Demon Box Page 5

  I refuse to say spokesperson.

  The crown of leadership has not been a light one. She's paid for her years of barricade busting and midwinter protest marches. She's been hung with irritating bells, tethered to drags, hobbled, collared with yokes made from Y's of sturdy ash sticking a yard above her neck and a yard below to stop her from squeezing between the strands of barbed wire (stop her until she really got resolute, of course; any of our fencing during those first years was at best a tacit agreement with the half-ton tenants), and she has had bounced off her hide barrages of rocks, clods, bean poles, tools, tin cans and tent stakes and, on one rainy raging night, after hours of mediation over a border dispute, fiery Roman candle balls.

  She doesn't do it so much anymore. She's learned the price of protest and I've learned how to build stronger fences and feed better hay. Still, we both know we can look forward to future demonstrations. There's a farm doggerel, goes: "Ya know ol' Ebenezer... she will do what'll please 'er!"

  Hi, Ebenezer. Still here at the dent in the pipe, eh, chewing away cool and calm? I see you haven't let no hotrod fox mess with your memories in the ruminating night...

  She's had other old men. The first was Hamburger, a big Guernsey bull, low-browed and hard-looking and horny enough to one time try to mount an idling Harley, biker and all, because a heifer in heat had rubbed against the rear wheel. During the bidding the auctioneer admitted Hamburger was no good looker to speak of, but he claimed he knew the beast personally and could guarantee he was a hard lover with boundless ardor. We knew he had spoken the truth as soon as the bull came down the truck ramp into our clover. He hit the ground with his hard already on. From that time on, almost any hour of any day when you saw Hamburger hanging out, it looked like he could have broke new ground by just walking on his knees.

  But ardor that knows no bounds neither knows any boundaries. He wasn't a movement leader like Ebenezer but he was just as hard on my fences. One morning he wasn't in our pasture. I found the twisted gap in the wire, but Hamburger was nowhere to be seen. Butch, my neighbor Olaf's son, finally brought us the news that his dad had Hamburger chained in his barn. When I went over to get him, Olaf says, "Come on in the house. I'll have the woman make us a pot of fresh coffee. I want to talk to ya."

  I trust Olaf. Like most of my farming neighbors he has to hold down a job to support his right to labor on his own land. He's out working his fields the minute he's home from the woods; he doesn't even change out of his calk boots.

  We chatted the first cup away. After the second cup he says, "That bull's become a breacher - dangerous. Guernsey bulls'll do that, all to once one day decide to be hateful. And this'n has decided. From now on he's gonna go through any fence any gate any damn thing that happens to stand between him and anything he fancies. Till eventually he's gonna turn on a human being. Maybe not a grown man, but he wouldn't hesitate to turn on a kid or a woman trying to head him. Ya can bet money on it. He's got that look in his eye."

  We went out to his barn and peered through the rails. There was no denying it: what had once been just hard and horny was now a look burning with the first coals of hate for the human oppressor.

  "I'll butcher the bastard tomorrow," I said.

  "Now don't do that. Ya don't want to be eatin' hate. He's still young enough so he oughten be too tough, but he'll have all that breachin' and screwin' and sod-pawin' in his blood. The meat'd be rank as a billygoat. What it is ya'll have to do is put him in a fattening pen and top him off with grain for about forty days. Try to get his mind off all the hellin' around after hot heifers."

  We built the pen out of railroad ties and telephone poles, but I had my doubts about changing Hamburger's mind. Not only was he still horny, with those heifers crooning at him every night from miles around - "Hamburger... Hammm-burger, honey" - those coals in his eyes were hotter with each passing penned-up day. When we saw that the weeks of solitary were making him no mellower, were in fact making him rush daily fiercer at the fence when we brought his grain out, and roar and rumble nightly louder and louder like a pent-up volcano of sperm, we finally resorted to putting a potion in his serving of morning mash, hoping to raise his consciousness, if not up to the Knowledge of the Glorious All-Pervading Mercy that Passeth Understanding, at least up out of his scrotum.

