KARL NASTROM

The Bull Calf

I knew he was gone before the flies did. Half a mile away, I put down my mending, pushed a loose hair behind my ear, and made a note in my journal. August 18, 1949. 9:18 a.m. 
            The match barely trembled in my fingers as I lit my cigarette. I’d known this was coming. No reason to go all wobbly like a two-legged stool. I smoked at a regular rate, knocking off the ash every other puff to keep the tip even, and wondered who’d bring in the cows that evening if they wandered into the back forty swamp again, like the day before. Naturally I smoked store-boughts—Chesterfields, in fact. Only women who swore and got drunk on a barstool with the pawing farmhands rolled their own cigarettes anymore, and I hadn’t never sunk that low yet even though I did have certain ideas sometimes. 
            I stubbed out the butt and put rubber boots over my house shoes in case of the cow pies, tied on my straw garden hat, and walked straight to him. “You sure done it now,” I said. 
            My Otto. 
            It was his own damn fault. The night before, I’d dreamed of dust and starvation and angels, with plenty of dead bodies to boot. After morning milking I said to him, “Pa, it don’t set right, you goin’ to the fields today. I had a dream.”  
            He said, “You and your dreams, Frau Bauer. Who else gonna make my hay? It’s down and cured and needs puttin’ up.” We all used to talk German, as kids, before the first war. Not anymore, after the second war. Otto still called me Frau, though. He said he never married a Mrs. Bauer and didn’t plan to pick one up neither. 
            As I come over the rise, I seen his bare ankle first, whiter than the day he was born and sticking up in the air like a fresh plucked chicken wing. He died stepping through the fence; his bootlace snagged on the bobwire as he dropped. Life is funny like that. Sometimes the lace snags, sometimes it slips free. He landed face first on a rock and busted a couple teeth that didn’t bother Otto no more, but Schleicher and Son had to fix them up nice for the open review. 
            Otto would have been black with flies but for the wind. Plenty of sunshine, strong breeze. A perfect day for making hay. He wasn’t wrong about that. But he was dead.  
            I knew I killed him, pure and simple.  
            I dried him out drier than a shallow well in a hundred-year drought, till his heart overheated with no waters to cool it and finally exploded.  So many times I warned him off. I told him to get shut of me any which way, even move into town or take another woman, but he just said I should stop talking crazy.  In the end, he was mine only as long as the good Lord allowed, then gone. My Otto crossed over. I called the ambulance and sat down to smoke. 

You see, I was born wild, Mother said, thrashing into the world like a fallen angel pitched right out of heaven. It’s one of the few things I recall of her, Mother telling me how much toil I was to bear, how I had so much wild in me it nearly killed her to carry me so long and bring me out to breathe the fresh air, but that she loved me the more for the troubles. I remember her face, and Father, and my brother. Then the fire came, and I don’t remember none of that for myself, except in flickering bits and flashes teasing me for eternity. It’s no good trying. I was the only one to survive. 
            The man who found me—the man I called Papa Schwartz, though he was no more kin to me than a doorknob—Papa said I chose, all on my own, to burn up my family. He said I did it for him to find me and have me. Papa named me Olivia. I never remembered my first name, the name Mother give me, so I took Papa’s name and became Olivia Schwartz. Papa said after I put my family in the fire, I ran like a wild animal, and that I threw myself into the frozen river to swim across to him. That’s how he found me. That’s what Papa said. I don’t recall. Papa said I was so hot the ice thawed as I swam and he could barely see me through the steam. He said that was because I sucked down so much fire, and it didn’t hurt me because I was still wild then—his perfect angel—and used to that kind of heat. 
            Papa said Olivia means alive, and I was alive, and he’d waited so long to be in the presence of someone like me. He’d done so much bad in his life that he didn’t believe he’d be permitted to die, but now he could rest easy knowing I would know what to do when his time came. He said I was plenty bad to do it. Of all that he said, only that last part made sense. 
            I kept something hidden in my secret places and parts in them years before I dragged Papa down and put him still moaning back into the river. I knew from a dream what to do. In the fire that nearly fried me, I sucked down the flaming bones and flesh of Mother and Father and my brother, too. They are inside me. I can’t remember their names, but they are my family. Whether I put them into the fire, or they put the fire into me, it was an awful thing to have burned with my family. My breath is always foul. The fresh air is gone forever.   
            Of course that’s why I never could bear children. Them old maids at the orphan house who raised me and gave me my manners after I put Papa into the river said it was because of an infection that should have killed me but I was too contrary to die. I knew that could not be the reason I was barren. I was all scorched and scarred from carrying my family’s smoldering ashes strewn around my guts and innards all them years. Can’t nothing grow on the surface of the sun nor in the pits of hell, and my insides was more charred than both put together. 
