Little Joe (2 page)

“Don’t you want Santa Claus to come visit tonight?” Grandpa asked.

“Yes, but I’d rather call him Kris Kringle.” Hannah puckered out her lower lip. “That’s who I wrote to, anyway, about the trampoline I wished for.
If
it happens to go on sale. Plus, the Misty Mate rabbit cooler, the pony beads and the unicorn-mane-braiding kit—either/or.”

Eli stroked the top of Fancy’s tail, ignoring Hannah and thinking of a name instead.

“Grandpa, do you think Kris Kringle knows anything about unicorns?” Hannah asked. “Since he’s only got reindeer?”

Both Grandpa and Eli knew whenever Hannah got this way, the best thing to do was just let her go.

“I know,” Hannah said. “How about Jesus! He was born tonight, too. Who wouldn’t be impressed with the name Jesus?”

Grandpa said he didn’t think calling the bull calf Jesus and having it hollered out over the loudspeaker above the fairgrounds would help Eli in the show ring much.

“Remember how you get to name all your bunnies whenever Snow White has a litter?” Grandpa reminded her.

Hannah nodded and tied the fuzzy scarf around her neck into a bow.

“Now go inside and tell your ma there’s a calf out here. And that we’ll be inside soon for dessert.”

“Hey-Ma-there’s-a-calf-out-here!” Hannah yelled as she headed for the house.

“How about Joe?” Eli said. “That’s your name. Huh, Grandpa?”

Grandpa’s nose turned red. “Well, he
is
big….”

The calf was so big, Grandpa said he just
had
to put “little” in front of Joe. Said he’d like to see the look on all the people’s faces when they heard his name announced at the County Fair and out walked the biggest little bull calf they’d ever seen. Then the bidding would start and they’d all be giddy to get a piece of Little Joe.

“You’ll make good money off this calf,” Grandpa said. “Once he wins the blue ribbon. It’s a Stegner tradition.”

Fancy finished licking Little Joe clean, then her and Old Gert started doing what mother cows do, hiding Little Joe by covering him up with so much straw and hay and mud that only they could find him.

When Eli came back to the barn after pie and ice cream, his heart crept into his throat. He couldn’t see Little Joe anywhere. He pulled up the switch on Fancy’s tail and got down in the straw on his hands and knees, poking around Old Gertie’s legs.

The cows got so bothered they walked right over to
the heap where Little Joe was. Eli felt so relieved to uncover him, he gave them all more water and took a drink, too.

The wind groaned in the rafters above. It lingered high in the hay mow, causing the mice to scatter. Eli looked up and eyed the lightbulb flickering. At their end of the barn, Ma’s broody hens cooed faintly. They knew something was different.

Fancy gave her calf a nudge, and in no time he was up on his wobbly legs. Trembling on all fours, he looked up at Eli with the biggest blue eyes Eli had ever seen. Blinking back wonder, Little Joe leaned and swayed in between Fancy and Old Gert until he gave up and flopped back down to give it a rest.

Grandpa walked into the birthing pen with a little brown jar and some rubber gloves. “Now it’s important that you take care of the navel.” He took hold of the brown stringy cord still hanging from Little Joe’s navel and dipped the end into the jar.

Little Joe’s belly shivered as his navel cord got dunked.

“It’s important that it doesn’t get infected. The cord’ll fall off in a few days, but you still need to rub the navel with iodine, Eli. So Little Joe won’t have any problems.”

Eli’d make sure nothing would happen to that navel. That nothing would happen to Little Joe. His first calf. The
scare was over and done with. He’d gotten Little Joe to breathe. Now the calf was safe under Fancy, sucking on warm milk.
Fancy deserves some grain for all this
, Eli thought.
And a good rest
.

Carefully, Eli took the brown jar and the rubber gloves from Grandpa and put them back in the medicine cabinet hanging in the tack room. Then he spotted the pictures above the feed bin. There was Grandpa and Pa, not much older than Eli, smiling with their milkers at the County Fair. Grandpa’s photo was in black and white, but Eli knew the ribbon was blue—
FIRST PLACE
it said along the shiny side of the satin. Pa’s picture with his grand champion was in color and he was kind of smiling, sort of. That was smiling for Pa—pressing both lips together tight.

Eli had a checked shirt just like the one in Pa’s picture. Maybe he’d wear it to the fair next year when he’d show Little Joe. Eli would be the first Stegner in the ring with a beef bull calf, now that they weren’t a milking operation anymore. “No money in milkers” is what Pa had said. He’d sold every one of the dairy cows last year, except Old Gert. So Eli’d be starting a new tradition.

Eli clutched the scoop and dug it deep into the feed bin. He poured the golden kernels into the red rubber tub and ran with it to give to Fancy. She looked tired and a little dazed. Her eyes were glassy, too; still, she took the feed. Eli scratched the back of her ears. Then he whispered,
“Merry Christmas, Fancy,” in one. This was the best Christmas present he’d ever had. Better than the John Deere cast-iron tractor he’d gotten two Christmases ago. Or the junior bow and arrow set from last year.

Eli reached out and touched Little Joe for the first time without being scared. Little Joe’s spotted gray muzzle was wet with milk and warm as a hot-water bottle, only softer and loaded with whiskers. Eli didn’t even care if he got a fishing rod from Kris Kringle or Santa Claus this year. He’d just gotten the best present ever. More than he could have imagined. He’d gotten Little Joe.

“You can’t stay here all night, son.”

Eli didn’t know how long Pa’d been standing there, scratching his head with his cap still on it.

“Is he really mine, Pa?”

“Isn’t that what Grandpa said?”

“Yeah.” Eli nodded. “I named him Little Joe.”

