It was as if he were pulling the calf out of a cave and some great force that had nothing to do with the cow had hold of the other end of it, and would not let it go.
Everett had a piggin string wrapped around the calf ’s front feet for a handhold. He tore the calf out of its mother with all the strength of his back and arm muscles. The cow struggled to get up, her tongue thrust out of her mouth. His boots made crackling sounds as he slid around in the crisp, dusty soil. His horse stood tied to a little persimmon tree and the dog lay at his feet, both of them staring at this difficult birth with a kind of dread interest.
The calf slid out in a rush of fluid and with it came the entire uterus, flowing out of the cow and turning inside out, prolapsing, a sliding sack of flesh the size of a sleeping bag, shedding its red lining. The cow made a gasping noise and she lay in a great mound, lifting her head again and again.
He tied the umbilical cord in two places, four inches apart, with twine. He cut between the knots with his penknife. He threw his slicker over the calf and pegged it down around it with rocks. It was a bull calf. He fished around for the roll of gauze bandage in his saddlebags and found it. He knelt down and began to wind it around and around the prolapsed uterus, now stuck all over with twigs and the small leaves of the Texas persimmon. There was blood all over his coat. He was smeared with fluids. Every predator within miles would be lifting its head, opening nostrils, licking its muzzle.
The bovine uterus was a great unwieldy bag that weighed more than thirty pounds. It began to take on a manageable shape as he wound the gauze bandage around it until it was the shape of a column. His hands seemed very old, older than the rest of him. They were spotted with white scars. They were difficult to operate. He got to his feet.
“Get up,” he said. She made a mawing, blatting sound. “Get up, goddamn it.” Her big hooves scrabbled and made grooves in the dust and ripping up the shiny, elastic stems of the leather plant. He knelt at her head and held her muzzle in one hand, clamping her mouth shut and with his other hand shut her nostrils and cut off her wind.
She fought with the last of her strength against suffocation and suddenly plunged to her feet, back end up first and then the front and Ross jumped to get out of her way. She swung her head and knocked his hat off. He kicked it aside and kept one hand on her. She was swaying. “Good girl,” he said.
The prolapsed uterus, bound into a long column, hung from her rear end. He pushed it back into her, unwinding the bandage as he fed the internal organ back into the cave of her body. The smell of birth and its detritus all around him in the crisp and burning drought lands. He put his hat back on after he wiped his bloody fingers on his shirt. He stripped the slicker from the newborn bull calf, and got it on its feet, and milked the cow of some of the birth milk. He opened the calf ’s mouth and thrust it in. He stroked his hard fingers over the calf ’s eyes and dug matter out of its nostrils and wiped the matter on his cracked chaps.
“Come on, baby.” He held the calf between his legs, and pressed the teat at his mouth. “Come on, sport, I been waiting for you a long time.”
The calf sucked one suck and turned his head up to the empty blue sky as the heavy cream rolled down its throat. It opened its perfectly fitted mouth and closed it again and sucked again, and the stuff of the new world poured into its body and with a sort of finality it sucked again and was committed.
He waited for a while. Then he untied his horse and held the rein with one hand and picked up the calf with the other. He threw the off-rein over the horse’s neck and stepped up into the saddle. It was a clumsy thing to do with the little brush carbine sticking up out of the scabbard and the loose-limbed bull calf slipping under his arm.
The horse took in a deep breath of the wind to see what information might be riding down on it. Then he turned his head quickly to a clump of little live oaks and cedar. His ears were stiff as buckram. Something had come along already, probably a coyote or a fox, but nothing to challenge a man on a horse. The dog started off across the stony ground toward whatever it was, but Ross whistled him back. Then he lifted the reins and they moved off, downhill, the cow trailing after, bawling for her calf. He wanted her to walk very slowly or she would come apart again. They passed by the ravine where the government men had buried his shot cattle. Some of the skulls and bones were exposed, scoured by the dry wind.
AT THE BARN he put the cow into a stall and the calf in the straw beside her. His son helped to hold the cow while he took a jerrican and poured five gallons of water down into her uterus. The weight of the water would settle it and hold it in place until the tissues reattached themselves. He led the bay gelding into the fairway and shucked off the saddle and the rifle scabbard and the blankets and carried it all into the tack room and shoved it onto a saddle tree. He hung the bridle over the horn and turned the bay out into the lot. The bay had had a hard ride with double weight and wouldn’t be worth a crying dime for two days. He put his hand on the boy’s shoulder and they turned toward the house, where it drowsed under the bare limbs of the mesquite and the pinwheel of the windmill fan sailing stationary with its long blades. His gray stud Kat Tracks ran down the fence line and lifted his muzzle in the air with a feline curiosity to take in the smell of the new calf.
The cook came into the kitchen in his rubber apron.
“Yo, Jugs,” said Ross.
Jugs said, “What is it?”
“Bull calf.” Ross picked up a scrap of paper from the kitchen table. It had columns of figures on it and he smeared the paper with cow blood.
“Is that it?”
Ross tried to wipe off the paper. “That’s it.”
“No branding crew this year.”
“Nope. We can do it ourselves. Me, you, and the boy.”
He laid down the paper and then went upstairs to Miriam’s room. He searched through the drawers of her vanity for a little three-minute sand glass he had given her years ago. Brought it back from a trip to San Antonio. He found it in the second drawer along with a hank of ribbon. The Magic of Old San Antonio, the glass said. He blew the dust from it and took it downstairs and sat it on the kerosene stove and lit a burner. He filled a shallow pan with milk from yesterday’s milking and then broke three eggs into the pan and turned over the three-minute glass.
He heard shots from the barn; a twenty-two. Innis was shooting rats. They nested in the four-hundred-pound mohair bags, chewed holes in them and made themselves comfortable in the world’s most expensive fiber. There was at present no place to sell it except in the East. He turned to the kitchen table and again went over his figures. So much for the shearing crews and so much for the shipping and so much for a train ticket to Woonsocket, Rhode Island, where most of the mills were shut down by strikes. Several people had been shot dead by the police. He would keep taking whatever he could get and storing it if he could keep the rats from establishing entire rat cities and rat undernations in it. This was called betting on the come. He had lost all his cattle except seven breeding cows and out of them he had got the bull calf in the barn and four other heifer calves.
Someday the grass would come back, someday there would be a market for angora coats and sweaters, and the military would need mohair for uniforms and flight suits. If they got into a war the four-hundred-pound bags would move quickly. In the meantime he had a match for Kat Tracks and that should bring in some money. He smelled something burning and the cook ran in the door.
“Shit, boss, it’s boiled over and them’s the last eggs.”
Ross took the pan by the handle and walked to the back door and threw the smoking eggs and burnt milk into the hardpan dirt of the backyard. He said, “Well, at least I still got my whiskey.”
His son walked up with five rats by the tails. He stepped around the mess of burnt eggs and milk.
“Was that my breakfast?” he said.
“Yes.” Ross kicked the pan. “There’s grits.”