Dirty Chick (9 page)

“
Seriously?
”

“Well, yeah. I'm sure she can see Hamish's cows across the way. Cows don't like being alone.”

I sat down on the couch and rubbed my temples. “Okay. So Silas gets speech therapy, Miranda goes to swim lessons, and now what—playdates for a cow?”

But Peter was already nodding his head. “That makes a lot of sense. Cows are herd animals. Like alpacas, like people. They need to be with their friends. I bet if we get two calves, we won't have the same problem.”

“So now we need two cows.”

“Definitely.” Rebecca sipped her tea. “They're so cute!”

“And I need to give them a rewarding social life.”

Rebecca didn't notice the sarcasm. “Not really. If you get two at once, they should be happy together.”

“Besides,” Peter reasoned, “you can make money from cows. If you raise them up and get them pregnant, you can get like twelve hundred dollars for one cow.”

“But what about when Katya and Derek come back?” I said, starting to sound a little desperate. “We're gonna have a pregnant
goat, and this maniac rooster, and now you want cows—what are we gonna do with the animals?”

“Exactly.” Peter grinned. “Now we can't move back to the city.”

So the next morning, I strode across the road hoping to glean some wisdom from Hamish. I found him in his milking shed, cleaning out the machinery.

“We're thinking of getting calves,” I announced cheerfully.

Hamish straightened, keeping me in the crosshairs of his skeptical gaze. I touched the top of my head to make sure I wasn't wearing my devil's horns.

“Ya don't want calves,” he said finally. He sounded grim, and I wondered for the umpteenth time if he hated me.

“I don't?”

“Nah. Too hard.”

“But I
like
a challenge,” I protested. “And my niece thinks they're cute.”

This was possibly not the best thing to say to an overtired dairy farmer. Hamish looked at me. “If you just want to bottle-feed some calves,” he suggested, “come over to the calf sheds anytime. I'll let you feed the young ones.”

That was a little frustrating. Hamish thought I was not only a city slicker, but also an idiot. I didn't want to pet his cows. I wanted to keep my own for milk.

“I want to make cheese,” I floundered. But he was already shooting high-pressure water through his milking machine, and the conversation had come to an end.

What did I expect?
I thought miserably.
He probably saw me chasing after a rogue cow while bleating like a sheep. He comes around to borrow a lamb teat, and we're giving hand jobs to alpacas.

But I am a stubborn fool, and there's nothing like getting dissed
by a farmer to urge me ahead. Rebecca knew a lot about cows, but she'd always worked under the supervision of a teacher. This time, we'd be in charge. So I went back to the library.

Moving through the agricultural aisles, I cleared the shelves of all books having to do with calf raising. Then I wrote out a list of questions and made an appointment with our veterinarian. At the end of my hour-long visit, I knew quite a lot about cows: types of feed, vaccinations, and something called “drenching,” which is when you shoot medicine down the calf's throat to kill all the worms in its gut. Our veterinarian must have enjoyed my zeal, because after my visit she wrote up a four-page report on calf care and sent it out to us in the mail.

“See?” I crooned, waggling the calf report under Peter's nose. “Grumpy farmers aren't the only ones who know something about cows.”

Armed with our new information, we started scanning the listings. Buying calves, we discovered, was easy. We found a farmer on the Internet who had some Jersey calves for sale, rang him up, and struck a deal on the spot. At this stage, I was feeling pretty confident about my farming skills—so bold that I decided to bring the calves home in the back of my station wagon. This seemed like a sensible idea. There was plenty of room back there, and three-day-old calves aren't much bigger than a couple of dogs.

I even asked our vet about it first. “Shouldn't be a problem,” she told me. “There's some risk of scours, but it won't hurt
them
to ride in the back of a car. All you need is an electrolyte solution to rehydrate them, and they'll be good as gold.”

In retrospect, I should have looked up the word
scours
in the dictionary. Like
VX
and
sarin
, the word sounds deceptively benign, like it might have something to do with cleaning:
She scoured that pot
till it glowed. He scoured his face with hot soap and water.
In calves, however, scours refers to a death slurry that comes shooting out their assholes. I suppose you might call it diarrhea, but that would be missing the point. The stench of calf scours is so obscene that you cannot inhale it without gagging. It's like getting bombed with mustard gas or one of those other horrors long outlawed by the Geneva Protocol. Scours, in short, are a war crime.

