Bleeding Kansas (33 page)

When the first reporters arrived, Arnie and Myra were at Tonganoxie Bible watching Junior play football. Robbie was taking advantage of being home alone to practice guitar in the house, so he didn't even notice the Global Entertainment van when it pulled into the yard or hear Ashley Fornello ring the front doorbell. It wasn't until he glanced out the window and saw her bright blue jacket disappear around the milking shed that he realized someone was on the property.

His first thought was that Lara had come looking for him. He knew her mother was coming home today—it was why they weren't trying to meet until Sunday—but maybe she missed him as much as he missed her. He put down his guitar and hurried out to the back of the work buildings. When he realized it was a grown-up, and a stranger, he felt let down but tried to be polite.

It had taken Ashley Fornello so long to get a coherent story out of the Burtons that she'd lost some of her high-gloss reporting veneer. She told Robbie that she needed to see the miracle heifer and tried to bribe him with fifty dollars to let her into the enclosure.

“No, ma'am, I'm sorry, but ladies aren't allowed near the calf. The rabbis made it real clear.” When he said this, he wasn't thinking about Lara being in the calf's pen—she was separate from the rabbis, his father, the pastor. Her hiding in the manger didn't count as a female being near the heifer. But if he let a reporter with a camera in—the hair on the back of his neck stood up, imagining Arnie's reaction. “My dad will be home around five. You can talk to him, but he'll say the same thing.”

Ashley wheedled, flattered, bribed, tried to get him to point out the calf's special pen so she could take a picture from the outside. She asked him if he could repeat what the calf was saying. He kept saying “No, ma'am” as the easiest way to avoid trouble until she wondered if everyone in the valley was mentally deficient.

Before long, her rivals showed up, and then the stream of pilgrims began, initially people from Robbie's church, then the larger county community, as word spread via text messages. At first, Ashley and the other camera crews were content with interviewing the would-be sightseers, but pretty soon they got impatient and started going into the different barns and milking sheds.

Over in Tonganoxie, one of Myra's cronies in the parents' section got a text message from her daughter saying that her boyfriend's mother had gone to see the magic cow. The woman showed the message to Myra at halftime, and she and Arnie did the unthinkable: they left partway through one of Junior's games. He'd been doing so well, too, Myra mourned in the truck going home—three solo tackles and part of a sack in the first half alone.

By the time they reached the farm, there were twenty or thirty people milling around the back buildings. Arnie grabbed his deputy's megaphone from the trunk and ran across the rutted lot to the heifer's pen. Robbie was standing outside the door, barring people from breaking in, but the more enterprising camera crews were climbing up to take shots through the skylights.

Arnie turned on his megaphone. “I'm Arnie Schapen, and this is my property you're trespassing on. If you have business here, talk to me and we'll sort it out.”

As the news crews shoved for position around Arnie, their mikes outthrust, Myra started to snarl at Robbie for letting all these people on the property. Arnie interrupted his remarks to Ashley Fornello from Global to pull Robbie into the center of the group of reporters. He clapped Robbie's shoulder. The boy might look weedy, but he'd stood up to all these people. Maybe underneath that hippie getup and long hair, he really was a Schapen.

All he said out loud was, “Robbie here bred Nasya, our special heifer. Of course, he was looking for a good milk bearer, not a miracle, but God doesn't send us miracles when we're arrogant enough to try to create them ourselves. We don't know what the future of this heifer is. We don't know if she'll make it to three years old without a blemish. But what we do know is, the Jews who are paying attention to Nasya for us think she's pretty special.”

“I heard from one of your neighbors that she's performing miracles,” Ashley Fornello said, thinking of Eddie Burton's disjoint comments, that the calf had blessed him and told him he was doing the right thing.

“I haven't seen any myself,” Arnie said, “but, well, she's started speaking ancient Hebrew.”

There was a ripple of disbelieving laughter among the television people. “What's she saying? Give me more grass?”

Arnie's lips tightened. “If you came out here to make fun of me—or, worse, make fun of the Lord—there's no need for you to hang around. According to the Jews, she's begun saying the sacred name for God that no one has spoken out loud since the last of their high priests was murdered two thousand years ago.”

“So how do they know?” the man from Fox demanded.

“You'd have to ask them,” Arnie said. “I'm just a simple Kansas farmer. I figure the Jews know more than I do about ancient Hebrew and the Old Testament, but if you guys are up on your biblical Hebrew I'll be glad to learn from you.”

The crowd laughed at that, with him this time, so Arnie went on to say that the Jews warned them against letting women into the enclosure. “Not even my mother has been allowed in to see Nasya. Most of you here are like me, believing and hoping for the risen Lord to come again in glory. And even if you don't share all my beliefs, I know you'll respect them, and respect this heifer. So I'm going to ask the ladies to be patient, to remember what the Bible says, that they should ‘learn in quietness and full submission,' and to honor my commitment to look after this precious gift the Lord has trusted to me.”

