The Jesus Cow (3 page)

T
werp.”

Billy had placed the letter from the village flat on the table and was stabbing his forefinger at Vance Hansen's signature.

“What is your intended course of action?” said Billy, leaning in.

Harley shrugged. He despised Clover Blossom Estates, beginning with the faux gold leaf letters on the sign at the entrance that tried to pass off an anemic cluster of red-ink plasti-shacks as “estates,” and ignored the fact that no clover had bloomed there since the bulldozers departed. But above all he resented the fact that only by selling out to Klute—a final desperate act—had his father managed to hang on to his buildings and remaining fifteen acres. It was a tough thing to see his dad in his waning years, tilling this sad little patch, hemmed in by asphalt and vinyl siding and crushing debt. On his good days, Harley was grateful for what remained. Fifteen acres of elbow room was better than nothing.

“I dunno . . . ,” said Harley. “I don't really have it in me to fight 'em. Don't have the money for it. Don't have the anger for it. Don't want to deal with it.”

“I beat 'em on the burn barrel.”

“The burn barrel was different. You had leverage, and the stakes were low.”

Several years previously, the village board had instituted an annual burn barrel fee of $25. The burn barrel fee had been proposed and flogged into existence by Carolyn Sawchuck, who became environmentally outraged upon discovering the locals' most cherished means of trash disposal was to stuff everything into a fifty-five-gallon drum, spritz it with used motor oil, and drop a match on it. The men of Swivel especially viewed burn barrels as a birthright, and were deeply attached to this version of roughneck recycling as it allowed them regular reason to retreat solo to the backyard. Any inhalation of toxic fumes was viewed as a worthy trade-off for twenty minutes of contemplation and a furtive beer. There was also the satisfaction of reducing responsibilities to ash. “It ain't
re
cycling,” Billy once said, as the two men drank their Foamy Vikings and stared into the waning flames of the burn barrel Billy kept strategically located within eyesight of his porch, “it's
de
cycling.” So cherished a tradition was the burn barrel around these parts that when Carolyn Sawchuck took her protest of the “ecologically barbarous” practice before the Swivel Village Board, Harley would have bet his pickup truck that it would never pass, but what he failed to anticipate was that Carolyn Sawchuck had done her homework and arrived waving inkjet printouts of a recent state statute outlining the environmental consequences of open burning and mandating the per-barrel fee. The motion passed on a 4–3
vote and when the next round of tax bills arrived, all burn barrel owners were assessed a $25 surcharge, which Billy refused to pay on principle. Called before the board, Billy stood tall in his orange rubber clogs and insisted he would not pony up.

“Well, it's mandated,” said Vern Fosberg, the village president. “State makes us do it.”

“And, Vern,” said Billy, “if I pull an open records request, I trust I'll find your burn barrel registered? The one out behind your yard barn?”

“That's an
incinerator
,” said Vern, sternly. “Elevated and ventilated for a clean burn.”

“That's a fifty-five-gallon drum stood on two concrete blocks and shot five times with a deer rifle,” said Billy, who in fact had tweaked his and Harley's burn barrels in the identical fashion.

“The burn barrel fee is
mandated
,” interjected Carolyn Sawchuck from her folding chair seat in the front row, waving a fresh sheaf of inkjet printouts for emphasis. In general, the Swivel Village Board meetings operated under only the most tenuous tenets of Robert's Rules of Order, and this suited Billy fine, for he simply turned and said, “Yes it is, Carol.” He always called her Carol specifically because she insisted on Carolyn. “But your lease on the old water tower is not.”

At this, Carolyn yanked her papers from the air. Among her many pet projects, Carolyn was especially dedicated to community betterment—whether the community wanted it or not. When Swivel had erected its new water tower, it slated the old one for demolition. In fact, the local scrap hauler, Margaret Magdalene “Meg” Jankowski, had submitted a salvage bid to the village board and it was on the verge of being accepted when Carolyn
Sawchuck—at that time having been in town for only a matter of months—stormed through the door waving an e-mailed injunction (hers was an active and indignant inkjet) and declaring that in the interest of the “culture of community and the community of culture,” she had submitted the old water tower to the state landmarks commission and would henceforth be fighting for its preservation.

