Cows

Dolly the Cow

Cows

I came home one day and the cows were gone—their russet bodies and white heads no longer dotting the field like chess pieces. Their owner, Tractor Bob, had been threatening to sell them for months. I had come to depend on them, their abundant irregularities, their intractable legs and square heads. Each darklit morning en route to work, I drove down the blue shadowed foothill, passing Bob’s tiny trailer. After my drive home from Seattle every day, when I dropped down into the river valley, I felt the day’s irregularities solidify into something dependable, faultless. The cows were a part of that.

Every afternoon, Bob, who was old and deaf, drove his decrepit truck along the road, trailing hay. His herd calved early that winter. His fences barely kept the cattle in, and often at night, coming around a corner, one of the bulls stood in the middle of the road, stoic, still chewing on the day’s memory. Now, only one cow remained.

Studies of cows reveal they have remarkable cognitive and emotional abilities; they form small social groups within a herd, and can hold grudges against other cows for years. They can suffer anxiety, fear, and worry about the future. Bob knew none of this, I’d bet; but he knew how to raise the best cattle in the valley.

The day after he sold the herd, Bob died. I had only known him for several months. His mind by then resembled an old typewriter with keys missing, but he knew my car, and always waved. His passing affected me in strange ways; my patience for change had been squandered by a cross-country move, a divorce, a new job. I held onto the temperate constants in my life: the tall western cedars, cottonwoods lined with eagle’s nests, a barred owl calling up the dawn, the Pinteresque tableau of morning cows. The Sunday I drove to his memorial service at the senior center, it began to hail, the kind of hail that drove decades of past grievances down your collar. My neighbors were there: the shepherdess who worked for the FAA, the social worker, the retired landscape painter. We swapped pleasantries over Styrofoam-cupped coffee. I learned that the remaining cow was there because she had refused to get on the truck to be sold.

The sun came out when I left, and driving up to my place, I paused and looked at his land, the place he refused to leave to go to the hospital. His ancient green and blue John Deere sat parked where his trailer had been, the grill covered with a small bouquet of flowers, his black rubber boots posed in front. The sun lit up the grass, the stagnant brook, the copse out of which the ravens flew. Several large brown vultures worried something near the ditch. Bob’s wild-haired caretaker Alison, said I could walk out and have a look. There, in four parts, lay the flayed white sections of a calf: a flank with a curvilinear piece of spine, a hoof, a scapula, a front leg. Alison joined me, and we slowly walked over to where Dolly, the remaining cow stood. She squatted down in front of Dolly, who was chewing grass and eyeing us with a weary stare, her full udder dangling between her legs. “That’s why she wouldn’t get on the truck,” Alison said. “I remember that calf, I had to help it up the bank sometimes.”  We walked back to the road, Alison’s two brown horses trailing me. Back east, in my old life, death felt hostile. But here, close up, I felt its integrity. Fingering the dead calf’s jawbone in my hand, we climbed back through the fence.

–(Notes from: In the Valley of the Moon, A Year of Sundays in the Snoqualmie Valley)

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