            Not that my Otto cared one bit. He buried my sadness in him like a fresh furrow pushed over a seed. He gathered me like a twig against a riverbank. I eased into his currents and lolled in the slow shady water until the currents bent deep to that cold layer of pure water far beneath the surface. Down there, Otto took me all the way in. 
            On summer nights, as the crickets sang and the June bugs thumped against the screens, he switched out the lights and worked off his boots and socks and flooded me with all the life of that day. In them moments we never talked, both of us just there with our thoughts. He must have puzzled it out, that there wouldn’t be no little ones, but he never said a word. He was steady as the moon, and he said I was prettier than moonlight through the trees even though I never been nothin’ but sticks and twine jumbled loose in a feedsack, with acorns for breasts and freckles big as oak leaves splotched around my whole skin, not to mention the scars. 
            Otto was forty-nine years old when he passed. Me, ten years younger. We married in 1927, when I turned seventeen, after the old maids cut me loose and shoved me out of the barn, as they put it. I’ll never so much as hold a man’s hand again after my Otto, even if I live to be two hundred years old, as would be fit punishment for all I done bad but don’t now relate.  
            In place of the babies I couldn’t bear him, Otto gave me cows. That man was a damn good farmer. His name fit him true, Otto Bauer, and he wore it as well as any man could, like the ribbons he’d have won if he’d been born in time for a war. He told the weather by checking the leaves outside our kitchen, and he never put one seed in the ground without first digging his fingers deep into the dirt. He had the touch. The whole place knew. 
            The cows cottoned to him easy as sippin’ tea. As easy as I, sitting next to the receiver on a cold winter night, could hear the radio orchestra play just the right notes for the master conductor. Otto’s fingers, stained with grease and sun and tobacco, would crack a walnut between two knuckles, then fold a shirt neater than any department store clerk up in the Cities. Them cows filled his bucket with money for us, year upon year. 
            Lucky the old girls milked good for him, because they sure didn’t like me. One time, Otto got fearsome sick, and I arranged for a neighbor to do evening milking. When the neighbor didn’t come, I had to milk. The cows sniffed out my smoke. They was afraid of my fires. My bucket stayed empty. The cows bellered all night, miserable with life. 
            Otto didn’t put no store in my idea about my fires causing problems for cows. He thought that was hogwash. “You don’t sing to ‘em, Liv. They gotta know you care.”  
            I snorted. “Care about a cow! There’s a song for you, right there, and a sad one too. They love those sad songs, huh?” 
            He was right. I never did care about a cow. But I did have a softness for the sick calves that stood quiet, tied to the barn wall and, when the time came, died alone, a few feet away from their mothers whose milk was deposited in our bank account already. 
            A month before he passed, Otto said, “Liv, there’s a calf I need you to try. Little bull, too stubborn to die.” He spoke over breakfast. That was already a surprise. Generally he read his devotional, drank his coffee, and ate in silence. But then to speak about a bull calf? Otto didn’t have much truck with sick bull calves. He said a heifer will pay for herself, many times over, but a bull’s gotta prove its purpose, and gettin’ sick ain’t it. “Go on down after dishes,” he said. “Thing’s likely already dead, but if it’s still kicking, try with your fingers.” 
            I had a routine for the sick ones he asked me to tend. I’d scratch them on the head, crossways along the flat, hard stretch above the eyes, then offer one dry forefinger. If the calf took the finger I got a pail and that was that. If the calf didn’t take the finger I dipped it in milk and run it along the calf’s gums. Next I brung the whole pail up under the calf and scooped milk to its mouth and splashed it in. I don’t know if there’s book learning behind my tendency, but it’s what I done and mostly it worked. Eventually the calf’s tongue curled around one of my fingers and damn near sucked off my fingerprints. Then I knew the cure took. 
            When I went to this particular little bull calf that Otto sent me to save, nothing worked. It stood there, the most beautiful coloring I ever did see, a white head with white ears and a perfect pitch-black triangle upside down dead center between its eyes. I tried everything. The creature wouldn’t even look at me. 
            “No use,” I said to Otto over morning cake. 
            “I’ll put it down, then. Might be contagious.” 
            That evening, over supper—when Otto usually talked more than a preacher at a picnic—he was silent. He picked at his food, cutting the pieces into smaller pieces without putting anything in his mouth. Finally he leaned his fork against his plate. 
            “Remember that calf?”   
            “The dead one?”  
