Mad Cow Nightmare (7 page)

She ran into the barn, past Hamlet’s stall. The stallion blinked down at her, stamping his hooves, as though upset about something. On the barn floor a pile of hay and manure, a broken slat, a saddle thrown down on its back—bridle and reins gone. Ophelia’s stall empty. Empty! What? She opened her mouth to shout but nothing came out. There was no way the mare could have broken loose, she’d never have done that; the stall gate was latched.

Now it swung open with the wind, a grating sound like tears. Someone had opened it. Someone had stolen Ophelia. Franny collapsed back against Hamlet’s stall and the stallion licked her neck with his long coarse tongue. “Where’s Ophelia? Where’s my darling?” she croaked, blowing into Hamlet’s mouth for solace. But the stallion’s huge moist eyes only gazed down at her sorrowfully.

Chapter Six

James Perlman was in his barn, bandaging a lamb’s shank where she’d been bitten by a neighbor’s hound, when a shadow loomed in the doorway. There was the stink of an unwashed body, a menacing silence like Maureen’s used to be—Maureen could keep silences for days at a time—she was a dragon, breathing fire. Panic ran like freezing water down his spine. Strangers were not allowed in the sheep barn unless specially invited—and then James had a boot disinfectant to apply. There was the fear of foot-and-mouth disease, scrapie. That traveller woman brought the fear home. “Stop right there,” he called out. “Did you read the signs?”

James wasn’t going to be interrupted by an uninvited guest. He wasn’t going to stop what he was doing. The lamb was a pretty little thing, perfectly shaped, she took the bottle like a baby. His poor hurt baby. He was always drawn to hurt animals and children— their helplessness, their fragility. He thought again of that woman in the white nightgown. He imagined her laid out on his sofa, grateful, like so many of the hospice patients, for his solicitude. He wouldn’t try to touch her. He would just look at her, wait on her. That was all he’d had in mind back at that Buffalo hospital. . . .

Now the man was all the way in the barn and James had to rise. He held out a warning arm but the man ignored it. The fellow began talking, using his hands, like he was desperate for answers. Angry that none were forthcoming.

James knew then who he was. He knew from the clothes he wore: the T-shirt that read
Death To Brits.
The bearded face with the Irish hooked nose that wasn’t ugly now but would dominate the face in later years. The radio described him as the partner of the escaped woman—he’d been seen leading her down the hospital corridor. And here he was, looking for his woman. James glanced about for his disinfectant but couldn’t remember where he’d stashed it. Besides, the man’s face said he wouldn’t allow it.

“I seen her come this way,” the man said, his big blotched hands on his hips. “She been sick and we had an argument. I want her back. She’s my woman.”

My
woman, he said, like she had no mind of her own—no opinions, no rights. James didn’t like that. He’d voted for the politicians who backed
Roe v. Wade.
A woman had a right to her own body. He’d told himself that, even as his own body came down on that female in the recovery room. She was at least fifty, she wouldn’t bear any more children. What hurt did he do her? He’d told himself that, too. She’d come on to him earlier, hadn’t she? But deep down he knew he was wrong. He hated himself for doing it.

“I saw her, sure,” he told the man—to get him out of the barn. The man could be carrying that disease himself. He’d given blood, the hospital said, he’d lied when they asked if he’d ever been in the UK. “She went that way.”

James pointed in a direction opposite to the one the car had taken. It had actually been heading east, toward East Branbury. Where the Healing House was, though he didn’t mention that to the man. After all, the car could have turned in any direction. “She was in a car. There’s no telling where she got dropped off. Could’ve been a local fellow. Could’ve been on his way to Burlington, who knows? Or Montreal. That’s all I can tell you.” He took a step toward the man, to nudge him out of the barn. The lamb bleated in its pen, a pathetic sound.

“You saw her,” the man said. “I found this on your porch.” He reached into his pocket and pulled out the crumpled nightgown. Held it up. James could see the spot of blood on the shoulder of the gown. He felt guilty then for not bringing it into the house. The man glared at James, like James had molested the woman, when he hadn’t, wouldn’t have touched her. Oh no, he was over all that.

“I gave her my wife’s dress to wear,” James said, feeling the bile rising in his throat. “I left it outside and she took it. She didn’t come in my house. I was planning to call the—” He paused; he didn’t want to use the word “police” in front of this man. He didn’t know why. It was just the way the man was looking at him, scrutinizing his face like he’d seen James somewhere before. This man was from Tonawanda, according to the news report. Tonawanda wasn’t that far from Buffalo. The fellow could have seen something in the paper, remembered something. You never knew. It was all so ugly. He had to get this man out of his barn, out of his life.

