Mad Cow Nightmare (35 page)

Charlotte, Jane Eyre, Esmeralda, Dolly, Oprah, Elizabeth, Amelia—Ruth thrust through the crowd, to hug each one. When they brought up Zelda, bucking and bawling, it was the final blow. Ruth flung her arms about the irrepressible beast, wept another full bucket. “Don’t let them take you, Zel,” she cried. “Don’t let them!”

Zelda reared on her hind legs and shot a hefty kick at her captor. The man yelped, and clutched his groin. The cow ran at a second agent who’d come to help the first. “Go, girl!” the crowd cheered. “Go go go!”

A shot rang out and Zelda fell, in mid-kick. Ruth dropped to her knees, her mouth a silent 0. The wild eye pierced her own. And then went cold.

Ruth was keening. She wept for Zelda, she wept for all her beloved cows whom she might not ever see again. She wept for     innocent victims everywhere: humans and animals, trampled underfoot; tortured, slaughtered.

She wept for herself. What was she going to do now? Where was she going to go? How was she going to make a living?

Colm was holding her, people were trying to embrace her, make promises, give options, offer barns and land. “Damn it all, girl, pull yourself together.” It was old Glenna, rasping in her ear. “Come over tomorrow and see me. I got thirty acres and only Fay’s rented cow keeping down the dandelions. We’ll have a scotch. We can talk. We can work out a deal.”

Slowly the old lady’s face came into focus. That face like a waterfall, that crisscross of deep lines, the white hair like a cyclone had hit it. That foolish red lipstick on the withered forehead. She was beautiful.

But Ruth couldn’t think about scotch and small talk. She couldn’t give any answers.

“Zelda” was all she could think to say, leaning back against a pliant birch. “Oh, my poor darling Zelda.”

Chapter Twenty-five

Maggie ran into the farmhouse kitchen with Keeley in tow, and held up a pair of charred shoes. “They were in his room. At that inn!” she shouted. “I went with Keeley to get his train model and there were the shoes. The chambermaid was shoving ‘em into a plastic bag with his other stuff. I didn’t want Tormey’s old pants and shirts—told her to take ‘em if she got somebody can wear ‘em. But the shoes. Look!”

Ruth looked. But she couldn’t seem to focus. It had been just two days since the seizure of her cows and she was still in deep mourning. The emptiness down in the pasture . . . What did she want with a pair of shoes that looked like they’d been through a holocaust?

Maggie was waving a black shoe in her ringed hand. “It was Uncle set that fire, burned our trailer. Oh you bet! To get back at Darren for leaving the farm. Keeley knows, right, Keel? Keeley ‘members him coming in late at night, drunk, stinking like a furnace, right?”

“Oh,” said Ruth, realizing. “Why didn’t you tell us, Keeley?”

“Uncle was still alive,” Maggie said softly, and the women’s eyes connected. Stupid woman, Ruth told herself. Of course. The boy was afraid.

There was the glimmer of a smile on Keeley’s lips. His demeanor had altered since the uncle’s death. It was as though a hundred pounds had been lifted from his shoulders. Though the scars would remain, Ruth knew. And there was his mother, awaiting trial. Awaiting the verdict, as well, from the hospital where they’d taken her for testing.

The jury was still out on Maggie. Sooner or later she, too, would be brought to trial.

It was some small compensation at least to know there would be no more damage from the uncle. But it didn’t undo what had already been done.

And so with my cows, Ruth thought. She recalled an Irish play she’d read in college about a mother who’d lost her last fisher son to the sea; and the woman was almost relieved because there would be no more sons to worry about. For Ruth, Zelda was gone, her remaining cows taken away for testing. And in the morning paper, a Canadian cow tested positive for Mad Cow: “Although BSE has not been shown to be transmitted among cows in a herd, as a precaution the entire herd is being destroyed.”

Still, she had to hope, Colm kept telling her. Soon Darren would leave—he had found a job with a farmer over in Bridport. He and Maggie would take Keeley with them. Ruth had invited the boy to stay, but he shook his head. He needed his blood family, and Ruth understood. She’d contacted Emily, who would arrive on Saturday— upset that she hadn’t known about the summer’s happenings, but longing to be “home with family.”

Outside the window Boadie was leading a spindly-legged black-and-white calf across the grass—Charlotte 2’s calf that Darren had saved from the red dye. Keeley ran out to join them, and Maggie followed. Ruth would begin again—somewhere—with that adorable creature. Looking at Boadie, she wished she could paint. She would entitle the picture
Old Woman and Calf.
She would paint all the beauty of the pair onto canvas.

