A Good Marriage (22 page)

I felt for the spark-button and pushed it. A brilliant circle of blue-white radiance leaped out. At first my eyes were too dazzled to make out anything; I could only hear those painful cries and the hoof-thuds as one of our goddesses tried to escape from whatever was hurting her. It was Achelois. When my eyes adjusted a bit, I saw her tossing her head from side to side, backing up until her hindquarters hit the door of her stall—third on the right, as you walked up the aisle—and then lurching forward again. The other cows were working themselves into a full-bore panic.

I hauled on my muckies, then trotted to the stall with the .22 tucked under my left arm. I threw the door open, and stepped back. Achelois means “she who drives away pain,” but this Achelois was in agony. When she blundered into the aisle, I saw her back legs were smeared with blood. She reared up like a horse (something I never saw a cow do before), and when she did, I saw a huge Norway rat clinging to one of her teats. The weight had
stretched the pink stub to a taut length of cartilage. Frozen in surprise (and horror), I thought of how, as a child, Henry would sometimes pull a string of pink bubble-gum out of his mouth.
Don’t do that,
Arlette would scold him.
No one wants to look at what you’ve been chewing
.

I raised the gun, then lowered it. How could I shoot, with the rat swinging back and forth like a living weight at the end of a pendulum?

In the aisle now, Achelois lowed and shook her head from side to side, as if that might somehow help. Once all four of her feet were back on the floor, the rat was able to stand on the hay-littered barnboards. It was like some strange freak puppy with beads of bloodstained milk in its whiskers. I looked around for something to hit it with, but before I could grab the broom Henry had left leaning against Phemonoe’s stall, Achelois reared again and the rat thumped to the floor. At first I thought she had simply dislodged it, but then I saw the pink and wrinkled stub protruding from the rat’s mouth, like a flesh cigar. The damned thing had torn one of poor Achelois’s teats right off. She laid her head against one of the barn beams and mooed at me tiredly, as if to say:
I’ve given you milk all these years and offered no trouble, not like some I could mention, so why did you let this happen to me?
Blood was pooling beneath her udder. Even in my shock and revulsion, I didn’t think she would die of her wound, but the sight of her—and of the rat, with her blameless teat in its mouth—filled me with rage.

I still didn’t shoot at it, partly because I was afraid of fire, but mostly because, with the carbon lamp in one hand, I was afraid I’d miss. Instead, I brought the rifle-stock down, hoping to kill this intruder as Henry had killed the survivor from the well with his shovel. But Henry was a boy with quick reflexes, and I was a man of middle age who had been roused from a sound sleep. The rat avoided me with ease and went trotting up the center aisle. The severed teat bobbed up and down in its mouth, and I realized the rat was eating it—warm and no doubt still full of milk—even as it ran. I gave chase, smacked at it twice more, and missed both times. Then I saw where it was running: the pipe leading into the defunct livestock well. Of course! Rat Boulevard! With the well filled in, it was their only means of egress. Without it, they’d have been buried alive. Buried with
her
.

But surely,
I thought,
that thing is too big for the pipe. It must have come from outside—a nest in the manure pile, perhaps.

It leaped for the opening, and as it did so, it elongated its body in the most amazing fashion. I swung the stock of the varmint gun one last time and shattered it on the lip of the pipe. The rat I missed entirely. When I lowered the carbon lamp to the pipe’s mouth, I caught one blurred glimpse of its hairless tail slithering away into the darkness, and heard its little claws scraping on the galvanized metal. Then it was gone. My heart was pounding hard enough to put white dots in front of my eyes. I drew in a deep breath, but with it
came a stench of putrefaction and decay so strong that I fell back with my hand over my nose. The need to scream was strangled by the need to retch. With that smell in my nostrils I could almost see Arlette at the other end of the pipe, her flesh now teeming with bugs and maggots, liquefying; her face beginning to drip off her skull, the grin of her lips giving way to the longer-lasting bone grin that lay beneath.

I crawled back from that awful pipe on all fours, spraying vomit first to my left and then to my right, and when my supper was all gone, I gagged up long strings of bile. Through watering eyes I saw that Achelois had gone back into her stall. That was good. At least I wasn’t going to have to chase her through the corn and put a nose-halter on her to lead her back.