But the vet didn't mention war crimes, so we duct-taped some feed bags to the floor of the station wagon's trunk and thought that would suffice. And at first, everything seemed to go fine. For starters, Rebecca was right. Baby calves are outrageously cute. We chose two caramel-colored Jerseys with huge dark eyes the size of salad plates. When they lowered their eyelashes and flicked their big soft ears, I felt like I'd teleported into a Christian greeting card.

Peter, Rebecca, and I loaded them into the car and set off for home, with Peter at the wheel. We took the back roads alongside pleasant green paddocks, and the calves seemed to enjoy the scenery.

Then they stuck out their tongues. “Mama!” I heard from the backseat. “The cow is
licking
me!” I turned to see a python-like tongue emerging from a calf's mouth as it strained to suck my daughter's hair. Rebecca, who was wedged between the two car seats in back, was crouched down low to avoid the tongue. She appeared to be busting up laughing.

“Home! Home!” Silas insisted, batting at the tongue snake on his head. For such adorable animals, these calves had unbelievable tongues. They were huge, black, and pointy at the end, like Satan's.

Just then, Silas's arm connected with a calf tongue. Maybe he swatted a tad too hard, but the next thing I heard was something wet hit the feed bags, and the world became a blur.

“Sugar, Honey, Ice, and Tea!” Rebecca yelled the phrase she often
substituted for expletives when in the presence of children. It was cute, but I only dimly registered what she was saying.

“
Air . . .
” I gasped, rolling down the passenger-side window. I arched my neck out of the car, fully prepared to vomit on the tarmac. Beside me, in the driver's seat, Peter was coughing and gagging. He swerved to the wrong side of the road, his hands going into a spasm.

“
Mama
,” Miranda wanted to know. “Did you
fart
?”

But I couldn't speak. The world was swimming. Another audible squirt came from the back, and the air in the car turned green.

Then they started slipping in it. Having thoroughly fouled the feed bags, the calves began sliding back and forth in their own filth. One of them fell, whipping up a new cloud of stench. The other one collapsed on the first, and they both emptied their bowels in unison.

I have no memory of the remainder of the trip. The next thing I remember is hosing down the calves in our driveway and drying them off with towels. The dogs took one sniff and ran away, cowering at the far side of the house. I ran inside to mix an electrolyte solution, hoping to cure the calves of the scours.

Once they'd slurped down the bright yellow drink, we sat in the paddock and tried to choose names. Mustard and Chlorine were vetoed for being too depressing, as were VX and Sarin. Rebecca came up with Luna and Maya, but I reminded her that these were cows and not backup singers for the Jerry Garcia Band. Then I suggested Plague and Ebola, but Peter's no fun and declined.

“It has to be cuter,” he insisted. “Like Daisy and Buttercup.”

“My cow at Putney was named Belinda,” Rebecca mused wistfully. “I called her Bebe. She was such a beautiful girl. I used to weave flower garlands and drape them around her neck.”

“Really?” I rolled my eyes. “When I went to school, I used to read books.”

Rebecca looked a little hurt. “Hey, now,” Peter nudged me. “Not everyone was a front-row nerd.”

“You're right,” I conceded. “Sorry. I probably should have spent more time with flowers.”

“That lil' lady looks like cinnamon,” Miranda said, pointing to the darker of the two calves.

“That's not bad,” I commented. “Cinnamon. Maybe we'll call her Sin for short.”

“And Lil' Lady?” Miranda asked.

“Cinnamon and Lil' Lady?” All I could think was
Now my cows have stripper names.
But with my outside voice, I said, “Great choice, Miranda. Those are perfect.”

We sat with this for a moment, watching the calves. Cinnamon extended her snake's tongue and twisted it upward, delicately picking her own nose. This was an impressive party trick, and I thought to myself,
Yes. Stripper names will do just fine.

