Muck (22 page)

We are truly aligned, Doc and I. Two educated men against this toucher of teats, this disappointed man. Doc walks to his car. I follow. He places his needle and tube in the boot. Vials of white fluid rattle in their compartments.

“Is that penicillin?” I ask, because Doc will be pleased to know I have knowledge of scientific history, the history of penicillin. From Fleming to Florey. I have read about the miracle that turned mould on a cheese lunch into the white in those vials. Jesus turned water into wine, but penicillin was more useful. I’ve heard people, stupid people confuse Pasteur as the discoverer. “How can you confuse Pasteur with the mould?” I shake my head for more allegiance from Doc. “Penicillin is not Pasteurisation. Some people! What a joke.”

Doc says “Indeed,” as if he has no interest in discussing the issue further. Who else in this district would know his Fleming from his Florey; his Pasteur from his penicillin? Knowledge enough surely for a vet to take an interest in the knower. I accept he must be a busy man, always pressed for time, his services prized. But he is not talking to a Norman or a Bill now. This vet, this science man, is talking to me.

Feet will be expecting him for refreshments. We have a new manor house—a person of Doc's standing would be expected to want to tour it. Do so as a man would tour a place of significance, an impressive location, an architectural site. A man who listens to classical music is a connoisseur of the finer things. Surely he won't be hurrying away. Surely he will do us the courtesy of at least a cup of tea, postpone his next appointment in favour of Tudor Park hospitality.

“You’re not rushing? There are refreshments waiting for you up at the new house.” I use a frown that I hold in place until he stops his fidgeting among rattling vials and rackety drawers. I hold it until he stands up straight and concentrates on me.

“I’ve work to do,” he says.

“Well, there’s more to do here,” I say. There isn’t more work to do, but I will invent work if I have to, just to make him apologise for hurrying if nothing else. He may want to rush on to appointments, but he is refusing our family’s food and drink. He is not going to leave at
his
convenience. He’ll leave at ours, mine. Such punishment might make him more social to us next time.

“A sickly calf,” I say. In the hut there is a sickly calf he might cast an eye over. A sickly calf by other people’s terms perhaps, but not so much by mine. From birth the calf has been unable to suckle. Being a
he
he was doomed for the bobby calf truck but is already a week old and way off making the proper weight. Sickliness has therefore been his saviour. And I intend to be his saviour from now on. I’ll transform him with my tending. Twice a day I feed him like a baby, squeezing his weak mouth to grip and suck a bottle. I tell Doc this in a low voice not for Norman’s hearing. Calf feeding is my job and not Norman’s. I’ll spare myself his mocking that I’m wasting time and effort on a runt. The low voice is also in keeping with the reverence I have for the task. I am the calf’s only chance. I am the nurturer. No-one cares for him but me. I am his Jesus of Taonga. I will save him and I will keep him. He will survive and be so grateful he will become a follower of me. I will give him a proper name to go by because to go by “calf” or “sick calf” demeans.

“He’s in the hut over here,” I say. Holding my hand out as if inviting him into my privacy.

The hut is a tiny tin place: you must duck your head to be under its roof. The floor is a row of slats with narrow gaps between them so piss can flow through or be hosed away with the scours of splattery yellow and scours more blood than digested food.

The sick calf lies on his side, his shaggy brown coat sunken around his bones. He should be gambolling his freedom from the bobby truck, instead he hardly lifts his head. He has doom-eyes, a dark acceptance of his fate, set well back in their sockets as if to protect them.

I lift him so he can balance on his pale, floppy pincers. He stands shakily, my fingers hooked around his ribs.

Doc has covered his nose and mouth with his hand. He lets out a muffled gagging. “Putrid,” he muffles. “Worst I’ve smelt in some time.”

I close the wood door to keep Norman from prying, he and his defeatist attitudes. But Doc bunts the door open with his shoulder.

“Let the air get out through here for Christ’s sake,” he gags. “Don’t you have a sense of smell?”

“I can’t smell a thing,” I reply. Of course I can smell. The stink would sicken anyone. But I have not brought him in here to criticise my sense of smell.

“The calf is rancid,” Doc gags.

“He can’t help it,” I say as a reprimand, cupping the calf’s chest in one hand and petting his bony head with the other. Petting not too hard or else the force makes the head drop.

Doc stares at me. He speaks through a handkerchief. “
He
can’t help it. But
you
certainly can. You can help him by knocking the poor beggar on the head. This minute. This is no way to treat an animal, cooped up in filth, starving to death.”

I give this vet an angry stare of my own. “I’d never hurt an animal.”

“This calf is dying and suffering in the process.”

“It’s getting better. Yesterday he couldn’t stand at all.”

“He’s not standing now, it’s just you’re holding him.”

I want this man out of my hut, away from my calf. Interfering with how I do things. Telling me to kill the very thing I want to make well. I tell him not to bother with this patient.
I
will look after him. “I’m sorry I troubled you with it.” Then I clench my teeth, bow my head and go on petting the head-bones for the vet to become fed up and leave.

But he doesn’t leave. He coughs into his handkerchief and steps aside for Norman to get good footing on the slippery slats and come closer for a look.

Norman waves his hands in front of his nostrils. “You’ll have the protection of animals mob on to you at this rate, boy.”

He says that “boy” like a signal to me that he and Doc are back aligned. The two of them aligned against me. I stay clenched and bowed.

Doc orders me to let go of the calf and let it drop. I refuse. He orders again. “Let it go.” I clench. Doc orders more loudly this time that I’m to let the bloody creature go.

