Something Rich and Strange: Selected Stories (3 page)

The road curved a final time, and the battered mailbox labeled COE appeared. Carson turned off the blacktop and bumped up the drive, wheels crunching over the chert rock. The porch light was on, from the barn mouth a lantern’s lesser glow. Carson parked next to the unlatched pasture gate, got the medicine bag and canvas tool kit from the truck box. He shouldered the gate open and pushed it back. This far from town the stars were brighter, the sky wider, deeper. As on other such nights, Carson paused to take it in. A small consolation.

The lantern hung just inside the barn mouth, offering a thin apron of light to help Carson make his way. He took slow careful steps so as not to trip on old milking traces. Inside, it took a few moments to adjust to the barn’s starless dark. Near the back stall, the cow lay on the straw floor. Darnell kneeled beside her, one hand stroking her flank. A stainless-steel bucket was close by, already filled with water, beside it rags and a frayed bedsheet. Darnell’s shotgun, not his rifle, leaned across a stall door.

“How long?” Carson asked.

“Three hours.”

Carson set the bags down and checked the cow’s gums, then placed the stethoscope’s silver bell against the flank before pulling on a shoulder glove.

“I think it’s breeched,” Darnell said.

Carson lubed the glove and slid his hand and forearm inside, felt a bent leg, then a shoulder, another leg, and, finally, the head. He slipped a finger inside the mouth and felt a suckle. Life stubbornly held on. Maybe he wouldn’t have to pull the calf out one piece at a time. At least a chance.

“Not a full breech then,” Darnell said when Carson pulled off the glove.

“Afraid it isn’t.”

Carson spread the tarp on the barn floor, set out what he’d need while Darnell retrieved the lantern and set it beside Carson. Inside the lantern’s low light, the world shrank to a circle of straw, within it two old men, a cow, and, though curtained, a calf. Carson did a quick swab and pushed in the needle, waited for the lidocaine to ease the contractions. Darnell still stroked the cow’s flank. As a young vet, Carson had quickly learned there were some men and women, good people otherwise, who’d let a lame calf linger days, not bothering to end its misery. They’d do the same with a sheep with blackleg. Never Darnell though. Because he’d witnessed enough suffering in Korea not to wish it on man or animal was what some folks would think, but Carson knew it to be as much Darnell’s innate decency.

“Why the shotgun?” Carson asked.

“Coyotes. I’ve not heard any of late, but this is the sort of thing to draw them.” Darnell nodded at the calf jack. “Figure you’ll have to use it?”

“I’m going to try not to.”

The cow’s abdomen relaxed and the round eyes calmed. Somewhere in the loft a swallow stirred. Then the barn was silent and the lantern’s light seemed to soften. The calf waited in its deeper darkness for Carson to birth it whole and alive or dead and in pieces. Carson’s hands suddenly felt heavy, shackled. He looked down at them, the liver spots and stark blue veins, knuckles puffy with arthritis. He remembered another misaligned calf, not nearly as bad as this one. He was just months into his practice and had torn the cow’s uterine wall, killing both cow and calf. Doris had been pregnant with their first child, and when she’d asked Carson if the calf and cow were okay, Carson had lied.

Darnell touched his shoulder.

“You all right?”

“Yeah.”

Carson lubed his hand, no glove now, and slid it inside, pushed the calf as far back as he could, making space. Sweat trickled down his forehead, his eyes closed now to better imagine the calf’s body. He found the snout, tugged it forward a bit, then back, and then to one side, and then another. Carson’s heart banged his panting chest like a quickening hammer. The muscles in his neck and shoulder burned. He stopped for a minute, his arm still inside as he caught his breath.

“What do you think?” Darnell asked.

“Maybe,” Carson answered.

Half an hour passed before he got the head aligned. Darnell gave him a wet hand cloth and Carson wiped the sweat off his face and neck. He rested a while longer before nodding at the tarp.

“Okay, let’s get that leg.”

Darnell hooked the OB chain to the handle and gave the other end to Carson, who looped the chain around a front leg. Darnell gripped the handle, and dug his boot heels into the barn floor.

“Okay,” Carson said, his hand on the calf’s leg.