BACK FROM LOVE MOUNTAIN

U
nfortunately, the calf incident was not our last brush with the scours. While Peter was at work during the week, Rebecca and I spent our afternoons together. I'd emerge from my office around noon, and then we'd make lunch and bake some bread, and Rebecca might get out her spinning wheel before we left to pick up the kids.

Our afternoons were mostly uneventful, until the Day of the Indian Chili Bomb. Looking back, I have to admit I had no one to blame but myself. After my and Peter's trip through Mexico and Central America, I'd come away with a monkey on my back: a devastating addiction to hot and spicy chilies.

These were difficult to find in New Zealand. Most of the time, I'd bring home a jar of jalapeños only to discover with a sinking heart that the spice had been boiled right out of them, their flavor sanitized with sugar and brine. Tongue-numbing habañeros simply weren't on the menu for the majority of Kiwis, and though exotic
chilies could be purchased in the major cities, Whangarei was a wasteland for spice.

So when Rebecca suggested making tacos for lunch, I pulled out a new jar I'd found, full of green and red chilies that had flown all the way from India. Their South Asian origin was promising, and I placed one on my tongue, heart brimming with hope.

Instantly, my cheeks flushed red and my eyes began to water. The balance of sour, salt, and spice was just what I needed to scratch that hot-pepper itch. Rebecca piled our plates with tortillas, rice, and beans, and when I gave her a chili, she reached for her water glass.

“Wow,” she commented. “These are pretty strong. One's probably enough for me.”

Which was fine. We all have our limits. As for me, I ate seventeen. I piled them on my beans and I stacked them in my taco. Then I started wrapping them in slices of ham, merrily calling them chili bombs and popping them in my mouth like candy.

After our meal, Rebecca dragged out her spinning wheel and started feeding it a pile of alpaca fleece she'd brought with her, calmly pressing the foot pedal to get the little wheel to spin. I was still planning to make a pashmina, so she'd started me on the lowest rung of the fiber ladder: picking fleece.

This is a mind-numbing task in which you sit like a mental patient, carefully picking tiny flecks of dirt out of endless fluff balls. I suppose with the right mind-set, such as cocaine psychosis, this would be fascinating, but after five minutes, my brain went numb and I turned on my iPod. I started up the audio version of
Middlemarch
,
reasoning that this way I might actually finish that eight-hundred-page nightmare.

About an hour passed, and Dorothea Brooke was just starting to
crush hard on Edward Casaubon, when I felt a peculiar tingling in my abdomen.
That's funny
, I thought
. It's not that time of the month yet.
I shifted my weight on the couch and turned my attention back to my fluff.

A little later I checked my watch and stood up, brushing stray fur balls off the front of my jeans. “We'd better get going,” I told Rebecca. “It's almost time to get Miranda from preschool.”

“Oh, sorry, sure!” Rebecca pushed her spinning wheel to the side and hurried to her feet. Although Becca was technically my niece, I hardly knew her. Peter and I had spent most of the past seven years abroad, and though we'd had some visits over the years, this girl was practically a stranger to me. We were always friendly with each other, but a veneer of good manners kept our conversations stiff.

I grabbed my purse, pulled out the car, and Rebecca climbed in. She rifled through our CD collection, a motley pile of generic-looking disks burned from iTunes. “What's this?” she asked, holding up one of the few with a commercial label.

“CMCB?” I grinned, turning back to the road. “Chinese MC Brothers. They're rappers from China. They're pretty good, actually. Check it out.”

I'd always been fond of this CD. Blending classical piano, hip-hop and metal, these guys could really crank a tune, and everything sounded extra angry in Mandarin. Rebecca pushed the volume up to window-thrumming levels.

At about the time we pulled onto the main road into town, my cramps returned. And now their origin was clear. They had nothing to do with my period; rather, it was the seventeen Indian chilies I'd popped with my lunch. My lower intestine was starting to scream.

But “just a moment, I've got the shits” is not a phrase I felt I
could say to a delicate young woman I hardly knew, so I determined to wait it out. We were twenty-five minutes from the preschool, I reasoned. I could do anything for twenty-five minutes.
This is a breeze,
I told myself as cold sweat beaded my brow.