Harley, being a closet sentimentalist, cherished the old tower. In contrast to the garish spheroid overlooking Clover Blossom Estates, the old tower better matched his childhood recollections of Swivel as a plain but good and decent place to live. That said, the tower came with liability headaches including drunken teenagers with spray-paint cans engaged in what was lately, even in these hinterlands, referred to as “tagging,” so he had come around to the idea of scrapping it. However, he had also come to rely on the monthly lease payment paid by the village for the privilege of keeping the tower on his land. If the old tower was demolished, these payments would cease, and with them his main means of paying off his outstanding student loan. Thus, despite his stoic's trepidation regarding the very outspoken Carolyn Sawchuck, when she proposed—in the name of preservation—to assume the lease, he was secretly pleased.

The village board, seeing an opportunity to wash their hands of the old tower and Carolyn Sawchuck in one fell swoop, tabled Meg Jankowski's scrap bid and voted to have village attorney Vance Hansen draw up paperwork transferring ownership of the tower to Harley Jackson, and within the week, Harley and Carolyn had signed a lease agreement. Carolyn announced she would apply for state funds to restore the tower the very next day, “in the interest of maintaining the legacy of this place, whether you people deserve it or not.”

AND SO IT
came to be, when Carolyn tried to force the issue of the burning barrel mandate, Billy returned fire by referencing Carolyn's precious water tower lease. Carolyn—well aware of the friendship between Billy and Harley, but unaware that Billy and Harley had never even discussed the lease—took it for a thinly veiled threat and decided to let the burn barrel mandate ride. The issue was tabled indefinitely (“tabling” things was a specialty of the Swivel Village Board).

Back at the trailer, Billy celebrated his victory by stuffing his burn barrel with empty cat litter boxes and inviting Harley over for a Foamy Viking. As the cardboard roared, Billy proudly related how his implied threat to revoke the water tower lease had gotten Carolyn to back down.

“But,” said Harley, “it's not
your lease
.”

“Had to be done. That woman has the disposition of an eczemic rattlesnake.”

“Be nice,” said Harley.

“I never could toe the mark,” said Billy, straightening defiantly, “and I never could walk the line.”

“Okay, that's just a Waylon Jennings song,” said Harley.

NOW, AS HE
sat at his mother's kitchen table considering Vance Hansen's upside-down signature, Harley imagined himself going before the village board to face these threats. Immediately, his palms moistened. Harley could hold his own on the fire hose, could bull aside a recalcitrant steer, and—ever since his first kiss, which convinced him that some things were more powerful than shyness—he could even crank up the courage to ask a woman on a date. But to actually place himself before the public? In a position of confrontation, no less? This set his heart to fibrillating.

He simply lacked the will to engage. Like many low-key loners, he wasn't cut out for confrontation of even the slightest order.

Billy pointed at the letter again. “You gotta tell 'em something. Or they'll be on you like cat hair on my coveralls.”

“Yah,” said Harley, still staring at the letter, far from making a decision. He was fighting self-loathing. He tended to be a guy who aimed for the middle and yet somehow still undershot.

“And that calf . . .”

“Normally I'd just steer it. Raise it for a beefer.”

“Yah,” said Billy. “Under normal circumstances, bein' a bull calf, it ain't worth the gas it'd take to haul it to the sale barn.”

“Well, they been up some lately,” said Harley. He loved this sort of grammatically relaxed conversation. The easy flow of it.

“But bein' that it's got a big ol' JC tattoo . . .” Billy let that one hang there.

Harley didn't want to think about it.

“I don't think you understand what you've got here, son,” continued Billy. “You know how it is—someone sees Jesus on a toasted bagel and the pilgrims come a-marching. What you got there is a golden calf. The
good
kind!”

“Well, I—” Harley used his fingernail to scrape at the label on his beer.

“Hell, I read on the Internet some woman in California spotted the face of Christ in a cheese sandwich and sold it for twenty-eight grand on eBay.”

Harley looked up.

“Fossilized grilled cheese. Twenty-eight grand.”

Billy let that sink in, then continued. “Whereas you—you have a
calf
. A living, breathing, tangible, touchable
calf
.”

Harley sat there. Then shook his head.

“Born on
Christmas Eve
.”

Harley shook his head again.

“In a
manger
.”

“Well . . . ,” said Harley, “it wasn't a
manger
.”

“It is now,” said Billy, raising both eyebrows meaningfully. “I'm
framing the narrative
.”

