Bleeding Kansas (29 page)

She felt triumphant when she reached the last shed in the row without detection. This one didn't have a calf tied to it; she backed into the dank, musty straw covering the ground inside and studied the closed pen. It wasn't sealed, the way it had appeared in the distance: the roof was raised about a yard from the walls so that air could blow through. The wall was also six inches or so from the ground to make it easy to sluice out the pen. Arnie had put in a series of skylights in the roof, which Lara could see because the interior lights were on, but the sides didn't have any windows. Poor calf, Lara thought. No mom, no fresh air, no buddies to talk to.

She was only fifteen feet away now and she could hear the excited voices of the men crowded into the doorway: “It said what?” “How can they tell?” “What does it mean?” “Shut up so we can hear for ourselves!”

At that moment, her cell phone rang. Her heart almost stopped, so great was her fear, but the men were too intent on what was happening at the pen.

She looked at the screen. Her father. Oh,
no
! Not checking up on her now! She backed into the empty shed again and answered.

“Lulu, where are you?”

“Just out, Dad, I'll be home pretty soon.”

“Where is ‘out,' young lady?”

“I'm at a friend's house. I'll call you in a minute. Got to go!”

“Don't hang up! I'm going into town to see your mother, and I want you to come with me. Tell me where you are!”

She hung up and turned her phone to
VIBRATE,
which she should have done before she left the house. If she told Dad what she was doing, he'd have ten fits. Besides which, she didn't want to see Mom. Anyway, she had a date with Robbie—sort of a date. Seeing Robbie would be way better than looking at her mother's dead-alive face and listening to a lecture from Dad.

She could feel the phone vibrating. Her father called her three times while she stared at the phone face. It was six o'clock. She should go home and wash up so she'd be on time to see Robbie, but—then she'd get sucked into going into town. And, besides, she was this close—she had to see the calf.

L
ARA SCUTTLED AWAY
from the empty shed. She made a wide circle around the miracle calf's pen, moving so close to the waste lagoon that she heard the frogs and insects chirping at its edge, then crawled through the field to the back of the pen. She lay flat on the ground, which was wet and smelly from a recent sluicing, and peered under the raised wall. The men inside the pen were shouting now, some yelling at the others to shut up, but all of them creating so much racket that Lara couldn't make out individual words.

She couldn't see much: straw on a raised platform with large black stones beneath it, Arnie's overalls and the black pants of the three Jews and Pastor Nabo to her right, unidentifiable legs of two men in front of her so close that she could have reached a hand in and untied their shoes. Robbie's legs, which would be skinnier than any of the others, weren't visible—he must be lost in the crush at the door. She could see nothing of the calf but heard its anxious bleating over the men's voices.

“What a gift, what a blessing.” Pastor Nabo choked on the words. “Brother Arnie—I can't believe—here, in your manger—Let us pray!”

Nabo intoned Jesus' name, and started to thank Him, but one of the Jews interrupted. “You may mean well, my friend, but this calf is speaking the sacred Name of
Ha-Shem
in Hebrew. She is calling on the Holy One in language so ancient and so sacred, it would be a sacri—it would be a mistake to invoke your Christ's name on her. She is set aside for the rebuilding of the Holy Temple, and, as such, she must not have her mission compromised by other gods.”

The man's voice, as thick with emotion as Pastor Nabo's, briefly silenced the others. Lara heard someone directly in front of her mutter, “Damned Jews, trying to tell us how to worship.” Another voice said, “Later, Kurt, later.”

The men started filing out. As the crowd thinned, Lara could see the calf's red legs dancing uneasily around her raised pen and then Robbie's jeans as he climbed up on the platform next to the heifer. All the visitors were gone. Robbie and Arnie were alone in the building.

“Don't you do
anything
to that calf!” Arnie shouted. “That calf is set apart, she's sacred. You cannot touch her or spoil her the way I know you've been doing. You come along with me now, boy.”

“But, Dad, do you think she was really saying the secret name of God? To me, it sounded like ordinary bleating, you know, the noise they all make when they're nervous. And this girl, she's so lonely, it's made her act—”

“And you know better than the Jews what ancient Hebrew sounds like, I suppose?” his father said. “Don't go talking like that: this heifer is going to make our fortune. You come along now.”