CMCB launched into one of their metal numbers, and as the lush green trees of Purua sped past on both sides, the bass chords throbbed in my skull. “
Qi dài nà yí kè
,”
the lead vocalist bellowed, and each beat made my sphincter clench tighter. On the steering wheel, my knuckles went white.

Rebecca, for her part, just thought I was dancing, and she started bouncing up and down in the passenger seat, doing a free-spirit version of busting a move. I could feel my colon contracting, an invisible python recoiling for the strike. I drove stiff-backed, clenching the steering wheel, rocking my body back and forth in a paroxysm of pain.

By this time, we'd left Purua and were rolling past the manicured lawns of Ruatangata. These were the moneyed suburbs, the place where city-based professionals kept a few rolling acres, two luxury cars, and a swimming pool. Unfortunately for me, what they conspicuously did not keep were public toilets.

I'm not saying I'm special. We've all been in uncomfortable bathroom situations before. I've been stuck on a Guatemalan bus with a violent stomach bug, I've suppressed my bodily urges in classrooms and on job interviews. I gave birth to both my children naturally, each time powering through waves of contractions that threatened to rip my back in two.

Which was why I knew when I'd had enough. As with childbirth, there comes a time when you just don't give a fuck. “There's something I need to tell you,” I gasped, not daring to glance at Rebecca. “I am about to have violent diarrhea.”

To my surprise, she didn't squeal. Rebecca might be a chamomile-drinking tree hugger, but she's also a farm girl, and she knew just what to do. “Here, up here.” She pointed. “There's space to pull over. Go behind that tree. There's no one around.”

With a buoyant sense of release from the darkest void of hell, I pulled the car off the road and slowed to a stop. Already loosening my belt buckle, I lunged for the door handle, stumbled onto the gravel, and ran toward the nearest property.

“Wait!” Rebecca called. “Do you need Kleenex?”

She handed me a tissue, and I tumbled into a stand of trees, thanking God, heaven, and all my lucky stars that the good people of Ruatangata worked for a living. No one would be here to witness my disgrace. I crouched down and let fly, a fusillade of South Asian shrapnel defiling the grass beneath me.

I straightened, my body limp with relief, and froze. Straight ahead, not twenty feet away, was a comfortable home with a large picture window. The back of a gray leather couch was visible, and the dim, shifting glow of a television set. And there, like the all-seeing guard of the Panopticon, was the back of a woman's head. She was watching TV.

With the smooth, silent moves of a poop ninja, I wiped myself off and reached down for my pants. The gray head tilted, leaned forward. I stopped.
Is she turning?
What would she do, I wondered, if she turned around only to find a half-naked woman in her carefully groomed backyard, pants around her ankles in a puddle of filth?

I fastened my trousers. Silently I backed away.

“All better?” Rebecca asked when I'd safely returned to the car.

“All better.” I nodded. And from then on, the two of us were the best of friends.

Besides allowing me to bond with my niece, the Day of the Indian Chili Bomb helped me to empathize with Cinnamon and Lil' Lady. Everyone has a bathroom situation now and then, and those poor cows didn't have the choice to pull over to a nice green lawn. Once they got over their scours, the girls were much more appealing. We'd go out and visit them in the evenings, scratching them behind the ears and brushing dried dung from their caramel coats. Occasionally, Cinnamon regaled us with her fantastic nose-picking trick. But even though we now had two real farm animals, we still weren't winning any points with Hamish. This is because we asked him if we could feed his leftover milk to our cows.

I know cows are supposed to give milk, but for the first few months, they just drink it. Powdered milk is expensive, and not as nutritious for the calves. Because we lived across from a dairy farm, we asked Hamish for a bucket of milk each day. He was kind enough to agree, and he didn't even charge us, which made me think he might be a really nice guy under that constant frown.

The problem was one of perspective. From Hamish's standpoint, cows were livestock. They needed a certain amount of protein and calories each day to survive. To this end, he gave us curdled milk, milk with antibiotics in it, and sometimes there were leaves and twigs floating on top.

