The Jesus Cow (2 page)

W
ell, that's trouble,” said Harley Jackson, and although he was alone in the barn, he spoke the words aloud. In the manner of most long-term bachelors, Harley had grown accustomed to speaking within earshot of no one but himself, and was not at all self-conscious about the practice. In fact, he preferred his conversations thus. How pleasant to speak freely without fear of contradiction. Last thing you want, really: answers.

Despite the barn, and despite a small herd of beef cows, Harley hardly considered himself a farmer. Lifelong bachelor, factory worker, member of the Swivel Volunteer Fire Department, that's pretty much the list. Oh, and college dropout. He forgets that one sometimes. Not out of shame or deception, but because it was a long time ago. One semester short of graduation, he had been forced to withdraw, and he'd never made it back. Fifteen years now he's been employed at the filter factory in Boomler, twenty minutes down the freeway, pulling
twelve-hour shifts in a rotation leaving opportunity for other modest pursuits: He hunts some, fishes a little, tinkers on his truck, and like a lot of folks in the area, has taken to raising a few head of beef on the side. The beefers are more of a hobby than a moneymaker, really, although they do earn him a modest break on the property taxes.

Once while they were having porch beers after the evening chores, Harley handed his friend Billy Tripp a bottle of Foamy Viking and asked, “Billy, what's the secret to happiness?”

“Low overhead,” said Billy.

Pretty much
, thought Harley.

The calf in the straw was wet and wobbly kneed, woozily head-butting its mother's abdomen, intuitively prospecting for the udder it knew to be south of its current location. Problematically, the calf had rotated north. This allowed Harley to inspect the flip side of the animal, upon which he was relieved to see nothing but the standard black-and-white patchwork. Bumping into its mother's foreshank, the calf paused, tottered backward a half step, then turned to renew its search, and in making this turn it once again revealed the critical side of its hide, upon which could clearly be seen what appeared to be an above-average stencil of the Son of God.

In his time, Harley had been a believer. A born-again believer. There was a time when the sight of this calf would have dropped him to his knees. Now he simply saw a complication in the even keel of things.

Harley sighed, and again spoke aloud.

“I better call Billy.”

BILLY TRIPP OPENED
Harley's barn door and fully filled the frame. Well over six feet tall and burly with the stature of those
men who carry a seventy-pound overage like seven, he arrived clad in grim sweatpants and a capacious parka, and notwithstanding the Christmas Eve snow stood shod in orange rubber clogs. He wore a beard the size of an otter.

Billy was a decorated combat veteran whose wartime injuries had at one point put him flat on his back for the better part of a year. He and Harley were well along in their friendship before Billy shared the whole story. “Anybody who says they're above it all has never been beneath it all,” he said by way of conclusion, then never spoke of it again. He lived surrounded by stacks of books and an innumerable census of cats in a single-wide trailer on a sliver of property purchased from Harley's father during the years Harley was away at college in the city of Clearwater—an hour south of Swivel. Upon his return home, Harley resented the presence of the trailer at the far end of the pasture and by default its occupant, but one afternoon as he struggled to repair the frozen apron chain of his father's manure spreader, the sky darkened and it was Billy blocking the sun. “As the worm gear turns, eh?” said Billy. The combination of literate humor and obscure manure-handling technology knowledge appealed to Harley, and a low-key conversation ensued. Now Harley considered Billy his best friend, although Harley never cared for the term, implying as it did that life was a pageant. Like Harley, Billy was also a bachelor. The two of them liked to get together and not talk much.

After a childhood of daily dairy chores, Harley had sworn he would never again milk a cow, but he retained a farm kid's atavistic affection for fresh-skimmed cream over cornflakes. When he broached the possibility with Billy, who subsisted on a military pension and disability drawn on his injuries, Billy saw the milk as
a means to defray his prohibitive monthly cat food expenses, and thus offered to split the milking chores. With this agreement in hand, Harley obtained a bred milk cow from one of the few remaining dairy farmers in the county.

Billy was present the day she was led off the back of the cattle trailer.

“Tina Turner,” said Billy.

“Huh?” said Harley.

“Tina Turner. We'll call her Tina Turner.”

Harley had tried in vain to make any connection, some resemblance of hairstyle or mannerism, a certain strength to the gait.

“But I don't—”

“Not the point,” said Billy, seeing Harley there puzzling.

