Mad Cow Nightmare (23 page)

“They’re witches—witches!” Boadie wailed. “They’re after Maggie and Liz. They’ll take my piggie. They’re putting a spell on us. I got to stop them!” She ran down after the women in black, her arms flailing. Ruth could barely keep up with her. It
was
like a spell, Ruth thought.

“Ashes, ashes,” the women sang, “we all fall down.” And they tumbled in a dark heap in front of the trailer.

Maggie appeared in the doorway, her carroty hair loose in the wind. She grabbed a pitchfork by the side of the trailer, rammed the nearest black butt with its sharp tines. The woman screeched and rolled into a fetal position. The pitchfork attacked a second butt, and a third; then everyone was screeching, the pack running back up the hill. A panting Boadie snatched up the sign and ripped it in three pieces. The women straggled slowly, hollering, up toward the driveway where Bertha had left the church van; Maggie kept after them with the pitchfork. A prick in the butt, a prod in the back of a plump black-stockinged leg. Bertha had lost both of her patent leather pumps; they rolled into a fresh cow pattie.

“Go home, witches!” Maggie shouted, waving the pitchfork, “back to your dens. Back to your cauldrons. Leave us alone!”

The women piled into the black van, Bertha at the wheel. “We’ll be back, Ruth,” Bertha screeched out the driver’s window. “You’ll hear from us again. You can’t win. We’ve got God on our side!”

Mercifully the van drove away. Maggie stood panting, grinning, on the hillside, the pitchfork dangling in her left hand. Liz ran up behind her, crying. Boadie trotted up behind the pair, the potbellied pig in her arms. The pig had grown since they’d arrived, but the old lady wasn’t going to let it free. “One of them tried to take her. She tried to take Blossom,” she whimpered. “They would of killed her.”

“They’re too squeamish to even touch a pig,” Ruth said, gathering her senses. “Now stop crying, all of you. And thank you, Maggie, you were wonderful!” Ruth took the pitchfork from Maggie’s arms—it belonged in the barn, she noted—and hugged the young woman. She felt the return hug and knew Maggie was weeping, too. All those centuries of hate! Ruth hugged harder, felt the strong arms around her own back.

Lord, but it felt good to be hugged. So good. It felt like, well, firm ground under the feet, a cup of strong coffee, the children home, safe, in the house. When Colm’s battered Horizon drove up into the driveway and he jumped out with a copy of the local
Independent
in hand, she pulled away from Maggie and ran to hug him.

“Jeez, Ruthie,” he said, “you got a stranglehold on me here, easy now, girl.” But he was hugging back. His body was warm and solid in her hands. She didn’t want to read the newspaper he’d brought. “Not now,” she said. “Let’s go inside and sit together on the couch. That’s what I need now.”

He scooped her up, carried her over the threshold of the kitchen door. She heard herself laughing like a schoolgirl. She couldn’t help it. Colm was laughing, too. They were both laughing.

Outside by the calf pens, Maggie was singing, “Red is the rose, blue is my heart. . . .” Boadie’s trembly soprano joined in, and then Liz’s sweet contralto.

“They’re singing a love song. Gets me in the mood—how about you?” Colm said, and pointed upstairs.

“Colm, what about the cows? They have to be milked.” She glanced at her watch. Well, she did have almost an hour. It would be kind of nice to ...

“Half an hour, Ruthie, that’s all—a little time-out, huh?” He put her down, circled her waist with his sturdy arms, and moved on through the kitchen. Giving in, needing him, she let him lead her up the scuffed oak stairs.

* * * *

Franny was in jail. She was the only woman in residence, so she had a room to herself. She thought of Virginia Woolf, a woman’s need for a room of her own, and smiled at the irony. They’d taken Ophelia from her: two men, both smirking. “Just for testing,” they told her—”Calm down, go back in your house.” But she didn’t want to go back in her house. She wanted to be with her mare. She’d fought and they’d had to restrain her, summon the cops, who took her to the local jailhouse. What could a woman do against all those men? She bit the cop, heard him yelp, reached for him again, but he slapped on the handcuffs.

The worst of it was she couldn’t seem to cry. It was like it had all happened in a dream. Her precious mare gone and Henrietta trying to summon up bail. But who could dig up five thousand bucks when you could hardly get enough together each month for the mortgage on house and barn? It was a nightmare, and she just wanted her day mare.

She couldn’t smile at her own pun. “Ophelia! Phelia, baby!” she shouted, and the words bounced back from the bare prison walls and struck her in the temples.

