Church of the Dog (18 page)

Rumor has it that a student of mine is pregnant, and by the way the staff whispered about it in the staff room, you would’ve thought someone was dying. I wonder when motherhood became such a failure. I don’t really understand. While I like my job, I’ve never really found it to be the all-encompassing embodiment of fulfillment like I thought it would be. Motherhood strikes me as a much more meaningful way to spend your life. In my mind I say a silent blessing for the student.

I go out and check on the two-year-old heifers. They’ve begun to calve. I see one calf who isn’t nursing. One of the quarters of the mother’s bag is smaller than the others, and when that’s the case, it’s easy to think he has drunk. Not all quarters of a heifer’s bag are always even, though. The calf has a big hump in his back. He’s hungry. I get him up and get him nursed.

I can see the water bag on another heifer. I need to check on her in another hour and a half or so. If she doesn’t get that calf out in two hours or less, there’s a problem.

I ride out to check on the three-year-olds. Mamas and babies are looking good. I see a heifer on the ground with the calf’s front feet coming out of the birth canal. I wait long enough to see the calf’s head making it out, right over the feet. They’re fine. I ride on.

Coyotes have been out with the older cows. I see one dead calf with hoofprints all around it. Dammit. When two or more coyotes team up on a cow and calf, the cow keeps the coyotes at bay but tramples her own calf in the process. I should have brought a gun with me.

I see another humped-up calf. His mother has big tits, and he is having trouble getting them into his mouth. I stay and help.

I photograph my room, the toys that are still in my closet, and the red model airplane still hanging from the ceiling. I lie on my bed and photograph the ceiling I stared at so many times. I photograph the photographs of my parents that hang on the wall in the hall that I pass on my way to the bathroom. I photograph the photographs of me bull riding.

I study one closely, the one where I’m on the ground and the bull’s feet land inches from my neck. For the first time I see how bull riding was my way of playing Russian roulette. I see my complete ambivalence about living, both in the past and recently. And I ponder the irony of how bull riding was seen as such a brave thing when, in fact, it was a completely chicken shit thing for me to do, something I did because I was too afraid to pull the trigger myself and definitely too afraid to commit to life. I take the bull-riding pictures off the wall and set them facedown on the dresser. I don’t want to be that boy on the bull anymore.

I go downstairs and photograph Grandma on the front porch looking up to the sky, like she does so often, and then out to the horizon, almost as if she is resigning herself to staying here on Earth when she would rather be above.

I was watching some documentary about Monet. One line of the whole movie resonated for me: “It is said Monet did not want to merely paint objects; he wanted to paint the air around his objects.” So I can’t help but wonder if Monet had been one of us. He is, after all, known as “The Master of Light.”

Presently, I’m building a giant sun sculpture for my purple garden. I’ve collected numerous yellow, white, and clear glass candy dishes and drinking glasses. I drilled holes through all of them and am now attempting to hook them all with copper wire to a frame I welded together that hangs from a tree. Then I’ll add some more . . . something—I’m not sure what—to suggest radiance. So far it’s not working, but I’m not giving up on fifty dollars’ worth of thrift store crap that easily.

One thing about teaching that is really challenging to me is that I truly believe art class in itself is a contradiction, and yet sometimes I find myself thinking rather strong critical thoughts about students’ work. I don’t want to have these thoughts about their work. Really, I just want to encourage them to experiment and to love art.

So when I find myself thinking critical thoughts, I know it’s time to turn my focus back on my own work. It’s working. This stupid project is humbling.

I’ve been thinking about Lady Godiva and how all she was trying to do was bless the farmers’ fields with good fertility blessings, and how she was misunderstood. Just because she didn’t feel like wearing clothes, her sacred ride was manipulated into something perverse. I’m going to do some kind of Lady Godiva monument in my garden. She can bless my garden, and I won’t twist her intention.

I wonder, if Monet were alive, how he’d paint the light around Lady Godiva, how he’d show that the blessings radiating from her hands were real. Blessings are such a powerful energy, like wind in a way; you can see neither, but both affect the physical world. This will be my next challenge.

Roses have sprung up around my porch. All kinds. The climbing ones are everywhere. I know this is the work of Earl.