What I wanted to do first was plug the pipe—I wanted to do that before anything—but as my gorge quieted, clear thinking reasserted itself. Achelois was the priority. She was a good milker. More important, she was my responsibility. I kept a medicine chest in the little barn office where I did the books. In the chest I found a large can of Rawleigh Antiseptic Salve. There was a pile of clean rags in the corner. I took half of them and went back to Achelois’s stall. I closed the door of her stall to minimize the risk of being kicked, and sat on the milking stool. I think part of me felt I
deserved
to be kicked. But dear old Achelois stilled when I stroked her flank and whispered, “Soo, Boss, soo, Bossy-boss,” and although she shivered when I
smeared the salve on her hurt part, she stood quiet.

When I’d taken what steps I could to prevent infection, I used the rags to wipe up my vomit. It was important to do a good job, for any farmer will tell you that human vomit attracts predators every bit as much as a garbage-hole that hasn’t been adequately covered. Raccoons and woodchucks, of course, but mostly rats. Rats love human leavings.

I had a few rags left over, but they were Arlette’s kitchen castoffs and too thin for my next job. I took the hand-scythe from its peg, lit my way to our woodpile, and chopped a ragged square from the heavy canvas that covered it. Back in the barn, I bent down and held the lamp close to the pipe’s mouth, wanting to make sure the rat (or another; where there was one, there would surely be more) wasn’t lurking, ready to defend its territory, but it was empty for as far as I could see, which was four feet or so. There were no droppings, and that didn’t surprise me. It was an active thoroughfare—now their
only
thoroughfare—and they wouldn’t foul it as long as they could do their business outside.

I stuffed the canvas into the pipe. It was stiff and bulky, and in the end I had to use a broomhandle to poke it all the way in, but I managed. “There,” I said. “See how you like that. Choke on it.”

I went back and looked at Achelois. She stood quietly, and gave me a mild look over her shoulder as I stroked her. I knew then and know now she was only a cow—farmers hold few romantic notions about the natural world, you’ll find—but that look still brought tears to my eyes, and I had
to stifle a sob.
I know you did your best,
it said.
I know it’s not your fault.

But it was.

I thought I would lie awake long, and when I went to sleep I would dream of the rat scurrying up the hay-littered barnboards toward its escape-hatch with that teat in its mouth, but I fell asleep at once and my sleep was both dreamless and restorative. I woke with morning light flooding the room and the stench of my dead wife’s decaying body thick on my hands, sheets, and pillow-case. I sat bolt upright, gasping but already aware that the smell was an illusion. That smell was my bad dream. I had it not at night but by the morning’s first, sanest light, and with my eyes wide open.

*  *  *

I expected infection from the rat-bite in spite of the salve, but there was none. Achelois died later that year, but not of that. She never gave milk again, however; not a single drop. I should have butchered her, but I didn’t have the heart to do it. She had suffered too much on my account.

*  *  *

The next day, I handed Henry a list of supplies and told him to take the truck over to The Home and get them. A great, dazzled smile broke across his face.

“The truck?
Me?
On my own?”

“You still know all the forward gears? And you can still find reverse?”

“Gosh, sure!”

“Then I think you’re ready. Maybe not for
Omaha just yet—or even Lincoln—but if you take her slow, you ought to be just fine in Hemingford Home.”

“Thanks!” He threw his arms around me and kissed my cheek. For a moment it seemed like we were friends again. I even let myself believe it a little, although in my heart I knew better. The evidence might be belowground, but the truth was between us, and always would be.

I gave him a leather wallet with money in it. “That was your grandfather’s. You might as well keep it; I was going to give it to you for your birthday this fall, anyway. There’s money inside. You can keep what’s left over, if there is any.” I almost added,
And don’t bring back any stray dogs,
but stopped myself in time. That had been his mother’s stock witticism.

He tried to thank me again, and couldn’t. It was all too much.

“Stop by Lars Olsen’s smithy on your way back and fuel up. Mind me, now, or you’ll be on foot instead of behind the wheel when you get home.”