Robbie's legs turned around and stepped down again from the platform. He was moving slowly. Lara pictured him slumped over, the way he'd been when Myra was yelling at him.

The work lights that had brightened the pen went out, and the calf bleated again, “Yeh-heh, yeh-heh,” as Arnie shut the door. Lara heard him cry, “See, there it is again. She's repeating God's secret name. She's bound for glory!”

The gap between the ground and the wall was narrower than Lara's shoulders, but the dirt was soft from all the sluicing the Schapens gave the pen; it didn't take Lara long to scoop out a shallow trough with her filthy fingers. She stretched her arm under the wall. Her fingers closed on one of the black stones; grabbing it, she pulled herself all the way inside.

The day had almost spent itself while she'd been watching and waiting. Without the work lights on, she could barely make out the heifer on her raised platform. The dimness turned the heifer's red-orange hide to black. The animal heard her and moved restively.

Lara wished she could turn on the lights, but they'd show through the skylights and bring Arnie on the double. She got to her feet, stubbing her toes against the boulders that surrounded it. As her eyes adjusted to the murky pen, she saw the railing around the platform and the calf's manger full of hay.

“Hey, girl, it's okay,” she whispered to the heifer, reaching an arm up through the railing to scratch her flank. “I know you're not supposed to have any females near you, but, dang it, you're a female yourself, you must miss all the other girls in the herd, not to mention your mom.”

The calf bleated again, the “yeh-heh, yeh-heh” that had so amazed the men, but then lowered her head and rubbed against Lara's outstretched hand. Lara grabbed the railing and hoisted herself up to the platform. She swung a leg over the rail and climbed inside the enclosure.

Her heart was racing. If Arnie found her here, she was worse than dead. The thought only made her want to raise the stakes. Arnie thought he was everyone's boss, he thought he could gloat over her mother's illness, over Chip's death, but she, Lara, could destroy his precious heifer, bring him down to earth in a hurry.

What if she stole the heifer? She could hide it in the X-Farm, feed her sunflowers. She swung back over the enclosure rail. Using the pale light from the screen on her cell phone, she tried the door. It was padlocked on the outside. If she was going to take the calf, she'd have to come back with a screwdriver to undo the padlock.

The cell phone gave her a new idea. She scrambled back into the pen, tucked Chip's cap into one of the back pockets of his pants she was wearing so her face would be recognizable, and took a picture of herself with her left arm draped around the heifer's neck. Holding the phone at arm's length, she turned and kissed the calf on the nose and snapped the shutter again.

The calf butted her in the chest, sending her sprawling into the straw. Lara laughed with excitement. “Want to play football, do you, missy?” She got up, grabbed the heifer's shoulder, and had flung a leg up over her back when she heard voices outside the enclosure and the sound of a key in the padlock.

She froze with terror. She couldn't get out of the pen and under the wall before the men came in. She dove into the manger and pulled the hay over her head. It was a tight fit. She was terrified her shoes were showing, but she couldn't afford to sit up to check. In another second, the lights came on inside the room.

The heifer was bucking and snorting around her small pen. Lara had alarmed her by trying to climb onto her back, and she was further startled by the return of the men. Lara heard Pastor Nabo cry in ecstasy, “She's full of the Holy Spirit!”

The hay was tickling Lara's nose; she sneezed several times before she could work a trembling hand through the grasses to squeeze her nostrils together, but it seemed that the calf was making enough noise to muffle the sound.

Through gaps in the manger slats, she could see a little bit of what was going on. Arnie unfastened a gate in the calf's enclosure and the men climbed onto the calf's platform. Lara couldn't tell how many there were, especially when a couple of them leaned back onto the manger. If she goosed them, maybe they'd think the Holy Spirit was descending on them.

“Now that the Jews have gone, we can invoke the God they have ignored to bless this holy animal.” The pastor's voice shook with emotion.

