Billy Ray's Farm

  The cable had jammed tight against the housing, and Shane went for a hammer out of the back of my pickup and Billy Ray and I pulled on the calf some more while Mr. Leslie worked on the cable. I didn’t understand how the thing worked and we kept losing those precious minutes. The calf stopped moving and just lay there. He looked dead. We couldn’t move him. I felt helpless, and I knew Billy Ray did, too.

  After what seemed a long time but probably wasn’t, we got the cable stretched back out and hooked onto him again and slid him out into the mud. We all knelt next to him and Mr. Leslie tried to revive him, pulling his head up and shaking him, but I’d seen too many shot deer like that, tongues lolling. I didn’t want to accept it and I ran my fingers down his throat, thinking maybe his airway was clogged with mucus, and I thought I felt a reflex in his tongue and jaw. I pushed up and down on his ribs, trying to make him breathe, but it looked like he was already gone. He just lay there, wet and red. A big, healthy calf that should have been trying to stand.

  Mr. Leslie thought that maybe if we moved him around in front of the heifer where she could lick him, he’d come back to life. Billy Ray got him up in his arms and staggered out through the lot with him, moving in the dark and getting blood on his coat, his boots sucking with each step in the mud. Shane and Jory moved the posts from in front of the heifer so that Billy Ray could get in with the calf, but when he put the calf in front of her she just stood up and started toward the pasture. She stepped on the calf and took another step or two and fell. She got up and walked and fell again.

  The calf was lying in the chute that Billy Ray and Shane had knocked together so that Billy Ray could load and unload stock as he needed to do sometimes and they were shining the light down on the calf. I still couldn’t accept that he wasn’t going to come to life. I got down next to him and picked up his head, wiped the mucus and blood away from his mouth and blew air down his throat, thinking of the CPR classes I’d taken. But it didn’t do any good. He wasn’t breathing and he wasn’t going to. I finally gave up and faced it. We’d lost our first calf.

  I was angry about a lot of things: that my boy didn’t have a decent barn to get his heifer into to help her, that we didn’t have a decent light, that the lot was full of mud, that the calfpuller jammed, that we didn’t have one ourselves. I was angry that the heifer had been bred to a big Beefmaster bull whose progeny was too large to slide through the width of her hipbones. More than anything I was angry about my boy trying so hard to start a farm of his own and having everything he touched turn to shit.

  THE KID DIDN’T let twenty-four hours pass before he had his hands on a two-day-old Holstein bull for forty bucks. He hauled the heifer over here from our place at Tula in the trailer we gave him for his high school graduation present. It’s long and red with a roof and white spoke wheels, pretty sporty. We thought it would be the most useful gift for the young cattle entrepreneur.

  I went up to the catch pen and helped him get the calf fed and for me it was a learning experience. The calf’s pretty neat, black and white with long knobby legs. He was lying beside a bush and I studied him while Billy Ray was getting the heifer into the loading chute. He slid some posts in front of her through the boards, then blocked her in with some more at the back of her legs. My job was to hold her tail.

  There’s something about holding her tail straight up that prevents her from kicking—in this case, the calf. She took a big shit all over her tail just as I was ready to grab it so there was that to deal with, but I tried to find a place that wasn’t too slick. Billy Ray walked the calf up there, kind of shoving and pulling at the same time, and the calf went straight for the back teats and started butting and drinking. She didn’t try to kick him and I asked Billy Ray how he happened to know about this phenomenon of tail-holding. He said it pinches a nerve in her back or something and as long as I held it up she wouldn’t kick, so I kept holding it.

  He took a half-gallon bottle and started stripping the milk out of the two front teats and he had about a quart in a little while. He put a big rubber nipple on it and tried giving some of it to the calf after he’d nursed for about twenty minutes, but he didn’t want it. I guess he was full.

  We took the calf back to his pen and turned her loose in hers, and I felt a lot better about everything after that.