But Ruth wasn’t an artist, she could hardly draw a line. Ruth was a farmer. When Glenna phoned again that night just as Ruth was climbing into bed, Ruth listened. It was a second invitation for her to use Glenna’s hundred acres. “What do I want with a hundred acres?” the octogenarian said. “I’m happy just sitting on the porch with a bottle of scotch. Contemplating my navel, you know?” She burst into her rich belly laugh. “But I’m a Vermonter, too. Can’t see land going to waste. Look, girl, you can put anything you damn please on it. Cows, goats, sheep—horses—llamas if you want!”

“I love llamas,” Ruth said, smiling to think of Carol’s llama, soaking the front of a Carhart jacket. “But they do spit. And I don’t know anything about horses. I’ll leave horses to Franny.” Franny had got her Ophelia back after Nola went for testing—her child lawyer had seen to that—but the mare was being “carefully monitored,” according to the feds. Franny had to be content with that.

“But no birds,” Glenna warned. “I draw the line at birds. You know that emu farm down on Route 125? Well, one of ‘em got loose—those friggin’ big wings—those long skinny legs! Sprayed my clothes basket when I was hanging clothes. I had to wash ‘em all over again.”

Ruth thought of the agents leaving the farm, frantically spraying their government vehicles with disinfectant, as though everything on the Willmarth farm—people, grass, vehicles—was contaminated. And then James Perlman, driving slowly past, windows closed though it was ninety degrees outside, safe in his sterile car. She hadn’t seen his face among the demonstrators.

“No birds, she’s right,” Colm said. As a four-year-old, Colm had been attacked by a cranky turkey; he was still phobic. Even a sparrow in his path, he said, gave him hives.

“All I have now is a heifer calf,” Ruth told Glenna. “I suppose I could begin with her. But there’s an outside chance I may get my cows back. The use of my land. Who knows? I mean, look, Glenna, I don’t know anything about raising goats.”

“They mow the lawn,” Glenna said, “they give milk.”

“Yes, there is that,” Ruth said thoughtfully. “You can milk them.”

“Good girl,” Glenna said. “You bring that little critter over tomorrow, okay? We’ll introduce her to Daffodil. Though Fay’s thinking of buying that foolish beast. All that rent going out every month—just so she can call the place a farm B&B?” The belly laugh came again, rich and mellow out of the old lady’s gut. “It’s settled then. See you tomorrow. I’ll break out the scotch.”

“She thinks I’ve agreed,” Ruth said, hanging up the phone.

“Jeez, Ruthie. A golden apple falls off a tree and you’d let it rot?” Colm reached for her. He was wearing his blue pajama top with no bottoms. His hair was a gray-brown scarecrow on his head. He was taking those little sips again from her lips, like a calf nursing its mother. She had to laugh. She was laughing when the phone rang and it was Chief Fallon from the local police station. Colm grabbed it and she couldn’t help but hear; Fallon, it seemed, had a built-in loudspeaker in his throat.

“Hey!” Colm said, then “Wow! Fantastic! Here, tell Ruthie.” He handed over the phone, but she’d already heard. The hospital had called. Nola had passed the test. She wasn’t sick with Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. She wasn’t a carrier—”Doesn’t seem to be. But she killed a guy, right? Two guys?” Roy Fallon shouted. “Oughta have those DNA tests soon.”

“Self-defense?” Ruth suggested, and Fallon shouted, “What do I know? You say both guys threatened that traveller woman—that’s why she did ‘em in? Christ, you’ll need a helluva good lawyer to prove it happened same way twice.” He gave a chugging heh heh heh laugh, like a train picking up speed.

Colm grabbed the receiver from Ruth. “We got one,” he said. “A good lawyer. We’ll give ‘em a fight.”

“You’re a cop. You gotta be objective, remember?” Fallon said, and Colm said, “Yeah, oh sure. Well, g’night then,” and hung up.

He grabbed Ruth and lifted her up off the bed, shouting, “Hallelujah, your woman’s clean!” and danced her on top of the bed.

“Stop it, stop, you animal!” Ruth cried. “Good news for Nola, though she’s still facing a stone wall. And they haven’t cleared my Friesian calves. They haven’t brought back my cows.”

“Think positive,” said Colm, the optimist.