  Our potion produced more agitation, it seemed, than enlightenment. He stood staring into the empty bucket a few minutes, slobbering and twitching. Then he gave a mighty fart and charged. He leveled a railroad tie with his first rush (it must have been a good one; we had estimated his weight as that of six men and medicated him accordingly). When he crashed out we headed for high places, stumbling over each other in our realization of what we had wrought, but his hormones were apparently stronger than his hate; forgetting his scattering tormentors, he stampeded straight for the neglected herd. Far into the night we could hear the debauchery.

  Betsy phoned Sam's Slaughtering. The little refrigerated aluminum truck was there at dawn. Sam's son John got out and took the.22 rifle from the rack behind the seat. Sam no longer did the actual knockover. He was content to stay back at the butcher shop and argue with deer hunters while his son took care of the field work. John was only about eighteen at this time. Though not a licensed butcher, years of accompanying his father on these killing runs had taught John something about death and timing. He knew to arrive at dawn, to stroll out to the condemned animal before it was fully awake (a wave of his hand, a call - "Hey! Here!" - a sharp crack...) and to drop it with the first shot.

  The resulting quake of terror that runs from one end of the farm to the other after this shot must never enter the mind of the victim, or the meat. Ya don't wanta to be eatin' fear, neither. As far as John and I and the cows are concerned, this is what kosher was originally supposed to be about.

  After Hamburger we went through several steer misses - chance bulls, spared by our ineptness with the elastrator or weak rubber bands; but these fellows were at best bush-league bulls who kept trying to get into their own mothers, so they lasted no length of time. After a couple seasons of no bull, and fast approaching a time of no beef, I made a deal with my dad and brother and Mickey Write to get new blood on the property. Mickey had a couple of ponies foundering on my far pasture, and my father knew a milk producer with an extra young bull to swap. Mickey hauled the ponies to the producer in his girlfriend's horse trailer and returned a few hours later with our trade. We all stood in the bee-loud field and witnessed the cautious coming-out of a black Aberdeen yearling, as demure and dimensionless in the trailer as midnight itself. This was to be Abdul, the Bull Bull.

  Barely a boy bull that afternoon, he backed off the ramp as cowed-looking as a new kid on a strange playground. A cute new kid, too. Almost dainty. He was long-lashed and curly-locked and hornless, it appeared to us, in more ways than one. He took one apprehensive look around at our array of cows watching him in a row, tails twitching and eyes a-glitter from two years of bull-lessness, and struck out south for mellower climes like San Francisco, through our fence, our neighbor's fence, and our neighbor's neighbor's neighbor's fence before we could head him off.

  When we finally got him back he took another look at our cows and headed this time for Victoria. It took two days of chasing him with rocks and ropes and coaxing him with alfalfa and oats to get him back and secured and calmed or at least resigned that this was, ready or not, his new home. He stayed, but all the rest of that summer and fall he kept as much field as possible between himself and that herd of hussies stalking his vital bodily essence.

  "What kind of Ferdinand have you rung in here on me?" I asked my father.

  "A new experimental breed," Dad assured me. "I think they call 'em Faggerdeen Anguses, known for docility."

  When hard winter set in, young Abdul finally took to associating openly with the herd, but for warmth and meals only, it appeared. After the daily hay was gone he would stand aside and chew in saintly solitude. With his shy face and his glossy black locks he looked more a pubes
cent altar boy considering a life of monastic celibacy than the grandsire of steaks.

  There comes into the story now a minor cow character, one of Hamburger's heifers named Floozie. A cross-eyed Jersey-Guernsey cross - runty, unassuming, and as unpretty as her father - yet this wallflower was to be the first to clear Abdul of the charge of Flagrant Ferdinandeering. Betsy had told me some of the cows looked pregnant but I was a doubter. I was even more skeptical when she said that it was homely Floozie who was due to drop her calf first.

  "Any time now," Betsy said. "She's secreting, her hips are distended, and listen to her complain out there."

  "It's only been barely nine months since we bought him," I reminded her. "And the only thing he jumped that first two months was fences. She's just bellering because the weather's been so shitty. Everything is complaining."