  BILLY RAY’S FARM does not yet exist on an earthly plane. It is a vision of his imagination so far, and I have no idea of the form it will ultimately take in real life, but I imagine that it is a place where tall trees grow and the deep green rolling pastures are dotted with flowers. Fat sleek calves frisk on the sunny hills and draw sustenance from between the massive hind legs of their mothers, their bags laden with rich milk as they calmly chew their cuds while the calves nurse and butt. There are clear streams flowing, and the cattle drink in the shade, their elegant necks stretched to the cold water where small fish swim and bullfrogs trumpet in the evenings. There is a solitary bull who surveys his domain from a hillside, his broad face curly with hair and his gaze intelligent, omnipotent, his eyes beautiful. His body is rippled with muscle and his swinging bag of registered sperm sways in a dignified manner as he walks. This lofty monarch has the blood of the best bulls in America pumping through his veins. The calves he sires are sturdy, heavy individuals that weigh nearly a hundred pounds at birth.

  In winter the cattle are warm and happy in a well-lighted barn, a vast cathedral of timbers and stalls, racked hay, a tack room, a vaccination pen, a calving pen, a dehorning pen, a catch pen built of heavy pipe.

  There is a cat—several cats—to keep the barn free of rodents and a few wandering chickens to pick up the ticks and fleas. The great center hall of the barn is loud late at night with the sound of Billy Ray’s boots on the concrete, for there will be no slipping and sliding here in mud while trying to deliver a calf. Electric lights will furnish the brilliance required to work on mothers in trouble.

  On Billy Ray’s farm there will be total harmony, wooden fence rows straight as a plumb line, clean, with no weeds, no rusted barbed wire. A few horses will be dotted over the rich grass. Maybe there will be a big catfish pond where visitors fish on Sunday afternoons.

  Each cow will have an acre of grass and the grass will be regularly fertilized and mowed so that everything is neat and orderly. The mud will be kept to a minimum. Billy Ray will work hard and his farm will earn him a living, and he will be happy, and his life will be fulfilled, and he will know a great peace in his soul such as few men have ever known. God will smile down upon him and his efforts, and the farm will hum like a well-oiled machine. There will be dogs, and life will be good.

  ELI IS A WONDER. He’s red and white and his hair is curly and his downward dropping horns have a nice graceful curve. He’s not quite two years old and he weighs about sixteen hundred pounds.

  You can go out there to the fence behind our house and scratch his old head, he likes that. He hangs around a bale of hay that’s about six feet thick and he gets fed extra range cubes so he’ll grow and gain more weight.

  You might be surprised to find out that there’s such a thing as a bull grant. I’ve heard of writers getting grants, but I didn’t know until Billy Ray got one that you could get a bull grant.

  The Mississippi Rural Rehabilitation Corporation, or MRRC, furnishes weanling bulls to deserving students through the agriculture programs in our state’s schools. These bulls come off a big ranch down in Winona, a six-hundred-acre spread that I understand is under a pipe fence. The fledgling young cattleman agrees to show the bull three times at places like the Dixie National Livestock Show, where they’ve got all these animals that are the giants of their species, and after that you get to keep the bull for your herd. Eli is registered, we got the papers on him, and at the time we got him he was worth about two thousand dollars. At the time we got him he only weighed about three-fifty, and he was very dangerous. Animals that are terrified can be very dangerous.

  Billy Ray went through the process, signed all the papers, made the necess
ary phone calls and hooked up his new red trailer and drove down to Winona to pick him up. When he got back home with him, Eli was not happy. As a matter of fact he would go crazy if a person approached within fifteen feet of the trailer. It was one of those things that gets worse the more you look at it. All Billy Ray’s friends and cousins wanted to come over and look at his new acquisition, and that’s to be expected, but Eli wasn’t keen on a whole bunch of company. Having backed off and looked at it and figured it out, I got the big picture. Here was a young Hereford bull, bigger than a calf, but not as big as he would be some day, and he had been recently taken from the warm udder of his mother, shooed into a barn, probably with people shouting at him, and then he had been loaded into a clanging trailer and driven eighty miles to a strange environment and he was kind of like a wild animal put in a zoo. He was, in short, terrified. All those kids came over and wanted to look at him, and he would go so nuts that I had to make them all back off so that he wouldn’t fall down and maybe break one of his legs before we could even get him out of the trailer. And getting him out was going to be troublesome. I know a real cowboy wouldn’t think too much about manhandling a three-hundred-and-fifty-pound calf, but out here in the Horn of Plenty, we’re not real cowboys. We’re just guys with cowshit on our boots. We didn’t know how in the hell to get him out of that trailer.