Pa took off the Carhartt coat he’d gotten for Christmas last year and hung it over Eli’s shoulders. “You’d better get to bed or Santa Claus might not show.”

“It’s Kris Kringle,” Eli murmured.

“Says who?”

“Hannah. That’s who she wrote to this year.”

Tattoo Day

Snow had made the farm so quiet Eli couldn’t hear the morning coming. But he could feel it: the frosty chill of his breath against a bare elbow as he turned over and remembered he had a bull calf, just four days old. It was barely light out. The windowpanes were still crusted over with ice. Scratching them to get a good look outside would only wake up Hannah next door. Besides, he knew the barn was knee-deep in snow. Had been since Christmas. Eli’s window faced the barn’s McIntosh red shingles. If he sat straight and balled up three pillows just right, Eli could usually catch sight of the silver-tipped weather vane and the
SWEPT
in
WINDSWEPT FARMS
. Not today, though.
Just a cloudy mess that looked like chicken feet scratches running up and down the glass.

Eli felt a draft shoot up his back. He tugged at the comforter. It wouldn’t budge but gave a familiar grumble. Taking the flashlight from under his pillow, he aimed it at the foot of the bed, where the dog lay. Tater had snuck in trying to get warm and was hogging all the covers. Tater opened one eye and followed the beam for a bit as it traced his potato-colored fur. But he soon lost interest and was snoring by the time Eli turned off the switch.

Eli crept out of bed and winced as his bare feet touched the floor. He wondered if Little Joe was warm enough in the maternity pen. Its windows would be frosted over, too. Reaching under the bed for yesterday’s socks, Eli snuck out as quiet as he could.

Icy pellets of snow began to smatter against the window between Eli’s and Hannah’s rooms. It looked over the pastures where Little Joe would be tasting timothy and white clover in a few months. Now they were bloated with snow and dotted by deer tracks crisscrossing the fence lines.

Hannah would be sore he hadn’t woke her up. But she’d just spook Little Joe anyway and take over with all her talking. Besides, Eli liked being the only one in the barn.

Eli’s boots broke through a crunchy layer of snow as
he cut a path to the barn. He didn’t mind getting up so early winter mornings, now that he had Little Joe. But he wished he’d taken the time to put liners in his chore boots. His toes felt prickly and his Steelers cap was no match for the sleet.

The market steers’ll take shelter under the tin roof next to the corral
, Eli thought. They’d already been weaned off their mothers when Pa bought them in the fall. They didn’t get warm milk like Little Joe.

Must be twenty below with the wind
, Eli figured. He saw the ax leaning heavy against the barn. He knew the first thing he should do was take it and chop the ice off the water trough the steers drank from. But the trough was a quarter mile away and all Eli could think about was his bull calf.
I’ll make sure to fork out more hay and scatter it around the herd
, he thought, eyeing the barn door.

Eli sucked in his breath and slid the door open. He leaned back, feeling for the stone step with his foot as he always did before putting his full weight on it. Then he descended several feet into the world inside the barn. Darkness surrounded him, cave-like and moist. He’d welcomed that dampness in summer, when it was a soothing wetness. Now it was stone-cold and icicle-tingly. Eli’s pulse quickened as he made his way deeper, guided by the gullies cut into the cement floor.

It took a few blinks before Eli could take in the dimness. What lay inside revealed itself in pieces. First, it was the shape of things. Two wooden arms of a wheelbarrow splayed sideways against a whitewashed post. Next, the jagged teeth of barbed wire. Piercing the air in circles, it glinted silver around spools as high as Eli’s waist. Then finally, movement. Eli spotted a smoky curl, hairy and soft. It wove through his legs in a quivering tickle. The curl turned serious, into a shove only a barn cat could give. A shove that nearly toppled Eli over until he leaned down and stroked it.

The cat purred and followed Eli as far as the pen, where they heard chewing.

Every time Eli entered the barn this early, he thought he’d wake up the animals, but it never worked out that way. They were always up before anybody else. Spider, the youngest of the tabby barn cats, was up, too, balancing on top of the stanchion wall. It couldn’t have been more than an inch wide, which suited Spider just fine. Spider could climb most anything a real spider could, the thinner the better. She licked the back of a mackerel-striped paw, peered over Little Joe in the maternity pen and mewed.

“He’s your calf, too, huh, Spider?” Eli’d seen Spider nuzzled up against Little Joe’s stomach yesterday afternoon. Eli wished he could get that close. He stretched out
his arm and made a bridge across the stanchion, but Spider didn’t need it. She jumped onto Eli’s shoulder, clear.

Eli rubbed his hands together to find some heat. The barn wasn’t much warmer than outside and it was dark. He couldn’t reach the lightbulb on the low beam yet, and the switch had been broke for years.

Little Joe shook his ears and hid behind Fancy as Eli unlocked the latch and came into the pen with a bucket of grain.

Keep humming
, Eli remembered Grandpa saying.
And pretend not to look
. It had been four days since Little Joe was born, and Eli worked on gentling him. Still, Little Joe snuck behind his mama no matter how slowly Eli slid the pitchfork into the straw to scoop up the manure. Little Joe would lower his neck, thick and fuzzy as a bear cub, and peek at Eli through Fancy’s legs. And no matter what Eli hummed, tossing the clumps into a wheelbarrow, Little Joe wouldn’t take water from the bucket Eli’d freshened until after Eli left.

Maybe he’d like other songs besides Christmas carols
, Eli thought. Christmas was over, but it was still Christmas-cold. Eli caught sight of his breath whenever he stopped humming. All he could think of to hum was Grandpa’s favorite—the “Pennsylvania Polka.” So he started humming that.