  That had been the coldest winter in Oregon's short recorded history - 20 degrees below zero in Eugene! - and the bitterest in even the old mossbacks' long recollection. Nor did the freeze let up after a few days, like our usual cold snap. The whole state froze for one solid week. Water went rigid in the plumbing if a faucet was left off for a few minutes; submersible pumps burned out sixty feet down; radiators exploded; trees split; the gasoline even froze in the fuel lines of moving cars. After a week it thawed briefly to let all the cracked water mains squirt gaily for a day; then it froze again. Another new record! And snowed. And blew like a bastard, and kept freezing and snowing and blowing for week after week right through February and March and even into April. By Easter it had warmed up a little. Fairer days were predicted. The snow had stopped but those April showers were a long way from violets. Sleet is worse than snow with none of the redeeming charm. With nasty slush all day long and black ice all night, every citizen was depressed, the beasts as bad as the folks. Beasts don't have any calendar, any Stonehenge Solstice, any ceremonial boughs of holly to remind them of the light. Cows have a big reservoir of patience, but it isn't bottomless. And when it's finally emptied, when month after miserable month has passed and there is no theology to shore up the weatherbeaten spirit, they can begin to despair. My cows began to stand ass to the wind and stare bleakly into a worsening future, neither mooing nor moving for hours on end. Even alfalfa failed to perk them up.

  Then one dim morning Betsy came in to tell me Floozie was in labor down in the swamp and looked like she needed help. By the time I was bundled up and had followed Betsy back down, the calf had been born: a tiny black ditto of daddy Abdul without a doubt, curly-browed and angel-eyed and standing against the sleet as healthy and as strong - to coin a phrase - as a bull. Floozie didn't look so good, though. She was panting and straining through sporadic contractions, but she couldn't seem to rally strength enough to pass the afterbirth. We decided to move them up to the field next to the house to keep an eye on them. I carried the calf while Betsy shooed Floozie along behind. We all had to duck our heads into the stinging icy rain. I was cursing and Betsy was grumbling and Floozie was lowing forlornly about the woes of this harsh existence, but the little calf wasn't making a sound in my arms; his head was too high and his eyes too wide with the wonder of it all to think of a complaint.

  The sleet got colder. Betsy and I went inside and watched out the window. The calf lay down in the shelter of the pumphouse and waited for whatever new wonder life had in store. Floozie continued to low. The afterbirth dangled from her rump like a cluster of grape Popsicles. Some of it finally broke away and dropped to the icy mud. The remainder started drawing back inside. Betsy said we ought to go out there and dig the rest of it forth. I observed that cows had been surviving calving for thousands of years now without my help. Dig my arm into that mysterious yin dark? I was not - to coin another - into it.

  That afternoon Floozie was down. She still hadn't passed the afterbirth, and fever was steaming from her heaving sides. She was making a sighing wheeze every few breaths that sounded like a rusty wind-up replica of a cow running down. The little calf was still standing silent, nuzzling his mother with soft, imploring bumps of his nose, but his mother wasn't answering. Betsy said peritonitis was setting in and we'd need some antibiotics to save her. I drove into Springfield, where I was able to buy a kit for just this veterinarian problem. It was a pint bottle of oxytetracycline antibiotic hooked by a long rubber tube to a stock hypo with a point big as a twenty-penny nail. Waiting for a freight at the Mt. Nebo crossing I had time to read the pamphlet of directions for the inoculation. It showed a drawing of a cow with an arrow indicating the vein in the neck I was to hit. It said nothing about where to tie her off, however.

  The rest of the drive home I spent considering various ties. A garden hose, I thought, would be best, with a slip knot... but before I was even turned into our drive I saw that I wasn't going to get the chance, not that day. I could see the sides heaved no more. The little calf was still standing beside the steaming mound, but was no longer silent. He was bawling as though his heart would break.