“I’ve told you all I can tell you, mister. She went off in a car. That way,” and James pointed again. But Christ, now he’d pointed the right way! He reversed the direction of his thumb, and the man narrowed his eyes. “Look, I’ve work here to do. I’ll have to ask you to leave.”

The man didn’t offer to move. There was that aggravating silence. The lamb was bleating, needing help for its leg. James was frustrated, he felt desperate, bold. “I know who you are,” he said. “You’re that woman’s boyfriend. They’re looking for you, too. You gave blood in that hospital. It might’ve been contaminated and they want you for testing. You owe it to the public. Do you want to start a plague?”

The man’s eyes were cold. What did he want anyway? James had said all he could say. He edged over toward the barn phone. He wished he had a cell phone; he’d go buy one today. He didn’t dare take his eyes off the man. He’d heard about those traveller men. They could be violent; they were petty criminals, most of them. Irish. His wife, Maureen, was Irish—fiercely, patriotically so. James was English on his mother’s side, Russian Jew on his father’s. He disliked the Irish in any form, traveller or no. They drank, they were rowdy, they told lies, they stole.

James was furious now, outraged. “Get out!” he screamed. “Out of my barn or I’ll call the police!” Uh-oh, now he’d said the word.

The man growled in his throat and then spit on the barn floor— a disgusting wad of mucus. He turned on his heel, the nightgown wadded up in his arms. For a moment he held it out, stared at it, like he’d tear it apart. Then he stuffed it in his pocket, ran out of the barn. Up the path to the drive. James saw him standing on the edge of the road, looking in the direction the car with the traveller woman had gone. Then he crossed the road and ran off into the woods.

James went to the barn cabinet, pulled down a bottle of Virkon S. The label read “Recommended for the FMD virus.” He sprayed it on the barn door, the door sides, the floor where the man had stood in his filthy raggedy shoes. He sprayed it on his own boots and pants, and on the sides of the lamb pens. He didn’t stop spraying until the bottle was empty.

* * * *

Colm was back by nine o’clock that morning and he brought disturbing news with him. He’d run into a pair of
Free Press
reporters in the local diner where he’d stopped for waffles and juice and they were talking up strategies for a piece on the Willmarth farm. “They were mouthing off a mile a minute,” he told Ruth, “like they were on the verge of an orgasm. A big breaking story. Like a local anthrax case. They kept on about that traveller woman, wanted to know her story: How could they find out? Who could they interview? I kept my mouth shut, just listened. They call you, huh, Ruthie?”

“Not yet,” she said, and pushed the pan of freshly made doughnuts in his direction. “And when they do, I’m not talking. I have nothing to say about anything. I mean, I don’t know anything, do I? What do I know, Colm?”

Colm looked thoughtful where he sat in her kitchen munching on a doughnut. There were two platefuls. When Ruth was feeling stressed, she cooked an overload. The sugar had formed a mustache on his upper lip. If she hadn’t been so alarmed at the thought of reporters she’d have giggled.

“We’ll have to be the ones to work up a strategy,” he said. “We can call up the fifth, you know.”

“We?” she said, teasing him. “It’s still my farm. My cows. You haven’t moved in permanently yet.”

“Yet,” he said. “That word holds hope. But hey, I was here that night, wasn’t I? I was upstairs asleep when the woman was down here flooding the goddamn tub. Jeez, I could of done something, I could of saved her.” He looked forlorn, his sugary lip was quivering; a lock of graying hair was falling over his nose, into the sugar. Colm could use a haircut.

She reached over and patted his hand. He gazed back at her like a spaniel that had just been hissed at by a feral cat. Smiling, she squeezed his fingers.

The phone rang.

“Don’t answer,” he said. “You’re out in the pasture. You can’t be reached. That’s the way we’ll play it now.”

The phone rang four more times and quit. A minute later Darren came running up the porch steps and into the house. “Can’t you answer the bloody phone? It’s for you, Ms. Ruth. I took it in the barn. I was baling hay—you got a bloody slim crop in this drought. Now I got to feed the calves. The calves oughta be Maggie’s job but she’s out of it, Nola gone and all. Christ on a cross, what a rough thing, Nola running off like that. Stupid, I call it. Who in hell’s dumb enough to run away when she’s sick?” He shook his head, ran a hand through his yellow windblown hair.

