by Lydia Davis
They make slow progress here and there in the field, with only their tails moving briskly from side to side. In contrast, little flocks of birds—as black as they are—fly up and land constantly in waves behind and around them. The birds move with what looks to us like joy or exhilaration but is probably simply keenness in pursuit of their prey--the flies that in turn dart out from the cows and settle on them again.
Their tails do not exactly whip or flap, and they do not swish, since there is no swishing sound. There is a swooping or looping motion to them, with a little fillip at the end, from the tasseled part.
Her head is down, and she is grazing within a circle of darkness that is her own shadow.
Just as it is hard for us, in our garden, to stop weeding, because there is always another weed there in front of us, it may be hard for her to stop grazing, because there are always a few more shoots of fresh grass just ahead of her.
If the grass is short, she may grasp it directly between her teeth and her lip; if the grass is longer, she may capture it first with a sideways sweep of her tongue, in order to bring it into her mouth.
Their large tongues are not pink. The tongues of two of them are light gray. The tongue of the third, the darkest one, is dark gray.
One of them has given birth to a calf. But in fact her life is not much more complicated than it was before. She stands still to let him nurse. She licks him.
Only the hours of the birth itself, on that day (Palm Sunday), were much more complicated.
Today, again, the cows are positioned symmetrically in the field, but now there is a short stray line of dark in the grass among them—the calf sleeping.
There used to be three dark horizontal lumps on the field when they lay down to rest. Now there are three and another very small one.
Soon he, three days old, is grazing, too, or learning to graze, but so small, from where I stand watching him, that he is sometimes hidden by a twig.
When he stands still, a miniature, nose to the grass like his mother, because his body is still so small and his legs so thin, he looks like a thick black staple.
When he runs after her, he canters like a rocking horse.
They do sometimes protest—when they have no water, or can’t get into the barn. One of them, usually the darkest, will moo in a perfectly regular blast twenty or more times in succession. The sound echoes off the hills like a fire alarm coming from a fire house.
At these times, she sounds authoritative. But she has no authority.
A second calf is born, to a second cow. Now, one small dark lump in the grass is the older calf. Another, smaller dark lump in the grass is the newborn calf.
The third cow could not be bred because she would not get into the van to be taken to the bull. Then, after a few months, they wanted to take her to be slaughtered. But she would not get into the van to be taken to slaughter. So she is still there.
Other neighbors may be away, from time to time, but the cows are always there, in the field. Or, if they are not in the field, they are in the barn.
I know that if they are in the field, and if I go up to the fence on this side, they will, all three, sooner or later come up to the fence on the other side, to meet me.
They do not know the words “person,” “neighbor,” “watch,” or even “cow.”
At dusk, when our light is on indoors, they can’t be seen, though they are there in the field across the road. If we turn off the light, and look out into the dusk, gradually they can be seen again.
They are still out there, grazing, at dusk. But as the dusk turns to dark, while the sky above the woods is still a purplish blue, it is harder and harder to see their black bodies against the darkening field. Then they can’t be seen at all, but they are still out there, grazing in the dark.
Lydia Davis, a 2003 MacArthur Fellow, is the author, most recently, of The Collected Stories (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2009). She is also the latest translator of Swann’s Way by Marcel Proust (Viking Penguin, 2002), and Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert (Viking Penguin, 2010). She lives in rural upstate New York and teaches at SUNY Albany, where she is also a Fellow of the New York State Writers Institute.
© 2011 by Lydia Davis
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Davis, Lydia, 1947–
p. cm.—(Quarternote chapbook series ; no. 9)
eISBN : 978-1-936-74761-0
1. Cows. I. Title.
PS3554.A9356C69 2011
813’.54—dc22
2010025149
Manufactured in Canada.
This book is printed on acid-free paper.
Sarabande Books is a nonprofit literary organization.
This project is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts.
The Kentucky Arts Council, the state arts agency, supports Sarabande Books with state tax dollars and federal funding from the National Endowment for the Arts.
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