not big, not flashy, just nice.”

  “Without being asked,” said Carolyn, and both women nodded.

  “Sometimes Pop came into town and bought Mom a gas station rose,” said Meg. “Took him all of five minutes, across the overpass and back, two bucks and it wasn’t much of a rose, but oh, how my mother smiled.”

  AFTER THEY HAD stacked the last can, Harley went straight to the Kwik Pump and bought a rose. Perfect, he thought, as he drove out Five Mile Road past the Big Swamp. Bring her a rose from the place where we first met.

  He smiled. Thought of his latest financial statement, the one Sloan gave him each month. How the last time he looked it had two commas. And now here he was proving his love with a gas station rose.

  Mindy and the caricaturist—portraitist—were just coming out of the house.

  “You remember Yonni,” said Mindy, sunnily.

  Harley did remember. He shook Yonni’s hand. It was soft, and Harley did his best to crush it.

  “We’re collaborating on a sculpture,” said Mindy.

  “Yah, cool, well, catch y’later,” said Yonni, easing off toward his car as Harley followed Mindy inside.

  In the morning when he came out and got in the pickup, the rose was still on the seat, the petals limp against the plastic wrap.

  TWO WEEKS PRIOR to Jamboree Days, Mindy ended it.

  “Is it the cartoonist?”

  “Baby, sometimes there is no reason,” she said, ignoring the insult and holding both of Harley’s hands. “That’s the fear and beauty of love.” She had ridden over on her Norton, and it was parked at the end of the sidewalk. He was standing on his porch, she was standing on the top step.

  “If you need time . . .,” said Harley.

  “Maybe ten years ago I’d have told you that,” she said. “And maybe ten years ago you’d have believed that. But now we both know—something has gone out of this. Time apart won’t fix it.”

  “But all the things you said? About baling hay? About living together apart? About taking our beefers to the sale barn together to save on shipping? About Panama? About—fer Chrissakes—how I smelled right?”

  “I meant them when I said them,” she said.

  Harley flashed with an anger he knew he’d regret. “Isn’t that just a fancy way of saying you lied?”

  Mindy didn’t match his anger. In fact, she spoke softly. “Technically, our relationship began with a lie. Or lies. Remember saying that stuff smeared on your hands was manure spreader grease? Remember the shoe polish can in your pocket? Remember you told me you were just cleaning out old drawers? Remember fooling around in the pen right beside that calf with the truth blacked out? Remember the damned loose lightbulb?”

  “Was it what I said about the money?”

  “What you said about the money hurt,” said Mindy. “And then it pissed me off. But no. We all say things we want to take back. I’m afraid this is much more mundane. This is just your garden-variety petering out.”

  It didn’t feel like petering out, thought Harley. It felt like he was stepping off a cliff and there was nothing but icy fog below.

  “I never got that motorcycle ride,” he said.

  “Good-bye, Harley.”

  He heard the Norton fire up and she drove away.

  THAT EVENING THE security guard let him into his own barn to stand with the Jesus Cow. It really was getting to be more of a cow than a calf now, a youthful, fuzzy steer, nearly three-quarters the height of Tina Turner but still nursing now and then. The steer was big enough he sometimes got down on his knees to reach the udder. When the pilgrims saw this there was much joyful laughter, as of course everyone thought he looked as if he were kneeling to pray.

  Jesus’ face was as recognizable as ever. You would never know this was the same calf that had been gashed with Reverend Gary’s crucifix. Sloan kept a hairdresser on retainer to maintain the steer’s hide and hair in top condition—what the cattle jockeys would call a “good bloom”—but Sloan was very strict on the matter of not manipulating the image in any way beyond combing and conditioning. What the paying customers saw was truly what they paid for. It was perhaps the most principled part of the entire operation.

  Harley moved out into the viewing vestibule and parted the curtains. He wondered how many thousands of people had filed past here. He thought of all those driving this way even now, or sleeping in the hotel in Boomler, or parked out back behind someone’s house on Elm Street, paying twenty bucks for the privilege of sleeping in their car. He wondered what the pope was doing right now. If he had reached any decision regarding the main attraction of JCOW Enterprises.

  So many people, he thought again. So many souls. From every state, and many countries. And every time he saw a child holding the hand of its mother, he thought of the little girl who disappeared that day back when he was still trying to do everything himself and it all went terribly wrong.

  He wondered how she was doing.

  He wondered if she was still alive.

  He wondered if she still had faith.

