Mad Cow Nightmare (2 page)

As Ruth watched, mesmerized, the woman appeared to shrink into herself, like a genie melting back into its bottle. In moments she was crumpled on the ground, curled up like a fetus. Was she dead? Playacting? Or simply passed out, drunk perhaps? The others, carried along by their music making, appeared to ignore her. The music crescendoed to its high, maudlin resolve.

At the end of the song a tall, lean, bearded man picked up the prostrate woman and, complaining bitterly—”Christ, Nola, and I got a bad back, you want to crucify me, huh?”—carried her beyond the lantern light and into a tent that someone had pitched several yards beyond the trailer. Which made Ruth all the madder because who had given permission for a second family and a tent on her property? This was a working farm, a hardscrabble farm; there were balsam and scotch pine trees in this area, Ruth’s attempt at diversity. Already she saw where a row of seedlings had been trampled by callous feet.

“Look here,” she shouted, and no one looked. Colm’s relative, Darren O’Neill, was pumping up a new tune on his accordion. Maggie was arguing with him.

“That’s not the tune,” she screeched, “that’s not it a-tall, you got it wrong.”

“Is,” he yelled, “is an alternate, you never sung it right, you don’t listen.”

“I do, I do, you got it wrong! Now put down that thing and let me sing it right.”

Ruth marched forward, hands on her cotton hips. She wished she’d had on her working jeans—who could show authority in a bathrobe? “It’s midnight,” she hollered. “Do you know what time the cows get milked? Do you?”

The crowd quieted to a few whisperings, stared at her. Who was this creature come to put the damper on their party? “Now what kind of foolish question is that?” Darren said, smiling at Ruth. “Where you think I’ll be at four-thirty this morning but in that bloody barn over there, milking your big beautiful herd?” He pointed at the red barn that seemed at this hour little more than a dark heap of boards. The moon had slid under a cloud.

Ruth stood there, awed by his insensitivity.

“Aw,” he said, coming over to her, “five hours of sleep is plenty, I never needed more, ma’am, not even when I was a kid.” He grinned into her face.

“Colm,” she said, addressing the infuriating figure in the white boxer shorts. “This is your relative. Please explain things to him. And who gave permission for that tent?” She pointed to the tent where the bearded newcomer was emerging now, stomping over to the group of spectators squatting on the grass.

Squatters. The word came to her. They squatted on your unoccupied land until they claimed it for their own, and who could get them off? She’d heard that about the Irish. Who were these people anyway? Gypsies, she thought. She didn’t care what Colm called them. Travellers like Maggie were surely to be classified as gypsies. Not European Roma gypsies, but itinerant wandering Irish-Americans who thought nothing, folk said, of taking the corn you’d just brought to fruition in your garden, or the ripe tomatoes or pole beans. Human raccoons! Come in an ancient pickup and a trailer painted a canary yellow.

Colm was whispering to Darren; the tall lanky fellow was all apologies as though he’d no idea the music could have disturbed anyone’s rest. “Right,” Darren said, “we’ll put it all away and let you go back and have your night’s sleep. We’ll be fresh as buttercups in the dawn and you’ll get a day’s work out of me’ll make you fall on your knees and shout a-men.”

“And that?” she said, ignoring the bullshit (that word again but fitting this time)—she pointed at the newcomers’ tent.

Darren squinted as though surprised to see it there, a thin plastic structure with tiny holes as though it had been attacked by a swarm of killer bees. He laughed. “Oh, that’s just my big brother, Ritchie, come to take me back to Uncle’s farm. The hired guy quit when he couldn’t take Uncle’s temper, and now he’s short of hands. But would I leave you in the lurch? Aw, hell, you know I wouldn’t— I swear—got a Bible around here?” He crossed himself with a flourish, glanced at Maggie for support; she trilled a few high notes. “Not this summer, not when I promised to stay, and Maggie here’s got a concert next month, up to Burlington, in one of them cafés there. Good pay, too, I tell you, am I right, Mag?”

“Right,” she said, and rubbed her palms together. She gave the younger sister a slap on the bum and sent her into the trailer, presumably to sleep.

“They’re not staying, any of them,” Ruth mumbled, and glared at the yellow trailer, which was clearly profiled now where the moon had swung back into view. Beyond the trailer she saw a second pickup that someone had driven into her pasture, mowing down a hundred new trees no doubt. And then a horse grazing on her scotch pine. She was dumbstruck with the audacity of it. And there was her lover, Colm, smiling, calm as a summer’s night, thumbs stuck into the band of his white boxer shorts. They were all alike, the Irish—on both sides of the ocean. Not like her own rational Scots, who’d feel the weight of an awful guilt to be exploiting another’s hospitality.

