This fly shit, perfect brown circle smack dab on calf pen’s white wooden rail, normally found in clusters called “droppings,” this one stood alone. Pinhead fecal stamp of a tiny, winged creature who lives so fast a life so short. Twenty-eight days, not even a moon cycle.
I am often thinking about death and in doing so constantly getting ahead of myself. Let me start again. This is about paying attention. I think. I think that’s how I got here. Thinking about how I once thought about the farm’s landscape. How it never really changed and because there was so little change in what I saw and because I was always seeing it, a certain sense of things took root, the sense that things had always been a certain way—the way they are now, more or less—and that they would always be this way. Some comfort in that, but also a little depressing. I couldn’t help wanting, maybe needing, both stability and discovery. Speculatively, this is how I noticed the fly shit and started thinking about death.
I’m doing it again, getting ahead only to fall back.
The calf shed is what I want to tell you about, the chores.
In my memory, it’s always the evening chores. Here’s something Willa Cather knew: there is a specific “loneliness of the farm-boy at evening, when the chores seem everlastingly the same, and the world so far away.”
“Seem” being the keyword there. I think. Because where you’re standing is both the middle of nowhere and the center of the universe. This is a thing I want you to know: that reality is a construct that is both personally and socially created, and that you are living in this reality, and this one is the only one of its kind—it is shared to an extent, but it remains largely personal and not shared.
And in my memory, it’s the evening chores. The well-worn path to the calf shed. Wire bucket handle’s bite. Trying not to spill. I hear them, the newborns, bellowing inside the shed. How’d they know I was coming? Can they smell so well? Is it some inner clock? The same that has found its way inside me, or me inside it, me walking its pattern day after day after day. What is it that knows?
I set the bucket down and the stress releases from the handle, the bucket mouth changing shape from oval back to circle, sending a ripple across the milk’s surface, the stone-tossed-in-a-pond kind of ripple, rushing from surface center to bucket lip, then cresting, spilling over bucket outsides onto the ground and no one to cry over it but me and not a tear to be found, then the tide rushing back from bucket lip to surface center, like a strange sort of clap, imagine the pond rejecting the stone except imagine the stone made of milk, shooting up to my cheek, a fat wet kiss. Smooch!
Slide the shed door open, metal wheels screeching against metal track. Newborn heat like hot breath. The calf shed’s insides as dark as the inside of a mouth with insatiable appetite.
Flip on the lights. Chaos!
The bawling turns fever-pitched, hysteric. Fast as I can, I gather and resettle the small rubber buckets into their small wooden bases. The broad-headed black-speckle bull calf nearest the door throws himself skull-first into the pen face, then stumbles backward, bell-rung dazed, bumps rump against the wall, then charges the pen face again, this time, thrusting his head out the pen’s head hole. I have to boot it out the way to keep from spilling milk all over.
I don’t have to.
Same time, the lanky red heifer in the neighboring pen flings her rubber bucket down the aisle, hooks the top of her pen’s head hole with the back of her neck and hoists the heavy wood-framed bull panel off the concrete as if it weighed nothing at all, eyes rolled back in her head as if she’s possessed. And maybe so, because how can she be that strong at three weeks old? She drops it to the concrete in a shattering crash, mesh steel wildly vibrating inside fence staples, a tinny hissssss that cuts through the hunger cries.
I pour milk over heads over ears over eyeballs. No time for pleasantries. Calves splashing and blowing bubbles, sucking and gasping, already chasing the final dregs around the circle seam. Slurp, slurp, slurping, the ration finished in seconds, then tossing them rubber buckets like confetti celebration, the cumbersome wooden bases, slickened sour with old spill, cartwheeling across the concrete, and the cat’s tail pinched. Mee-ouch! Them calves right back at crashing themselves against their traps, only now with drunken milk energy, wanting out, wanting want, want wanting, and no way out of that. Hoarse throats, voices altogether lost, nothing but breathy squeaks, fouled notes from a broken clarinet, and crashing still, crashing until they’re completely wrecked and falling on their knees and shoving muzzles through the meshes and sucking the last of it from each other’s fur, mouths grappling, mouths slowing, dazed, dumbed, sucked, crashed.