“But why—”

“Respect must be paid,” said Billy, his definitive tone making it clear he considered the answer self-evident and the discussion closed. Indeed, it was not uncommon in these parts to choose animal names for honorific purposes. Harley himself had once named a Holstein heifer calf after a high school girlfriend; sadly the relationship ended before the calf was weaned.

Now, as the two men watched, Tina Turner licked her calf from stem to stern, clearing the last of the amniotic fluid. At the moment, Billy was unable to see the image of Jesus, his view being blocked broadside by Tina.

Then the cow laid on an especially aggressive lick, and the calf stumbled into the open. The hair across its rib cage was slicked and whorled, but even thus distorted, there was no mistaking the image made manifest.

“Y'got the Son a God there, bud,” said Billy. “With a cowlick.”

This was a stylized Jesus, rendered in black-and-white splotches like clip art from the cover of a 1970s family-planning brochure, but immediately recognizable as the standard doe-eyed Lutheran hippie iteration.

Harley looked up at his friend. “Whad'ya think?”

“Get a lawyer,” said Billy. “And start printin' T-shirts.”

MARKED BY GOD
or not, Tina Turner's newborn calf still couldn't locate supper. Harley knelt down and gently steered the calf's snout toward the mother's udder. Sensing sustenance, the calf began to root around with his nose, nursing the air. Harley wrapped an arm around the calf's neck, grasping its jaw in one hand and a teat in the other. Slowly bringing the two closer and closer, he was rewarded when the calf drew the teat into its mouth and began to suck. After several false starts and separations, the calf locked on for a good long pull. Still kneeling beside the calf, Harley noticed that up this close he couldn't make out Jesus, or any face at all for that matter. Just black-and-white blotches. Hide and hair. Odd what tricks the eyes play given a little distance.

Satisfied that the calf was dialed in, Harley rose and backed away to stand beside Billy. Silently the two men watched the animal suckle. Finally Harley said, “That's miracle enough for me,” and Billy nodded. Then they lapsed back into silence.

After a significant interlude, Harley spoke.

“Staff meeting?”

“Eee-yep,” said Billy.

Harley shook out fresh straw for Tina Turner and her be-Jesused baby. After one more look at the calf, and one more shake of his head, Harley moved toward the door, and with Billy set out for the
house. They passed beneath the yard light, a fresh sifting of snow floating a halo through the mercury vapor glow. Across the yard, a small hut was visible at the base of the old water tower. The curtains were drawn, but a slim line of light leaked out, reflecting on a Subaru Outback parked inside the gate of the chain-link fence.

“The wicked witch is up late,” snorted Billy.

“Be nice,” said Harley.

High above, unseen in the darkness, Carolyn Sawchuck waited until the farmhouse door closed behind the two men, then commenced her descent. Rung by rung she left behind her biggest secret, hidden in full view of an entire town.

I
n the kitchen Harley uncapped a pair of Foamy Vikings. He handed one to Billy, and the two men seated themselves across from each other at the kitchen table. Harley had blown out a childhood's worth of birthday candles at this table. Even now he could summon the image of his mother leaning in, up to her forearms in matching red-checked oven mitts, to place another cheese-and-tuna macaroni casserole on the vintage asbestos hot pad still stowed at the bottom of the kitchen counter drawer beneath those same oven mitts.

A pile of unopened mail lay in the middle of the table. Billy took a swig of beer then reached out with his non-bottle hand and began riffling through fliers and envelopes. Harley had long ago grown used to Billy's habit of going through his mail and, as he was a loyal friend in all respects, did not object.

While Billy sorted, Harley wondered what his mother would have
made of that calf out there. Jesus Christ had been her reason for living. And yet for all her devotion to Him, and to His Father, and their Holy Spirit, and to Sunday-morning meeting, to hymns and vespers, to prayer at every turn, hers was a quiet faith, uncomfortable with show or emotion. Silently she read her Bible every morning, silently she bowed her head over each meal throughout the day, silently she ended the day on her knees in prayer beside the bed, Harley's father kneeling at the opposite side of the mattress, their very marriage bed bookended by worship. His mother's creed—religionwise and otherwise—was pretty much:
Let's not make a scene
.

