Muck (21 page)

Squeezing my eyes shut doesn’t help.

It takes more than squeezed eyes to stop wanting the cock out of its trousers and let a calf have its way onto the new finger. Not any calf, but Miss Beautiful, a calf above calves. Not of the cows but an evolved kind, a superior breed. “Someone could be watching,” I say to her, kneeing to keep her at a distance.

I busy myself with pushing a bloated calf from its position on the boom for the next in line.

Miss Beautiful, we are far enough from the milking shed for no-one to see us. But don’t magpies have sight? There are gaps in the hedgerows. An ancestor, dead and floating invisibly, might be above us this instant, checking me, his kin, to be heartened that he is watching the admirable progress of his loins.

I force the
me
voice to bellow out of my chest and stomach. I force and force. I sing the scales three times. Then mixed notes, randomly from the scale, till the cock has gone back to penis, and the ancestor can leave proud enough with what he has seen.

C
LOVER’S TINY GREEN FAN
normally has three leaves.

Three leaves like three servings of itself. Four leaves sometimes though it’s rare and therefore means good luck for the humans who pluck one like a soft coin given up to them from the wishing-well soil.

There she is at it again—Feet parting the pasture with her fingers. She kneels stiffly, pushing her palm down on one knee for balance. Four leaves bring great fortune or little blessings, she believes. Good health, much money which is what a life is for.

She keeps them, her treasure, between the pages of her books: the only books she owns—those Nanna recipes with cellotape binding.

“Come and help me look,” she asks of me. “Don’t you want your mother to be happy, healthy and rich? Come and pick clover with me so I won’t be left alone.”

But I am already gone, hurdling a fence, hand on post to spring, scissoring my legs. Gone to feed the calves, to sing and finger their mouths and let them nibble my groin in their huddle of hunger. Miss Beautiful again the most insistent of lovers, until my ancestors-thinking saves me.

Feet is beginning to wonder about four-leaf clovers. We have hardly been inundated with curious guests: “What’s the point of building a lovely manor home if there’s no-one to come and say Wow!? It’s like we add up to nothing for all our efforts in life. That’s the very way I feel sometimes.”

She and The Duke base their arguments on it, whether it’s awfulness in people that makes them stay away in droves. Feet complains that it is, and that when you’re stuck in North Island, New Zealand you are really much too far away for guests who are anyone worthwhile—“We might as well be at the South Pole.”

The Duke makes two points and leaves the arguing at that. One: people just don’t arrive, you have to invite them. We’re not royalty. People don’t ask for an audience. “You’ve been too long going into yourself.
You
need to go to the world. It doesn’t come to you.” Two: no-one’s ever good enough for her. It’s an off-putting trait. “If you act like you’re royalty, people turn up their nose.”

“That’s ridiculous,” Feet stomps. “I’m the least off-putting person I know. I expected more happiness at this stage in my life and I’m beginning to resent it not coming.”

She now refers to clover as “those bastard things, those frauds” but she still parts pasture unless it’s raining.

Today she has only picked for half an hour and there is a sound. She lifts her head and listens to the air. A ripping
168
sound of car tyres between paddocks on the milk-shed drive. The vet’s car, a grey station wagon with mud doors from the morning’s potholes.

Five four-leaf clovers so far this session and it has delivered someone—a vet visitor. Better than nothing. An educated man, a professional. Thick spectacles and a nodding, smileless manner of speaking to emphasise the confidence of his pronouncements.

He may wear overalls, but they lend him a green surgical appearance—he is no tradesman. He is a science man. So many pens poking from his chest pocket. When he removes his overalls before getting in his car, his slacks and shirt beneath are spotless. His radio plays classical music.

Feet hurries to the kitchen to set out cups and boil the kettle. She will butter a scone batch kept in the freezer for such occasions.

The Duke has not been well today. He is having a lie-down, but she’ll rouse him for welcoming the vet into our house. We can’t have someone sleeping and snoring when there’s a guest to show around.

Today five cows with marks for medicine sprayed on them. Two mastitis; two pessaries for afterbirth still hanging from backsides after calving. A milk fever Jersey who gets the staggers and falls down.

The fallings down are getting longer between the standings, says Norman. His cigarette sore is missing from his lip. He knows a worker should never address a professional man, a vet man, with that ugly sight stuck to his face. A worker needs to answer Yes or No clearly to professional questions and not be disrespectful with the pause it takes to draw smoke and sigh it, to speak with a cloudy mouth. “Doc,” is how Norman ends his answers. “She’s getting weaker by the hour, Doc.”

Doc nods that that is obvious just by looking at her sitting with her legs tucked under in the mud of the culling yard.

“Chewing her cud like she’s taking some sun, but on death’s door if you ask me,” Norman says with a grunt-laugh. “That’s the way of things. They’re a dumb animal.”

Doc agrees that what he says is true—she might indeed not be long for this world. This gives Norman cause to stand up straight in a moment of pride that a vet is not the only one who knows a thing or two. He turns to smile this to his Bill who grins acknowledgment. He turns to smile it to me but I ignore him.

