A More Perfect Cow - Part One -

For Sam

I’d begun to suspect the cow was Jesus, but I don't think I wanted to admit it. Not really. Not yet.

The first time was an accident. Second time was her doing. The third — I can’t reckon why, but I did it anyway, and my gun’s still hot as burning cast iron.

She was alarmed the first time. Or something of the sort. It was the coyote that made me do it — shoot her, I mean — and not on purpose. It had been stalking the fence all evening, and I’d kept my eye on its bonethin silhouette from the veranda, my rifle cocked. It didn’t deserve to die, I figured, and I don’t exactly love playing God, but the moment the coyote lunged from the briars and set off across the field, my bullet was quick to follow.

The coyote must have fixed its sights on my shotgun; it volte-faced for the briars. And so the bullet, with nowhere else to go, chose the heifer’s skull. A whistling hole right through her eye. But she didn’t fall.

Next time, it was a ravine, and it wasn’t my fault. I’d been leading the herd through the cedars, back down the steep path to the pond, when she slipped and tumbled down a shallow gully. She lay there a moment, stunned. We hardly moved. Then, after a long while, she stood out of spite, her neck cocked sideways at 40 degrees, splinters of bone pushing up like broken ivory keys through her fawn-colored fur. When she ambled off into the woods, I didn’t chase her. She came back to the farm the next day, gleaming brass cowbell and all, neck straight as a spade.

But bovine or Almighty, Christ or not, I brought in Doc Brown anyway, Doc Brown who was a stocky, resonant man, like a barrel of aged ale. Doc Brown who I, as a boy, had already thought ancient when he tended my grandfather’s cows. When he arrived, I fetched him a glass of my wife’s iced tea, my finest milking stool, and sat him down before the cow in question.

“What seems to be the trouble?” he asked, pushing up his delicate glasses.

“She’s. . .not been herself,” I said.

His spectacles were blank and sightless with white afternoon light; his eyes, for a moment, weren’t there. “Her symptoms.” He spoke the question flat, quick, a slap to the wrist.

I hesitated. Well, you see, Doc, it’s all perfectly rational: this cow is suffering from very broad, very acute delusions of grandeur. And I’m starting to believe right along with her. But instead I stammered, “she doesn’t come when I whistle or sing.”

After a long glance my way, Doc Brown regarded the beast for a spell: prodding at her bones, peering deep into her cavelike ears, staring hard into her glazed eyes. At last he stood, swaying, and, despite this being my land, told me to join him on a walk.

We took the dirt lane that circled round to my wife’s blackberry bushes. On either side of us, and at a great distance, the Holsteins eyed the veterinarian, his familiar gait which must’ve been like the slow funeral plod of the reaper’s, his familiar scent which certainly smelled of lilies and tombstones. I called to them, cooed, even crooned their favorite ballads, but still they would not come. The whole lot of them — dozens, perhaps more — pressed close together, one bumbling black and white form, as though they believed they were a clever herd of melting zebras, as though Doc Brown were a hollow-bellied lion.

“What is it, then?” I asked, slotting my trembling hands into my overalls. “Is she going to die?”

Doc Brown’s gaze carried away, somewhere beyond the barn. To the property line, where across the wide dirt road, stood the florid apple trees of Old Joe, the wheat farmer with the wild eyes. At last, Doc Brown said, “It’s July. It’s hot. I know what the heat can do to a man’s senses. I know what the summer can do.” He wouldn’t look at me. “I’ve got clients all the way across town. An ewe with a parasite. An ox with pneumonia.” What he said boiled my blood, turned my tongue into a fire poker, but I knew better than to spark a wildfire in summer — so I clenched my fists as he leant close and said: “listen careful, son, and only call me here again if your grandfather’s cattle is on fire: never, in all my days, have I seen a more perfect cow.”

That same night, I brought my grandfather’s velvet Bible to the barn, along with my wife’s necklace studded with a fragile gold cross. Bought it for her on one of those rare trips of our youth: summer, seaside, ‘46, maybe, or ‘48. The war was over by then, anyway, and my grandfather wasn’t yet gone.

“These look familiar to you?” I knelt in front of the cow where Doc Brown had been and knotted the gold chain between my fingers. “My grandfather was the praying sort. You remember him, don’t you — big man with the straw hat, big man with the kind eyes? How’s a cow’s memory, anyhow? Like an elephant, or like a goldfish?”

She blinked slowly back at me with her great glimmering dark eyes, and the more I stared, the bigger they seemed to become: growing outward and infinite. It seemed her eyes were hiding something — the universe, or hell, maybe even God. I shook my head. “Anyway, you know, it was easy as a boy, listening and believing. But as soon as I turned sixteen, I guess the rebellion kicked in — late bloomer, I was — and you couldn’t get me on my knees or in a pew, not for anything. It was the one thing we couldn’t find in common, him and me — the praying, I mean.”

The cow bowed her head, rifled her nose through the hay, and turned her rump to me.

I stood, startling a hen roosting by my feet. “Listen here, cow, I know you’re not holy. I know that because I don’t believe in holy. You’re not Jesus. But I certainly don’t know what you are, because it sure as hell ain’t mortal.”

If my accusation evoked offense, she didn’t let on. If I wanted, she seemed to say, I’d have to find Jesus some other way.