            “That’s the thing,” he said, running his hand through his hair he’d just smoothed back with water. Otto never touched his hair after combing it. “I took it out to shoot it. I had to carry the darn thing. I set it down, about to pull the trigger, when I heard a banging around to the other side of the barn, like a milk can tipping and rolling in gravel. You know how much trouble it is with a dented lip on a milk can—” 
            “Cats?” I said. Them damn barn cats was always doing wrong. 
            “No idea,” he said. “And the cans were fine. But here’s the thing. I’d left the calf untied because it couldn’t even stand. Then, when I went back, it was gone.” 
            I thought maybe he looked a little pale, under all his sun, when he said that. 
            “I wondered if some animal could have killed it and drug it into the weeds but there was no blood, no marks in the dirt, nothing like that. Then I thought maybe it stood up on its last strength and wandered over and fell through the fence, but there was no sign of that either.” 
            I swear that man was part Irish, the way he included every last detail once he got his steam with a story. At least he didn’t drink and sing like them weepy O’Halloran boys always going on about how much better things were where they was from, and how they hoped to get back there someday. It’s that hope that makes them Irish so sad all the time. Your original settlers around here, your Germans and Swedes and Norwegians—they know hope is useless except for hoping no one notices how lazy you are, because if you can’t work, what good are you?  
            “What about the calf?”   
            “It came back,” Otto said.   
            “What do you mean?”  
            He shrugged, lifted his hands like a prayer. “I found it standing in its mama’s empty stall, off to the side, like it was waiting for her to get in from the pasture.” 
            He moved it right away. You can’t have a calf back with its mama, no matter that there ain’t nothing so pitiful in life as the sounds of a cow and its calf when first separated. It’s like the heaven itself is torn a little, and gone to bleeding. I hear it still at twilight in summer, sometimes, in my mind, the sounds of cows calling and the calves answering and only a few feet between them, and they’ll never touch each other again. 
            “I just can’t believe it,” Otto said. “That calf was dead. It came back alive. And then to find its mama…” He went to the washbasin and combed his hair again.  
            “You keep combing that hair, it’s liable to stay in the comb, not on your head.” I had no reason to say it, to be so mean. He was going bald. Sometimes I was just like that. 
            His eyes got moist. “You talk about your fires and—what I’m sayin’ is, ain’t all spirits dark. There’s room in the world, Liv—even in yours—for another side, too.” 

After the orderlies took Otto, I squatted on the porch like any man, and smoked cigarettes, one after another, lighting each one off the last one’s stub.  My knees was aching when a clackety truck trailing black fumes pulled up in the yard and two men lumbered out. Stringy blond hair, bald in patches. Burned ears and necks. Arms dark as the river bottom. Chewing tobacco stains down their chins; pipe tobacco holes in their clothes. Per and Tore, the Lovik twins. Good farmers, tight as birchbark, sober as judges. Never married, still lived together. Judging by their general cantankerous dispositions, their ill-fitting clothes, and all them stains, a woman’s touch couldn’t a done no harm. But them boys was as allergic to women as to opening their wallets. 
            Per, who was mute, closed his passenger door gentle and come around the front of the truck; Tore, who spoke plenty for any two men, left the driver’s door hanging wide and got straight to the point. They’d heard about Otto’s death. They offered condolences, and also to do my milking, for free of course, as neighbors should. At first I was touched. Then I realized they lived ten miles away, and that’s a long trip to do a good deed on top of milking their own herd twice as big as Otto’s.   
            Them buzzards! They wanted to move in and take Otto’s cows. They wouldn’t be the last. Everyone wanted Otto’s cows that was the best in five counties. Seein’ them Lovik boys leer at the barn like a naked lady picture display, I realized that I’d have to do something about Otto’s cows. I couldn’t milk them myself. Would Otto want me to sell them? He’d hardly been dead. I hadn’t rightly had time to consider. 
            Suddenly a calico cat crossed the yard at top sprint, looking all crooked like cats do, and vaulted into the Lovik boys’ truck. Now, if there’s one thing everyone knows about the Lovik twins, other than how homely and cheap and stained they is, it’s their soft spot for cats. Them two is crazy for cats, especially feral ones that most folks ignore until they have too many litters, then someone takes a squirrel rifle and culls them, as Otto did about once every season. Nobody minds barn cats. Except Per and Tore Lovik.   
            I got an idea. I said, “Don’t even think about stealing my cat.” 
            Tore closed the driver door, shutting the cat in. That’s what I wanted, but I had to put up a good show. I walked to the rear of the truck and kicked the bumper. “If you leave with that cat, I’ll get Thorvaldson to sue you for this truck, as payment.” John Thorvaldson had been drunk since before I was born, but he was the only lawyer around. 