The chain slowly tightened. Carson bent the foreleg to ensure the hoof didn’t rake the uterine wall. Darnell did the hard work now, grunting as his muscles strained. They spoke little, Carson nodding left or right when needed. Minutes passed as the leg gave and caught. Like cracking a safe, that’s how Carson thought of it, finding the combination that made the last tumbler fall into place. It felt like that, the womb swinging open and the calf withdrawn. There were times he could almost hear the click.

“Home free,” Darnell gasped when the leg finally aligned.

Come morning, liniment would grease their lower backs and shoulders. They would move gingerly, new twinges and aches added to others gained over eight decades.

“Lord help us if our kids knew what we were up to tonight,” Darnell said as he rubbed a shoulder. “They’d likely fix you and me up with those electronic ankle bracelets, keep us under house arrest.”

“Which would show they’ve got more sense than we have,” Carson replied.

The second leg took less than a minute and the calf slipped into a wider world. Carson cleared mucus from the snout, placed a finger inside the mouth and felt a tug.

“Much as we’ve done this, you’d think it might get a tad bit easier,” Darnell said, “but that’s not the way of it.”

“No,” Carson said. “Most things just get harder.”

The last thing was calcium and antibiotic shots, but Carson doubted his hand capable of holding the needle steady. It could wait a few minutes. The men sat on the barn floor, weary arms crossed on raised knees as they waited for the calf to gain its legs. Carson leaned his head on his forearms and closed his eyes. He listened as the calf’s hooves scattered straw, the body lifting and falling back until it figured out the physics. Once it did, Carson raised his head and watched the calf’s knees wobble but hold. The cow was soon up too. The calf nuzzled and found a teat, began to suckle.

“There’s a wonder to it yet,” Darnell said, and Carson didn’t disagree.

They watched a few more moments, not speaking. The lantern’s wick burned low now. Carson resettled his hands, let his fingertips shift straw and touch the firmer earth as he leaned back. Only when the flame was a sinking flicker inside the glass did Darnell raise himself to one knee.

“Now let’s see if we can get up too,” he said.

Darnell grunted and stood, knees popping as he did so. He reached a hand under Carson’s upper arm and helped him up, Carson’s hinges grinding as well. Darnell lifted the lantern, turned the brass screw until light filled the globe again. He set the lantern down and walked over to the barn mouth, only his silhouette visible until a match rasped and illuminated his face a moment.

“So you’re smoking again,” Carson said.

“Nobody around to argue against it,” Darnell answered.

“Funny how you miss even the nagging.”

“That’s true,” Carson said, and stepped over to the barn mouth and leaned against the opposite beam.

The stars sprawled yet overhead, though now Venus had tucked itself in among them. Though no more than a dozen feet apart, the men were mere shadows to each other. Carson watched the orange cigarette tip rise and hold a moment, then descend. A shifting came from the barn’s depths, then a lapping sound as the cow’s tongue washed the calf.

“Doris was a fine woman,” Darnell said.

“Yes,” Carson said, “she was.”

“Four months now, ain’t it?”

“Almost.”

“It does ease up some, eventually,” Darnell said.

He stubbed out his cigarette. Something between a sigh and a snicker crossed the dark between them.

“What’s tickling your funny bone?” Carson asked.

“Just curious if the widows are showing up with their casseroles yet.”

“No,” Carson said. “I mean none since the funeral.”

“Well, it won’t be long and once it commences you’ll think you’re in the Pillsbury Bake-Off.”

“I’m not looking for another wife,” Carson said.

“I wasn’t either but they came after me anyway. We’re a rare commodity, partner. The one time I went down to that senior center, it was me and Ansel Turner and thirty blue-haired women. One of them decided we should have a dance. Soon as the music came on I got out of there and ain’t been back, but poor old Ansel was in his wheelchair so couldn’t get away. He was remarried in six months. They finally gave up on me but you’re fresh game.”

Darnell paused.

“I ain’t making light of your loss.”

“I know that,” Carson said. “I’ve had plenty enough grieving words and hangdog faces. The sad part I don’t need any help with.”

He was rested enough now to give the shots, but waited. Except for speaking to his son and daughter on the phone, Carson hadn’t much wanted to talk with people of late. But tonight, here in the dark with Darnell, there was a pleasure in it.

“The stars don’t show out in town like they do here,” Carson said.