I found this unappealing. Cinnamon and Lil' Lady were pets, and we envisaged their mealtimes as a chance for a pleasant gastronomic experience. I'd pull my gumboots on over my pajamas, put on a pair of rabbit ears to keep my hair out of my face, and fill two large calf feeders with fresh, warm milk. Sometimes I'd beat a raw egg in there for extra vitamins. Then I'd strut out to the calf pen with the feeders clutched to my chest, the rubber teats protruding like bright pink carnival nipples, and sing little songs to the calves
while they ate. They were particularly fond of “You Are My Sunshine,” which I sang out of tune while giving them a good scratch behind the ears.

Hamish thought this was ridiculous. “You don't need to
warm
the milk,” he told Peter one day when he was filling our bucket. “They'll drink it any which way they get it.”

“Could I have different milk?” Peter asked, peering skeptically at the bucket. “This one has a snail floating in it.”

“Give it here.” Hamish took the bucket and flicked the snail out with a grubby thumb. He handed it back. “See? No snail.”

When Peter reported this exchange, I considered that Hamish and I would never see eye to eye on the nuances of a gourmet calf diet, so eventually I stopped asking for free milk. Instead, I went back to my calf book.

“Bad news,” I announced one night over dinner.

“What, Mama? What happened?” Miranda asked through a mouthful of pasta. “Did more houses burn down?”

“We're not getting milk for two years.”

Rebecca lifted a napkin to her lips, delicately suppressing a smile.

“
Oh, for Christ sake
.
”
Peter set down his fork. “Why not?”

Miranda looked impressed. “Is
Christ
a grown-up word?”

I ignored her. “Because the cows have to have babies to make milk, duh. And we can't breed them for a year. Then it takes another year to gestate a new calf.”

Peter was crestfallen. In retrospect, this salient point of cow biology was obvious, but it came as a shock to us at the time. I thought cows made milk like chickens made eggs. I imagined a spigot somewhere on the bottom, like the lever you press for your Coke at McDonald's. I never connected cow's milk with sex and lactation, despite having breast-fed two babies of my own.

“But goats are much faster,” I told Peter, trying to cheer him up. “And Pearl's had two cycles on Love Mountain. We can pick her up soon.” I checked the calendar. “We can even go tomorrow, if you want.”

Peter perked up. “We can?” He immediately pushed back his chair and called Jackie, the neighbor who owned Love Mountain. “It's Peter,” he said when she answered. “My goat Pearl's on your hill up there, and I was wondering if we could get the key to the gate.”

Becca and I watched his face as his eager grin faded and his brow creased. “Uh-huh,” he said. “Okay. We'll be up there tomorrow.”

He hung up the phone. “What's wrong?” Rebecca asked. “Is Pearl okay?”

“She's fine.” Peter hesitated. “I think she's fine. Jackie said she saw her today.”

“Well, that's great!” I enthused. “We won't have any trouble finding her!”

“It's not that.” Peter came back to the table and sat down. “She said she saw ‘a pile of boys, all clustered in a heap. And your girl was right there in the middle.'”

“So, like, a big pile of male goats?” Rebecca looked confused. “On top of Pearl?”

Peter nodded.

“Oh. Wow.”

That phone conversation was a wake-up call. All those weeks she was up on Love Mountain, we'd managed to ignore the reality of goat-mating rituals. Instead we imagined Pearl frolicking in the sunshine, snacking on daisies and grass. We'd somehow even convinced ourselves the bucks would line up and take turns. Now terrible images flashed through my mind.
How many bucks in rut? How many gallons of pee?
I shuddered.

The next morning, Rebecca and I set off to rescue our goat. It wasn't hard to find her among all the wild bucks, because Pearl was the only one with a collar. We offered her bananas, but she wasn't interested. We ended up herding her back to the car.

That night, Peter looked worried. “She seems skinny,” he observed.

“She seems depressed,” I said. “Do you think she resents us?”

Peter made a face. “Stop anthropomorphizing the goat. She lived on a hill for a month and got laid. It's goat paradise. She's fine.”

But Pearl seemed listless. She ate a little grass and drank some water, then sat down under the palm tree and rested. Before I went to bed I stroked her back, right along the black stripe on her spine where she liked it best. She bleated softly, butting my hand with her head. I could feel her bones through the fur.