When Daniel rides out to check on calves or goes into town, I put on “The Tennessee Waltz,” open the windows so I can hear it outside, come out here on the porch, and waltz. Maybe I’m waltzing by myself. Maybe not. I like to think Earl is with me. I wear rose oil and put roses in my hair to entice him.

I walk through the fairgrounds at night, lost. Lights blink everywhere, on all the rides and in all the booths. Happy people eat corn dogs and win prizes at game booths. Couples walk hand in hand. All the little kids carry giant stuffed animals.

“Mom? Dad?” I call out. “Mom? Dad?”

Mara crosses my path, riding the white horse with the feathers tied in its mane again. She holds some cotton candy. Some of it is stuck to her face.

“Mara? What are you doing here?” I ask.

“What do you mean?” she asks back.

"This is my recurring dream where I can’t find my parents,” I explain.

“Do you know where you are?” she asks.

Just then I hear my grandparents call out to us from their seat on the Ferris wheel. They wave enthusiastically and look younger. “Yoo-hoo! Daniel! Mara!”

“Hello!” Mara calls back.

Their bench reaches the top of the Ferris wheel, and they kiss.

“She sure missed him,” Mara says.

We watch the Ferris wheel descend down the back side. As it nears, Mara calls out to Edith: “So, Edith, just visiting, I hope?”

“That was the plan, but I want to stay!” Grandma answers.

“Do you know where you are yet?” Mara asks me.

My eyes fly open, and I gasp as I bolt upright. It’s morning. I look at my door with dread. I get out of bed and nervously walk to my grandparents’ door. Outside I tap gently with one knuckle.

“Grandma?” I call quietly. No answer. I open the door and slowly approach. She lies on her back. The morning light filters through her sheer blue curtains, casting an eerie light on her. “Grandma?”

I reach for her hand. It’s cold. I jerk back reflexively.

I hear Mara storm through the back door, up the stairs, and into the room. “Oh,” she says and begins to cry. “She stayed.”

Mara embraces me from behind and sort of rocks. I just stand and stare at Grandma, stunned and numb.

spring

I never understood those people who blew their brains out indoors so that someone else had to scrub their remains off the walls and such. I don’t know if suicide is immoral, but I know making someone else clean up after it is. So I take Grandpa’s gun out from under his bed and walk through the two-year-old heifers out to the east hay field. I find myself walking toward the old Russian olive tree Grandpa used to marvel over. He couldn’t figure out how it lived in such dry soil so far away from a spring or a creek. As a boy I would think if that tree could survive here, I probably could, too, but now . . . now I’m tired of being left behind. And I’m tired of the isolated life I’ve created for myself. I sit near the tree and watch it for a while. The way the branches sway sort of soothes me . . . hypnotic somehow.

This decision is so permanent, and I start to wonder if maybe everyone thinks about doing this at some point. I remember when I was seven, I mucked up a model train I was working on. I thought it was wrecked and had every intention of smashing it into little pieces, but Dad caught my arm midair and told me to give it twenty-four hours before I smashed it. Said sometimes things look different the next day. Sure enough, the next day it seemed clear to me how to go about fixing it, and I was cooled off enough to follow through.

I think of my dad and decide to give it a night. I pull two calves on my way home.

It’s another frosty morning with new snow just a couple hundred feet higher in elevation than the house. I drink my coffee inside while the truck warms up, in hopes of avoiding scraping the windshield, which I hate doing. Then I drive to the hay barn, load up the truck, and drive up into the hills until I find cattle to feed. I hate the stillness of the morning, and I hate waking up when it’s dark.

The morning is clear, and light shades of pink and violet reveal themselves as the sun approaches the horizon. The truck bumps along the field.

Finally I spot the heifers and several calves. I dump bale after bale out of the truck. Steam and smells from the cattle fill the still air.

When I try to leave, I discover that I’m stuck because the weight over my rear wheels is gone. “Shit!” I start yelling, and it feels good. “Shit! Shit!” I yell as I dig out the tires. As I scoop the snow with my hands, I’m overwhelmed by the urge to throw snowballs at the cattle. “Why are you so stupid?” I yell and fire off a snowball. I fire off more snowballs, yelling “Stupid!” each time I throw one, although I know in reality it’s not the cattle I’m so mad at. I’m mad about being left behind.