“Darren. Please. I want them out by tomorrow night.”

“But, ma’am, the woman’s sick—she had surgery, Nola did, two weeks ago—up to Canada,” Darren said, looking innocent. “You can’t throw her out. It’s just till she recoups, you know, and they’ll be outa here. I give you my solemn promise.” He held out his large calloused hands as though a Bible might suddenly drop into them.

“Day after tomorrow then,” Ruth said, relenting. “Tell your brother to find a place for the two of them. These are new young trees on this pasture. I need the income. And see to it that horse is out of here at dawn. Can’t you see it’s digging up the grass?”

She blinked, and the place was suddenly empty. The spectators, horse and all, had gone, crawled away it seemed, into the dark. Were they bundled up among her trees? Sleeping with the cows? What would she find in the morning? Her trees trampled, her pasture littered with bottles, jars, paper cups, burger wrappers?

She had to have her sleep. She had to be up at four-fifteen. The cows wouldn’t wait. She stumbled back to the house. Colm was there at her elbow, all sweet talk and hands stroking her butt. Not a single apology for this mayhem in her life, this loss of sleep. She loved him: he was good, loyal, engaging, compassionate. He had a great sense of humor. But there were times he went too far.

“They would’ve sneaked over the border, I expect,” Colm said. “I suppose we should call that hospital, but I don’t want them in trouble.”

“What hospital? Why would we call them? What about?”

“Why, that woman who died of variant CJD—you didn’t hear it on the radio? They did an autopsy after she had surgery in a Canadian hospital and that’s what it was, CJD, Creuztfeld-Jakob disease—the human form of Mad Cow.”

Yes, she’d read about it, but oh, he was maddening, using those foolish initials. As if you could reduce pain, death, and disease to mere initials.

He went on with an ingratiating smile as though she were some kind of idiot, wholly out of the mainstream. “Comes from eating the meat of animals tainted with Mad Cow. They’re making a call for a hundred patients who might’ve been infected from the surgical instruments after some young woman died of CJD. Or from a patch of brain sheathing they closed the incision with. And worse, a couple of them donated blood, might’ve lied about where they’d been—like in farms where they’d had Mad Cow. The hospital’s closed down for now. They need those folks back for testing. For quarantining, I’d expect.”

Slowly she put it together—her brain wasn’t working too well at this hour of the night, especially after the rude interruption out in the pasture. Some young woman up in Canada had that incurable disease, and this woman in her tent, here in the Willmarth pasture, who’d been in that hospital and might be infected herself . . .

“Oh! Do you think it’s contagious?”

“Contagious? Well, I don’t know about that. Could be, I guess. But over a hundred deaths in Britain and Ireland in the nineties— you read the papers, right? It attacks the whole brain, makes it look like a sponge, full of holes. Brings on depression, paranoia. You start seeing things upside down. You see things in surreal colors, you hallucinate—see bugs crawling all over the place. It eats away speech, memory. You turn into a vegetable. The worst, they say, is if you’re infected it can sleep inside you for up to forty years—tens of thousands could already have it. And when it wakes up— bango!” Colm clapped his hands together. He was clearly enjoying the effect his words had on her. “Dead in seven days.”

Outside, the accordion made a last trill, and was silent. The night beyond the bedroom window was black, the moon eclipsed by racing clouds. She imagined waking to a pasture empty of cows, like the sheep farmers up in East Warren who only three years before had their herd quarantined and then slaughtered because two animals had allegedly tested positive for a form of Mad Cow that could take years to prove. A livelihood removed, dreams destroyed. She’d felt sick for them.

“It could happen to me,” she said, struck with the magnitude of it, the horror. “Oh, my God, it could.” She flung her arms around

her lover’s neck. “Colm, we’ve got to get the woman out of that tent, back to that Canadian hospital!”

“Even then it could be too late for us,” he said. “People will hear about it. Panic. Jump to false conclusions—you know.”

She knew. She knew only too well. She felt the panic herself. She held on to him, needing solace. But he was already asleep.