“Pastor, we don't want to jinx her in any way.” Arnie's voice was uneasy. “Until the Temple is rebuilt and the Temple sacrifices begin again, she's kind of a Jewish calf. If we baptize her, maybe something will go wrong with her.”

“Brother Schapen, I respect your fears, your concerns, but the Lord is not controlled by superstitions. We can't ‘jinx' a calf He's put His special mark on any more than we can create her ourselves. The Lord Himself knew the Jews were a stiff-necked people. We've seen this time and again in our dealings with these men from Kansas City. They won't accept Jesus as their Savior. They only want to rebuild the Temple for their own worship, not to hasten the Lord's return.”

“Yeah, Arnie, Jews or no Jews, since when do we let a bunch of guys from Kansas City tell us how to run a farm or raise a calf?” Chris Greynard's father said.

“But they were the ones who knew what the calf was saying. None of us would have known it was repeating the sacred name of God.”

“
Secret
name,” Pastor Nabo corrected. “The secret name of God. The Jews have special knowledge that comes from dedicating their lives to the Law instead of the salvation that comes through Christ Jesus. The Lord spoke to them first through the Law. Since they refuse the salvation that could be theirs, they only know half the story. And the half they refuse, the cornerstone that they reject, is our Savior Jesus Christ. We cannot reject Christ. We must invoke His blessing. If you're afraid of the presence of the Lord, Brother Schapen, maybe Brother Greynard should take charge of this calf.”

Arnie said sulkily that the calf had been given to him, to his farm, and he didn't need anyone else to take care of it. “But if we're willing to disobey the Jews over this prayer, maybe we should let women into Nasya's pen. You know my mother is a holy woman, Pastor, and it seems hard that she can't go near a calf on the farm she's looked after for over sixty years.”

“I think we all know the answer to that, Brother Schapen,” Pastor Nabo said. “We know that when Jesus spoke to us through His apostle Paul, He told women that they were to be subservient to men. We don't allow women to preach in our churches, and we don't want them desecrating this heifer. Let's invoke the Holy Spirit on this animal, my brothers in Christ.”

The men on the platform knelt. The poor calf was trembling in distress at having so many men close to her. All the while the pastor prayed, she moved anxiously around, bleating her pitiful “yeh-heh, yeh-heh.” Every time she made the noise, the men around her cried, “Praise Jesus!” and “Hallelujah.”

The pastor's prayer went on and on. He beseeched the calf to bring the day of the Lord, the day of Rapture, close to them. He besought her to go willingly to her solemn sacrifice, and recounted the Temple sacrifices from the Bible. He praised the calf for her holy virginity.

Lara's left leg was cramping. She wanted to scream in pain, and in annoyance with the pastor for being so full of himself that he couldn't shut up. She needed to get home. Robbie would be waiting for her at the tracks and think she'd stood him up. Dad would be so pissed off; she didn't even want to think about that. Behind those thoughts was something deeper, scarier, that revolved around the calf itself and the way Pastor Nabo was praying. Temple sacrifices, purity, the virginal cow—the words evoked images of blood and rape that sickened her.

Lara felt her face wet with tears but knew she couldn't cry out or even move. She clamped her teeth down on a mouthful of straw and held onto it for life. When the pastor finally finished, when the men climbed to their feet and left the enclosure and Arnie turned out the lights. Lara slid from the manger as quickly as her cramped and shaking legs would take her. She flung herself under the depression in the ground and crawled past Arnie's milking barn, then ran across his sorghum field to the road. She'd get her truck tomorrow. She couldn't face going into the dark sunflower field now.

Lara trudged slowly to the train tracks. Robbie had said he would meet her there at six-thirty. It was a little after seven, and there wasn't any sign of his truck. He must have gotten tired of waiting. She walked on into the house on leaden legs.

It was only after she'd stood under the shower long enough to use all the hot water, as she tried to flush not just the cow shit but Pastor Nabo's hot, blood-filled words away, and after she'd put Chip's fatigues into the washer with a double cup of soap and another of bleach, that Lara realized she was missing her cell phone. She remembered now: she'd been holding it when the men came into the pen. She must have dropped it in the golden calf's manger.