  The rest of that sleetsmeared day I spent shivering and shoveling and thinking how if I had just gone ahead and stuck my hand up that cow this morning I wouldn't be digging this huge goddamned hole this afternoon. While I dug and the calf bawled, the cows - one by one - came to the fence to stare in on the scene, not at the dead sister, who was already little more to them than the mud being shoveled back over her, but at the newborn marvel. As the cows stared you could see them straining back through the long dark tunnel of the winter's memory, recalling something. That little calf's cry was tugging on the udders of their memory, drawing down the milky remembrance of brighter times, of longer days and clover again, of sunshine, warmth, birth, of living again.

  Before that dingy day had muddied to full dark my cows were calving everywhere, not weakened by forlorn despair but strengthened by jubilant certainty. Ebenezer calved so fast she thought there must be more to come. We were able to slip Floozie's little maverick alongside; in her jubilation Ebenezer never doubted for a moment that she had dropped twins. By the next morning I couldn't tell the orphan from its stepbrother or from any of the other curly-browed calves that continued to pop out all that day in a steady black line.

  During all this maternity business, the father hadn't come in from the field. After the last cow had calved I walked out, and I could see him in a far corner near my neighbor's fence. I reached him just as the sun pried through a jam of clouds. He listened shyly while I tendered him apologies and congratulations, then turned his back on me to enjoy the bundle of alfalfa I had brought. I noticed further bellering and saw two of my neighbor's Holsteins with fresh black babies and, in my neighbor's neighbor's field of high-rent red Devons, saw more of Abdul's issue hopping about in the sun like a hatch of crickets.

  "Abdul, by God you are one bull bull!"

  He didn't deny it, chomping away with altar-boy innocence; he didn't brag about it, either. It wasn't his style.

  The seasons wheeled on. Our herd soon doubled and then some. We banded the baby bulls, ate the fatted steers, and spared the heifers toward the time when even I get it together enough to realize my dairy farm vision. As the herd got bigger, it got blacker. Better than two thirds were now three-quarters black, with fading smatterings of Guernsey, Jersey, and Oregon Mongol. Abdul got broader and less dainty, yet never lost his altar-boy demeanor; he never butted or assaulted a heifer with that typical show of cruel strength that gives origin to the name "bully."

  No one ever saw him score; taking advantage of his natural camouflage, he chose darkness for his wooing ground. If his midnight nuptials sometimes took him through a fence or two, he usually returned before dawn; when he didn't, there was never any attitude but gentle obedience toward any of us who went to fetch him back. The only anger I ever saw crimp his brow was aimed at no human but at the bull who serviced Tory's herd across the road, an old blowhard Hereford. It was easy to see why. After every broad-daylight hump of some sleepy heifer, this rednecked old whiteface had to parade up and down his fence and bawl his boasting across
the road at our young Angus. Abdul never answered; whenever Old Blowhole across the road started, Abdul always headed for the swamp.

  At length, Betsy began to worry about the number of our herd and about the size of some of Abdul's daughters. They were getting "that age," as it were (and as the nasty neighbor bull was quick to make clear whenever one of Abdul's virgin daughters grazed past) and old enough to be capable of inbreeding. I personally didn't think Abdul would stoop to incest, but who wants to take a chance on idiot veal?

  "What can we do?" I asked Betsy. We were walking along the fence, checking our charges over. Across the road Tory's bull was following, huffing up some new diatribe.

  "Pen Abdul up, or auction him off, or sell him, or -"

  She stopped, drowned out by the whiteface. When his harangue bellowed back down I asked, "Or what?"

  "Or eat him."

  "Eat Abdul? I don't want to eat Abdul. That'd be like eating Stewart."

  "Pen him up, then. That's the way you're supposed to keep breeding bulls..."

  "I don't want to pen him up, either. I wouldn't give Tory's bull the satisfaction."

  "That leaves sell or trade. I'll put an ad in the paper."

  We found no one wanted to trade anything but deer rifles or motorcycles. And the cash orders came not from kindly cattle breeders but from local beaneries seeking bargain burger.

  After a month passed without any results from our ads, and after a night helping Hock, our neighbor to the east, separate Abdul from the half-dozen Charolais Hock'd just bought, I decided to try the pen.