“Too bad for you, Ashley,” the Fox reporter said to Ashley Fornello. “But if you're quiet and fully submissive, we'll let you borrow some of our footage.”

“Sorry, boys,” Arnie said. “I can't allow cameras in the special enclosure. They may disturb or overly excite Nasya. And because of the wear and tear on the place, if you want to see the calf I'm going to ask you to pay a little something for the privilege.”

“Five dollars,” Myra snapped.

“Five dollars,” Arnie agreed. “My mother will set up a table near the house, and you can line up there to pay. We'll let six people in at a time. Of course, members of my church, they get a special rate of three bucks. If you want to join, I can give you the pastor's cell phone number.”

No one knew if he was joking or serious, so everyone laughed uneasily. Myra, ordering Robbie to fetch her a card table and a jar she could use to hold the money, moved the crowd to the gravel yard outside the kitchen door. At five, when Robbie went off to start the evening milking, everyone had left, including the television people.

Sunday turned into a different story. The clips that the Kansas City stations ran, using pictures of Nasya taken surreptitiously with cell phone cameras, got picked up on YouTube and the national networks. Even the
New York Times
sent its own reporter instead of relying on a local stringer to talk to Arnie. By Sunday afternoon, the crowds grew so large that managing them turned into a headache for the family.

At three, when Robbie had planned to meet Lara at her truck at the X-Farm so they could drive somewhere private, he could see he'd never make it out of the farm on time. The cowman, Dale, had come over, and some of the church elders were helping out. Junior, drawn home by the excitement of seeing his father on television, was enjoying the chance to shove people into place in the line, but Myra was keeping a bony hand and malevolent eye on her younger grandson.

She had planted Robbie at the card table, collecting cash from people and giving them numbers so they'd have a secured place in line. When Myra went into the kitchen to oversee preparation of another batch of cider—a dollar a cup, no refills—Robbie sent a text message to Lara. Since Myra always examined the phone bill and catechized him about any text messages he sent or received, it was a bold and desperate move.

It was at three that Reb Meir, Reb Ephraim, and a van full of yeshiva students and teachers arrived from Kansas City. Reb Meir was furious with Arnie for allowing so much publicity to escape about the heifer. He banished everyone from her enclosure, lining his students—who looked more like street toughs than a religious community, despite their fringed shawls and long frock coats—in front of the entrance.

Myra squawked in outrage. Junior, always eager for a fight, ran over to confront the yeshiva boys. Arnie pushed past Junior, his hand on his gun belt, his nose an inch from the enclosure door.

“You're on private property, and this is my calf. She's sanctified to the living God, to the Lord Jesus Christ, not to the dead letter of the law, so get away from that door.”

“Fine.” Reb Meir came up next to Arnie. “Do as you please with her. If you don't wish our help in ensuring her ritual cleanness, I will make it clear that she is so deeply flawed, under the ‘dead letter of the law,' as you call it, that no one will want to use her for any sanctified purpose.”

“You can't go around telling lies about my heifer!” Arnie shouted.

“If you won't let me examine her alone, and in quiet, I can only assume that she has been violated and you are ashamed to let me see her for myself.” Reb Meir shrugged and called to his students in Yiddish. They laughed and started back to their van.

“Chickens,” Junior called as they passed him. “Piglets.”

“You've eaten so much pork, your brains have turned to lard,” one of the students responded.

Junior jumped him, knocking him to the muddy ground and grabbing him by the throat. The other yeshiva boys began punching Junior but couldn't make a dent in him. Shouting to each other in Yiddish, they grouped themselves on Junior's left side and pushed, as if rolling a log—or tipping a cow. In a moment, they'd flipped him onto his back.

The cameras were rolling. For the journalists who'd been hanging around hoping for some kind of action, the altercation was a miraculous answer to their prayers. The yeshiva boys were punching Junior in the face. He roared. Pushing them aside, he got to his feet, picked up the ringleader of the students, and threw him to the ground. Some teens from Salvation Bible joined in, kicking or picking up larger pieces of gravel to gouge with. The yeshiva boys fought back with equal savagery.

Of course, the crowd quickly formed a raggedy ring around the fight. Some of the parents were even cheering their sons, applauding when they scored direct hits on the opposing boys.

Robbie slipped into the front of the crowd, near Chris Greynard's father, to see how much damage Junior was doing. He hadn't been involved in a fight himself since his Kaw Valley Eagle days, and he wasn't going to start now, either for or against his brother. Junior was dangerous when he was mad. Robbie hoped someone could stop him before he paralyzed one of the yeshiva students, although they were fighting as aggressively as the Salvation Bible crowd. One of them even seemed to have some kind of weapon, knuckles or maybe a knife—Robbie saw a flash of light on metal, but the boy was moving too fast for Robbie to tell.

As he stood in the circle of onlookers, nervously chewing a hangnail, Robbie heard one of the reporters say, “This is what life is going to be like all day, every day, if these crackpots actually try to rebuild the damned Temple.” Another answered, “No, it'll be worse, because they'll be using bombs and grenades instead of just fists.”