Chapter Three

Deep in the night Nola heard voices. She reached for Ritchie but discovered only the plastic mat they’d lain on nights since they left Canada—walking, stumbling, hitching rides after Uncle’s truck broke down. One night they’d stayed in a shelter: that was heaven, a real honest-to-god foam mattress. Mostly, though, nights were spent on the thin mat, no pillow, her head a torture. And Ritchie wanting sex every night, when her head was hurting so bloody bad she thought she’d die. She just lay there and cried inside. If she fought him it could go worse for her.

The voices grew louder, arguing. It was Ritchie and Darren— they’d never got on. For one thing, Maggie was Ritchie’s girlfriend first. Then Darren came between, married Maggie, his own first cousin; and the rejected Ritchie went to her, Nola. Nola with the pretty face—and the ugly scar on her breast. Yet for some reason Ritchie, the older by ten years, felt responsible for Darren, wanted him back on the uncle’s farm. Blood sticks with blood, he’d say.

“Quit bothering me now,” she heard Darren shout. “I ain’t coming and that’s that. I don’t give a good goddamn he’s our uncle, he got poison in his veins. It flows through him and comes out his filthy mouth. Now buzz off, Ritchie, leave me alone. I got cows to milk in the morning, a barn to paint. Go back to the old sumbitch, tell him I’m not coming.”

“You’ll be sorry,” Ritchie said, his voice sounding desperate, threatening, the way it did when Nola crossed him, didn’t do what he wanted, go the direction he pointed out. “You don’t come you won’t get a penny from me and Uncle. Sweet Jesus, this your last chance, I swear to God. The last!”

Ritchie stomped back into the tent and flung himself facedown on the mattress. His elbow hit her aching head. She cried out, but he hardly knew she was there. He was crying. Holy Mother, Ritchie was crying like a baby because his brother wouldn’t do what he told him to do.

“Ritchie?” she said, feeling sorry, wanting to soothe. She tried to stroke his bare shoulder—but “Shut up” was the answer. “I don’t need a mother. I need a woman. And not one who’s forever moaning about her goddamn sick head.” He flopped over, taking up most of the mat, shutting her out.

It was herself crying now, she couldn’t help it. She was the one needing a mother. She’d never really had one, had she? Her mother always pregnant, running off, fetched back only to get pregnant again. And dead after the eleventh child, a stillborn missing a kidney. They’d burned that last one up, like it was a chunk of firewood.

“Quit that sniveling, will you?” He flopped over on his back. “Jesus, I could do with a fag.”

He got up and went out; the night was quiet. Darren would have gone back to Maggie. Nola imagined him lying beside Maggie, arm around her plump body, kissing her, stroking her. Envy cut through Nola like a sharp blade. She had no one. Even her Keeley sometimes kept his distance—afraid of Ritchie, she supposed. Enola, her mother had named her. Turn the letters around and you got “alone.” Her mother would of known that when she named her. Her mother knew it was a Donahue’s fate to spin out her life alone.

Toward dawn Nola was squatting among the trees in her nightgown to take a pee—Ritchie gone God knows where—when she heard a cough behind her. She sat motionless, feeling an interloper here on this Vermont farm she hadn’t yet seen in daylight. There were mountains, she’d been told, but she could see only the dark shapes of cattle in the pale lemony lights from the trailer and, beyond, from the owner’s farmhouse.

“Nola?” It was Maggie, praise be, in a cotton nightie, a burning cigarette between her lips. Seeing what Nola was up to, she handed over a papery leaf to wipe with.

Nola squinted, examining it closely to be sure it wasn’t poison ivy—she’d had a bad experience just below the Canadian border. “Oak,” said Maggie, who knew about leaves, shrubs, plants, and poison berries, and Nola took the leaf. She had always been in awe of her cousin Maggie, even when they were small girls in North Carolina, their families sometimes travelling together through the South, her father doing little “home improvements” like putting on a roof that would come down in the next big wind.

Maggie was the cousin who’d got away—because of her voice, that was. She could hit high C and hold it a full minute. When she was sixteen she’d won a contest, got a job in a local lounge, and begun to save a little money. Nola had envied Maggie for escaping the clan, never thought she’d have the luck herself, in spite of her pretty face, until she met Ritchie O’Neill in the bar Maggie sang at. He’d swept her off her feet and into a shiny new pickup with milk chocolates and promises of escape to a farm in New York State. It was Ritchie and his half brother, Darren, who’d own the farm one day, Ritchie said, for the uncle never married, had no heirs—and wouldn’t Nola be the grand lady then?