“I won’t forget. And Poppa?”

“Yes.”

He shuffled his feet, then looked at me shyly. “Could I stop at Cotteries’ and ask Shan to come?”

“No,” I said, and his face fell before I added: “You ask Sallie or Harlan if Shan can come. And you make sure you tell them that you’ve never driven in town before. I’m putting you on your honor, Son.”

As if either of us had any left.

*  *  *

I watched by the gate until our old truck disappeared into a ball of its own dust. There was a lump in my throat that I couldn’t swallow. I had a stupid but very strong premonition that I would never see him again. I suppose it’s something most parents feel the first time they see a child going away on his own and face the realization that if a child is old enough to be sent on errands without supervision, he’s not totally a child any longer. But I couldn’t spend too much time wallowing in my feelings; I had an important chore to do, and I’d sent Henry away so I could attend to it by myself. He would see what had happened to the cow, of course, and probably guess what had done it, but I thought I could still ease the knowledge for him a little.

I first checked on Achelois, who seemed listless but otherwise fine. Then I checked the pipe. It was still plugged, but I was under no illusions; it might take time, but eventually the rats would gnaw through the canvas. I had to do better. I took a bag of Portland cement around to the house-well and mixed up a batch in an old pail. Back in the barn, while I waited for it to thicken, I poked the swatch of canvas even deeper into the pipe. I got it in at least two feet, and those last two feet I packed with cement. By the time Henry got back (and in fine spirits; he had indeed taken Shannon, and they had shared an ice-cream soda bought with change from the errands), it had hardened. I suppose a few of the rats must have been out foraging, but I had no doubt I’d immured most of them—including the one that had savaged poor Achelois—down
there in the dark. And down there in the dark they would die. If not of suffocation, then of starvation once their unspeakable pantry was exhausted.

So I thought then.

*  *  *

In the years between 1916 and 1922, even stupid Nebraska farmers prospered. Harlan Cotterie, being far from stupid, prospered more than most. His farm showed it. He added a barn and a silo in 1919, and in 1920 he put in a deep well that pumped an unbelievable six gallons per minute. A year later, he added indoor plumbing (although he sensibly kept the backyard privy). Then, three times a week, he and his womenfolk could enjoy what was an unbelievable luxury that far out in the country: hot baths and showers supplied not by pots of water heated on the kitchen stove but from pipes that first brought the water from the well and then carried it away to the sump. It was the showerbath that revealed the secret Shannon Cotterie had been keeping, although I suppose I already knew, and had since the day she said,
He’s sparked me, all right
—speaking in a flat, lusterless voice that was unlike her, and looking not at me but off at the silhouettes of her father’s harvester and the gleaners trudging behind it.

This was near the end of September, with the corn all picked for another year but plenty of garden-harvesting left to do. One Saturday afternoon, while Shannon was enjoying the showerbath, her mother came along the back hall with a load of laundry she’d taken in from the line early, because
it was looking like rain. Shannon probably thought she had closed the bathroom door all the way—most ladies are private about their bathroom duties, and Shannon Cotterie had a special reason to feel that way as the summer of 1922 gave way to fall—but perhaps it came off the latch and swung open partway. Her mother happened to glance in, and although the old sheet that served as a shower-curtain was pulled all the way around on its U-shaped rail, the spray had rendered it translucent. There was no need for Sallie to see the girl herself; she saw the
shape
of the girl, for once without one of her voluminous Quaker-style dresses to hide it. That was all it took. The girl was five months along, or near to it; she probably could not have kept her secret much longer in any case.

Two days later, Henry came home from school (he now took the truck) looking frightened and guilty. “Shan hasn’t been there the last two days,” he said, “so I stopped by Cotteries’ to ask if she was all right. I thought she might have come down with the Spanish Flu. They wouldn’t let me in. Mrs. Cotterie just told me to get on, and said her husband would come to talk to you tonight, after his chores were done. I ast if I could do anything, and she said, ‘You’ve done enough, Henry.’”

Then I remembered what Shan had said. Henry put his face in his hands and said, “She’s pregnant, Poppa, and they found out. I know that’s it. We want to get married, but I’m afraid they won’t let us.”