Mad Cow Nightmare (4 page)

All except for the sick woman.

There was a tumble of clean clothing on the toilet lid: panties, jeans, a blue checkered shirt with a bottle of Tylenol in the breast pocket. The woman who had taken the bath had doubtless intended to wear this clothing, perhaps take a Tylenol. Then, since there was no evidence of shoes, she’d returned to the tent. But had somehow been prevented. Did she run back through the kitchen? Or did she escape through the window, wide open because of the heat? And stark-naked?

There was no sign of dirty clothes she would have taken off, or a nightgown or pajamas, perhaps? Or had she come in her clean clothes—and before dawn?

And what about the man she had come with: Darren’s brother, Ritchie? What part had he played in this?

She stood motionless a moment longer and then hollered for Colm. Hearing no response, she raced upstairs, shook the sleeping fellow, poured out the scenario into his groggy ear.

She realized as she gushed on: The woman was indeed missing, the woman who might be carrying a life-threatening disease. A threat not only to herself but to others. At least that was the way folk would look at it. The woman had been on the Willmarth farm, folk would rationalize; therefore she was contaminated. So they’d boycott the beef from the slaughtered bull calves—and worse, the milk that came from Ruth’s cows. It was a disease, they’d shout abroad, that could affect the whole town, the county, the state. The whole country. The world—look at the way SARS had travelled in just hours!

“We’ve got to find her, Colm. We’ve got to know. She was taking a bath in my tub. She ate one of my doughnuts, I saw part of one in the water on the floor. She can’t have gotten far. We’ll have to inform the police. We have to find her. For her sake—and ours. It could mean my farm, Colm.
Our
farm—as you like to call it.”

“Jeez,” he said, and this time he was fully awake. He followed Ruth downstairs and into the flooded bathroom.

“Blood,” he said, squinting down at the windowsill, screwing up his face. “We’d better call headquarters.”

Chapter Four

The whole county, it seemed, had heard about the missing woman and what she stood for. And the man who’d brought her here, gone as well. “Plague,” said Ruth’s older daughter, marching into the barn next morning in the usual getup: long flowered rayon skirt cut on the bias, bare, unshaved legs, and something that looked like a nightgown draped over the whole. But leaving the two darling grandkids in the car as though they might catch something, Ruth thought, as though already Ruth herself was contagious.

“Damn it, Sharon, we don’t know she has something, you’ll just make things worse using that word.” Though hadn’t she used it herself, just yesterday?

“Plague,” Sharon said again, and choked out a list from AIDS to zebra mussels.

“She was in that Canadian hospital,” said Sharon, who listened to Vermont Public Radio each morning and habitually quoted the bad news to her mother on the barn phone. Though this morning she’d felt compelled to come herself to tell the tale, as though Ruth didn’t know the woman had bathed in her own tub and then disappeared—in such a hurry she’d left her clean clothes and the Tylenol. “The hospital authorities want the woman back. Good Lord—she was Colm’s relative, right?”

“Wrong. Darren was his relative—the brother Ritchie, too, of course. Nola was the girlfriend, a traveller—from the accent, a southerner, though they have some language of their own, Colm told me, something called Cant—a form of Gaelic. Travellers are like gypsies, you know, the lowest caste in Ireland—the one that gets spit on and blamed for anything that goes wrong. They’re sort of like the homeless here, but they hang out in clans. And all related in each clan, it seems—at least Nola and Maggie are. Colm said they’re double first cousins, can you imagine? That means there’s a relationship between kids born to siblings within one family who marry siblings within another.”

“Whoa. Far out.” Sharon had met Maggie, had even heard her sing on the village green, an impromptu noon concert with Darren on the accordion and Maggie in a flowing Indian skirt and sparkly top that barely hid her pendulous (as Sharon described them) breasts. Stuck in the ground beside them was a placard announcing her upcoming stint in a Burlington café. “But who’s going to listen to her now in that café?”

“Oh come on. We don’t even know if Nola has it, the CID.”

“CJD, Mother. CID is a police department in London. You’d better learn the right initials.”

“Oh, I know that. Don’t torment me, Sharon. But I’m thinking now it’s not as suspicious as Colm and I first thought. The poor woman had brain surgery, that’s all. She was exhausted, I figure. She was taking a bath and heard a noise. She thought she’d be hollered at for taking a bath, so she took off through the window. Pure and simple, no hanky-panky.”