  Billy Ray had built a nice little holding pen for Eli, had been working on it for a couple of weeks. But the posts were only about four feet high, and the wire was pretty flimsy. I didn’t figure he’d stay in there. It was electrified, which was supposed to keep him back, but we’re talking about an animal that was in a constant state of hysteria. His bawls of anguish only deepened my dread of what we had to do.

  We figured we needed some reinforcements for the actual unloading, so Billy Ray got on the phone and rounded up about fifteen people and they all arrived on a warm Sunday afternoon with ropes and things. I felt a lot better. Dan Rowsey was here, and he was Billy Ray’s Ag teacher all through high school. Lynn Hewlett was here, and he once loaded up a bad bull in a back-hoe bucket. There were also a lot of Billy Ray’s young husky friends standing around. I had on my flip-flops and wasn’t expecting to get very personally involved.

  With a series of ropes they roped him inside the trailer so that they could kind of gradually ease him out of it. I think the plan was to get him into the lot and then see what happened and, if need be, tie him to a big apple tree in what had formerly been part of Mamaw’s backyard. That was only as a last resort, though. The general hope was that once he saw that he was out of jail, he’d maybe start grazing peacefully.

  He was already acting like he was on some very bad drugs by the time Billy Ray backed the trailer up to the gate and swung open the back door. When Eli came out of the trailer hollering and frothing he began kicking ten feet high into the air. It was immediately evident that they were going to have to tie him to the apple tree, so they did. That worked until he started walking around and around in circles and finally came to the end of his rope, where he kept plunging until his knees went out from under him. Suddenly we were having an unscheduled hanging. I said, Well, damn, he’s dead. His tongue came out of his mouth and his eyes rolled up on his head while they worked feverishly to untie the rope, and I figured he had about maybe five seconds left before death got him when they untied it and he dropped to the ground. Did I say that by then there were about thirty people watching this? Maybe it was only twenty-five.

  He hit the ground and just stayed there. I couldn’t believe it. A new bull, newly dead. He pretty much just lay there, not even gasping for breath. I was just standing there shaking my head. Nobody said anything much. But then he drew one breath. Then another one. In a few minutes he was able to raise his head. Somebody who was thinking fast put a halter on him, a thick thing made of soft nylon rope that was hooked into a lead with a big brass snap swivel. We just watched him after that. When he got to his feet, shaken though he was, he started going crazy again, bucking and jumping, bawling, kicking. We just backed off because he was shaking the apple tree. But I’ll be damned if he didn’t decide to settle down.

  In short order I went and made a big jug of ice water, we all had some of it and congratulated ourselves, and everybody left except me, Mary Annie, Billy Ray, my nephew Jeremy, Michael Paul, and Snuffy Smith. And that was about the time that Eli decided to go crazy again. And it was almost worse than before. But we said, Well, hell, that big thick rope’s on him, and the apple tree will hold him, but then we happened to notice that in all his exertions he had spread that brass snap swivel and it was only hanging on him. All he had to do was turn the right way and he was loose.