And yet, for all her spiritual fortitude there were certain things she was unable to resist—caramels, the call of a nonnative bird, an unopened envelope. She'd wolf the caramels, then repent with prayer and tears. At the sound of a braided titmouse, she'd lurch for the binoculars and bird book, leaving the laundry unhung. And the mail? Rarely did she make it all the way up the driveway without tearing open each and every envelope. To her, each sealed packet represented something left undone. Harley, on the other hand, didn't care much for caramels, could identify maybe five birds including crows, and took quiet joy in letting the mail accumulate for weeks. He felt it a way of pushing back time. A passive-aggressive means of refusing interruption.

“Jesus on a T-shirt,” said Harley, as a way of resuming the conversation left hanging in the barn. “Ma wouldn't'a gone for that.”

Billy looked up from the mail and smiled. “She'd have grabbed your dad's black Sunday-go-to-meetin' shoe polish, headed for the barn, got down on her knees, and rubbed out Jesus.” Billy had met Harley's mother only a handful of times, as she died the same year he and his trailer arrived. She was a pleasant woman who wore long
skirts and her hair up in a bun, her demure exterior belying a strap-steel spirit that Billy discovered the first time he tried to smoke on her porch and she quietly informed him that he was welcome to smoke beside the mailbox at the end of the driveway, the look in her eyes a cross between schoolmarm and martial arts maven. Billy gave up cigarettes shortly thereafter.

“Yah,” said Harley, “then she'd'a told Dad to haul it off to the sale barn and sell it for a runt.”

Billy nodded, then raised his Foamy Viking in order to contemplate its character against the light. “You'd'a never had a fridge fulla these back in the day.”

Harley grinned. “Never brought a drop into this place until after Dad died. First one I popped, I startled at the hiss. Thought it was Ma giving me the ol' Scandihoovian tsk!” Harley was not one for big drinking, but he enjoyed a beer to settle things now and again. Like now, he thought, and he and Billy sat quietly, deep in their thoughts and shallow in their brew.

Harley had never planned to live in the house he grew up in. He remembered the odd sound of his father tearful on the phone—a rare show of emotion, and an even rarer thing, him calling on the phone—when he rang Harley's dorm room early one morning halfway through the final semester of his senior year, waking him to say Harley's mother had “passed” in the night. His father was always a quiet man, but he turned even quieter after losing his wife, he and Harley eating in silence at this very table after Harley dropped out of college and came home to help on the waning farm. By the time his dad “passed” a year later, they had spoken very little. There was no anger, no “issues,” as the professional self-helpers liked to say, just not much talking.

“This looks official,” said Billy, using a forefinger to flick a simple white envelope to the center of the table. It bore the return address of the Swivel Village Hall. Harley knew what it was and had left it unopened on purpose.

“Go ahead,” he said, flicking the envelope back to Billy. Billy reached into his sock, pulled out a knife the size of a jumbo perch, slit the envelope with a deft
snick
that belied his otherwise ponderous presence, then drew the letter out and smoothed it flat across the table.

Harley watched Billy's eyes work back and forth across the paper. Harley didn't need to read the letter to know what it was about. He recognized the signature of the village attorney, Vance Hansen. Vance was an uncomfortable little man who was forever fortifying himself with day-old doughnuts and burnt coffee, and the letter in question was yet another pretend-polite threat regarding the alleged odor of Harley's beef cows.

The letter was signed by Vance, but Harley knew the real push for this action was coming from Klute Sorensen.

And if Klute Sorensen had his way, Harley would be homeless.

A
t the moment, Klute Sorensen was strangling in his CPAP straps. He despised the breathing machine, viewing it as a symbol of weakness he would never tolerate in others. He had surrendered to it only after winding up in the Boomler Community Hospital emergency room five years ago, clutching his chest and certain he was dying of a heart attack. Eventually his troubles were (embarrassingly, as far as Klute was concerned) traced to sleep apnea. He was fitted for a mask, and even Klute had to admit he had felt better ever since.

But oh, how he hated the thing, especially when he woke at one a.m. with his head in its twisted grip, the mask wedged off center and squashing his nose. Lurching upright in bed, he tore it from his face and flung it aside. He'd heard the new models were much improved, but that would have meant subjecting himself to another doctor's appointment and fittings, and if there was one thing Klute
Sorensen despised more than weakness it was tweaking his schedule to accommodate weakness, so he continued to use the old model.

