A Miracle of Catfish (33 page)

He put the bucket back in the barn and shut the door, and then he went over and opened the gate to the catch pen and started shooing them toward it. A couple darted out past him and he let them go back to the trough. But he got the old Brahman and nine other cows with their calves into the loading chute and started letting them out the side gate one by one until he had just the old cow in there. He hemmed her in front and back with some fence posts he'd left lying there just for that. He slid the posts through the six-inch cracks between the boards, rested each of them against a post. He put three in front of her and three in back, too high to jump over. She couldn't back up or go forward. She didn't like it and tried to get out, but unless she broke something, he thought he had her. He wondered if he ought to tie her feet. He didn't want to get kicked in the mouth. With a hoof full of fresh shit. But it wouldn't be the first time.

He squatted down outside the wide boards of the catch pen and looked at her bag. It looked like it was holding about five or six gallons of milk. She'd been a good cow and had delivered a big healthy calf every year for the last nine years. He stretched out a hand for one of her teats, the biggest one, to see if he could squeeze some milk from it, but quick as lightning she kicked his hand and then kicked again and almost hurt him before he could get his hand back.

He looked up at her head. She had rolled one baleful eye back toward
him and she was trying to twist her head around to see how to kick him better.

“I'm trying to help you, you stupid son of a bitch,” he said.

She bowed up and kicked and tried to heave herself up out of the chute, but the boards were eight feet high and she couldn't get that high. She could kick the shit out of him whenever he reached in for that teat, though. He was going to have to tie her feet. So he went into the barn, hunting some rope. He didn't want to get crippled by a cow at his age. Then
he'd
be in a damn wheelchair. How much dating could you do in one of them? Not much, probably. Unless maybe they had a club for people in wheelchairs.

He opened the big side door so that he'd have some light. He seemed to remember having some rope somewhere, but there was so much stuff in the barn that it was hard to find anything specific. A lot of stuff was hung on nails, most of it coated with fuzzy dust and the spider webs of years.

He walked back toward the stalls and stopped beside the door where the trunk was stashed and opened it and looked inside, but he didn't see any rope hanging on a nail there. He closed it back and latched it.

Maybe it was upstairs. He went on down the hall in his rubber boots and walked over to the ladder and started up it very slowly. Old as he was, he had to be careful about climbing stuff. And some of the steps were loose, needed replacing. It was hard for a man to take care of everything that needed taking care of. Especially by himself. A long time ago when he'd had Cleve helping him, it seemed that everything got taken care of: fences fixed, tin roofs painted, tomatoes staked, hay cut and baled and hauled, calves castrated, gates repaired, stock all watered. He had a lot more cows then, though. He didn't want to mess with more than twenty head now. And a day would come when he wouldn't be able to take care of even one. He knew that. But that day hadn't come yet. And as long as he could walk and get around and climb up and down from his tractor, he was going to have some cows. There was nothing better than standing at the fence on a summer afternoon and watching them graze. It made a man feel good to look at them and know they were his. No matter what else had happened.

He went on up the steps, careful of his footing and his grip. His head
rose above the floor and he stopped with the top half of himself sticking up into the loft. He hadn't been up here in a while. The peak of the rafters was twenty feet above his head and he had nailed every one of them on. It had taken two months and six men to build this barn. That was in 1958. And the son of a bitch was still solid. It didn't even have any leaks in the roof that he knew of. He didn't see any rope. There were forty or fifty small bales of hay stacked against the back wall and some baling twine was looped around some nails sticking out of the rafters. But that stuff wasn't strong enough. Or it might cut her. What he needed was some rope. And he couldn't remember where in the hell he'd put it.

He climbed on up and pulled himself up onto the floor of the loft and stood up and walked across the boards. He looked around for the rope, but he didn't see it anywhere. He had spent a bunch of hot June afternoons up here, stacking hay amid buzzing red wasps while men below on trucks threw it up through the opened loft door, which was closed now and hadn't been used in a while, since he'd switched to large bales he could move around with his tractor. It was easier. Let the tractor do the work. He guessed the world got better in some ways as it went along. And in lots of ways it got worse.

