by Judy Blunt
Night Shift
Spring happened overnight that year, and the coyotes couldn't get enough of it. Calls shot up from shale banks and bloomed over the barnyard, sharp yaps and strings of eee's that met the icy pulse of northern lights overhead. Walking to the calving shed for the three o'clock check, I had to remind myself and the chickenhearted bird dog bumping against my heels that they were farther away than they sounded. Everything seemed closer and sharper those first few weeks when snowdrifts drew back in clean lines and the land rose through. Even the breeze seemed urgent with the smell of wet prairie and new sage, the swollen rumble of the creek. Or maybe it was me.
I ran my fingers over the pack of Marlboros in my jacket pocket, thumbing a matchbook from the cellophane sleeve. The breeze was steady northeast, perfect. John slept with the window open, and he had some pretty firm ideas about the sort of woman who smoked. Actually, he'd borrowed them from his father, or maybe it was a genetic thing, I didn't know. She was a vision of sin, this woman, and in the first years of marriage I had come to love her like a sister, the way she sat that barstool like she owned it, eyelashes drooping with mascara, cigarette fused to her lower lip. Definitely not wife material. "Probably can't cook," I said aloud.
Katie waved her tail and laughed up at me. A registered Gordon setter in a country seething with beady-eyed blue heelers, she had to appreciate a good joke. She pressed against my legs as I juggled the oversized flashlight and the chain latch on the corral gate, then dropped her ears and flopped down to wait.
Pinching a filter between my teeth, I pulled a cigarette from the pack, drawing air through the dry tobacco. My muscles were taut with exhilaration that had less to do with nicotine than the solitude that went with it. I had hours before the ranch woke to be fed—kids, husband, and hired hands. At first light the pop of tractors brought cattle bawling up the creek to the feed ground and John's dad rattling down the hill to the shop. The smoking issue went back to the beginning of my days on this ranch. It was Frank who had issued the ultimatum a couple of months after the wedding—quit smoking or get out. I had abstained from smoking around him and Rose since before the wedding, and tried to be considerate at social gatherings when we were all together. But I was also a child of the sixties who had insisted on having the word "obey" stricken from the vows. When Frank put his foot down, I stuck my chin in the air on pure principle. I was not taking orders from a father-in-law.
John was sympathetic, up to a point, because he also chafed under Frank's iron rule. He was a newcomer to the ranch and to the ranching community, the guy with all the responsibility and none of the seniority. He'd spent very little time with his father before moving to the ranch at age twenty-seven, and they still weren't easy together. John backed me for a while, trying to josh both sides into getting along, until the day Frank walked into the kitchen unannounced and spotted my cigarettes lying on the table. He grabbed them and pitched them at my head.
"Are you still smoking those sonsofbitches!" It wasn't a question, and he was still swearing as he slammed back out the door, nearly running into John. They faced off in the shop. John grabbed a crescent wrench from the bench inside the door, his dad gripped a ball peen hammer and they squared.
"You take care of your own goddamn nest and I'll take care of mine," John said, his words so tight they barely moved his jaw His father's face looked stretched, and it shone with rage.
"Then you'd better goddamn take care of it," he hissed, "or get up the road."
That night when his dad left, John laid down the law as gently as he could. My smoking had raised more hell than it was worth. He must forbid me to smoke. There was too much at stake to stand on principle. If I loved him, I would do this for him. There was more, and I sat silently and listened. Everything he said made sense. I couldn't defend smoking, I found, without sounding selfish, a spoiled teenager. John vowed to help me quit and I nodded, and in a way the matter was settled, mapped out in clear lines. All I had to do was keep both feet on the right side. All I had to do was be good.