“And what about that blood the police found outside in the grass? I heard it on the radio. I mean, how do you account for that?”

“On the grass?” Ruth hadn’t heard about that. The police had arrived with a crime lab technician, after Colm, who worked part-time for the Branbury police, summoned them at five-thirty in the morning. The technician had photographed the soapy, watery mess, donned rubber gloves, and gathered up hairs and fibers; the police stretched a yellow crime scene tape around the whole kitchen. When Ruth complained she couldn’t make coffee or eat breakfast, they enclosed only the bathroom. After all, the woman wasn’t dead, was she? She was only missing. Wasn’t she?

The affair was sounding more ominous now. She slathered the barn floor with a mop as though it were the bathroom floor—no blood, but shit and slobber and bits of hay, making for easy sliding. More than once Ruth had gone head over teakettle on that floor and landed on her butt. Darren was okay with the herding, milking, and planting, but he was no hand when it came to cleaning; he let Ruth do that. And Maggie wouldn’t put a foot in the barn. The most her soft white hands could seem to do was pull a few weeds. At least the grandmother and young sister volunteered to feed the calves—in particular, the two Friesian calves Ruth had purchased, at Colm’s urging, from the uncle back on the Tonawanda farm. The uncle had given her a “good price,” and Darren had brought them to Vermont in June.

Today, though, Maggie was keening as though the traveller woman really was dead. Keening was a business with the Irish, Ruth had heard: folk often hired professional keeners for their wakes and funerals. Calamity, it seemed, brought traveller clans together; they revelled in one another’s mortality.

“Cripes,” Sharon said, going to the barn door, “it sounds like a whole army of wailers out there.” Mother and daughter listened as the noise rose to a crescendo, trembled in the air like the eerie background music of a sci-fi film, and then fell, a long, cascading waterfall of potential disaster.

So they might have keened in medieval times, Ruth thought: to mourn the dead—or near dead—of the Black Death.

“Where did the keeners come from—at least twenty women and children?”—Sharon asked, but Ruth couldn’t answer. It was as if they had been waiting in the woods and hills for the kill, and now, a ragtag army in colorful cast-off clothing, they’d converged on Ruth’s pasture to warn of dire things to come.

“Go out and see. You’d fit right in, in that outfit, Sharon,” and Sharon laughed. Sharon danced to her own tune, she didn’t care how she looked—although her husband, Jack, had lately taken to making comments that Sharon would repeat, giggling, to her children: “It’s parents’ day at the Quarry Hill Day Care, and Mother will show up in a
loverly
new lace curtain.” Though that wasn’t really so funny: Sharon
had worn
a curtain to Town Meeting day when she was pregnant with three-year-old Willa, and even got compliments from her peers.

“I’ll go down there then. I want to see for myself what’s going on. I’m worried about you, Mother. They said on VPR—”

“What? They mentioned me? On public radio?”

“This is your farm, right? They said—” The barn phone rang and Sharon pointed a finger at Ruth. “Pick it up, Mom, and hear what they have to say. You’ve got to face it. Take your stand, prepare your defense.”

“What are answering machines for?” said Ruth, and went on swabbing the floor. A sick heifer mewled in the rear of the building. It had foot rot. This was all the illness she was prepared to deal with right now.

“Even domestic cats get CJD,” Sharon announced when the phone had completed its fifth ring. “Up in Canada, elk and deer. In Britain, cows, pigs, and sheep—you saw that newscast a couple of years ago, you were at my house. It was after I served that garlic cream soup we all got sick from. A British cow shedding weight, drooling, acting crazy—off balance, waving its head, threatening the vet. Then boom, dead as a doornail! All in a matter of hours.”

“I wish you wouldn’t say that: dead as a doornail. What
is
a doornail anyway?”

“Then that young woman in Wales—I saw the documentary. She took to sitting alone on her bed, staring out the window for hours at a time. The doctors called it a nervous breakdown, but two years later, there she was, paranoid and incontinent. A month before she died she went blind and couldn’t talk or eat.”

“Enough!” cried Ruth, forking hay into the sick heifer’s stall. “That was ten years ago. They’ve got a handle on it now. Nothing in the news about all that for a dog’s age.”