“You're framing something,” said Harley, “but it doesn't smell like narrative.”

“Son, sometimes yer thicker than bad slab wood,” said Billy, digging around in the mail and pulling out a copy of the
Weekly Dealio,
a local newsprint shopper that had survived the online age, hanging on via anniversary and gag fiftieth birthday announcements, auction notices, pet kennel listings, used car ads, and the overwrought poetry of real estate agents.

“Check this out,” said Billy, flapping the paper open and spinning it around so Harley could see the front page. The entirety of it was given over to an advertisement for Clover Blossom Estates. House after house, lot after lot, every single square in the grid was stamped
REDUCED
.

Harley looked at Billy quizzically.

“If a fella was sittin' on a gold mine . . . ,” said Billy, and let it hang there.

Harley looked at the ad again, then back to Billy.

“Undevelopment,” said Billy.

“Undevelopment?”

Billy pressed on. “Go whole hog with this holy calf business . . . don't stop with T-shirts . . . charge admission to see him, sell the mother's milk, sell patches of his hair, posters, can
coolers—everything you can, right down to his freeze-dried holy turds hung in amber from a necklace. Shoot, you could even rent him out! Reverend Gary down at the Church of the Roaring Lamb would froth at the mouth to trot that thing out Sunday mornings. It'd be a red-hot attendance booster.

“Yah, there's lots you could do. Then, when you've got more money than God and his three leading televangelists, and the worshipful hordes clogging the byways have trampled Klute's property values down even further, you go after that bully with everything you've got and start buying back Clover Blossom Estates, lot by lot, matchbox by matchbox, everything at cut-rate, and finally you bulldoze the whole works right back to the way it was, thus jabbing your middle finger in the eye of history, progress, and—while you're at it—so-called manifest destiny.”

“Um . . . ,” said Harley.

“UM?!” said Billy. “I lay out God's own plan to lift you out of poverty, to bust free of your usurious manacles by turning a low-dollar bull calf into a multimillion-dollar extravaganza of winning one for the little guys, of bloodying the nose of the muscle-brained bigfoot happily trampling your family history in the name of the almighty dollar and the best you can muster is ‘UM'?”

“Well, I just—”

“This is the viral age! You Instagram a single snapshot of that calf, the world will tweet and retweet a path to your door. And we haven't even begun to talk
endorsements
.”

“I really don't think—”

Billy snorted, and flipped the
Weekly Dealio
into the trash.

Harley took a deep breath, let it out, then spun the last of the suds around the bottom of his beer bottle.

Low overhead
, he thought.

He took the last swallow of beer. It was flat and warm.

Let's not make a scene.

“I gotta think on it, Billy. Right now I'm leaning to black shoe polish.”

C
hristmas morning broke to the rumble of a junk truck. Margaret Magdalene Jankowski came downshifting off the overpass and past the old water tower she had hoped to scrap, her split-shift Ford straight truck squatting to the overloads beneath the weight of a dismantled combine (Meg was ninja grade with a blowtorch), a rusted harrow, and a flattened Ford Festiva, the snug balance of the load testament to the fact that this was a woman who knew her way around ratchet straps and chain boomers. The truck pulled into the Kwik Pump and Meg, a slight and nimble widow in a watch cap and greasy coveralls, jumped out to pump the fuel. After paying cash for the gas (she never used a credit card), Meg turned left out of the lot and drove the truck a block into Swivel, pulled a U-turn, and parked along the curb in front of St. Jude's Catholic Church. Most days, she would disappear into the chapel for ten minutes, where she would light a votive
candle, pray a decade of the rosary, then reemerge to return up the road past the water tower, recross the overpass, and hang a left down the southbound ramp for Clearwater and the scrap metal processing center.

But today was Christmas. When Meg dismounted from the truck and walked across the St. Jude's parking lot past the concrete Virgin Mary sheltering beneath the protruding half of a vintage bathtub buried in the vertical, she was carrying her best dress hung and sheathed in dry-cleaner's plastic. Today the truck would sit parked all day long at the curb as Meg assisted Father Carl in the celebration of both Christmas Morning masses. She was weary, having returned from midnight mass only a few hours previously, and prior to that having spent Christmas Eve day dissecting the combine, tamping down the Festiva, and loading the truck, but for Meg, devotion trumped all. If it seemed strange that she had driven to Christmas services in a loaded junk truck, it helped to know that it was her only vehicle. If Meg was invited to remove a beached Buick from someone's yard, she arrived in the junk truck. If she had been invited for cocktails, she would have arrived in the junk truck.