  He looked at the empty parking lot. The generators were extinguished for the night, but there was enough moon and ambient light from the scrolling LED on the water tower that he could make out the plastic ropes and lath posts, the grass trampled flat, the dirt showing through, here and there a candy wrapper, or a Bible bookmark, or a souvenir catalog, rolled up into a tube and discarded, blown open maybe to a page listing the prices for a Genuine Authorized Jesus Cow laminated prayer card set (Get the Whole Series! All Saints, Every Apostle, Plus Archangels!) . . .

  His beefers were huddled by their shelter. I’ll have to buy my hay this year, thought Harley. First year the baler hasn’t been used since Dad bought it new the year I was born.

  He thought of his father now, recalled the quietness of him, how when Harley was a boy every day ended with his father sitting on the edge of Harley’s bed, the Bible open across his knees. He could see his father’s work-thickened finger pointing to the book of John, chapter eleven, thirty-fifth verse.

  “Shortest verse in the Bible, Harley,” said his father.

  Two words. Harley thought of them now.

  Jesus wept.

  I bet he did, thought Harley.

  I bet he did.

  CHAPTER 31

  It was the Fourth of July, and Jamboree Days was in full swing. As part of an agreement with the village, the entire Jesus Cow operation was shut down for the duration of the celebration, and the LED wraparound on the water tower and the barn illumination were all switched off for the first time in months. Harley stood alone in the dark, head rolled back on his shoulders, contemplating the ponderous black bulk of the tower. Far above, almost straight up, at the very dome of the tower, Harley could see the flag of the United States of America. Lit by one bright white light, the flag shifted like an uncomfortable grade-schooler caught in the spotlight during a recital, not so much unfurling or waving as fidgeting in the glare.

  The flag had been Sloan’s idea. When the new water tower went up, the VFW had moved the village flag with it. Apart from celebrating the Fourth, Sloan felt that raising a flag atop the old water tower again would bolster the image of JCOW Enterprises and help diminish some of the criticism it had been weathering lately.

  Initially, Sloan contacted the local VFW to arrange the flag-raising, but when they showed up and asked Carolyn to unlock the gate so they could figure out how to access the pole, which was mounted at the very peak of the tower beside the vent cap, she refused, at which point Snook Hustis accused her of being un-Ameri
can.

  “I am no such thing,” retorted Carolyn. “In fact, I’ll run up that flag myself. I don’t object to the flag, I object to the invasion of my privacy on behalf of the flag.” As when faced with the mounting of the LED sign, she also made vague reference to landmark preservation statutes. In conclusion, she recited three verses of a Wendell Berry poem. No one at the VFW was interested in continuing the debate, and Carolyn—who didn’t want anyone within forty feet of that vent cap—was true to her word, scaling the tower with a fresh flag and lanyard. While she was up there, she surreptitiously pried open the vent cap and snuck a look. Everything was in order, the PVC “T” straddling the overflow tube and showing no sign of cracking or breakdown. She returned to the ground very pleased with herself. In fact, halfway down the ladder it struck her that should the need arise, she could now climb the water tower at any time on the pretense of tending the flag.

  Harley was aware that Sloan’s motivations were less than patriotic, but he was still happy to see the red, white, and blue flying above his buildings again. Harley figured he was a low-key patriot. Residual of his father’s admonishments regarding pridefulness he never cared for the PROUD TO BE AN AMERICAN bumper stickers, but he was certainly grateful to be an American.

  He had the place to himself tonight, with the exception of a small detachment of security guards on duty to redirect those pilgrims who arrived unaware of the shutdown. More than one set of those saw the bright lights of the softball field and rather than genuflecting before a holy calf, wound up in the beer tent. Harley’s father and mother had donated the land for the park, and used to enjoy watching the softball games from their porch. The view was still available, but was latticed by the new security fence running the perimeter of Harley’s property.

  It had been a helluva year, he thought as he stood watching his neighbors at play and the sounds of celebration floated his way: the drum-thump of the cover band, the drunken woo-hoos, the calls of encouragement from the stands, the “hey-battah-battah” the “ducks on the pond,” the aluminum plink of the bat connecting with the ball, and the beery cheers for the occasional close play. Someone jacked a home run and Chief Knutson, manning the PA system, bellowed “TOUCH ’EM ALL, WARTHOG!” Clouds of moths whirled through the light banks, and the whole scene was lit so beautifully, so greenly, it was simply lovely.