A Brutal Business

Jeanne Wilkinson

I called him Henry. I'm not sure why, but Henry he was, the last of my Holsteins. Black and white, but mostly black, with a white star on his forehead. I'd sold the rest of the herd to a farmer in the next county. To be with you. 

No, that's not quite true. I would've sold them anyway, because it was all too much.

Illnesses, injuries, weather, weeds, breakdowns, bills, sweat, stings, fly strips, field work, calf deaths, cat deaths, and the price of milk going nowhere but down. When you came along, I went with you. Left it all behind except for Henry. My last calf. A boy. Most of the calves born in my barn had been boys. Can't keep a herd going with boys. Useless boys. Cows are girls. You know. Milk?

 Not even worth putting on the cattle truck, those adorable little ones with their wobbly legs walking up that tragic plank to a non-future, at best a cattle yard, food and drugs scientifically formulated to make them grow too fast: a terrible stink, squashed side by side, shit to their knees, rotting hooves, no room to roam. No. Some of the local farmers would bonk them in the head, the boy-babies, toss them into the woods to become a frothy maggot-wave squirming on the forest floor, a creamy carpet for deer to sniff and walk away from. 

A brutal business, farming. I kept Henry, my last. 

I backed him into a corner and slipped a rubber band around his balls with the stretching tool: snap. Better than cutting. Maybe. It seemed better. The band cut off the circulation; his bullish self withered and died; he became a steer. Magic. Not about to smash through fences to get to the source of that delicious cow-lady smell wafting in the wind, not about to run fierce and fast and bellowing to humpetty hump hump, humpetty hump hump, hind-quarters twitching, pounding, pumping. No, none of that. Instead those sweet and salty smells would drift right past his cold steer nose, no more delicious than a diesel truck chugging down the road.

You and I picked each other up in the wind, across the room, down the road. We chased our sweet-and-salties smashed through fences fields forests humpetty hump hump ohmygod humpetty hump hump, shedding old lives with our clothes, rising up brand new beasts from fragrant steamy soil. We had no rubber bands squeezing our randy souls, snap. 

Oh, we were wild. We were delicious.

Your place had irregular fences. Or none at all. A swamp — we didn't call it wetlands then — and sometimes a corn or hay field leading up into the woods, woods, woods all around that bled out deer, small herds and families nibbling corn and dappling themselves back into the woods again waiting for cold-snap hunters to take their corn-filled bellies home on top of cars, heads hanging slack over back windows, glazed and deadly glares knifing into the car at men in blaze-orange who should have been wolves. Couldn't see a house anywhere from your windows. A long driveway that flooded. Jesus, that driveway, with me always stuck on one side or the other in the track-grooved muck where the stream passed over, or parked by the road where everyone knew my car. Knew my story. Knew my past. Knew my gone-now herd. But better the small-town scandal than my car sunk in a swamp-black slick of slurried ruts that filled with tiny fleeting fish during hard rains, fish who slid swimmingly into bird gullets or baked into mud-fried fish sticks in the subsequent sun.

We brought Henry there, to your place. We put him in a shed but he got out. It wasn't much of a shed. He wandered the abandoned fields and we found his shadowy self not far from the deer, herded him home, gave him corn. We'd ring the Henry bell; he'd saunter down to get his treat and sleep in the shed, and yes, he did that every night. We didn't fence him in; we didn't tie him up. We took chances with Henry. He ran wild, he did.

We took chances with each other. We cut our arms and bled each other's blood when the midsummer moon shone full on our shining blade. We were mother, father, sister, brother, cradled infant at our breasts: closer than words on paper; closer than lovers. Summer nights were star-pricked, candle-shadowed, floating in music, floating in flesh. Summer days were wind-songed, wildflowered. Roaming with our book we named those tender blossoms one by one: scorning the invasive aliens; breathing pistils and petals; leaving them be. 

We ran wild, we did. We were pistil, petal, stamen and sepal. We did not leave each other be.

We wondered when we would eat him: Henry. Because Henry was not a pet. Henry was meat. Yet he was a pet, and happy, happy as a lone steer could be. And sleek. Furry black back smooth as oiled onyx. Henry and his good life. Then it was fall, with that snap in the air that hit you in the morning, that little slap of things going brown, shutting down, closing up, sleeping, rotting, dying. Hunting time. Butchering time. We wouldn't do it ourselves. We'd call the locals. It would be them, not us, who shot him in the head, sliced him down the center, cut him into four pieces, and left us his heart in a pail on our doorstep, which I would give to neighbors. All too real, that heart. And the tongue, too, long and pink. Jesus. Then they would haul the quartered carcass to the cutting place of saws and knives where beasts become chops and steaks and burgers, letting him hang for a while to age and mellow, eventually returning Henry to us wrapped in clean white waxy paper. We would freeze and thaw him out piecemeal; he would sizzle in our pan permeated with that sweet-earth nutty rounded full and melting flavor common to right-living domesticated flora and fauna not stressed or poisoned, pushed or prodded. He would come back to us delicious.

This is the bargain we've long made with our food animals: we feed them; they feed us. Who gets the best of that bargain? After years of farming, I don't know. But the least we can do for our meat is to give it a good life, was my thinking.

A brutal business, farming.


Then one day that fall, you had gone somewhere, probably to one of your jobs, the odd ones. It was one of those mist-rising season-turning days, neither warm nor cold, where you could wear a jacket or not wear a jacket. I went outside to feel the still-warm sun and saw a strange thing, which was Henry lying on a pile of straw in front of the shed, rays of golden light striping through the fog onto his dark fur. Henry who was usually up and about and even gone by that time, leaving us to wonder once again if we should tie him up or fix the pen because would he really come back to us? Really? we would wonder as his dark form disappeared into the trees, scratching our heads, doing nothing. But here he was this sun-buttered morning, our Henry, on his side, legs sticking straight out, so I walked up to him lying in that strange way and saw that he was stiff and still as a stone, and I saw that he was dead.

I stared down while fog drifted in, a thick swamp mist that covered us like a blanket and tucked him in up to his eyes, Henry's eyes that lay wide open to the sky above, filmy and blank under long beautiful lashes. And I was alone. Alone in that sky-blotting mist with Henry, who was dead. Alone, alone, alone. I sat on the grass, wet like tears had fallen, yet my eyes stayed dry. How did it happen? Did he eat something bad? Did he swallow a piece of metal lying about? How did he die? Why did he die? Why why why? Still as stones we were that day, Henry and I. And when you got home, still as stones we were that night, you and I, sitting at the kitchen table, smoke from our cigarettes the only thing moving in the world. 

We chewed on Henry's death like cud. He was too big to bury. We performed no ceremony. We called the locals who take dead animals, fresh dead animals. I didn't ask what they were used for. Mink food? Did they pay us? Did we pay them? I don't remember. I only know that a truck came and took Henry away, unceremoniously. He did not come back to us delicious.

We were still wild, that fall, you and I. We ran fiery-footed in frosted grass, me crazy frantic to warm myself at the fount of your hot soul and bathe in it naked like temple water, you cooling with winter winds that whistled through the cracks in Henry's empty falling-down shed. You with a gun chasing after deer in Henry's old stomping grounds; me curling up on the kitchen floor drinking a whole goddamned beer in the morning first thing, life slipping slithering into a slurried mess, ruts in the driveway freezing into mountains and valleys, no birds no fish just deer flying wild and wounded, just me flying wild and wounded, trails of cold thin winter blood dripping from our love skinned and sliced into pieces . . .

. . . heart in an old tin bucket that I left behind that winter day. But I took my tongue with me, I did.