This was true. Nola was clean, she was healthy—there had never been any contamination—not in that quarter anyway. So Ruth should be glad of that. Colm released her and she stood on the mattress and flung her arms high. “Praise be for something, anyhow,” she cried—”if not for the cows, at least for Nola’s health. Praise be for my unmarked calf. I’ll call her Eve!”

Colm put his arms around her; she hung on for life while they did a pirouette. They fell back laughing on the bed—and the slats gave way. Omigod, the whole bedful of slats! “Too bloody short for the bed,” Colm hollered as they went down together in a bang and crash. Like an army being routed, Ruth thought; like a fort felled, a town liberated from an enemy.

They were still on the mattress after making love, though it had sunk below the sides of the bed. But it was all right, they’d stay the night this way, Ruth told him. She was too exhausted to get up.

“And a damn good thing,” Colm said. “I haven’t got strength to pick up a single slat. Not tonight. Not after I moved three boxes full of clothes and books over here this afternoon.”

“You what?”

“You’re not going to stay here alone, are you? Cows gone, Emily in college, Vic off with friends half the time. You need somebody to keep you company, right? Somebody to come home to after a long day of goat tending over at Glenna’s? I mean, baby, I’m your man.”

Before she could answer he was leaning over her: those hot slurpy kisses, sucking up her resistance. “You
can
milk goats,” he reminded her when they came up for air. “Goats eat anything—you won’t have to recycle your tin cans. You don’t have to worry about planting corn. They’re easier than cows.”

“But they’re not cows,” she said. “They don’t have those big brown liquid eyes. They’re not like Zelda. Or Jane Eyre. Or Dolly. Or Elizabeth. Oh, my poor Elizabeth,” she murmured. “Elizabeth’s pregnant. Who’s going to help her freshen next month? She has that narrow passage. She’ll need help.”

“She’ll be back by then. You’ll get her back. You watch.”

“You think so?”

“I do.”

She gave in to him then. There was always the fairy tale after the plague. “London bridge is falling down . . . ashes, ashes ...” she sang softly. A play song for children. A way to forget until the next time. Like sleep. She nestled into the curve of her lover’s shoulder, she fit there nicely. His flesh was warm. Warm as summer sun on the bare back. Warm as a cow’s fleshy flank.

“They slept with their cows back in the old days,” she said. “Winters anyway. Your forebears and mine—wherever they were living—Ireland, Scotland, Vermont. It was the way to keep warm. Man, woman, and beast, curled up together.”

“Moo-oo,” Colm murmured, and dropped off to sleep. Outdoors the first rain of the season splattered against the window glass, nourishing the corn that Ruth would store in one of the old stave silos. “Just in case,” she told the rain.

For Llyn

Acknowledgments

Thanks and gratitude to the following for their help with this novel:

Linda and Larry Faillace of East Warren, Vermont, whose sheep were destroyed by the USDA, and who granted me an open, generous, and insightful interview; Joy Smith of Springfield, Vermont, breeder of Lippitt Morgans, who introduced me to her stableful of gorgeous horses; Nancy C. Plimpton for her history of the Lippitt Morgan family; Tim Fitzgerald, expert on Irish travellers; and traveller Richard J. Waters, author of the fabulous Internet site: www.travellersrest.org.

Thanks, too, to my dedicated and helpful readers Chris Roerden and Llyn Rice, and again to Llyn, master engineer, who responded to a plethora of “how-to,” “how-come,” and “how-about” questions. To my legendary editor, Ruth Cavin; my assistant editor, Toni Plummer; my copy editor, Brenda Woodward; and my agent Alison Picard—I’m deeply indebted to all of you. To members of the Champlain Valley Unitarian Universalist Society, a welcoming congregation and continuing source of inspiration. To my UU writing group, and to David Weinstock and members of his Thursday workshop, who encouraged my writing in so many ineffable ways. And finally, to my beloved extended family for being there for me during the research and writing of this novel.

I read innumerable articles on Mad Cow disease in
The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal,
and in the Vermont newspapers
The Addison Independent, The Rutland Herald, The Valley Voice,
and
The Burlington Free Press,
including Barbara Eastman’s superb column, “A Farm Journal.”

Three books were also helpful:
Nan, the Life of an Irish Travelling Woman
by Sharon Gmelch,
Gypsies, The Hidden Americans
by Anne Sutherland, and
Bury Me Standing
by Isabel Fonseca.

Copyright © 2005 by Nancy Means Wright

Originally published by St. Martin's Minotaur [0312331339]

Electronically published in 2010 by Belgrave House