Mad Cow Nightmare (19 page)

“And you didn’t think to tell anyone until Monday that you’d seen the woman?”

“I don’t work Sundays, do I? Why’d I tell anyone before then? Look, I gotta get back to work or he’ll kill me.” She tilted her head toward the overseer, who was coming into the barn.

“Thank you, thank you so very much,” Ruth said, and smiled at the fellow, who frowned back. “May I ask you a few questions?” she said and he said, “I don’t see why. I got nothing to add to what anybody said. I do my job and that’s that. I never saw the woman. Never wanted to.”

“Well thank you. That says it all.” And Ruth left the barn.

New York, she thought, as she drove back along Route 125 toward Branbury. And why would Nola want to go there? Had she any reason, any goal in mind? There was the farm she’d come from, of course, but from all accounts she didn’t like the uncle. Did she know he’d come to Vermont? Not likely. Then again, there was the boy. She would want to find him. But the boy was with the uncle now, in Branbury. Ruth would have to see to it that the media announced that fact. So if the woman were to hear a radio or read a paper, she would return to Vermont.

How did Nola and the uncle get along? The uncle and the boy? She would have to talk to Maggie, she would have to talk to the uncle. She would have to find Nola before the traveller woman heard about the uncle. Perhaps she should visit that New York farm and talk to the farmhands there. And who
was
Nola anyway? Mentally as well as physically. Ruth needed to know more. Much more.

But how could she leave her farm? There were federal agents coming for her calves, maybe for the cows they had already quarantined. She had to be there.

And who had killed the man Ritchie? Was it really that sick woman, Enola? The bruises the apple worker described suggested a motive. Or was it someone else who hated the man, for his or her own reasons? Before she went traipsing off to New York she’d start with the. ones closest to the uncle: She had them all on the farm now. Maggie, Boadie, Darren, the uncle, the boy Keeley—though he was hardly more than a child. When Nola came back to find her boy, as perhaps she would, Ruth wanted to have answers for the desperate woman.

* * * *

Back at the farm she found all hell had broken loose. Two armed men had hold of Boadie. One of them had her pig and another her shotgun. Boadie was screaming and so were Maggie and Liz. Agents were loading the bellowing calves into a white truck. Not just the Friesians, but all of the calves, she saw: all eight, Jane Eyre’s new calf and Charlotte’s—and Esmeralda’s!

Ruth leaped out of her pickup and ran at the men. “What do you think you’re doing? You can’t do that! Those others aren’t Friesians, they’re my own Holsteins, born this year on my land. You have no right to take them, no right!”

“It’s the farmers who have no right. No right to question the USDA—you should know that,” one of the agents said, smirking, and went on with his work.

An ancient Colt wobbled into the driveway behind the truck and Sharon leaped out, hollering. “They can’t get away without hitting my car. And I won’t move! Mom, I got ‘em blocked in. They’re not going anywhere.” She opened the back door, unloaded two children and two dripping ice cream cones—then shooed her crew into the house.

The men seemed oblivious to Sharon’s car; a ruddy-cheeked fellow was trying to hustle the pig out of Boadie’s arms. “Ma’am,” he was saying, “ma’am, we’re just taking it for tests, if it’s healthy you’ll get it back.” The fellow looked as though he’d be glad to have lightning suddenly strike, just to get away from the clutching, hitting, shrieking old woman.

“My piggy, my darling, my sweet piggy—you can’t have my piggy!”

Sharon ran to the defense, followed by Maggie and Darren. Together they wrestled the pig from the agent’s arms. The fellow looked pleadingly at his colleagues, who were loading in the last calf. Boadie shuffled off with her pig, back toward her trailer. One animal saved, anyway. But what of Ruth’s calves? Their mothers were out in the pasture. They’d come back for milking—and no calves. And Elizabeth, eight months pregnant. Ruth thought of her son, Vic, kidnapped as a boy—how distraught, how grieved she’d been.

“Get the tractor,” Ruth hollered at Darren. “Close in that truck. Sharon, drive my pickup in front so they can’t get out that way.”

She threw keys at her daughter. “They can all leave in their one car. The truck stays here. They have no right, damn it! No one told me they’d take
all
my
calves! Sharon—get my rifle out of the pantry.”

