Billy Ray's Farm

  I’m sitting in my room now, the dogs sleeping on the bed behind me, Sammy Lee and Lilly and Hallie, and snowbirds are feeding from the little birdfeeder that I loaded up with seed a few weeks ago. I wouldn’t let my dogs suffer the way I let that heifer suffer. What does that say about me? Does it say that I care about some animals more than others? Maybe it says that I know that some are kept as only potential makers of supermarket meat while others sleep in my bed and are like my children to me. Does it say that I’m a bad man, an uncaring man, or only uncaring in certain ways? When I let Sammy sit in my lap while I’m typing these words on this machine does the thought of shooting him ever enter my head? He snuggles under the covers with me at night. The cow does not. He doesn’t worry about anybody ever eating an offspring. And neither does the cow.

  But I hope she’s still alive, and maybe even a little better. I’d like the Dead Cow Blues to leave for a while, take a nice long vacation.

  IT DIDN’T WORK. She didn’t get any better. The next day when I went over she couldn’t even lift her head, and she was too weak to drink the water I tried to give her. The heifers all went to Senatobia in the big red trailer of my dream where they brought a lot less than Billy Ray paid for them. He lost $250 on one heifer alone.

  Sometimes you just have to do something. I opened the drawer under the microwave in the kitchen and showed him the Smith & Wesson, strapped in its little brown leather holster. I told him the bullets were on my dresser, and he went over there to do what had to be done.

  IT SNOWED YESTERDAY and we drove by the place last night on our way to town. We had to go to a party and life has to go on in the midst of whatever else is happening.

  Billy Ray and Allan, a friend of his, had cut the fence and dragged the dead heifer onto our place, and somebody from the county had come out to bury it with a backhoe. The snow was all over the ground and the backhoe was sitting in the middle of the pasture with the lights on and it looked spooky, everything white around it, and the lights shining on the bucket, the big claw stretched out on the hydraulic arm like some kind of prehistoric beast that was gnawing at the frozen ground.

  BILLY RAY DOESN’T tend to sit around and mope over a setback. The next morning he was up early and out cutting pulpwood with Allan, trying to recoup some of his losses. Mary Annie met him driving the log truck and she said he waved to her and grinned, sitting up high in the truck as if he were saying, Look at me, Mama, I’m doing something I like. I’m happy.

  Counting the dead heifer and the two calves and the reduced price the heifers brought at the sale barn Thursday, the kid lost about fifteen hundred dollars, or about half of all the money he had in the world.

  ELI, THE HEIFER and the calf she adopted, and one other cow, are over here at our house but there’s no stock on the place at Tula now. Not much point in burning off the rest of the grass since there won’t be anything there this spring to eat it. I won’t go back much until it warms up and I can get out with the chainsaw and start cutting the scattered limbs from the ice storm, or chip some more mortar off the weathered bricks that are left in the toppled chimney that’s lying in big chunks on the ground.

  I’m scared for him to buy any more cows just now. I couldn’t stand to see him get burned again this quick. He just got another job cutting meat at a supermarket uptown, and he’ll probably keep cutting wood for a while. School won’t be over until May. He’ll do all that and keep saving his money, although it costs him a good bit to feed Eli. I don’t know how big that bull will get but he’s still growing. He can eat one of those big six-foot-round bales of hay in about a month. Once the grass comes out he’ll be able to graze, but this cold weather seems locked in for a while longer. A few of the birds have already returned, some cardinals, a few sparrows, and the other day I thought I saw a little female bluebird sitting on the feeder. They just don’t stay around here in the winter. The birdbath is frozen, nothing but a big rim of ice sitting in the scalloped top. I can see a big hawk cruising over the dead brown grass from here. He’s probably having a hard time of it, too. But spring will come. It won’t always be cold and frozen and there won’t be a skim of ice over the pond at Tula. The stubs of last year’s okra stalks are jutting from the ground in the garden where Lilly has gnawed them down, along with my grapevines, and my blackberry bushes. She’s a boxer and letting her inside is like turning a horse loose in the house.

