My Gentle Barn (33 page)

“Why, Jay? What was in there?”

He sat there a moment. Then finally he said, “There were heads, Ellie, lots of heads … from all different kinds of animals. He was keeping them in cat carriers all over the walls.”

The next day, Jay began making calls to the authorities—the Health Department and Animal Control—both of whom knew about the place and had been trying to rectify the situation. In between his calls Jay retreated into his silence, but I could see this thing weighing on him. Every so often, he’d shake his head, like he was trying to shake the images out. When he started talking about it again, he seemed especially focused on the cows.

“You have to go back and at least save a couple of them,” I said. “This is just torture knowing what’s going on and doing nothing at all.” Although the authorities were supposedly handling the situation, we knew from experience that the process could take a very long time.

Before Jay went back to the site a couple of days later, he called the Health Department again to check on the status. “What are your intentions?” I heard him say into the phone. “Because I’m going to pull some cows out, and we want to know if you’re planning to shut him down.”

We knew we had to pay for the animals; this guy wasn’t going to
relinquish them for free. But as a rule, animal rescues and farm sanctuaries don’t buy animals from abusers because it enables them to buy and abuse more animals. We’d come up against this challenge before, and there wasn’t an easy answer. Do you stick to the rules and walk away from suffering animals, or do you help the animals because you’ve seen their faces and felt their pain and it’s haunting you? We figured if the place was going to be shut down, it would be all right to buy some cows.

The woman from the Health Department said that although there was not an imminent closure, they had given Manuel specific instructions on how to clean up his place. He was forbidden to buy more animals until he complied. That was good enough for us; we were going to save some of the animals we couldn’t stop thinking about.

So Jay went back and bought two cows. They were both skinny and terrified of humans. He backed the trailer right into our cow pasture and opened the trailer gate so they could come out on their own, and we gave them lots of fresh water and hay. One of the cows—who we would later name Karma—was particularly agitated. All through the night she bellowed without cease. At the first glow of dawn, I ran down to the cow pasture to check on her and reassure her that things were going to be OK now. Then I saw the milk dripping from her udder.

“No wonder you’re so upset,” I said to her. “You have a baby somewhere.” I ran back up to the house and told Jay, and he called the guy right away.

“What’s the deal?” I heard him say on the phone. “You didn’t tell me she had a baby.”

Manuel admitted he had her calf, but that he had promised it to a family for their Christmas dinner.

“That’s not right,” Jay said. “The mom’s going crazy, and we need that baby for her to calm down.”

Manuel protested, saying the calf was already on his truck, and in fact would be on its way to the customer right now if his truck hadn’t broken down.

At that Jay hung up the phone and jumped in his truck with the trailer hitched to it. When he got to Manuel’s place he blocked the driveway, where the big truck was parked. The driveway was on a steep grade, and Jay recognized quickly what was wrong with the truck: if you park a heavy vehicle on a hill and you don’t put on the emergency brake before putting it in park, the load weighs on the gears instead of on the brakes and you can’t shift the truck into drive.

“I’ll fix your truck in exchange for the calf,” Jay told Manuel.

Manuel looked at my gringo of a fiancé and laughed. “Right. You got a deal.”

Jay tied a rope to Manuel’s truck and hitched it to his own, pulled the big truck half an inch up the hill, then unstuck the gear.

“Shit,” Manuel said.

Ten minutes after that, Jay was driving home with Karma’s baby.

He called me from the road and I went out to wait for him on the driveway with Cheyanne on my hip. As soon as Jay’s truck drove in through our gates, Karma began bellowing again. And I could hear a calf’s small cry answering back from the trailer hitched to the truck. Jay got out and led the calf toward his mom, who was trying madly to get through the fence to her baby. Twice the calf passed out and fell to the ground, weak from hunger and stress. But finally Jay led the calf through the gate, and within seconds this baby was nursing as Karma licked and nuzzled her son.

As I watched the calf nurse and nurse, making up for lost time, I hugged Cheyanne tighter and couldn’t stop crying. I related so deeply to this mother; we both loved our babies and were driven by love and instinct to nurture them. But I got to keep my babies; no one had the right to take them from me. Because of Karma’s species, a man had the right to tear her baby from her without a second thought, leaving the two crying out for each other. I wanted to bellow, like Karma had bellowed all night; I wanted to cry out to the world from the rooftop, to tell all who would listen how wrong this was. Karma was only one of thousands—hundreds of thousands—of such mothers, and most did
not get to experience this happy reunion. I vowed in that moment to try, in any way I could, to right this wrong.

For the next two weeks, Jay and I were haunted by the cows who were still suffering in that awful place.

“I have to go get them,” Jay said finally, and he went back to the backyard butcher and brought home the rest of the cows. Among this group of six was another baby, this time not separated from her mother. We now had nine malnourished and terrified cows. They got along with Buddha and Vegan just fine, but their only contact with humans had been abusive. It was going to take a while for them to learn that some of us could be trusted.