“It will flop down,” I clench. A mistake to say that. I knew the instant I said it.

Doc takes the handkerchief from his face and holds out his arms. “Exactly. It will flop down. It’s at death’s door. The kindest thing is to kill it.”

I let the calf go. It flops, its legs tangled in its legs. Tongue lolling. Its mouth slowly closing, head sinking to rest on its side.

Doc says accusingly, “It should never have got this far.”

“Amen,” nods Norman. “Too busy off with the fairies singing, this boy.” He shimmies his fingers across the air. “Hear him all over the farm, singing, singing.”

That my
me
sounds have reached his ears, have drifted inside his hearing, inside anyone’s hearing except the calves I sang among, violates me, like leering into my private soul.

“I don’t know what on earth you’re talking about,” I laugh. “You must have voices in your head if you think I’d be wasting my time singing when there’s work to do. I have a responsibility to master every element of Tudor Park’s business.”

Norman sniggers through his beard hole the words
Tudor
Park
, and shimmies his fingers again as if the name is too fanciful for his listening.

Doc raises his voice that singing or no singing, someone has to deal with this miserable calf. He himself is happy to do the deed, though he shouldn’t have to explain the economics involved in giving lethal injections every time a sick calf needs to meet its maker.

“Here, here,” Norman says.

Doc tells me to fetch a rifle if I have one and give this calf some relief. Or else he’ll feel obliged to have a word to my father about the rights and wrongs of keeping suffering animals hanging on.

The Duke told I caused an animal of his, of ours, to suffer? Me reduced to Churchill in his eyes?

“No, no,” I smile to Doc. “It’ll be done immediately. My old man isn’t feeling too well today. Please don’t disturb his sleeping.” I assure him he has made himself very clear on the calf issue. Given The Duke is not well, there would be no point calling in for a cup of tea after all. Best he hurry on to his next patient. Doc nods that he’s taking me at my word. He gets in his car and is gone.

Bill has fitted hip clamps to the front-end loader. He has lowered the loader arms and screwed the clamps to the cow’s hips and lifted her. Her hind legs paw weakly at the ground to grip it. Her front legs fare better—they walk but walk harnessed to the one spot.

Norman goes to the tractor and takes from its tool-box a hammer like a skinny dog’s head. With this in his fist he comes back to the hut, gumboots clapping against his shins from his long strides.

He opens the hut door and ducks through it sucking on his unsmoking sore. He crouches in the doorway, his eyes crossed to peer down for any sight of a glowing on his lip. “You’re not cut out for this way of life,” he says. “You’ve got no stomach for it. You don’t belong here with your
Tudor Park
nonsense and singing. Animals aren’t pets. A calf’s a fucking calf. It’s a nothing. You put it out of its misery—whack on the noggin—and that’s the end of the matter.”

He has passed the shame down to me. It is he, not me, who holds the hammer but it’s me who feels shame. Shame that I have no stomach, no farmer’s courage for killing. An old, disappointed man like Norman is going to do my deaths for me.

There must be no great feeling to it, killing. Just a ritual inherited from the tribes of the ages. Even learned men— politicians, judges, Caesars, show little mercy bringing death to the condemned. Here I am baulking at a bag of stunted calf bones.

“Wait. Let me. I’ll do it.” I ask to be handed the hammer.

Norman holds the hammer out of my reach. He speaks quietly, almost gently that there’s no need for me to prove myself on the issue. He’s lost count of how many calf heads he’s cracked in his life. This will be just another.

I insist. Not with words but a determined tilt of my head to show I’ve set my mind on it.

“Good on you,” Norman says, shuffling sideways to let me crouch through the door. We have an allegiance now. I take the hammer in my fist, a heavier object than I remember hammers ever being.

I summon the pull of history to raise my arm. I am raising my weapon to club life out for the first time. My initiation killing. I am history. There is history after all in this place. I am human. I am ancient.

The blow-thud stamps a white circle between the calf’s eyes like a raw target. But one blow only starts the killing. It does not finish it. The calf’s eyes roll back. Breath pops and bubbles from the dying nose, but another blow, and quickly another blow is needed to make sure. Three off-centre rounds dent the skin, white on white. There is no blood. Small hairs stick to the hammer’s sheen.

Norman drags the kill outside by the leg. Too small to bother with the dead cow lorry—we’ll have to dig a hole. He compliments me on my strong right arm. It usually takes him four or five goes.

I breathe so fast I could believe the calf’s breathing has passed up to me and now I have extra.

D
OES
D
OC HAVE A WAY TO
diagnose humans, so close are we to the animals? Could he tell the difference in me now —that I am a human with extra breathing? Breaths that heave in and out of me with each remembering of the hammer head coming down. In my ears the gushing noise of my heartbeats. Can a stethoscope sense if it is fear or shame, exhilaration?

Next time he calls to cure Tudor Park cows I have questions to ask this educated man: does he get extra breathing when he puts cows, dogs, horses, down? Does killing steal more life up into us from the corpse and make us stronger? Or is the extra breathing the victim’s last gasp slipped inside us to poison our memory?

And does nature try to balance the scales? Can it pass on the sickness of the killed thing to our loved ones? The Duke was unwell before but now he is worsening. He lies in an S to smother the pains in him with his knees. He vomits, then his face pinkens back to normal. Then he points to his chest. Then to a fire in what Feet calls his downstairs department. With the pain his eyes become blurred, he says. “It’s like looking under water.” He is cold but he sweats.