Crap
, thought Klute as he rose from bed and fumbled into his robe,
up for good now
. He knotted the belt, toed into a pair of bedroom slippers, and stepped to the grand window at the far end of his vaulted bedroom. Below he could see half the city of Boomler. Considering himself an eminence in the town, Klute had sited his commodius manse on the very lip of Boomler Bluff. Klute had built the house (it looked more like a sporting goods outlet store than a house) out of a sense of duty, convinced as he was that the community in general looked to him for inspiration. Even now, he liked to imagine, some grubby urchin was peering up through a grimy window to the dark bulk of Klute's giant skylined castle flanked by a triple-illuminated American flag of a dimension suitable for a Perkins Restaurant, and this sight alone would assuage the child's hunger pangs, replacing them with a healthy appetite for money and success. Klute Sorensen was not a man who considered himself in need of comforting, but he did take comfort in the idea of his helping the children.
Lifting all boats
, he thought, and naturally shifted his gaze toward Boomler's city park lagoon, which really struggled to support the metaphor as it was four feet deep and capped with a foot of ice. At the center of the lagoon Klute could see the lights of the official Boomler Christmas tree, which was mounted on the roof of a junk car. The Lions Club towed the car out there every year. Charged five bucks a pop for a colored light, with the proceeds going to children in Africa. After New Year's they removed the lights and rolled up the extension cords, then ran a two-dollar “pick 'em” on when the car would sink. The lucky winner received a jumbo pack of venison jerky and a $50 savings certificate from the bank, and the rest
of the proceeds went to the local playground fund. Each year, Klute found out how much the Lions raised for the playground, then wrote a check thrice as big so everyone would maintain a sense of perspective regarding the trickling goodwill of homespun charity as opposed to the beneficent fire hose of private enterprise.

Christmas by now, I guess
, thought Klute, pondering the Lions Club tree as he rubbed his sternum and wondered if he was imagining the slight pain in his chest. Had to be from the CPAP strangle, he thought. He swung his gaze around the lights of Boomler. A steady snow was falling, the flakes reflecting and amplifying the ambient streetlight glow. Just off the heart of downtown, on the banks of Birch Creek, Klute could see the unlit bulk of the grain mill and dairy plant his great-grandfather had built in the early 1900s, his grandfather had expanded in the 1960s, and his father had taken over in the 1970s. Klute remembered playing in the buildings as a boy, the roar and grind of the grain and milk trucks coming and going, the farmers loading supplies, the feed dust so heavy everywhere he could trace out tic-tac-toe games on the scale shield with Eddie, the man who tied off the feed sacks and lugged them to the loading dock. Through the decades the Sorensen patriarchs had parlayed this booming operation into a hardware and appliance store. When the interstate was proposed, Klute's father had the foresight (his seat on the county planning commission informing his point of view) to purchase property at the location of the proposed exit ramp, where he subsequently built a neat little Scandinavian-themed motel and restaurant to greet the initial influx of travelers. Klute remembers the pride he felt as a high schooler back then, watching his father cut the ribbon for that section of the interstate and the customers come pouring through.

For the Sorensens, it was a time of tidy profits. Then, in the 1980s, the small farmers who sustained the mill and dairy began to wane, squeezed out by the crush of high-interest loans and the force of larger operators, and by the 1990s both operations were shuttered. Right about the same time, the first McDonald's went up on the opposite side of the interstate, followed by a KFC. Locals and visitors alike drove past the Sorensens' Swedish restaurant to get their Big Macs and buckets of Colonel Sanders Extra Crispy, and soon the restaurant could no longer sustain itself. Then came a franchise Super 8, which finished off the homegrown motel. And, finally, when the big box stores really got going in Clearwater, the hardware and appliance stores could no longer compete and were rented out to a failing series of used furniture vendors. Being an avowed survival-of-the-fittest capitalist free marketeer, Klute found it difficult to articulate his anger at this turn of events, which had drained the family fortune over the course of a thirty-year drizzle.

KLUTE TURNED FROM
the window and walked into the living room, which was so cavernous and bare that even his slipper scuffs echoed. Padding into the kitchen, he drew open the door of a massive refrigerator, which was also bare save for several cartons of chocolate milk. Klute poured himself a glass and returned to the living room to sit on the only piece of furniture in the room, an overstuffed couch.

After years of watching the family fortune seep away, and after the death of his father, Klute had decided bold, decisive action was in order. The real estate boom was at full throttle, and Klute went all-in, tapping his final reserves to set up Sorensen Developments, Inc. The first structure Sorensen Developments built was Klute's
own gigantic house overlooking Boomler, because Klute understood that a man led by example. Then, having gotten a line from a banker friend on a distressed farm property conveniently located very near an interstate interchange, Klute drove north, to Swivel, where he went about pitching the Swivel Village Board on a dream development he called Clover Blossom Estates.