  The good rope had left with either Lynn or Dan, a real cowboy rope that was stiff and braided, and all we had around the place was some of this plastic string that Sears uses to maybe wrap around refrigerators. You put some of that stuff around your hand and make a couple of loops around it and hitch the other end to some serious cowpower, you’re liable to get your hand peeled to the bone. But it was all we had, and the boys crept up to him like commandos. They managed to get it around his neck, but the brass snap swivel finally parted, and suddenly they were taking a ride with Eli—Michael Paul being dragged, Billy Ray holding him around the neck, Snuffy with his hand inside his mouth, and then the bull fell on all of them. He was kicking and biting, and the boys were getting mashed. Mary Annie told me to do something. I had on my flip-flops. I jumped the fence when I saw them go down under him, leaped in— the Leaping Daddy come to correct a wrong—and grabbed a hind foot and got struck in the chest and knocked back about six feet in the air. I jumped back in there and found a place to hold to that wasn’t so easy to get kicked from, and we got him up and held him in a headlock and walked him by main strength back to the tree and retied him. Then we fell out on the ground for a while, counting and licking our wounds. Billy Ray’s ribs were bruised, my chest was bruised, and Snuffy had three fingers that were bitten and bleeding. It was the first time I became aware of the fact that a bull will bite you.

  It took a few days of feeding him and petting him, talking quietly, but Eli finally calmed down and accepted things and we were able to take him off the rope and let him graze.

  After enough time had passed, Billy Ray was able to train him to the halter, walk him, pet him like a dog. That was about a year and a half ago. I go out there now and scratch his old head. I hope he’s forgotten those bad early days when we were just getting to know each other. Because he could sure put a hurt on you now if he decided to.

  I DON’T RECKON bad luck ever takes a vacation. It doesn’t for Billy Ray. I had to go down to Tampa for a few days and I got back on a Saturday night. A friend of mine was passing through town and he stayed Sunday night with us, and then I got back to work on my novel.

  I got ten pages written and at four o’clock I got in the truck and drove over to Tula to check on the heifers. The black one was missing and I didn’t know if it was time for her to have her calf or not. I thought she might be up in the barn, or down in the bushes, so I started walking over the place to look for her. She wasn’t in the barn, wasn’t down by the pond in any of the brushpiles of downed timber. It was cold, and it had snowed some the night before, and I had my good Tony Lamas on tramping around in it. I found one damaged place in the fence, but it wasn’t big enough for her to squeeze out of, and I couldn’t figure out where she could be. There was a little lot next to ours and the owner had let Billy Ray’s heifers graze on over into it, but I took a look over there and didn’t see her.

  It started snowing and it was pretty beautiful. Big wide flakes were drifting down onto the surface of the pond and they didn’t even make a ripple. The snow started sticking and I kept walking around, looking for that heifer. I was worried that I wouldn’t find her, and I decided that she had to be lying down in some spot that I’d overlooked, but it was getting dark, and colder, and I stopped on the levee to watch the snow drift down for a while. There was total silence, a
nd the cedars were green, and my boat was pulled up on the bank, and the dock had snow dusted all over it. I went on home and told Mary Annie that one heifer was missing, but that I’d go look for her first thing the next morning.

  THE SUN WAS SHINING the next morning, but it was bitterly cold. Shane had told me the night before that there was no fence on the back side of that lot next to ours, and that the heifers could wander off down in the woods if they wanted to. I’d said to myself, Well, damn, my luck, that’s where she is.

  I drove over to my little place at Tula and headed down through the bushes he’d told me about and immediately saw a big black form lying on the ground. The heifers had made trails down there like deer. At first I thought she was dead, then I saw her move. When I got up a little closer I could see the calf sticking out. My heart sank deep. She was lying against a cedar tree on her side, quivering or maybe having convulsions. The calf was black and his head was resting on top of his feet and his swollen tongue was protruding from his mouth. It was easy to see that he was dead, but impossible to know how long. I started running and I ran back to my truck and drove fast back home to get on the phone and call Mary Annie and get her to call the vet and ask him what to do. I was afraid I’d have to pull the calf myself and I wanted to save as much time as possible while I started gathering up what I would need: some rope, a long chain, my three-ton come-along.

  She called back and said the vet was in surgery and would be for another hour and a half. He said the calf would have to come out if we wanted to save the cow, so I knew what I had to do: hitch the come-along to a tree with the log chain, put some ropes around the calf’s feet, and try to get it out without pulling it in half. There was nobody to help me, but as bad as it was going to be, it had to be done.