Hell's Bottom, Colorado. Laura Pritchett
wire in a circle in his palm, he closes his fingers over it, and pushes his fist, with the wire folded inside, into the cow. He rubs the cow’s hind legs with his left hand as he works inside her with his right and hums a long conversation to her. “You’ll feel better soon, mama mama mama sweet mama girl, bet you’re hurting but it’s almost over, sweet old mama.”
Andrews brings his hand back out, holding the two handles. “I’ve got it looped around the hindquarter. You help me saw.” He hands one handle to Ben. “Pull up and to the side, there.”
“Sorry about this mama,” says Ben. “You’ve been trying your hardest here.”
As each man alternates pulling, there’s a whir of the wire as it’s pulled back and forth across the calf. The cow strains with this feeling of something moving inside her, and her ears flick backwards at this new sound coming from her rear end.
“I bet Danny Black has a calf you can graft on,” Andrews says after a moment. “He just lost a cow.”
“We’ll give him a call.” Ben uses his free hand to wipe the sweat forming on his forehead. He feels sick. In all his years of ranching, he’s only had to do this twice before, and each time it makes him want to quit the business altogether. He feels the tension of the line as it meets the bone of the unborn calf’s leg, and he grits his teeth.
“Just about there,” Andrews says. They saw for a moment longer and then Andrews indicates to stop. He reaches inside the cow and pulls. Ben steps back as the calf’s hindquarter, severed from the groin to the point at the tail, slushes out in a waterfall of blood and thumps on the ground. The cow tries to turn, but the halter keeps her head in place, and Renny is there anyway, scratching her ears and blocking her view.
Renny has forced herself to watch, not to let her eyes wander even for a moment, not to let the wince inside her escape. Now she considers Andrews, watches as he closes his eyes and sticks the fetotome back inside the cow and feels for another place to fit the razor wire. His face is hard in a way she finds beautiful; his skin is tough and wrinkled, and gray stubble flecks his low cheeks and square chin. His forehead is wet, and a bead of sweat sinks down, causing his eyelids to blink rapidly over his green eyes.
She looks at Ben. His face is so familiar that she doesn’t really see it at first. But she squints and concentrates. His hair is dotted with more white, she sees, and he’s cut himself shaving just below the jawline. His eyes look soft and calm, as they usually do, calm despite the fact he hates what he’s doing. She knows he’s cringing inside, but even after all these years together, she can’t see a sign of it anywhere.
“Just get through this, Mama,” she says into the cow’s ear as she scratches it. “I know just how you feel. Carolyn was easy. But that Rachel. I thought she was ripping me apart. The plight of mothers, I tell you.”
It was Rachel, Renny recalls, who first suggested that Renny and Ben live apart. Carolyn agreed. Renny and Ben didn’t have the momentum or cause enough for a divorce, their daughters counseled, but maybe, just maybe, they’d be happier apart. They began to devise plans, point out various spots where a new house could be built on the ranch. They admired various views. They talked about digging a well and running electric lines out, about the division of responsibilities. And all at once, last summer, it became real.
Ben called some old friends and disappeared with them to the back of the property, and soon a small log house stood at the end of the north forty. A few contractors, a little hassle, but surprisingly easy. Renny could have the old rambling house, Ben said, with its piles of junk, with the visitors driving into the front yard. What Ben wanted was some quiet, some remoteness.
The horses are back there now. She can barely see them huddled together, right in front of the small dark square that is her husband’s home. The colt is trotting wildly around the group, throwing his head in the air. He suddenly bunches to a halt and kicks his hind legs up and out. She remembers what it’s like to feel that way, the buzz of energy in her chest, in her throat. How she would shudder with the force of it, which was too much to control, her thoughts and laughter and love shooting off in every direction. She can recall the sensation perfectly. Her throat aches with its absence. Where once a joy swirled she feels a cavern, and though she does not know how to right herself, she is sure she has faltered, and how sorry she is for that. How incomplete she is now.
Ben decides to dump the pieces of this calf beyond his cabin, near the gully. He’ll throw the head and hindquarters and body into the brush. The dogs won’t dig through the mass of sticks to get to the calf; and besides, the body will be frozen to the ground soon, then covered by snow. By the time everything melts, the calf will have decayed. It’s amazing, he thinks, how a life—laughter, arguments, little arms reaching out for him to carry her to bed—how everything ends up as clean bones. As far as he can tell, there’s nothing more.
He looks up to find Renny watching him. Her head is tilted, her face soft—both of which are unusual enough to startle him. “I’m going to get Danny Black’s calf,” she says, lifting her chin, straightening out. “Before the snow starts to stick on the roads.”
Ben nods and looks away. But once she’s turned, he looks back up to watch her go, his eyes following the one pink curler she’s left in the back of her hair.
“Would have been a bull calf,” Andrews says as the other hind leg slips out of the cow and thuds down in the snow. “I bet a hundred pounder. She may be able to push the rest out. That big butt was the problem. Give us a push, Mama.”
A waterfall of blood and yellow fluid comes with her strain. She relaxes and shifts her weight, then tenses. The rest of the calf slithers from her in a pool of membranes and blood and flops to the ground. A blue tongue hangs from the side of a small mouth, eyes open in a dead stare. Guts and the spinal cord protrude from the back part of the calf, and steam rises from them as blood seeps down and pools out into the snow. Immediately the cow tries to turn and thrashes wildly when she cannot break free of her halter.
“Whoa mama, good mama. You saved us a lot of work by pushing it out.” Andrews gently tugs on the membranes hanging filmy-clear from the back of the cow. “I’ll give her a few sulfur pellets for immediate infections and then give her a shot of penicillin. I’ll leave a bottle and syringe. Keep her up here for a few days and watch her.”
“I don’t want to lose her,” Ben says, running his hand down her rump. “She’s a good mama.”
“She looks like it,” Andrews says from where he’s kneeling, putting the coiled razor wire back into his bag.
“She would have protected this calf with her own life if she had the chance.”
“Yes, I know.” Andrews is standing now, ready to go.
“Leave the antibiotic in the barn, if you don’t mind,” Ben says, and then, winking, adds, “but if you want to get paid, you better leave the bill in my truck.”
“Will do.” Andrews smiles and then turns, with a wave, toward the barn.
Ben waits until he hears the truck start up before bending over to grab a piece of the calf in each hand. As he drags the parts toward a bench near the barn where he can sit and skin them, he considers how close this calf came to living—only a few degrees of circumstance. He’s learned this much, how so much of life is the precarious moment, the sudden event, the surprise that spikes out of an ordinary day. How the rest—the bulk of life—is necessary to absorb these little bits. Absorb them and heal and wonder at.
They’ve been through the plains and the spikes of life together, Renny and he. It seems they’re still circling and connecting where they can, to do what they must, on the ordinary days such as this.
By the time Ben is done skinning the pieces, Renny has returned with a sickly looking calf. She struggles under the weight of it as she carries it through the barn and into the corral. She kneels down in the snow and holds it against her as Ben rubs the hide over the calf’s head. With orange baling twine, they tie the largest pieces of hide onto the shivering animal.
Once the cow is