And if she had been allowed to scrap that water tower, the pope would have received 15 percent of the proceeds.

St. Jude's Catholic Church was nothing fancy. No soaring arches like the church in Boomler. No frescoes, no life-size, lifelike, bleeding and be-thorned Christ mannequin nailed to a towering cross of solid plaster. Rather, the crucifix that hung above Father Carl during services was punched from polished brass, the suffering Son represented in abstract fashion, his halo formed of tack-welded wire. St. Jude's had been constructed in the late 1960s from blueprints composed by an architect apparently heavily influenced
by early Brutalism and Postwar Basement Rec Room. The exterior was done up in concrete and browns, and the interior ran heavily to blond paneling. The pews were padded with Naugahyde, the carpet was a close-nubbed tan-and-mustard-striped affair the texture of a polyester pot scrubber, and the figurines representing the twelve stations of the cross hung on their plaques like dated bowling trophies, the mustachioed long-haired disciples projecting the mien of gentle folk rockers. In short, you could imagine Michelangelo giving the whole works half a star. There were no bells in the belfry, rather a set of metal horn speakers hidden in a cupola that blared out tape-recorded chimes. But every single time Margaret Magdalene Jankowski stepped through the doors of St. Jude's, dipped her fingertips in the holy water, and crossed herself, she thought—no,
felt
—only one word:
sanctuary
.

Meg had been christened in St. Jude's, her father (hale and hearty and having just purchased his first tow truck) and mother cradling her in a long white gown as a priest in horn-rimmed glasses sprinkled her scalp. The pews were full in those days, most of the congregants' faces windburned from fieldwork. By the time she took her first communion, the priest with horn-rimmed glasses was assisted by the young Father Carl, who in those days had all his hair and a fat set of sideburns. It was Father Carl who married Meg and her high school sweetheart, Dougie Clements, in St. Jude's the summer after they graduated, and it was Father Carl who performed the funeral mass two months later when Dougie was killed by a drunk driver, hit while helping Meg's father tow a stalled vehicle from the shoulder of the new interstate. After Dougie was buried, Meg moved back home with her folks, never remarrying and eventually taking over the tow truck service and
salvage yard when her father's health failed. Both parents were gone now.

After hanging her dress in the family room, Meg approached the altar, genuflected, then walked to a small rack of votive candles at one side. Kneeling again, she lit a candle, replaced it in the rack, and bowed her head.

Twenty-some years, and still she came in every morning to light that candle for Dougie. Even as she murmured in prayer, she recalled herself standing at the altar, a young bride with no idea of what life would hold but that God and this blessed church would provide.

HARLEY HAD NO
plans for Christmas. In fact, he did not care for Christmas. He did not hate Christmas. He was not at war with Christmas. As with the old water tower, his sentimentalism was in play: he liked the nighttime glow of the lights and decorations other people put up, he liked to buy a bag of angel foam candy in Farm and Fleet and eat it all in one sitting (
There y'go, Mom
, he always thought), and he enjoyed going to the community choir Christmas concert at St. Jude's when his work schedule allowed it. But as for Christmas Day itself, he could do without it—particularly in the way it disrupted the daily normalcy of things. He simply didn't care to turn on the radio and hear music he didn't normally hear, or find his comfortable news and sports talk shows were holiday themed rather than re-chewing the usual well-worn issues of the day. Once Harley found a groove, he liked to ride it, and Christmas Day was a pebble in that groove. There was no mail delivery (although based on his feelings about the mail—or at least the
nature
of the mail—he'd been getting lately, perhaps that was a blessing), the feed mill
was closed, the filter factory shut down, and no one seemed to be where they were supposed to be. Everything was thrown off. All in all he preferred any given Tuesday. Thus, even as Margaret Magdalene Jankowski rose from her prayers and prepared to help Father Carl set up for the service to follow, Harley welcomed the chance to shrug into his chore coat and step outside to feed and water the beefers. In the chores he found the comfort of the everyday.