  I hate it that Lilly and my other dogs have torn up the whole backyard, dug up flower beds, just gnawed everything down in general and torn some of the screens off the house. But I wouldn’t swap any of that for my dogs. I can always plant more vines and bushes and things. I can fill the holes they’ve dug with a little dirt. It’s a small price to pay for the pleasure they give me, the warmth of their personalities and their endless amusements. They never make nasty comments the way some people do and they don’t have to be excused from the room if they need to fart. They don’t ask for much, just for you to like them and feed them and give them a warm place to sleep on cold nights. In many ways their company is much more preferable than that of a lot of people I run into. But I can talk to them and they can answer with the expressions on their faces, their wagging tails, their obvious happiness at being with me. They’re so easily satisfied, and their needs are so simple. You can smile at them and they’ll smile back. You can’t have a relationship like that with a cow.

  THE FICKLE FINGER of cow fate swings wildly and it’s like a roulette wheel, you never can tell where it will stop. You are sometimes not even aware that it might be hovering near you until it lands, with full force. I mean you can be minding your own business with no idea that anything untoward is coming toward you, and then, boom, there it is.

  Events were going on outside my peripheral vision: Billy Ray had one real cow left, a big Brahman with long drooping ears and a kind of mottled hide, brown fading to gray, and big wet eyes that when you looked at them inside a cattle trailer seemed immeasurably compassionate and sad. She was off up in the pasture behind the house one night in the beginning throes of calfbirth, and I was in the house messing around with some of my stuff, looking over my manuscripts, listening to some music, not really working but really at peace with the world since it seemed that most of our cow problems were over. The loss had been taken and the future didn’t actually look bright but it looked like we might be able to back up and regroup for a while, plan the next strategy. Maybe buy some grown cows. Maybe not even worry about cows for a while. There had been so much grief that it was best to put it away from me for a while, not hold it close to my heart.

  So this cow started having a baby. I didn’t know anything about it. Billy Ray went up there to check on her and found an ominous large wet sac of something membranous and semitranslucent hanging out of her. He started having another fit and he came back down here and told his mother that he thought the uterus was hanging out. Prolapsed. The uterus gets messed up and if you’ve ever read any of those James Herriot books you know what I’m talking about and what the cow has to go through to get it put back in and what the vet has to go through to get it put back in and I didn’t know anything about all of this going on.

  Some phone calls were made. They were keeping me in the dark, protecting me. They often do that. Sometimes they don’t inform me that things are approaching the crucial stage. Often they wait until the crucial stage itself actually arrives, and this was the case here. Billy Ray and his mother called Dan Rowsey, described what was hanging out of the cow, and Dan was forced to give a diagnosis over the phone. Since Billy Ray had described the thing hanging out of her as gray, Dan said he thought her uterus had prolapsed with the calf behind it. He told them there was only one thing to do: load up the cow (it was a Sunday night), haul her up to the vet’s office, let him perform surgery on her, then get rid of her. Mary Annie came back here into my nice warm un-molested nest and laid that on me.

  I didn’t say anything. I felt a little bitter, true, but I’ve learned to develop a kind of fatalism that takes
me through a lot of storms. One of the things I do is tell myself, when things are looking pretty bleak, no matter what hour of the day or night it is, that tomorrow will be a better day, even when I know that tomorrow won’t. I also console myself with knowing that my children need my help and that’s my job. So I pulled my boots on. Grabbed my coat. Didn’t bitch. Got my cap and my gloves and my flashlight and went out to get in Billy Ray’s truck for that bad ride up into the pasture. I couldn’t imagine what the thing looked like. I had something in mind kind of like half of an unborn elephant, maybe, hanging out, the big grayish mass swaying a few feet above the ground and the cow carrying on in some kind of horrible way. Bawling, swinging her long gray-brown ears around. The nightmarish logistics of the rest of the night were too bad to even think about. And the vet bill. How much would that be? What if the vet was watching a world premier movie on TV? With his socks on? With a glass of wine in his hand? Would he want to drop all that and go into the smelly guts of our cow? It just gave me a bad feeling all over but I got into the truck without protest, everybody kind of walking on eggshells around me, waiting for me to blow up. They knew that being disturbed in my happiest of happiests by real bad news was one of my least favorite things to happen on a Sunday night. You’ve done your work then. Even God said that was the day of rest. You shouldn’t have to go chasing after bawling cow guts on a Sunday night. But I didn’t say a word.