Soon words don’t seem angry enough for me, so I just start making angry noises while I fire off more and more snowballs with less and less accuracy. The cattle stay a little ways back but keep glancing longingly at the hay. Now snowballs are not satisfying enough for the anger in my arms, so I start pushing the truck in thrusts while yelling my grunts. Eventually, the truck starts moving, but I’m not done, so I keep pushing the truck, running behind it, occasionally slipping in the snow and once hitting my chin on the tailgate. But I don’t care. I don’t care about anything. I don’t care which direction I’m going, and I don’t care if this truck rolls down a hill and smashes into bits.

I’ve been pushing and running for probably a half mile when my neighbor, Owen, drives up on his four-wheeler. “Son! Son!” he calls to me. “Want me to get the tractor and pull that in for you? What’s the problem? Transmission?”

I stop and look at him, feeling sort of defeated, exposed, and a little embarrassed. I don’t know what to say or how to explain this.

“Well?” Owen’s voice booms out of his barrel chest. I just sort of stand there, shoulders rolled in, mouth open, and nothing coming out of my mouth.

“Son, are you okay?”

I’m not sure how to answer that. I suspect, though, that in this world where ninety-eight percent of all problems are solved by someone telling you to “cowboy up,” I better just answer yes. “Yes, sir.”

“What’s the problem with your truck?”

“Actually, sir, there’s no problem. It’ll get me back just fine.”

“Well, then, why in God’s name are you pushing it, son?” It’s weird to have him call me
son
. It hits a trigger with me, but then another part of me finds it sort of comforting.

“I was just blowing off steam.”

He looks at me carefully. “You meltin’ down on us, son?”

“Nah,” I say, looking down at the ground, shaking my head slightly, and smiling enough to convince him I’m all right, which I guess I am.

“Okay, then.”

I take that as my cue to hop in the cab and go. And at that point any anger I had turns back into that familiar lonely numbness.

I stare at the sky behind the branches for a while—white billowy clouds passing across the blue—and wonder what it will be like to float through that sky or become part of it or whatever happens, assuming I don’t go straight to hell. I can’t believe I would go to hell for this. Surely God has compassion and mercy.

The tree sways back and forth the way my mother used to rock me. I remember I went through this time where I was afraid to go to sleep. She wouldn’t make me go back to bed, where for some reason I felt so afraid. She’d make me some Campbell’s vegetable beef soup or sometimes split pea with bacon and then let me fall asleep on her lap while she stroked my hair. I shut my eyes and let myself go back there, to the comfort of her lap, listening to her hum a lullaby, and the rhythmic combing of my bangs.

When I open my eyes, Mara sits next to me, while Zeus is off sniffing holes in the ground. “Beautiful tree,” she says.

“Yup,” I don’t look at her. I keep my eyes on the branches. Then we sit there for at least a half hour in silence.

“What’s the gun for?” she asks.

“Coyotes,” I half-lie.

I can tell she’s not sure whether to believe my story. Then she says gently, “Come on, friend. Let’s go back and eat some soup.”

I am looking at the tree from the back porch today when Whitey comes ripping up the driveway. He stops abruptly, gets out, and strides over.

“Come on, boy,” he says firmly. “You’ve got a ranch to run. You got a thousand pregnant cows calving.” I guess I move too slow, because he adds, “Don’t just sit there like a sack of shit, boy. Get up.” Whitey never swears.

He waits in the doorway while I step in to grab my hat, and he notices the gun where I left it on a bench near the door. “Give me your piece, boy,” he says firmly. I hand him the pistol. He takes the bullets out and puts them in his pocket, muttering, “If you got a coyote problem, you’re gonna have to call me because your gun privileges have just been revoked.” That’s when I realize Mara sent him.

We don’t talk much today. We pull two calves. Then we find a set of twins. I put one of the twins on my saddle in front of me to put on one of the nurse cows in the barn. Keeping track of one calf in a big herd is about all a cow can manage on a good day. Keeping track of two is impossible. If the twins aren’t split up, at least one will get lost and starve to death.