The young agent laughed, and the other scowled at him. In minutes the truck was blocked in, Ruth was pointing her Winchester at the men. “Just following orders, ma’am,” one of them told Ruth, backing away from her hunting rifle. “Just doing my job.”

“Then get a new job,” Sharon yelled.

“You’re obstructing justice,” the man shouted. “You’ll be sorry, you don’t move those vehicles. Put down that thing. You can’t get away with this.”

“So you said. You’ll move in a tank, sure. Now leave,” Ruth said, feeling the breath well up out of her toes, out of her heart. “If you want your truck back you can get it later, after we unload the calves. For now, just go. Go, I said!” She cocked the rifle. Couldn’t think if she had bullets in it.

They went, the young agent, who wasn’t laughing now, and the three scowlers. They promised to return after they reported this second mutiny to the proper authorities. They were just following orders, one of them shouted again. He didn’t give a damn about the calves, “We were just doing our job!” His voice died away as the Buick backed out of the drive.

“Now start unloading,” Ruth ordered. “And move those calf pens. Darren, find a place behind the barn that a truck can’t get to. We have to circle the wagons. We’re in the right here—it’s on our side, you all know that.”

“Brava, Mom,” said Sharon, grabbing Charlotte’s calf by the collar, hustling it down the back slide of the truck. “You won the day”

“The day,” Ruth said. “Maybe just that. Just the day.”

“You can live a lifetime in a day,” said Sharon.

“Sweetie, sweetie, sweetie, swee wee wee,” Boadie crooned to her squirming pig, “swee wee wee wee wee.”

Chapter Fifteen

There was no placating Ruth, Colm knew that. Still, he tried. He stood over her where she had flung herself back, exhausted, on the horsehair sofa. Standing gave him better leverage. He loved the woman, but jeez, she was hard to control. Not that he wanted to control—Colm was a man of the twenty-first century (more or less)—but he at least wanted equal influence time.

“You have to give up fighting the feds, Ruthie. They’re bigger than you are, they’re an organization.”

“I hate organizations. I hate the establishment. I hate—”

“Ruthie, please. The sixties are over. This is two thousand—”

She covered her ears, scrunched up her eyes. “I don’t want to hear your argument.” Her forehead was one wide wrinkle.

He sighed, sat down on the edge of the sofa, but she didn’t move to give him room. She had to understand. This was bigger than both of them. This was a plague. “Two contaminated calves, Ruth, can lead to a total wipeout. The whole of Vermont sick. The world. You have to open your eyes.”

She sat up, grabbed his arms, pinched. “But that’s just it. We don’t know they’re sick. We don’t know that Nola woman is sick—not with CJD, anyway. There’s no grounding for this. You read this morning’s
Free Press.
They’ve lowered the Mad Cow death forecast. Only one hundred thirty-two people have died of it—and most of them in Britain.”

“I read it, yeah. And they admit they don’t know. They just don’t know. It could still be a hundred thousand, the way it takes years to incubate. And there’s no blood test to find out how long it does take. Some Nobel prize neurologist saying we don’t know where and how prions move through the body before they show up in the brain.”

“And they tried to take all my calves, Colm, all eight of them—with no prior notice!”

She wasn’t listening to him, that was a fact. He sighed, and kept trying to quiet her. “So that was a mistake. The head honcho called this morning to apologize—you told me that yourself. The guys who came for them got it wrong. Human error, that’s all. You got to allow for mistakes. They only want the two calves.”

“But the rest are in quarantine! I can’t sell the bull calves, I can’t sell the milk from my cows. We still have to milk but then we spill it into the ground. And we’re not supposed to tell anybody! As though Agri-Mark wouldn’t know, for one, when they come for the milk and we turn them away.” She had a point there, he thought. “They might as well lock me up, Colm, build a wall around the farm, put up a sign that says
Polluted.”
She put her face in her hands, pushed her fingertips into her skin.

“Ruthie, don’t cry. I can’t stand to see you cry.”

“I’m not crying. I’m angry. I’m furious! I’m a one-woman mad machine!”

She
was
crying, spilling snot and tears all over the black horsehair sofa. Okay, he wouldn’t mention it again. He pulled her up into his arms, and she didn’t resist. He let her weep all over his clean blue cotton shirt; tears soaked his khakis. He’d have to change his clothes before his next client appeared, but it was okay.

“Cry, love, get it all out. Cry for the woes of the world.” He was astonished at the vibrato in his voice, rather admired it. But she didn’t seem to notice.