True to his word, it became a "we" project. Every hug began as a sniff test, ending abruptly if my hair held the faintest trace of smoke. His nostrils flared when I walked by. The hired men tattled. Cigarette butts I stashed in the weeds found their way indoors, sometimes scattered like seed on the kitchen floor, sometimes dropped in my coffee cup. I cleaned them up and never said a word. I was bad, and I knew it. Why couldn't I just not smoke? I didn't know Before long, John's patience gave way. The smell of cigarette smoke brought him roaring out of a dead sleep. I bought them with egg money, untraceable. I smoked one, maybe two a day, and when the men hung around the buildings all day, I seethed. They had me on the run. There was the time I leaned out of the wind against a granary to light a cigarette, feeling secure with the men off fencing. Suddenly the wind caught a shop door and slammed it. I nearly wet my pants. The electrical shock of adrenaline left me weak and shaking. And angry.
This was the game we called smoking, just one leak in a mile-high dam. If John and I recognized the issues that lay behind it, we didn't let on. We spent a great deal of time and energy keeping confrontation at a safe level. The anger I felt at being forbidden and the anger he felt when I defied him were manageable angers; they passed and left a blank spot where we could write "normal" or even "happy." We shared a history, a love of our children and the land they grew on. We were careful with each other. But there were times we slipped, times I pushed too hard and defenses crashed. One time I argued for the power to sign bank drafts when I paid the ranch bills every month; another time I wanted a small wage check for field work, something in my own name. John listened. The last time I pressed him for an answer, he rose to his feet and grabbed his hat from a shelf by the front door. He turned, pointing the hat at me, straight-armed.
"Don't think you're going to run this ranch," he said, and for once the truth lay between us, flat and unmoving. In the stillness that followed, his expression never moved, and my gut twisted with the finality I read in those clean straight lines. Old rules do not break; they simply stretch and snap back like a well-made fence.
Inside the corral, I cupped my hand around the match flare and leaned against the gate, dizzy but mellow. The heifers were up and anxious again tonight, their ears swiveling forward to test the darkness, then back to the row of babies bedded down against the windbreak. The lantern beam swung a lazy arc across the pen, stroking down the backs, pausing a moment on the tail end, moving on. I smoked while counting the heads I could see from the fence. We started with 125 heifers in mid-March and in a month had calved all but 35. "Got a good catch on those heifers," John's father would say. I grinned around the last inch of Marlboro. What can anyone say to a man who takes personal credit for a cow's heat cycle and a bull's virility? The herd shifted to watch me fieldstrip the cigarette butt and stomp a clod of half-frozen corral mud over the pieces. They parted easily as I began talking and clucking my way among them.
The past week had been slow and I wasn't surprised to find a heifer down, secluded against one end of the hayrack. She grunted softly as my light played over her ribs and down her flank to the fluid-filled membrane that bulged beneath her tail. The hay was wallowed flat where her head had rolled back with each contraction; she'd been at it for a while. Stepping closer, I could see no sign of feet in the bubble of opaque fluid glistening in the flashlight's beam. She clambered up awkwardly as I approached. The gates were set in the calving barn, and I hazed her toward the doors at an easy jog.
We had built a high wing fence of lodgepole pine that narrowed like a funnel to the barn doors, a system used by the Indians who had built wings of brush and boulders to guide buffalo off the cliffs that loomed over the creek. The bottom layers were white with bones. The heifer fell into a high-headed trot with the pole fence on one side and me on the other. As she swung through the doorway, I raced up behind her to close the gate before she changed her mind. She stood panting amid a labyrinth of smaller pens, ignoring her labor to watch
me enter and flip a switch that activated the series of flood lamps along the rafters. I urged her down the alley to the far end, where a square catch pen bedded with straw waited. This gate swung both ways, and when pushed to the inside formed one side of a narrow chute that ended in a head-catch. A small duck-through door opened to the warming room, where we kept vet supplies, gunnysacks and a space heater. The delivery area had a cement floor beneath the straw, and water ready at a hydrant outside the warming room. It was a state-of-the-art system, more modern in its own way than my house.
