Island (27 page)

Such scenes of selling and butchering would repeat themselves until a rough balance between livestock and available hay was achieved. In dry seasons when the hay crop was less lush there would have to be a corresponding reduction in animal numbers. In years that were more bountiful we could afford to winter individuals who would not have survived the more rigorous selectivity of leaner years. The selection of those who would remain and those who would “go” was always a tight and careful process. Like shrewd and thoughtful managers of athletic teams preparing their lists of protected players, we would go over the strengths and weaknesses of each individual. Age was always a factor, as was general strength; fertility, as I mentioned, another, and sometimes even what might be called “personality.” Animals who were particularly ill-tempered or high-strung or who had developed bad habits, like leaping fences or raiding summer vegetable gardens, received thoughtful scrutiny as the deadline approached. And as always, if the troublesome individuals had outstanding positive traits, they would be given additional leeway and allowed to make it for another year. Sheep who produced “weighty” lambs or a high proportion of twins were forgiven balancing weaknesses, and the cows who were the leading milk producers were generally grudgingly indulged, regardless of how unpleasant they actually might be. They were often the “stars” on not overly strong teams and were catered to accordingly.

I say all of this now so that you might understand the environment in which the calf club wish was born, and also so that you might see the situation in which it existed for a while – wobbly
and uncertain but grounded in a kind of realism similar to the animals and the people who were its basic source.

The idea itself, however, came from a new person in our midst. In the late winter and early spring of the seventh grade a new and dynamic agricultural representative began to visit our two-room school. He was young and athletic and brimming with vigour. He was one year away from the completion of his degree and had interrupted his formal studies for a year of “in-the-field” practical experience; and we were to be part of his field. He was almost contagious. We had always had visits from agricultural representatives but they were for the most part men who were older and gave the impression of wishing they were somewhere else. One used to wear a suede jacket and a pair of grey trousers covered with cigarette ashes and other interesting stains. He would sit at the desk in the front of the room and ask if there were any questions. There would seldom be any, so he would ask one: “Well, then what will we talk about?” Then he would look out the window rather longingly, as would we, hoping for, if not a discussion topic, a sort of mutual deliverance. Another used to show slides of “common North American weeds.” He seemed to come later in the year, in May or June, and always in the afternoon. Each slide bore the name of the weed which was illustrated, and he would read the label aloud to us in a ritual which we came to call the weed parade. “Common Ragwort,” he would say, or “Scottish Thistle” or “Wild Onion” or “Broad-leaved Dock.” He would always glance surreptitiously at his watch and drink from a thermos bottle of coffee laced with whisky. In the drowsy hot afternoons, as weed followed weed
and their names became more slurred and the vapours from the whiskied coffee rose around us, we would find it almost impossible to stay awake. But our new man changed all that.

First he said that in addition to our present vegetable garden clubs we should start a calf club. He had been doing research, he said, and all we needed was a minimum of ten heifer calves produced by a pure-bred sire. These would be born the following spring, so it was not too early to begin thinking of their conception. The mothers could be “any cow of high quality.” Such quality would hopefully be transferred to her daughter. We would need a paper signed by the keeper of the pure-bred sire, indicating the breeding date and the hopeful conception of the desired calf. We were to check our cattle at home and speak with our parents. We were interested in dairy cattle, so we should not select a beef-type mother. Neither should we “cross” breeds if we could help it. We should not breed a cow with heavy Holstein characteristics to an Ayrshire bull, for example, because the breed characteristics would become confused. His research had shown that the predominant strain in the area was Ayrshire and there were two Ayrshire bulls approximately ten miles apart and subsidized by the Department of Agriculture. These bulls, he said, were not being “utilized to their full potential.” We copied it all down in our scribblers to refer to at a later time.

On our way home I considered all the cattle that we owned, thinking of their backgrounds and their breeding and when they were due to give birth that spring. I was already a year ahead of myself in searching for my candidate for mother of the year. I settled mentally on a large and consistently gentle cow whom we called Morag. She was basically white with cherry-red
markings and long and sweeping elegant Ayrshire horns. She possessed almost all of the “high-quality” requirements which had been mentioned and she would deliver her current “ordinary” calf quite early in the spring. She had always conceived quickly and easily following the births of her other calves, and I could not believe my good fortune.

When I entered our house my father was fixing harness in the kitchen. He was not in a good mood, I realized, but I was so enthusiastic that I told him all about the new agricultural representative and our potential calf club, falling over my words in my excitement.

“Oh,” he said with something like vague annoyance, “I’ve heard all that before. Those agricultural representatives are all the same. They just talk and talk and talk and never do anything. They come in their fancy cars in the middle of the haying season and expect you to drop everything and talk to them. Almost everything they say is common sense anyway: ‘Plant early and you will harvest early.’ ‘Rotate your crops.’ ‘Use lime.’ ‘Heavy rainfall results in a high yield.’ ‘Turkeys are needed for the Thanksgiving market.’ Who doesn’t know that? What they say is all baloney.”

“Well,” I said, thinking I had best keep on, “it would just be one cow. I was thinking of Morag after her calf is born. There is a pure-bred Agricultural Society bull at MacDougall’s five miles away. We could breed her there in the summer.”

“Not me,” he said. “I’m not dragging any more cows on the end of a rope to one of those bulls. I kept one of those Agricultural Society bulls here myself about fifteen years ago. More trouble than he was worth. Took up too much space in the
barn. Had to haul feed and water to him all the time because he was too dangerous to let out. Then if he didn’t get exercise he wouldn’t breed properly. And people always came with cows at the damnedest times. Seven o’clock on Sunday morning. Any time there was a wedding or a funeral. Any time you were leaving the house you’d be sure to meet someone with a cow and have to go back in and change your clothes and go handle the bull for them. Bull got so he wouldn’t let anyone else around him but me, so I could never leave the house. People would come with their cows and if I weren’t home they’d complain. Not that they didn’t have a right to, I suppose.”