“I’m not crying,” she shouted, jumping up, rolling him off the sofa. “I won’t cry. Crying gets you nowhere. I’ll fight, that’s what I’ll do. Now go make me a cup of strong coffee, Colm, and let’s plan our strategy. We have to find Nola. And soon.”

The police had been looking for Nola for over a week now with no luck, but he decided not to mention that. He poured two mugs of coffee, sat Ruth back down, and draped an arm across her shoulders. “Okay, Ruthie. You go first. What’re your thoughts?”

“She’s gone over the bridge,” she told him.

“Huh?” It was the first he’d heard of it. “What makes you say that?”

“A worker I interviewed saw her go.”

“What? And you never told me? You never informed the police? Our men interviewed those workers, too, and no one came up with that.”

“There are two women in your department, Colm. Must you call them all ‘men’? Anyway, it was only this morning I found out. When I went to interview the workers.”

He sighed. She drove him completely nuts sometimes, bonkers.

“Well anyway, this worker did,” she said and waved away the police—men and women. “So now I want you to go down to the radio station and see that word gets out about the uncle and Keeley being here in Branbury. You see, I figure she’s planning to go back to that farm and get the boy. Just a hunch, you know, but it makes sense, don’t you think? If you had a child, you’d want to go collect him, see he was all right, wouldn’t you? Get him off that New York farm where they had two sick animals?”

“Now you’re admitting they might have that disease.”

“I am not, Colm! I’m just—oh, you know. Stop plaguing me.”

They couldn’t have a conversation without that word, but he let it go. “She’s going after the boy she thinks is still there. Okay, good thinking. So let’s get a map and plan out her route.”

Ruth was sitting now with her chin in her elbows, gazing at the walls she’d painted a bright yellow one day last fall after they’d had an argument. He couldn’t recall what it was about, but she’d slapped on the paint, needing “sun in her life,” she’d said. Today she looked mostly nostalgic—that was the word. Looking like it was her own son she was desperate to find. Ruth had been crazed with worry over Vic that time he was kidnapped. There’d been no talking to her, she would have raced around the world looking for the kid.

“So we’ll alert the New York cops in case she hitches a ride or stops somewhere?”

“Wait.” Ruth lifted her chin, she was coming back to life. “First the radio. We want her to know that Keeley’s here, and turn around. I don’t want police stopping her till she gets here. I want to talk to her myself, put her at ease. I want to see her with Tormey Leary—see how she reacts to him. Where was he when Ritchie was killed? You ever think of that, Colm? Your darling cops are so sure it was Nola wrapped those reins around his neck.”

“They’re not my darling cops, Ruthie. I just work there a few hours each week. If it hadn’t been for my grandfather—”

“I know. The big hero. Killed in action, stopping the rumrunners down from Canada.”

Colm was proud of that feat, actually. He didn’t like Ruth’s deprecating tone of voice. Sometimes he fantasized about that grandfather: imagined him chasing the predators, stumbling into an ambush, getting shot by a desperado.

Colm didn’t know how he would have reacted to those smugglers. He didn’t think he’d have had the courage to pursue them. He didn’t feel he could live up to the family legend. He’d rather just trudge along in real estate, help his dad in the mortuary. But he needed the money. Moonlight in Vermont.

“So, Ruthie, you think the uncle might’ve done him in? How’d he know where to find him?”

“That’s for us to figure out. He’s on my list for this afternoon. You just put on your cop hat and get that message out to the media, and I’ll interview the uncle. Talk to Keeley, as well. The boy seems a loner—hasn’t said a word since he got here, but I suspect he
could
tell us something.”

Colm was dubious. “I tried—but the kid just walked away.”

“Colm.” She had that stubborn, I-don’t-want-to-hear-it look on her face that drove him bananas. “We can’t just sit back and let this plague thing take us over. We have to fight. We have to take steps. Small steps maybe, but keep moving, keep pushing the bad stuff away. Now go. Some time or other she’ll be in a car, or wheedling a meal out of some reluctant housewife. And hearing a radio.”

“Sure, Ruthie. But you let the agents have the two calves, okay?”

She just sat there with that look on her face, so he didn’t pursue it. “Go now,” she said, pointing a finger at the door.

“
Can I finish my coffee?”

“Take it with you, Colm.”