I’m holding my breath till my face hurts from too much blood in it. Norman probably thinks I am red with embarrassment that I lack his farm learning, but I’m in training. I have decided to build up my lungs for singing. I have just walked a full minute down the drive to the milk shed without taking a single breath.

Norman must consider himself the equal of a vet. Just because of one moment of pride he is now equal to Doc and can take charge and grab the cow’s penis-tail and lift to try and urge it to all fours.

Doc waves him to stop: “It’s not a lever that tail. You’re not helping her one bit.”

Norman keeps hold of the tail though stops yanking it erect. His mouth is a hole in his beard as if he’s about to speak. Only a wheeze and grumble come out. He does let go of the tail but only because Doc is staring at him, waiting for his instructions to be carried through. The tail snaps shut over the cow’s backend.

Doc walks to his station wagon and its cupboards and drawers of drug vials, syringes, kidney dishes, sponges.

Norman takes a sore from his tin, one brown from previous puffings. He leans close to his Bill. “Cunt thinks he knows everything,” he says quietly, striking a match and drawing up light through the lamp of his cupped hand. Bill nods that cunt’s the right word, and shapes to give a quick kick into the cow’s side in time with a repeat of the swearing but Doc is about to return. He carries two bottles of calcium tonic to the cow and sets them down beside her neck. He takes a rubber tube from his overalls’ pocket and a long, thick needle.

He twists the cow’s neck using the backs of his knees to push. He sights the artery groove in the neck skin and throws the needle dart-like. He manoeuvres the dart up, down, sideways, until dark blood dribbles out. He connects the needle to the tube and ask-orders Norman to stand close with the bottle, open the bottle and fit the flanged end of the tube to it. He’s to hold it high and let the tonic gurgle until empty.

Norman does so but not before licking the sore to a fresh sucking spot and working it into a cloud billowy enough for inhaling and blowing in Doc’s direction. He tells Doc the tonic won’t do any good. In his experience a cow down for this long is fit only for the dead cow lorry.

“You could be right,” Doc says.

Norman winks and nods to Bill: some sentence is exchanged between them that needs no speech to be clear to them, a “Doc might not be a dill after all” or “Vets have the learning but
I
have the years.”

Doc fingers the cow’s eyelids wide open and diagnoses that she’s bright enough in herself.

Norman agrees, she is. “But she don’t stand on her eyes.”He winks again at Bill who covers his mouth against letting laughter out.

Doc concedes that the dead lorry might be all she’s good for if he thinks she’s going to suffer.

“Too true,” Norman says, and nods his allegiance with Doc against her suffering.

But men’s allegiances can last only seconds. Men fall out with each other. They get back on side. They fall out. Go back to firm as friends. Doc taps the cow’s eye corner to test that the eye blinks alertly. “You know,” he says. “I’d be giving her one more go.” He ask-orders Norman to go and get the hip clamps.

“Hip clamps?” Norman hoiks and spits a small cough to the ground. He makes an f-sound but doesn’t say the full
fuck
. Bill copies the mouthing and turns in time with Norman to have his back to Doc. He too hoiks and spits. He stands knuckles on hips.

Norman spits that the cow is too far gone for hip clamps. “Might as well fetch the rifle now.”

Doc says there is no sense in putting a good animal to the rifle, not before giving her the benefit of the doubt.

Norman licks his sore in disagreement and wonders for the life of him why a so-called educated man like Doc, a professional fellow, would bother with a poor beast that was good as dead. A man can read books about an animal but books can’t teach you what working hands-on with them every day will.

Doc repeats: hip clamps.

Norman licks that he supposes vets have got to earn a living. He makes a jerking movement with his head for William to fetch the hip clamps from the implement shed. “If the poor bitch is going to be made to suffer, so be it.” He holds out his arms and lets them slap down against his sides.

Doc pats the cow’s forelock and says she’s not suffering very much for now.

My allegiance is with Doc over a Norman. A learned man over a toucher of teats who has given up so easily on a bright-eyed cow. Who owns the cow in the first place? The Duke. And therefore me. This toucher is in no position of power to decide life or death over property of Tudor Park. I have a responsibility to remind him of that. “Where I come from we don’t give up that easily,” I say, a little out of breath from my breath-holding practice.

“It’s your people’s money. Waste it how you like.” Norman hoiks again. “Let it suffer.”

Doc would be impressed by some philosophical display from me here. “Wouldn’t suffering be better than death?”

Norman grunts, “How would you like to spend your life just lying there?”

Of course I wouldn’t like it, and I’m not a medical man, but I remind him that plenty of people live lying down in an iron lung. Plenty of people live propped up in wheelchairs.

Doc agrees that what I say is true. He speaks with that smileless authority that I can see makes Norman furious. So furious he spits out his wet sore and attaches to his lip a new one from his tin and gets involved in the distraction of lighting it.