            Per got into the truck. Tore said, “That scrawny cat is dying to escape. You seen how it ran. Everyone knows you want them cats dead. The cows is probably scared, too.” 
            “A cow ain’t a cat,” I said. “Anyway, I have help for milking.” That was a lie. “But I'll remember you was first to stop by.” 
            The Lovik twins each could have had their own brand new car, if they’d just dig up one of them pickle jars they was rumored to have hid all over their farm. I prayed they didn’t break down in my yard and figured they'd just come again the next day to ask about the cows, after they carried their new cat home and got scratched up a bit. 
            Once they’d gone, I put on my high boots to get the cows in. Naturally they’d wandered back into the swamp again, and I had to chase around like a dog, swinging a stick and hollerin’ to round them up. Walking behind Otto’s cows, watching their tails flicking flies and their rumps swaying, even the way they defecated in stride, smooth as sunrise—I saw for the first time through Otto’s eyes and understood why he’d been so fond of those dumb things that could crush any two humans without a thought but were too meek to do it, instead returning day after day to their stanchions. 
            Them thoughts flowed over me like sticks on a river. Then one snagged on something below, and in the next breath, I vomited down to the bile, on my knees in the dirt, crying, beating my hands against the rough gravel, ignoring the cuts, “No! No! Oh, my God what have you done? Otto...” I couldn’t stand. I tipped back into a pile of fresh cow manure that soaked to my skin. I didn’t care. I crawled to a tree and pulled myself up. Off to the distance the cows, set toward the barn, trudged along, on their way to be milked by Otto. I couldn’t tell them that would never happen again. But they’d know. They’d never be the same. The loss of his touch would ruin them.  
            That’s when I knew what I had to do. 
First I found the old milking lamp that Otto hadn’t used in years. Them particular cows might not know the lamp, but they’d know, with their stupid animal knowledge, that it belonged in the barn. They’d accept it. 
            Next I ate a clove of garlic. I crushed more cloves and stripped naked and rubbed raw garlic anywhere the smoke from my fires might be leaving my body. I wasn’t taking no chances. I chopped up yet more garlic and stirred it with vegetable oil and smeared that mixture from head to toe before putting my clothes back on. 
            I didn’t expect the cows to object to my plan, but I’d learned well from Otto that cows are better disposed to pretty much everything after they’re milked. So I milked the cows that night, with Otto probably still cooling on some medical slab. I put all my concentration and love into my fingers. I sang every song I could remember, over and over, the happy ones too. Them cows milked sweet as candy at the fair. The garlic worked. The cows didn’t notice my fires, and they filled the bucket like a bible story. There was so much milk the cans overflowed. I gave the rest to the cats. 
            I fed the cows, the mangers full of cured hay, nice and dry, all up and down. They stood, as cows do, stupid, knowing, patient as life itself, slowly chewing, jaws moving side to side, back and forth like they had nowhere else to be, and forever to get there. 
            I unscrewed the lamp and poured the kerosene all around the barn. 
            In the back pens, I found Otto’s miracle calf. He’d named it Resurrection. He said it was spared for a reason and would stud the herd. I opened the nearest door to the barnyard and grabbed that calf through the nose with two fingers. I jerked it from the pen so hard it lifted off the ground. “Go on,” I said. “Run!” The calf stared. I kneed it as hard as I could in the ribs to really get its attention. “Run!” The calf kicked my shin and ran into the night. I closed that door, checked that rest were shut too, then opened windows for a draft. 
            I lit the match. 
            The first time I was in a fire like that, I didn’t remember nothing. That second time, I watched. It wasn’t so bad. The smoke did the killing, and that came quick. Most cows didn’t even try to bust loose. Their dying sounds were not too different than being separated from a calf. They’d done this before. They understood. 
            Me, I barely noticed as the flames jumped and the smoke rose. Of course I got tolerance from childhood and that matters. The garlic helped a heap, too. Them old maids at the orphan house was right: you can use garlic for anything. The cats flung themselves from the haymow long before they was in danger. Maybe I should have factored the cats into my plan. But it’d been a long day, and I wasn’t done yet. I had to find Otto’s bull calf and bring him back in.  

KARL NASTROM grew up in Minnesota and began writing in 1996, while on active duty as a USAF intelligence officer. Karl has since worked as an attorney in Alabama, California, and Minnesota, and as a high school math teacher in Mississippi and Maryland. He has performed original live stories and poems on multiple stages around Minneapolis and in Newcastle, England, where he studied creative writing. His short fiction has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. He currently lives and writes in Seattle, Washington. His website is: www.karlnastrom.com.