He remembered screwing his wife up here. That was a long time ago. He'd done a lot of screwing in this barn. He'd done so much he couldn't remember all of it. It was so big and had so many places to hide somebody that it had been almost easy to get away with it. Somebody could walk in off the road and come in the back door and nobody at the house would even see her. That was how he used to meet Queen. How many times had they done it in this barn? Hundreds. At night. In the middle of the day. On cold and frozen days, wrapped in blankets and lying in the hay. Up here, too. Why in God's name did he do it? Why didn't he just run off with her? Would he do the same thing if he had the chance again? He hoped Lucinda never found out about it.

He looked above him and could still see the saw marks in some of the rafters. Halter Wellums had sawed every piece of this wood out of some longleaf pines that Cortez and Toby had cut on Coy Patton's place. Those were some mighty fine logs. And they had made some mighty fine timber. In its height and width, the sheer size of it, the loft had always reminded Cortez of pictures he'd seen of cathedrals. And it always
smelled the same. It always smelled like hay. But there wasn't any rope up here. And what was done with Queen was done.

He climbed back down and went out the back door of the barn and opened the door on the corn crib and looked in there. There it was. It was nylon rope and he remembered sticking it in here now. He'd bought it up at Sneed's, twenty feet of it, in a plastic bag. It was eight-hundred-pound test, dark blue, very soft. He grabbed it and went back through the barn, up the hall, out the big door and over to the chute. She was knocking her head against the boards of the chute and she was bawling. Her calf was bawling, down on the other side of the barn.

“All right, you son of a bitch,” he said, and pulled out his pocketknife. He cut two pieces about four feet long from the rope and bent down next to her. He looked up at her. She had her foot right next to a post and Cortez threaded the end of the rope through the boards and around her foot just above the hock. She didn't raise hell and she let him pull the rope back out through the boards and then he made an overhead knot, tying it twice. She tried to move her foot and couldn't and she went crazy, jerking her whole body and trying to lift her foot. The chute was shaking. Cortez got up and went around and let himself into the catch pen and walked around to the other leg. He squatted down.

Three times he tried to tie that leg and three times she kicked at him. One time she nearly smashed his finger against the post. He just squatted there and waited for her to calm down. She was gentle as a lamb unless you had her hemmed up. Or tied up. She was a good cow, but she was getting old. She probably wouldn't have but one or two more calves. When one started having bag trouble, they were about like an old car: time to trade for a new one. Make some baloney out of her. Potted meat. Vienna sausage.

He tried twice more before he got the rope around her leg. He didn't get it up as high as he would have liked, but he had to settle for it. He made the same knot he'd made on the other side and then he opened the bib of his overalls and pulled the milk tube from its little cloth bag. He stuck it lightly between his lips while he twisted the top from the small tube of lubricant and then he squeezed some of it onto the tube, making sure the tip was coated with it. He set the lubricant on the ground and leaned toward the cow with the milk tube. It was hollow, made of
aluminum, with a rounded end that would open up the teat and let the stopped-up, curded milk flow out through it. Get all that mess out of there. Let the calf nurse and keep her from getting her bag messed up. Teat might rot off or something. You didn't want that.

“All right, baby,” he said softly. “You let me get this up in you and you'll feel better.”

He put his hand around the swollen teat and pushed the tip of the milk tube up in it and things went wrong. She heaved backward toward him and he heard a post crack, and then she slammed herself forward and tried to break the posts in front of her. Cortez dropped the milk tube and she stepped on it, mashing it into the mud and cowshit in the bottom of the chute. She kept trying to kick, slamming herself against the boards.