  We got up there and put the light on her. A small clear bag of fluid that held about a quart of water was hanging out of her and I breathed a big long deep sigh of relief.

  “Shit fire, Billy Ray,” I said. “She’s fixing to have this calf and she just ain’t busted her water yet.”

  I went back to my stuff, pulled my boots off, put my feet back up, turned Leonard Cohen on.

  NEXT MORNING I moved over close to the window with the field glasses and focused on the cow out in the pasture, a small brown-gray lump lying on the ground behind her. Billy Ray had tried to get up close to the calf to determine its sex but the cow threatened to kill him, so he backed off. I could see pretty good from here. The calf had a white face and it turned out that she was Eli’s first calf. The calf got up on its knees and I saw the long red umbilical cord hanging down. Hawks were cruising the sagegrass and my dogs were playing in the yard. I had a cup of coffee and I was listening to Bruce Delaney. I kept the glasses to my eyes like a field marshall or a killer of long-distance game. The calf wobbled around some but that was to be expected. It was walking pretty good to be only about ten hours old. It put my mind to rest and all I had to worry about was making one day follow the next. I knew I could do it. I lowered the glasses, let them hang around my neck by the strap, and looking out over the pasture I lit a cigarette. Life seemed to have regained its balance. There were no cows suffering anywhere because of me.

  Fishing with Charlie

  HE WAS STRAIGHT FOR thirteen months, hadn’t even had a beer in all that time. He’d lost the needle and he was singing good and feeling good and blowing the sax good, and the day he pulled up in the yard and parked, one of the first things he did was show me a beautiful old Remington .22 pump that his daddy had given him a long time ago. I had some beer in my truck and he had some Cokes, and we got in and drove over to a twenty-seven-acre impoundment that a friend of my daddy’s had built back in the 1970s sometime, a place that wasn’t fished much, a place that was loaded with largemouth bass.

  It was and is a wonderful, almost magical lake. High bluffs wooded with oaks and hickories rise up over the east side, and the water is dark yet somehow invested with a strange clarity that often lets you see the fish when it strikes. A couple of boats stay tied to the levee, and we availed ourselves of one and slipped out into the smooth ripples with the sun bright overhead, not a hot day at all, just a great day to fish. Charlie was a worm fisherman, a diehard. He had some kind of half-floating white-speckled things he called grubs, but they were more like fat Texas worms, only weirder. We paddled around and he got into the fish immediately. He talked a lot but he didn’t talk loud. What tickled me was how he’d set the hook. He’d lean way back when a fish hit, and you’d think he was going to fall out of the boat, but then the fish would be hooked and Charlie’s arm would be cranking on the reel and he’d tow it in. I was fishing with a small floating Rapala, getting a strike once in a while, but mostly I was watching Charlie because he was knocking them dead.

  We fished all that evening, talking and catching up on each other’s lives, paddling around on the dark water, and wherever he threw, they hit. I guess he caught about thirty, but he only kept eight small bass for filleting later that night. We hooked up with Tom Rankin a little later at my pond and got into my aluminum boat and drifted around for a while, didn’t catch anything. I’d stocked it but they were still small. Full of bream but no grown bass yet. A big thunderstorm came up out of nowhere, complete with jagged streaks of lightning, and Charlie allowed as how we’d better get our asses out of the water, so we did. Tom snapped a picture of Charlie and me on the dock I’d built with my own hands.