Plus, he had to check on that calf. Harley regularly recalled his father—in a rare moment of low-key speechifying—invoking the word “husbandman” and urging Harley to take the term to heart. It wasn't enough to own animals, his father said. You had to walk among them daily, get keyed into their rhythms so you'd notice if anything was amiss. Harley would never be the husbandman his father was, but he did once pick up on a beef steer with a bad hock while simply watching the animals loaf, and by calling the vet was able to intervene in time to keep the animal on track for the abattoir, ultimately a zero-sum proposition for the steer, he supposed, but still the right thing to do, and he was quietly proud of himself for catching it.

So before he threw hay bales down from the mow, he walked through the beefers. The barn thermometer was tickling single digits, and a stiff breeze from the west had left patches of the barnyard snow scoured and thin, broken here and there by dark brown knobs of deep-frozen cow pies. The beefers were hunched and bunched behind the corrugated steel half shed that served as a windbreak, dispassionately chewing their cud, neither grateful nor ungrateful for his husbandry as far as he could tell. After a quick head count to verify that everyone was in attendance and upright, Harley turned his attention to the stock tank. Finding it full and
unfrozen—meaning both the plumbing and deicer were operational—he turned on his heel and stomped through the deeper snow in the lee of the wind and let himself in the barn door.

Even after he switched the lights on it took a moment for his eyes to adjust from the wintry white light to the darkness of the barn. The calf was resting against its mother, both of them fold-legged atop the straw.
Maybe I—,
thought Harley, hoping that somehow overnight the image might have disappeared, but then,
Nope, there it is
.

And indeed the face of Jesus was in clear view, all but the bottom fringe of beard, which was tucked into the straw. “
Jaypers!
” said Harley, unconsciously uttering the severest oath he had ever heard his father utter. He had harbored some hope that here on the morning after, the image might have been less distinct.

Tina Turner got to her feet and lowed at him hungrily. “Yah, okay,” said Harley, shaking his head as he turned and climbed the haymow ladder. Unhooking the door that swung out over the barnyard, he pitched down a dozen bales, then dropped a single down the chute above Tina Turner's manger.

Most people these days used round bales, the ones that resembled giant cigar stubs or were wrapped in white plastic and looked like elephantine marshmallows. You spiked them with a tractor and they'd feed the cows for several days. But Harley stuck with the old-school bales, the ones that were a packet of hay contained by two loops of knotted twine. They were more work, but he still liked using his dad's old John Deere baler. Billy would drive the tractor while Harley stacked bales on the wagon, the roar of the engine rising and falling to the rhythm of the plunger. Harley found this mechanical harmony soothing, and evocative of a time
when everything made sense. Or was at least
containable
. Plus he figured lugging those bales every day was his equivalent of a gym membership.

When Harley stepped off the bottom rung of the ladder, Tina Turner had her head through the slats of the pen, and was straining toward the hay bale. Harley flicked open his lock blade, snicked the twine, and using one foot, swept several flakes of hay within reach of her looping tongue. Her udder was rotund with colostrum, and Harley noted a fleck of foam at each corner of the calf's mouth—a good sign; he'd been feeding. The calf was standing now too, facing Harley head-on, sturdy as you please, all the wobble gone out of its knees. Harley eased around one side of the pen, once again hoping the image of Christ would be indistinct, or that from another perspective it might appear to be a road-killed muskrat or some such—anything, really, as long as it was more benign than the Holy Savior of Man—but then the calf turned to suckle, and there it was, a hairy Rorschach open to only one interpretation: Jesus Christ.

Back outside in the cold, Harley elbowed his way through the cluster of beefers now tearing at his pile of hay bales. One by one he lugged the bales to the bunk feeder that ran along one side of the barnyard, cut the twine, and kicked the flakes along the length of the feeder. When the last bale was split and distributed, he stood in the feeder and watched the cows eat. There was always a comfort in this moment. He found simple satisfaction in the sound of the cattle snuffling and grinding the hay in their molars, switching their tails in contentment. There was the feeling that he had done something tangible and good. Christmas? Maybe so, he thought, but it was hard to imagine any other gifts so thankfully received.

OVER AT ST.
Jude's Meg rose to change into her dress and assist Father Carl.

Christmas
, she thought, looking at the abstract brass Jesus.
Happy birthday.

In his office, Father Carl pressed a button, and the tape-recorded bells rang out the joyous message.