She sat on a stool in a semi-daze and vegetated. She was a dun-colored vegetable, shapeless, amorphous, like a rutabaga or a head of loose-leafed lettuce. Or an onion that you peeled and peeled—and what did you have? Nothing. No name. No mare.

“Franny? Franny, love! I’ve got you a lawyer. He’s here with me now. Franny?” The cell door grated open and there was Henrietta, like a summer’s day in a hot pink shirt—was it still summer? Or had a whole season passed since they locked her in here? Hen had a young man with her; his face was a fuzzy peach. Wide green eyes, open green collar to match—at least no tie; Franny loathed men in ties. He might be eighteen—could you be eighteen and hold a law degree?

“Franny, love, I’ll have the money for you by Monday, I’ve borrowed on my Merrill Lynch. Only one percent interest, it’s nothing at all, sweetie. We’ll get you out of this hellhole. Oh my God, is that supposed to be a toilet? Gross!” Henrietta pointed to the scarred potty in the corner. Franny had used it and it wouldn’t flush. Hen marched over and slapped down the lid.

The lawyer’s name was Calvin Bottum. The name reminded Franny of the unflushed toilet. He was a pleasant sort of fellow but too young, oh my, much too young. “What can
you
do to help?” she asked skeptically, when she’d told him her story and he’d taken copious notes.

“We’ll give it our best shot, that’s what we’ll do,” he said with a grin that showed rows of shiny white teeth. His face fairly glowed. He actually resembled an
unripe
peach. “We can sue?”

It was a question. She gazed back at him. “How much would that cost? What good could it do?”

He spread his hands. “You might win in the end,” he opined. “If they find the mare healthy.”

“Well, of course she is!”

“Yes, well then you can sue for damages. Heartache, headache, mental trauma, and so forth.” He was warming to the subject; his cheeks grew more peachy still. “Now if you’ll give me carte blanche I’ll do some homework. I’ll want to know more about this man Ritchie. All I know is he gave blood up in that Canadian hospital—illegally, oh, yes. I’ve done some homework. Without owning up.”

“Owning up to what?” Henrietta asked, her face as plump and pink as a sunset. She patted Franny on the arm—pat pat pat. Franny moved away; she wasn’t in a mood to be patted. She just wanted to get out of here and find her baby, her adorable mare. It was horrible, horrible! To think what that sweet mare was enduring. What indignities, when Phelia was a full-blooded mare, descendant of True Diamond, in turn descended from Moon Glow, over in Royalton, Vermont, where the Lippitt Morgans came from.

“I understand he’d been in western Canada, buying calves for his uncle.. Oh yes, I’ve done a little homework all right.” He appealed to them for approval—those dazzling teeth. “Didn’t own up at customs. You know—when they ask if you’ve been on a farm? And then he gave blood. No telling who has that blood in his system now.”

“Oh my God.” Henrietta threw up her arms—she was so emotional, Henrietta. It drove Franny crazy sometimes. “Isn’t that irresponsible?” Henrietta said, appealing to Franny.

Franny didn’t respond. She was confused. They wanted Ophelia because the mare might be carrying something bad, something spread by that contaminated man who stole her. Now they’d taken the mare to test for that bad thing. Should Franny have let them have her earlier? Was her precious mare really contagious to someone else? She couldn’t think. The words “responsibility,” “accountability” entered her head, words the Republicans were always throwing about and annoying the hell out of liberal Franny, making her feel guilty when she didn’t want to feel guilty.

“Isn’t that irresponsible?” Henrietta said again, and Franny said, “We don’t know that that man stole her.”

“What? But Franny, you said—that is, you were so sure—I mean, how else would he have got the reins around his neck?”

“It’s not proof. It might have been that Nola who took her, found the man, and wrapped the reins around his neck. You don’t know, no one knows.”

“But Nola’s contaminated too, right? I mean she was with that man. We know she was with that man. Sleeping with him, right? The newspaper said they used those infected instruments again in the hospital after that other woman died who had whatever those dreadful initials are—”

“CJD,” Calvin Bottum said. “Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. The only way to prove one has it is to examine the brain tissue—but of course by then the person is already dead.” He grimaced at the irony of it. His cheeks colored.

“You mean, they’d have to kill that traveller woman to test her?” Henrietta asked, and the lawyer shrugged.

He was showing off, Franny felt. He was definitely too young to defend her. Those teeth looked as new and gleamy as a child’s first teeth. She had no confidence in lawyers anyway. It was hopeless, the whole thing was hopeless. Moreover, she didn’t like the inference that only in death could the disease be proven. “Oh, my poor innocent Ophelia,” she whispered.