Being from Boomler, a village with four—rather than three—digits on its population sign, Klute fancied himself an outside hotshot born to show these rubes in Swivel a thing or two, and indeed he had managed to swagger his way into the obsequious good graces of the Swivel Village Board, which had approved the rezoning plans to accommodate his development, and Solid Savings Bank, which had approved the financing for the development.

Klute's charm offensive had begun the night he pulled up before the Swivel Village Hall in a monstrously jacked-up secondhand Hummer sporting plein air stars and stripes on both doors and personalized plates reading
1MPG
. Klute intended this abbreviation as a boastful toast to conspicuous consumption but it went slightly awry when one of the locals peeping out through the nicotine-bleared window of the Buck Rub Bar read it as shorthand for
I AM PIG
. Even had Klute known this he would not have been deterred, for he was not one to be deterred, as indicated by the fact that before he switched off the Hummer it was reverberating to the sounds of a motivational business audiobook titled
Stomp Your Way to Success: A Clodhopper Walks All Over Wall Street.
In fact, the passenger seat of the SUV was littered with motivational business audiobooks the likes of
12 Steps to the Top Floor, Scream Like You Mean It,
and
Set Sale! Seven Shipmasters Share Their Success Stories.
What Klute lacked in business acumen he made up
for in body mass, cologne, and confident aphorisms, and this was enough to convince the Swivel Village Board to approve his plans and the bank to hand over money. There was much talk of jobs and an expanded tax base and repeated invocation of the two most magically twinned words in the star-spangled lexicon,
growth
and
progress
. By the time negotiations concluded, the Swivel Village Board would have been willing to strap on tool belts and raise the houses themselves. In short order Klute Sorensen snapped up Harley's father's farmland (which—not coincidentally—was precipitously close to being foreclosed on by the very same bank financing Klute), divvied it up with poorly built roads, slapped together a dozen split-levels, and began handing out brochures:
CLOVER BLOSSOM ESTATES—A SWEET LIFE AT A SWEET PRICE
.

And right about then, the real estate market climbed over the railing of a very tall bridge, closed its eyes, and jumped, dragging Clover Blossom Estates with it. Before long there were plastic shopping bags wind-socking in the dying shrubberies and goldenrod growing through the prematurely cracked sidewalks.

While the reasons for Klute's real estate troubles were easily diagnosed through the most cursory review of any given financial news crawl, he chose instead to focus on Harley Jackson's beef cows, which he insisted—despite their downwind location on the other side of the four-lane—set up a stink that was driving away potential customers and rendering his homes unsaleable. Everyone on the village board knew this was utter blowhard hoo-hah, but at the outset they had acquiesced to Klute's demands for significant tax breaks, the sunsetting of which were a decade distant, and as such, they felt compelled to take his side, and were further impelled by the fact that this also shifted the blame from their shoulders to
those of Harley, who—although historically local and a member of the fire department—had been viewed with some suspicion ever since returning degreeless from college. Rumors of his attending dance recitals and poetry readings in a converted Clearwater tire factory had exacerbated the general unease. The few remaining homeowners of Clover Blossom Estates, finding themselves deeply underwater with the siding peeling away, were also looking for a scapegoat, and Klute commiserated with them mournfully, rolling down his Hummer window to visit with them beside their fraying ticky-tacky boxes, sniffing the air delicately and shaking his head, never mind that it was the agricultural nature of the setting that had drawn them in the first place.

No wonder my chest hurts
, thought Klute, sipping his chocolate milk and allowing himself a little sadness at the way he was being treated. He was an entrepreneur. A job creator, an opportunity builder. And, dare he say, as he sighted the hem of his giant flag luffing in the snowflakes, a
patriot
. Over in one corner of the room was a flapped cardboard box half filled with copies of
Atlas Shrugged
. An anniversary edition. Annotated, with gilt-edged pages and an introduction written by a leading radio talk show host. He loved to hand the books out with a hearty handshake. “All you need to know!” he would boom while crushing the recipient's palm, even though he himself had never made it past chapter five.

Truth was, Klute Sorensen was in a bind. Overextended. Overleveraged. On the verge of being undone.

There was one other thing. A thing Klute Sorensen would never admit, not even if someone said it out loud and it echoed all around his unfurnished barn of a house.

Klute Sorensen was lonely.