“I’m not down there often of a night to know,” Darnell answered, “but it’s nice to look up and see something that never changes. When I was in Korea, I’d find the Big Dipper and the Huntress and the Archer. They hung in the sky different but I could make them out, same as if I was in North Carolina. There was a comfort in doing that, especially when the fighting got thick.”

“I did that a couple of times too,” Carson said.

Darnell lit another cigarette and stepped outside of the barn, listening until he was satisfied.

“They ain’t yapping about it,” Darnell said, “but they could still be out there.”

Carson half stifled a yawn.

“I can put us on a pot of coffee.”

“No,” Carson answered. “I’ll be on my way as soon as I give the shots.”

“Back in Korea, we’d not have figured it to turn out this way, would we?” Darnell said. “I mean, we’ve gotten a lot more than we ever thought.”

“Yes,” Carson replied. “We have.”

Carson went back inside, gave the shots, and packed up. Darnell lifted the lantern in one hand and the medicine bag in the other, led them back down to the pickup. Darnell opened his billfold and offered five ten-dollar bills that, as always, Carson refused. They shook hands and he got in the truck. As Carson bumped down the drive, he looked back and saw the lantern’s glow moving toward the barn. Darnell would hang the lantern back on its nail, maybe smoke another cigarette as he stood at the barn mouth, attentive as any good sentry.

J
ared had never been this far before, over Sawmill Ridge and across a creek glazed with ice, then past the triangular metal sign that said
SMOKY MOUNTAINS NATIONAL PARK
. If it had still been snowing and his tracks were being covered up, he’d have turned back. People had gotten lost in this park. Children wandered off from family picnics, hikers strayed off trails. Sometimes it took days to find them. But today the sun was out, the sky deep and blue. No more snow would fall, so it would be easy to retrace his tracks. Jared heard a helicopter hovering somewhere to the west, which meant they still hadn’t found the airplane. They’d been searching all the way from Bryson City to the Tennessee line, or so he’d heard at school.

The land slanted downward and the sound of the helicopter disappeared. In the steepest places, Jared leaned sideways and held on to trees to keep from slipping. As he made his way into the denser woods, he wasn’t thinking of the lost airplane or if he would get the mountain bike he’d asked for as his Christmas present. Not thinking about his parents either, though they were the main reason he was spending his first day of Christmas vacation out here—better to be outside on a cold day than in the house where everything, the rickety chairs and sagging couch, the gaps where the TV and microwave had been, felt sad.

He thought instead of Lyndee Starnes, the girl who sat in front of him in fifth grade homeroom. Jared made believe that she was walking beside him and he was showing her the tracks in the snow, telling her which markings were squirrel and which rabbit and which deer. Imagining a bear track too, and telling Lyndee that he wasn’t afraid of bears and Lyndee telling him she was so he’d have to protect her.

Jared stopped walking. He hadn’t seen any human tracks, but he looked behind him to be sure no one was around. He took out the pocketknife and raised it, making believe that the pocketknife was a hunting knife and that Lyndee was beside him. If a bear comes, I’ll take care of you, he said out loud. Jared imagined Lyndee reaching out and taking his free arm. He kept the knife out as he walked up another ridge, one whose name he didn’t know. He imagined Lyndee still grasping his arm, and as they walked up the ridge Lyndee saying how sorry she was that at school she’d told him he and his clothes smelled bad.

At the ridgetop, Jared pretended a bear suddenly raised up, baring its teeth and growling. He slashed at the bear with the knife and the bear ran away. Jared held the knife before him as he descended the ridge. Sometimes they’ll come back, he said aloud.

He was halfway down the ridge when the knife blade caught the midday sun and the steel flashed. Another flash came from below, as if it was answering. At first Jared saw only a glimmer of metal in the dull green of rhododendron, but as he came nearer he saw more, a crumpled silver propeller and white tailfin and part of a shattered wing.

For a few moments Jared thought about turning around, but then told himself that an eleven-year-old who’d just fought a bear shouldn’t be afraid to get close to a crashed airplane. He made his way down the ridge, snapping rhododendron branches to clear a path. When he finally made it to the plane, he couldn’t see much because snow and ice covered the windows. He turned the passenger side’s outside handle, but the door didn’t budge until Jared wedged in the pocketknife’s blade. The door made a sucking sound as it opened.