She held herself rigid, her eyes wide to keep the tears at bay. Whatever happened, she would be stoic, she would cope. “Get me out of here, Hen, I want to see Phelia. I want to know she’s still all right.” She turned to the lawyer. “I want to know where they took her. Find that out for me, will you?”

She had to trust this child lawyer—what else could she do? She smiled wanly at him, and he patted her shoulder as if
she,
forty-six-year-old Franny, was the child and he the mature adult.

* * * *

Colm got up twice in the night to pee and woke Ruth each time— he’d had too much wine. A bad day was his excuse for the surfeit of wine. A house he thought he’d sold had fallen through when the young couple decided to divorce, and then Tormey Leary had gone to visit Colm’s dad at the mortuary, tried to borrow money, and his dad was peeved, and summoned Colm.

“I mean, why should Dad lend him money? They hardly knew each other, they were barely related,” Colm said, coming back into the room after a third trip to the bathroom. “And now this guy wants to exploit him. You know Dad would never get the money back. Not from that fellow. I mean, the guy’s practically bankrupt— can’t sell his milk.”

“Uh-huh,” Ruth said. She didn’t want to think about “bankrupt.” She’d been in a sound sleep and now Colm was engaging her in an unsavory discussion.

“So the guy gets all heated up because Dad won’t lend him the money and the guy goes Irish and starts crying, saying he wants to leave farming, go to Alaska, and start a new life. But he needs money for that. The only thing that saved the day for Dad was a new body arriving at the mortuary. Dad asked Tormey if he wanted to help embalm the fellow and suddenly Tormey had to leave. But he’d be back, he said, sounding desperate for the money. Dad just rooted his feet to the floor and buttoned up his lips. He wasn’t about to change his mind.”

“Your father was right not to lend him money. Now will you please get back in bed? I have to milk in”—she checked her watch—”oh Lord, in two hours.”

She’d had a bad day herself, with those kooky women marching on the trailer, then the four letters to the editor she’d forced herself to read in the local paper—people she didn’t even know, full of unsubstantiated fears, protesting she was keeping her cows on the farm when they might be spreading Mad Cow. Or SARS. When there hadn’t been a single case of SARS in that Toronto hospital when Nola was a patient. Why, she wondered, did those letters all at once start appearing? It was as though someone was organizing the protest. Bertha maybe?

Colm lost his footing on a rag rug and crashed onto the bed. Crack! A slat sprang loose under the mattress and the bed tilted. “I’ll fix it in the morning,” he said.

“It’s already morning, Colm, and I’m wide awake. So fix it now, please, sweetheart, or I’ll be rolling over on top of you.”

“Would I mind that?”

“Please, Colm?”

He got up obediently and shoved the slat up onto the bed rung. It was a fairly new queen bed but poorly put together, so the slats had a tendency to slip out—at least they did when Colm shared the bed. Humming, he shoved up the mattress on his side and secured the slat. The sound of his humming at three in the morning got her laughing. The cockeyed slats seemed a metaphor for the absurdity of her life now, everything falling apart: a dead man, a missing woman, pirated heifers, and madwomen with red circles on their foreheads singing nursery rhymes on her lawn. And now letters to the editor calling her irresponsible, a spreader of disease—just because she wanted to keep her farm, her livelihood.

She felt like Alice falling through the rabbit hole. “Queens never make bargains!” she shouted. Colm laughed with her as he crawled back into the bed. He kissed her on the lips, those little sipping kisses like he was lapping up a bowl of soup or slurping a pina colada.

He rolled back over on his left shoulder and a second slat banged loose.

“Leave it,” she said. “Just hold me so I won’t fall on the floor.”

“If you fall,” he said, “it’ll be on top of me. I’ll keep holding on, Ruthie. You can count on me.”

“I know,” she said, as the bed sloped downward—and she clung for dear life to her lover.

* * * *

Colm brought in the morning
Free Press
and there it was on the first page: WILLMARTH CALVES SUSPECTED TAINTED WITH BSE. The feds, he thought, would be pissed to see it. Though how could they expect news like this to be swept under the rug? He scanned the article; it said little beyond a few known facts. The Friesian cows had originated on a farm in the Netherlands where Mad Cow had struck down two other cows. The article did not say how the USDA knew that these calves had the disease. It ended with a mention of the calves found on the Tonawanda, New York, farm owned by Tormey Leary, and the fact that all the calves, including those on the Willmarth farm, would be taken to the government laboratory in Ames, Iowa, presumably to be slaughtered.