  I had a foil-wrapped package of ribs from Handy Andy and we took them over to Sheila Baby’s and microwaved them, and broke out some potato chips and paper plates, and sat out on her deck looking at her big lake and eating the ribs. She had a chandelier made of mule deer horns hanging over her dining-room table that I thought was about the coolest thing I’d ever seen.

  Her driveway was muddy and we almost didn’t get out of there. We had to pick up a bunch of heavy rocks and weigh down the back end of Tom’s Dodge to make it out, slinging mud everywhere, laughing together the way only good friends can.

  I REMEMBER CHARLIE standing on the stage alongside Duff, his whole head and hair slicked back with sweat, blowing on that saxophone and the whole house rocking. And then he’d start singing in this old black man’s voice, low down and dirty, and he could wail. He loved my books and I loved his music. The Tangents were the house band of Mississippi, and Duff had these cowboy boots that were patched with silver duct tape. They were the best I ever heard.

  I can segue into a perfect place with my guitar when I’ve had enough to drink and it’s quiet at night and my work is done for the day and I know that all I have to do is stay up late enough to be able to sleep. I don’t worry about the sun rising over the window because it doesn’t matter, because I don’t work for anybody but myself. But in those small quiet moments of early morning, I miss Charlie. And I’m not pissed off at him for doing what he did, only greatly saddened that he left us so early. He was thirty-nine.

  ENTRY FROM MY journal, April 14, 1997: Got up at 12, read some on the novel, marked a few pages, started mowing the back yard at 2:30. Stopped at 4:15 to go to the feed mill for soybean pellets. Ate some ribs and mowed again till almost dark, unloaded 600 lbs. of feed and watered the heifers, burned two woodpiles behind Mamaw’s shed. Started to work, ate supper, worked until nearly 11. Tom called late and said they’d found Charlie Jacobs dead in New Orleans. What a waste.

  The journal entry doesn’t tell about me crying in the kitchen, but I did.

  HE’D CALL UP and at first you wouldn’t know who he was because he wouldn’t tell you. He’d just keep talking and asking you how things were and after a while you’d realize who that gravelly voice belonged to, and even if it had been six months since you’d seen him, he’d be talking just as if the last conversation you’d had with him had been last night. He’d always want to know when we were going fishing again.

  Who can say what his life became in New Orleans? The band had broken up after so long, after all those years of playing frat parties and smoky bars and weddings in the Delta and private gigs for friends. Fish went to work for Larry Stewart, playing the keyboards, and Duff had to stop drinking, and Charlie drifted down to the Crescent City to play solo gigs and form a new band. He had been writing some songs and he wanted to cut a record. I heard from him rarely; he was busy with his music and I was busy with my writing. Tom would talk to him once in a while and
give me a report. It was rumored that he was back on the heroin, but I didn’t know if that was true. The one thing he wanted from Tom was a copy of Father and Son to read, and I know he asked for it several times. I was in New Orleans last fall and should have looked him up, but I didn’t, should have left a signed copy for him at Beaucoup Books, but didn’t, just caught another airplane and went on with the book tour. But I know he got his hands on a copy somewhere and read it, and I heard what he told Duff about it: “It’s a damn good book.” Unquote. Hell, that’s a good enough book report for me.

  THE LAST TIME I saw him was in a bar in Oxford and we talked for a while, standing there at the end of the room. He had a new woman with him and he looked wild and fragile. But he said that things were going well in New Orleans and that he had good hopes for cutting his record. There were always a lot of people wanting to talk to Charlie and we eventually drifted away from each other that night. I never talked to him again.

  HE LIES NOW in his family’s burial ground, an Indian mound that stands looking over a big field where cotton is probably growing right now. On the day of the funeral it wasn’t planted yet, but we’ve had a cold spring in Mississippi, and everybody’s late planting.

  I rode down from Oxford with Jonny Miles and Tom, and we were drinking beer from roadside gas stations before eleven o’clock. We knew it was going to be a long day, and we fortified ourselves frequently. We made it to the church on time, and the little yard was filled with musicians and writers, artists and photographers, the family and friends, and anybody else who loved the Tangents and their music, and Charlie.