Bales stacked along the walls absorbed outside noise, and the interior seemed unnaturally still as I rustled a nest in a pile of loose straw and settled in to watch the heifer. Nose to the ground, she circled the pen with a growing sense of urgency as her labor resumed. Had anyone been there I would have given him ten-to-one odds that she would lie down facing me so I couldn't monitor her progress. I would have won my bet, too. Front legs folding under her brisket, she settled to her side with a grunt. The membrane had broken in her dash to the barn and I had seen the bottom of one hoof peeking out at the height of a contraction, comma-shaped pads soft and puffy from the warmth of the womb. There was still a chance that the other foot would follow. Sometimes we had to pull calves—help the heifer by wrapping chains around the calf's legs and pulling as she pushed. But more often than not, they figured it out.
Stretching my legs in the straw, I relaxed in the luxury of silence. Waiting for her to calve flew in the face of general ranch policy, but to John, exhausted by the pace of spring work, free help was free help. I could do pretty much anything within reason, and he wouldn't flicker. Frank was another story. The sight of me with a cow brought him loping across the barnyard. It made him crazy. Had I followed a common ranch wife custom, I would have checked the heifers and fetched the men immediately if I found one calving. The first time his father caught me up to my armpit in a cow he slammed through the gate and grabbed my shoulder, pulling me to one side. "Here, here, wait wait wait ..." He was sputtering, winded, jerking at the band on his wristwatch, popping the snaps on one cuff. Elbows up to ward off challenge, he thrust both dry, grease-blackened hands into the cow
When the chains were secured on the calf's front legs, he hooked up the puller, a steel Y-shaped contraption. The forks of the Y fit below the birth area and a wide band went over the cow's back to hold it in place. The leg of the Y was about four feet long, and at the end a powerful winch controlled the cable we hooked onto the calving chains. He pulled the calf while the cow stood caught by the neck in the calving chute, working the winch like he was hauling in a trophy fish, so much torsion on the line I half expected the calf to cannon out and land in the straw behind him. It was the last time I could stomach watching Frank in the calving shed.
I quit helping with calving during the daytime mostly to avoid Frank, but there were other reasons. Three kids were a handful, too young to leave alone, too many to take along. And the hired men seemed to have more to prove if I worked outside. These were men's men, most of them, used to working undisturbed in a man's world—which scenario did not include women in the calving shed. The last time I calved the day shift I ran two heifers in to watch, both barely started, and went back to the house to check on the kids. The hired man saw me leave, and when I returned half an hour later, he had just finished pulling the second calf.
"What took you so long," he yelled, grinning as I walked into the shed. Then the cow staggered up, gave another heave and her uterus landed in a slick purple mass at his feet. He'd been trying to show off and had pulled the calf before it was ready, causing the prolapsed uterus—an outrageously stupid mistake, as far as I was concerned. But when he complained that I had "spoken up" to him, I got no support beyond another worn lecture about trying to boss the hired men. "You might be dead right, but they're not going to take orders from you," John reminded me for possibly the tenth time. His voice matched the sag of his shoulders, forever the mediator, and hating it. It was difficult to keep hired hands this far from town, and Frank was notoriously difficult to work for. Where hired men were concerned, John played the "good cop" role to Frank's "bad cop," and could generally keep everybody working happily, as long as I didn't jump in and piss someone off. It was a basic rule: wives didn't give orders. It wasn't that I didn't get it. I flat refused to.
Most ranchers I knew pulled calves in the early stages of labor rather than lose sleep or waste daylight. They treated birth like a disease that was cured by quick action. Complications were obstacles that they treated with the same finesse with which they tore stumps from productive fields. In Frank's day, calves had been winched from the womb with fence stretchers or pulled free with a farm tractor or pickup linked to the chains on their feet. The uterine prolapse that frequently followed this rough treatment was blamed on a defect in the cow's anatomy or heredity. She would be hoisted by her hind legs from the tines of a buckrake or an overhead winch while her fifty-pound uterus was rinsed with soapy water, dusted with sulfa powder and reinserted. The process triggered strong contractions, so the vaginal opening was sewn shut with a large curved needle and twine to prevent a relapse. Survivors of this first stage were given massive doses of antibiotics to curb the infection. Survivors of the second stage were shipped with the canner cows in November, hamburgers on the hoof.