“That’s just it,” Sharon went on, “the dogs—” The phone rang again and Sharon stopped in midsentence to pick it up, listen, and smile triumphantly as though the caller had just corroborated her story. “One moment, please,” she said, and held it out, a hand over the mouthpiece. “It’s those women down the road, the ones with the Morgan horses. What do you call them?”

“Lippitt. Lippitt Morgans. The original Vermont Morgan. More rugged, ridable, and lovable than your government Morgan,” Ruth said, quoting her neighbors. She wiped her hands on her jeans and took the phone. She liked those two women, had been witness to their civil union. They’d come from Poughkeepsie, New York, to have a ceremony when the new law passed, decided to settle on the Larocque farm and raise their horses after old Lucien went to live with his daughter.

This time, though, it wasn’t about coming over for a cup of coffee, exchanging pleasantries, or the latest on how to keep raccoons out of the corn. Franny and Henrietta had been listening to public radio. They were worried about their horses. They had four full-blooded Lippitts; someone had just called to cancel a scheduled breeding with their mare.

“But why?” cried Ruth, all innocence—though she knew it was because of the missing woman. “There hasn’t been a single instance of Mad Cow in America. Or in any horse anywhere, for heaven sake. Tell them that!”

“Those sheep,” Franny said, reminding her of the destroyed Vermont sheep.

“And never proven. Never!” cried Ruth, her back to the wall. “And sheep don’t get the actual Mad Cow. Look, Franny, let’s be rational about this. Nothing’s been proven about this traveller woman, either. Even if she has that disease, it doesn’t mean she’s contagious. You have to eat bad beef—the nervous system of infected cows. Let’s not panic till we find her.”

“Even then it could take days, weeks—months,” Franny said in her low, croaky voice. Franny had been a summer stock actress before she aged and expanded and could no longer reap the bittersweet roles. Now she rode a horse as stout as herself and leaped up and down off her favorite mare as nimbly as a circus performer.

“Franny,” Sharon said, grabbing the phone, “be reasonable. This woman was on the property exactly twenty-four hours. Mother never saw her before last night, never even heard of her, right, Mother?”

Ruth nodded and shrugged. She felt helpless—something like the embarrassed bare-assed sunbather she’d seen in a cartoon, greeting the UPS man. “The poor woman took a bath, which Mother has decontaminated—why, she used a whole box of Lysol on it after the police did their thing, right, Mother?”

No, that wasn’t right. Ruth hadn’t even touched it. The crime lab technician took all the samples. But Ruth let it go for now. She heard Franny’s tragic voice crescendoing: her beloved horses, her bucolic life-in-the-country, her partner’s health—for Henrietta had some mysterious ailment from a dirty needle in her experimental days, and could fall an easy victim to any modern scourge. Already the couple was anticipating the West Nile virus since an infected bird had been found just seventy miles north in Franklin County.

Ruth snatched back the phone. “What I’m trying to tell you, Franny, is there’s nothing I can do. I have thirty-four cows. Don’t you think they’re in greater danger than your four horses? It’s called Mad Cow for a reason, you know. Look, I could be the victim here. Do you think I’ve had a minute’s sleep all night, worrying about my livelihood?”

“But that’s why I called—to cheer you up!” Franny shouted from a half mile down the road. “I’ve been worrying about you, Ruth. I just wanted to tell you we’re here for you. You can come over anytime and we’ll have tea and commiserate. I have some anti-stress tea, I want you to try it.”

“Thank you,” said Ruth, and hung up, though she wasn’t sure what kind of reception she’d get if she did appear on their doorstep. Would they spray the contents of a can of Lysol on her?

Ruth was waving good-bye to Sharon, who’d been summoned by a sibling fight in the car, when the phone rang again—eight times. It was Bertha Willmarth, her born-again ex-sister-in-law, who called Ruth twice a week as a kind of atonement for her brother’s abdication of wife and farm. Ruth held the receiver away from her ear and grimaced at the sick heifer, who, as if in sympathy, was making a gagging sound.

Bertha and her peers had been researching in the local library and come up with some horrors that “You ought to know, Ruth. Listen: ‘Mad cow is the cer-reepiest of all the, uh, pri-on diseases. It makes the Ebola virus look like chicken pox!’ That’s a direct quote from a piece in
Time.
Prepare, Ruth, prepare! If you’d come to my church we’d help. You know we’d be glad to have you.” Her voice rose in pitch and volume; she began quoting the Bible: “ ‘I am come not to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance.’“