The white-headed freemartin isn’t bucket broke. Her twin, a red bull, bigger, stronger since before birth, sucks the wire panel dividing their pens, saliva foaming out the corners of its mouth, bubble ropes, dangling. Then it crams its muzzle through the mesh and sucks on my pant leg. No, thank you. Little stomach swole tight and stamping hooves going more! more! more! while I pour, pour, pour the colostrum for his sister, the white-headed freemartin, small, weak, same curled-up position as when I entered the shed, nestled deep in fluffy yellow straw, as if nothing’s happened, as if this hunger frenzy is all a dream. Whose?
Spade hands under her ribcage. Body so warm and fur so soft, so lush. She wobbles when stood up, shivers. Mostly bones. Hooves still spongy. I dip my fingers in the fatty colostrum, offer them to her. No response, at first. Then, slowly, she recognizes. Slowly, her jaw begins a chew-like motion. Slowly, so slowly. I squeeze the bucket between my knees and, with free hand, I stroke her side encouragingly. Imagine my wrist a mother’s muzzle, my fingers an intelligent cow tongue going “good, good, good.”
This is going to take a minute. A Willa-Cather-everlasting-minute that delivers my thoughts beyond my own desires to be done with chores and milking, beyond burning back muscles and nose tip itch, beyond farm-kid lonesomeness and the world so far away, and finding myself right here, at what might be the very center of this present moment.
That’s when I notice the single fly poop. The one I was telling you about. Spectacular dot. It makes you wonder about the workings of a fly’s butthole. The rapid digestion of a thing that lives so fast a life so short. Makes you wonder about the marks we leave, and marks left upon us, deeply and forever, by which I mean until we are dead. And I think of death and in thinking of death pay more attention to life.
See here: the newborn calf, before its mother can finish lapping the amniotic fluid from its fur, rising on wobbly new legs, half-blind and raising its head to a milk-swollen udder it’s never seen, its mouth open to a teat it’s never known.
See here: that same calf taken from its mother in that same moment and learning, within a matter of minutes, to lower its head to the bucket, submerge its muzzle in colostrum, and drink without drowning.
It’s a wondrous thing. The head should go up. That’s where the milk is. The calf’s brain is wired this way: to know without knowing. Same as you and me. What is it that knows?
Father calls it bucket-breaking. But I’ve been in the calf shed too long to think that way. The only thing breaking is my back, and maybe a little of my heart. We are teaching each other—me teaching the calf, the calf teaching me—how to live in an upside-down world without mothers.
See here: this little tail’s swishing.
Here’s something I wonder: how much of the hunger is me, and how much of me is the hunger? Where is that line drawn? What morals does hunger have? What can it value? This abstract thing that we are first born screaming with, this constant companion, among the very last who will leave us. And He said whoever comes to me shall not hunger—you know the fella I’m talking about. Born in a manger. Which is where livestock eat. The French word for eat is manger. It comes from the Latin word manducare, which means to chew. Which is to say that this wondering is not new. To live is to hunger is to live. There is no answer. That’s not the point. I’m not sure there is a point. What I think I want to say is that within an everlasting minute in the calf shed, one can learn to pay attention so deeply they begin to understand that the world is both far away and all around them simultaneously.
See here: the skinny white freemartin has pinned your fingers to the roof of her mouth. She doesn’t want to lower her head. She is confused, frustrated, hungry, underdeveloped. In the wild, she’d be dead. The wild is both far away and here, too.
Gently, but forcefully, guide her to the milk. For a moment she has it, she sucks once, her tongue paddling backward, then she swallows, a long, languorous gulp.
See here: the little tail’s swishing. Her mouth cinches upon your fingers. She raises her head, neck stiff. Then she plunges her head down into milk, splashing you, her spongy hooves shuffling the dusty straw. If you’ll be patient, she’ll figure it out. If you’ll pay attention, the neat, sharp line of her front teeth won’t peel your knuckles to the bone.
Barney T. Haney is an associate professor at the University of Indianapolis. Winner of the Chris O’Malley Prize, his work has appeared in Nashville Review, Mid-American Review, Cola Literary Review, and Barely South Review, among others.