I had this theory of birth as a natural process that worked best at nature's own speed. It was considered a pretty harebrained idea in a community where the only "natural" human birth in decades took place in the backseat of a car bucketing down the road toward the hospital. Stranger yet, I insisted that my own experience with birth transferred to the calving shed. The methods I argued for were common sense to me— giving the cow time, pulling with the contractions as they occurred, easing off when they quit. Birth is birth, I reasoned, human or bovine—same process, different product. Most often my argument met with offhanded dismissal. If a woman's knowledge of birth gave her insight into an animal's experience, what did that make her? If a man could calve a cow did that mean he could deliver a baby?
I knew my own experience, flying solo through three Lamaze births in four years in the sterile shelter of the twenty-eight-bed hospital seventy miles north of us. Behind that were the stories of my mother and her generation, drugged labors, forceps, women kept flat in bed for days after birth. One of my aunts made the long ride to Malta sitting on my cousin's head but was prevented from delivering by two strong nurses who crossed her legs and held her down until the doctor arrived. Intrusion was normal, and the fewer challenges offered by the mother, the more smoothly things went.
In my family, only my grandmother remembered when birth depended on women working together, mother and midwife, neighbors who helped one another through birth and stayed on to cook a few days. She bore eight children. She told me of a time the midwife didn't come, of having both hips nearly dislocated by my grandfather, who panicked at the slow crowning of his daughter's head, folded my grandmother's knees against her stomach and pushed, until the screams of a ten-pound baby joined those of his wife. He was easily forgiven. Childbirth and children lay within the boundaries of a woman's world. Men knew livestock. There was all the difference in the world.
Inside the barn I checked my watch again and then rose to walk around to the other side of the pen. The heifer rolled her head to watch me, and I spoke to her in a soothing tone. Her labor was hard now, drawing her in taut, extended arches with little rest between. If something hadn't moved by now, it wasn't going to. Our heifers were bred to Angus bulls six months after being weaned from their own mothers, and were still losing baby teeth and growing when they gave birth the next spring. Calves were sold by the pound, and the rancher's only control over his paycheck in the fall was to build bigger calves. It amounted to keeping big cows, buying big bulls and breeding early to get as many calves as possible out of each cow. It was a matter of pure business, dollars and cents, profit and loss; the smaller picture was the nine-hundred-pound heifer that stared through
the fence at me, straining to give birth to a ninety-pound calf. It was like a hundred-pound woman having a ten-pound baby—not impossible, but it wasn't going to be easy either.
The heifer still had a single black hoof showing and it looked half-grown, facts that I related to her in a steady monotone as I moved back around to prepare a bucket of antiseptic soap and water. Lifting the calving chains from their nail on the wall, I ran out of things to say. I stood there slowly pouring the stainless steel links from hand to hand like coins, pulling hoof-sized loops and letting them slide empty through my fingers.
I dropped the chains in the bucket of soapy water and stripped off my jacket. A few hours a night, six weeks out of the year, I did things my way. The heifer had decided to ignore me. There was a slim chance that she would allow me to ease up behind her—another ten-to-one shot—but this time the odds were against me. Unlatching the gate, I began pushing it forward and she lurched to her feet, moving unsteadily along the chute I created until the head-catch closed around her neck. She attempted to back up, fighting the metal bars that held her. I pushed up tight against her so she would not have room to kick hard, slipped a loop of lariat around her hind leg, then jumped back out of the way and snubbed the free end to a pole behind me. She stood quivering, not quite resigned. Swinging the gate back to give us room, I pushed up my sleeves and tossed my watch over beside my coat, rinsing my hands and forearms in the bucket as I fished out the slippery chains. I had quit wearing my wedding ring when calving started, but my left thumb still slid down to check. Forming loops at both ends of the chain, I slipped them over one clean wrist. Her ears flipped back as I eased up from behind, but she stood.