“You crazy son of a bitch,” Cortez said, trying to find the milk tube in the mud. He caught a glimpse of it and then she stepped on it again. She was spattering shit all over him with her lunging feet. But he stayed calm. Cortez was kind of like a doctor with a cow, is how he thought of it. You had to have patience. You already knew that you were smarter than the cow, who was a lot bigger than you, but the thing about it was that a cow, being one of the dumbest animals there was, might hurt you accidentally trying to get away from you because of something you were doing to it that maybe didn't feel so good. Like punching holes in your ears to put in plastic identification tags. Sticking a pointed trocar into your abdomen wall to let out deadly fescue gas. Or cutting your balls off with a really sharp knife if you happened to be a bull. So you had to outsmart the animal, and you had to make sure that the animal couldn't get loose until you were through doing whatever you were doing to it. This foot-tying business wasn't the best idea in the world, but it was all he had right now until something better came along. They probably made leather hobbles for something like this. He could check in one of his catalogs and see.

He had to reach in with his hand and go through the mud and the shit, squeezing gobs of it between his fingers, searching mostly by feel for the little aluminum tube. Which would have to be taken back inside the house now and washed and sterilized again. He'd have to stick a straw down through it to make sure it wasn't plugged up. But he hadn't
even found it yet. He kept feeling around for it and finally got it back in his fingers.

There was a man gate built into his fence on the side of the barn that faced the driveway and he went through it and walked back down the driveway to the house. He left his boots at the back door and went to the kitchen sink and washed the milk tube with soap and hot water. He turned a burner on under the pot of water that was still sitting there from when he'd sterilized the milk tube last night. He made sure it was clean on the inside and then he dropped it into the water on the stove and sat down at the kitchen table to wait.

It was only about seven o'clock. Maybe he ought to just load her up when he got done with her and take her to Pontotoc and let her out at the sale barn and they could sell her for him Saturday. She wasn't going to bring much, old as she was, but he could probably find another one to take her place. He could look in the
Mississippi Market Bulletin
, which he read religiously each month, from front to back.

He sat there and waited for the water to boil and thought about going up to the Co-op this afternoon after lunch and see Toby and get a couple of bags of catfish feed. And then he probably needed to run by Sneed's and get a steel garbage can with a tight-fitting lid to keep the feed in. And he had to remember to be sitting by the phone Friday, waiting for the fish guy to call. He couldn't imagine why the fish guy would be getting out of the business since it looked like a pretty interesting business. He wondered how the guy raised them. Maybe he could ask him when he got here. He had to go get the money from the barn. He'd do that Thursday night and have it ready for him.

He heard the Brahman bawl out in the chute. He wished he had somebody to help him. She'd already cracked one of the posts and that wasn't good. He didn't think she could get out. She probably weighed twelve hundred pounds, though. Some of that old rotten wood might not hold. But there was nothing to do but wait and see.

He got up and went over to the refrigerator and opened the door, wondering what he was going to have for lunch. Just about all the food from the funeral was gone. Even the ham, which had lasted a pretty long time. He wished he had some more of it. Maybe he needed to go buy a few groceries this afternoon after he got the catfish feed. He thought he
wouldn't mind having some bacon for his breakfast since he was getting tired of pancakes. Or maybe he needed some cereal. Cereal was easy. Just pour some milk on it. He didn't much like cereal, though. It didn't seem like it filled you up very much.

He shut the refrigerator door and walked back over to the stove and looked at the pan. Some small bubbles were starting to arrange themselves in rings at the bottom of the water. He saw one little piece of shit float out of the milk tube and he reached in with just the tip of his finger and dipped it out, wiped it on his pants. Then he sat down at the kitchen table again. He played with the salt and pepper shakers. He pushed one this way, one the other way. He wished the water would hurry up and boil. Get this shit over with. He wondered if his wife had gone to heaven. He hoped so. She'd always wanted to.

When the water finally boiled he turned off the burner and took the pot over to the sink and poured out the hot water and reached in for the milk tube and wrapped it in a paper towel because it was hot. He went ahead and lubricated it and then stepped back outside and put his boots back on and walked back up to the barn.