I had never worked with frightened cows; I would just have to feel my way through it. I knew I couldn’t simply leave them alone to steep in their fear; they had to get that terror out of their bodies. But as with any frightened animal, I also knew I had to take it slow. Each day, when I entered the cow pasture, the nine rescued cows fled as fast and far from me as they could. Moving slowly and giving them plenty of room, I cleaned up the yard, filled water buckets, and distributed fresh hay, singing to them so they could get used to my voice. They also got to witness how comfortable Buddha and Vegan were with me. Sometimes I just sat in the pasture and read a book. Slowly, slowly—over many days and weeks—the new cows would begin to wander a tiny bit closer. It took months before they would finally come close enough to sniff at my head or my shoe, then eventually to chew on my shoelaces or lick the pages of my book. It was important that I not reprimand them or stop them from any exploration they wanted to do. I wanted them to know that I was safe, and that their own desires and curiosities were safe.

Although we had removed all the cows from the backyard butcher, there were still many other animals who were suffering at Manuel’s
hands, and there would likely be more to come. There wasn’t a day that passed that we didn’t think about those animals, and we continued to stay in touch with the authorities. The Health Department seemed to be staying on top of the situation, and we felt certain that because public safety was at stake—with this guy selling tainted meat—the situation would be taken care of. I hoped and prayed that one day the safety and well-being of species other than our own would be taken just as seriously.

Each time a group of at-risk kids visited, I took them to the cow pasture to see our new animals. But before I led them down there, I spent time preparing them for the visit. I told them the cows’ story and explained how badly they’d been treated and why they were so frightened.

“We need to calm our bodies and move slowly to help the cows feel safe,” I would tell them. “I’m trying to teach them they can trust humans, and I need your help to be successful at that.”

For some of these kids, quieting their energy was a chore—they were used to acting out, being loud—and it took them some time to figure out how to calm themselves and find this meditative space that would allow safety for another creature.

One group of eleven- to seventeen-year-olds from a gang-prevention center showed up for the first time when the calves were just beginning to be curious about me. As always, I prepared the kids for the visit. “If we sit really quiet,” I told them, “the babies might even come over and check us out.”

“There’s babies?” one girl said, her eyes wide with excitement.

“Yes. Two of them.”

We walked down to the pasture, and we all sat down along the outside of the fence. I watched the kids trying to move slowly and then to sit still. Occasionally one of them would whisper at the others to be quiet or stop moving. When the group really settled into stillness,
sure enough, the calves inched closer, sniffing at the air. Then one calf would jump and gallop away and the other would follow. But moments later they were inching toward us again.

After a long while I moved back a bit from the fence and asked everyone to gather around so they could hear me.

“What do you think of the babies?” I asked them. “What words would you use to describe them?”

“Adorable,” one girl said.

“Full of life,” said another.

Others chimed in with the words “cute,” “smart,” “playful,” “beautiful,” and “perfect.”

We watched the cows quietly for a while, and then I asked everyone if they ever talked to themselves with unkind words. “What are the worst things you say to yourself?”

They giggled and squirmed, and then one boy said, “I don’t think about myself at all.”

“Well, do you guys always think positively of yourself, or are there criticisms that you give yourself once in a while?”

After a long silence, one girl said, “Well … I think I’m stupid.”

This gave others the courage to speak, and one by one they admitted their private self-criticisms:
Ugly. Fat. My ears stick out. Not popular. Selfish
.

“So, I’m wondering if you’ve always felt that way about yourselves. Have you always thought you were stupid or fat or ugly?”

Some of them shrugged.

“We’re watching these perfect babies, just a few weeks old.” I nodded toward the calves. “They’re so beautiful. And I wonder, when you were just a few weeks old, what people thought when they looked down at you, just tiny and new. What do you think they saw in you?”

“That’s a hard question,” one boy said.

“I know, it is a hard question. But it’s worth thinking about. You can take your time.” I let them sit silently for a moment to contemplate
this. Then I said, “All you see in these babies is perfection and beauty and intelligence. When you were tiny, what do you think people saw?”

“Maybe they saw the same thing we see in these baby cows. Like, cute and smart and stuff.”

I nodded. “I think that’s right; I think that’s what they did see. So, how do you think you came to see yourselves as ugly and fat and stupid, and all the rest?”

“My mom says I’m stupid,” said one girl, “so I guess I just thought she knew.”

Another girl said her uncle joked that she was ugly, and a boy said the other kids at school called him Fatty.

“So, if we gathered around these two babies and told them, ‘Your ears stick out’ or ‘You’re stupid’ or ‘You’re ugly,’ do you think they would believe it over time?”

“No,” a boy said.

“Why?”

“Because they wouldn’t pay attention to it.”

“Then why are we paying attention to what other people tell us?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well, here’s my vote,” I said. “I vote that we know how beautiful and intelligent and holy we are, just like those babies. And I vote that we not listen to what other people think of us, that we just
know
who we are, that we just know we’re perfect and no one can change that.” I put my hand in the center of our circle. “Who’s in?”

One by one, they put their hands into the center on top of mine, all of them beaming.