Ruth sighed, and waved him off. “Get Boadie. She’ll feed the calves. She’s always out there petting them.”

It was Franny again. “Can’t you answer the phone when a body needs you? I been ringing and ringing and then I get that gypsy fellow who doesn’t know shit from shinola. It’s terrible, oh God, terrible, the worst kind of tragedy.” She broke into sobs. Ruth held the receiver at arm’s length.

“They found the woman,” Colm conjectured, “tests were positive. She has the CJD. Now what?”

“What’s terrible, Franny?” Ruth said, waving away Colm’s words. “Calm down now and tell me.” Ruth had been through Franny’s crises before. The last time it had been Henrietta with the chicken pox and Franny unable to cope.

There was a panting silence, unusual for Franny. Then a gagging sound, as though Franny were trying to catch her breath, trying to speak, but couldn’t get out the words. “It’s, it’s—”

Ruth waited. Colm was grimacing, he was into the plate of doughnuts again. And after those morning waffles.

“Gone,” Franny choked out. “Phelia’s gone. Like drowned, only not even that. Just gone. Her stall empty. Nothing but a pile of turds and urine on the floor, she must’ve emptied her bladder when they took her, scared to death, my beloved. Ooh God.” The sobs went on like a pot boiling over.

“Hang on, I’ll be right there,” Ruth said. It was all she could think of to say. She envisioned the mare gliding down Otter Creek with flowers in her mane, on the way to Lake Champlain where she’d slowly sink, like Hamlet’s lady friend, into the roiling waters. Ruth hung up, mopped her perspiring brow with a hot hand.

“What is it now? Henrietta got the hives? Can’t eat for a change?”

“Ophelia’s gone, Franny’s prize mare,” she told him. “It’s like losing a lover, Colm—Franny adores that mare. And somebody’s gone and stolen her.”

“Hey. Somebody left the barn door open, that’s all. She got out. You’re getting paranoid, Ruthie, you’ve got to keep your head.”

“Maybe so. But the way things have been going around here lately, I’ll believe anything. I’m going over to have a look-see.”

“And if the reporters come? The health guys to get more tub samples?”

“You can deal with them, love, you know you can.” She kissed him and felt the sugar crusted under her own nose. He kissed her back, taking dozens of small sips from her lips as if she were an ice cream soda. It was sweet and mesmerizing and for a moment she gave in to it. Until the phone rang again and she pulled away, leaving the answering machine in charge, and she took off for Franny’s barn.

* * * *

“I can deal with them, I
can”
Colm told himself when the white Subaru careened into the driveway and the couple he’d seen at the Branbury diner leaped out and trotted purposefully up the steps and into the kitchen. He wiped his upper lip with a paper napkin; rose to his full five-foot-ten-and-a-quarter to greet them.

Colm longed for clarity. He just wanted to go back to his real estate office where he understood what was going on. The Connecticut couple wanted a farmhouse with a trout pond and a view of the mountains. It was perfectly aboveboard and simple as hell. After a short search he could undoubtedly find it for them—there was always a view in Vermont, if not a trout pond. But a missing woman? Even the FBI had been alerted, in case she’d left the state. Could they find her? A needle in a haystack, as the saying went.

“Ms. Willmarth is out,” he told them, “and I’m just a friend.” He put a finger to his lips to show he had nothing to say.

But already they were snapping pictures of the kitchen: the stove, the refrigerator, the bathroom door where the yellow crime scene tape was barring passage. One of the reporters, a middle-aged man in a short-sleeved, open-necked tattersall shirt and a pool of perspiration on his snub nose and forehead—for already the temperature had hit eighty-six—was leaning into the bathroom to get a shot of tub and window.

“Wait a minute here—you can’t go in there. You can’t photograph without a signed release,” Colm cried, and flashed his police badge. He was only a part-time cop, but damn it, he was going to pull rank when he had to.

“Sure, sorry,” the fellow said, the damage already done. Colm wanted to yank the camara off his neck but resisted the urge. It wouldn’t do to irritate the press. Besides, the publicity helped—now and then.

The female reporter frowned at the cameraman, spreading vertical pleats under her nose. She was obviously older, fifties maybe. She knew the ropes; the thrust-out chin was steely. She lifted a “What can you do with these young jerks?” eyebrow at Colm. Then she cupped a hand around the corner of her mouth as if to utter a secret and said, “If anyone from the USDA calls, you haven’t seen us.”