He began to gather up his harness from the floor in preparation for the evening chores. I felt that perhaps I should point out that all of our best cattle were still descendants of that long-departed bull but it somehow did not seem a good day for that kind of logic. After he had gone to the barn, my mother said: “He is not having a good day but you realize he did not say ‘No.’ Ask him something definite and volunteer to do the work yourself. He is getting tired. You know that if he gives you his word, he will always keep it.”

It was true. Whatever uneven moods my father was prone to, he possessed a memory that did not permit him to forget anything and he was always true to his word. In retrospect, it does not seem that we were certain of many things, dwelling in the realm of fluctuating weather and fickle seasons and aggressive insects and indifferent soil; but of those traits we were sure, and we clung to them as the uneasy swimmer to his certain log.

In the barn it was growing dark. My father moved about the animals with a tired familiarity, leaning against them, pushing
them with his shoulder as he moved towards their mangers, talking to them in a sort of abbreviated private language, pulling manure with his fork from beneath them, tightening their halter chains, distributing their feed so that it was within their reach.

“Okay,” he said before I had time to speak. “I didn’t say you couldn’t, just that I wouldn’t. If you raise the fee, you can have the cow.”

It was, it seemed, fair enough.

The fee was probably part of the reason we had stopped using the Agricultural Society bull in the first place. Another was that it took valuable time in a period before the widespread use of trucks and artificial insemination. “He,” the bull, had gone too far away, and it was no longer considered worth it. It was expensive, as I mentioned, and there was also a feeling that paying money for the simple breeding act was a bit too much – as if it were somehow unnatural, a kind of perversion or animal prostitution in which we did not care to be involved; as if there were an uneasy idea that no one should have to “pay for it.” There was also the shrewd and pragmatic observation that after a few years of such selective breeding most cattle already contained “good,” if not exactly royal, blood and further exalted matings were perhaps a waste of time. It was probably a reaction to such spreading ideas that the agricultural representative had come among us in the first place to plant the seeds of the calf club wish.

In any case, I had achieved the first step. Before the birth of Morag’s present calf, I had already willed her pregnant once again. I entered my name with the agricultural representative and told my fellow schoolmates that I would “go.” The snow had
not yet melted, nor had the wild ducks flown north, nor had the first spring lambs and early kittens yet been born, but I was already well into not only this spring but the next as well.

After the birth of Morag’s “ordinary” calf, there followed the long period of waiting. If she were to deliver the magic calf by early next spring, she would have to conceive in the middle of summer. It took nine months from conception to birth – “just like people,” as we used to say. “Cattle are the only animals that take the same length of time.”

As the spring passed and the early summer approached, the hectic pace of our lives increased. School drew to a close and during the last few weeks we attended it irregularly. We were needed at home, and whatever we had learned during the year was already in our past. Feverish preparations for the approaching haying season began: the repairing of machinery, the sending away for parts, improvements to the barn and also a myriad of other activities involving gardening, canning and the making of cheese. The short intense summer was upon us and we had no time to lose.

Meanwhile the animals grew sleek and fat and were distant from us most of the time as we prepared to gather in their winter sustenance. In the early weeks of July we began our haying in earnest; cutting the most mature fields and leaving them to dry, then raking and finally pitching onto the wagons, then driving into the barn and pitching off, and returning again and then again. Always threatened by broken harness and non-functioning machinery and always fearful of the sudden spectre of rain.

On the evening of the fourteenth of July I noticed the signs in Morag when I was bringing the milk cows home from their
pasture by the sea. She was coming into her breeding cycle and it caused a restlessness and tension not only within herself but among the other cattle as well. It was late in the evening when I first noticed it and there was nothing I could do that day. That night the radio told us of the approaching rain squalls which were to hit on the following day.

“Goddamn it,” said my father, “and us with all that hay out.”

We had just recently cut a new field, so much of it was still undried. In the morning we were up at five, moving feverishly about our tasks, racing against the weather. At the morning milking Morag’s situation was truly obvious, although my father did not notice. He was not around the cattle much but busy harnessing the horses and shouting directions to animals and people alike. The clouds were already bunching, although they still seemed far enough away, hanging over the ocean and visible from a distance.

“Hurry up,” he said, coming into the barn where I was milking the cows. “It’s going to rain. We haven’t got all day.”

“I think we should keep Morag in the barn today,” I stammered quickly, fearful lest he should get away before I broached the subject.

“What for?” he asked and I could see that he was so harried and preoccupied that he had given my words but little thought.

“She’s in heat,” I said. “She began last night.”

For a moment his eyes seemed to cloud over with noncomprehension, but then they cleared and became filled almost with panic, as he understood the significance of my words. It was as if he were trapped by his memory and his word. Trapped by them at this, his busiest time.

“But there is no time today,” he sputtered. “We have other things to do than just worry about this one goddamn cow.”

“Okay,” I said. “We will just keep her in and see what the day brings. I didn’t say I wanted to go with her now.”

“Okay,” he said, as if he were relieved of an earlier capricious promise. “Take the others down to the shore. We have to get going.”

What the day brought was a forenoon of furious activity. First we raked the driest hay and then followed with the groaning wagons. The sun shone erratically, but the air was so humid that little actual drying took place. At times the clouds blotted out the sun, and once we could actually see the rain falling out to sea, although it had not yet started to fall upon the land. All morning as we raced about, raising new blisters upon the calluses already formed on our hands, Morag moaned and bawled her passion from the barn. When we came in with the loaded wagons, we could hear her threshing about in the frustration of her captivity and her desire.