“Power went dead.”
“And she walked right through her?”
“Like muck was molasses.”
“Goddamn dumb.”
“As a tongueless Polack. Figured we didn’t get a rope round her pretty quick, she’d be clear to China.”
Standing at the edge of the quag, John grips Nobie’s left hand while he wanders as far as he can into the slime before tossing the looped rope he’s holding at the cow. He tries unsuccessfully several times to lasso the animal, which lows, exhales phlegm, and sinks deeper. With each failure, Nobie’s ruddy, sun-chapped face gets redder. In John’s injured shoulder, the burn intensifies.
“Widen the goddamn loop, Cecil.”
“She’s wider’n a whore’s legs a’ready. She’s so covered with muck, though, I can’t toss her straight!”
When finally he gets the rope around the cow, it slips down onto her neck, so pulling on it would strangle her. “Now I can’t reach the friggin’ thing to get it off, John.”
“Let me run get a pitchfork. We’ll get a prong into that loop, then run it back over her ass.”
“Just don’t leave me here in the goddamn quag, John. I might not be here when ye get back.”
After yanking Nobie from the muck, John gets a pitchfork from the barn. Ten minutes later, the loop surrounds the cow, though only her head and the upper third of her torso are still above the muck. Nobie and John are slime-covered. The pitchfork is lost to the quag. When the two men pull on the rope, the cow doesn’t budge.
“I better run get the John Deere.”
“I wouldn’t spend much time talkin’ ’bout it,” says John.
Nobie runs for the barn, his waders making wet, sloshing sounds.
Kneeling by the quag’s edge, John, watching fog patches move like ghosts over the damp meadow, talks softly to the cow. Working to break through the haze, the sun tinges the grass gold. The organic smell of that world is an opiate to John’s frayed nerves. He daydreams being fifteen years old and working, not with Cecil Nobie, but with his father.
As Nobie backs the John Deere up to the quag, half his herd gathers round. John ties the loose end of the rope to the tractor’s drawbar. He pulls the rope until the loop closes tightly around the cow. “Ease her forward till she’s taut, Cecil. I’ll sit down on her. Maybe keep her from jumping.”
Nobie drives the tractor ahead until the rope is like a tightwire over the slime. Feeling the loop’s pressure, the cow moos protestingly. Still gripping the rope, John sits down on it. “Steady she goes, Cecil.”
Nobie gives the tractor a little gas.
“Don’t jerk her, now.”
Nobie eases out the clutch. The rear wheels briefly spin, then take hold. The cow groans. It lifts up some, comes forward a foot or so, lifts up higher, then, bellowing, falls on one side in the muck and is pulled free. “Whoooa!” yells John.
Nobie stops the tractor. He lets it roll back a little. With the clutch in, he guns the engine victoriously.
John jumps from the rope, pulls the loop from the muck-encrusted heifer, then stands back as the animal scrabbles to its feet. Blowing its nose, shitting and pissing at the same time, it angrily charges toward the pasture, while John, watching it go, thinks if only he’d had a similar chance to save the dead girl.
Stinking to high heaven, they stand in the back yard of the house John grew up in, while the last of the fog lifts.
“Got ye any work, John?”
“Just chopped up that old lightning-struck oak.”
“Any a’ the paying kind?”
“That’ll pay me something come fall when I can sell her.”
“Thought you was doing some blacktopping.”
“Nah.”
Nobie strips off his waders, then, in his skivvies, leans back against the porch railing and starts scratching different parts of his wiry, hair-covered self. “My oldest boy, Eban, he’s done with school come spring. Already got hisself into college. Place in Rochester.”
“Good for him.”
“Got hisself some smarts from his mother, I guess. Wants to do something with computers—make ’em think or something.”
John nods.
“Never used one myself.”
“Me neither.”
“He thinks they’re the best thing since sliced bread. Says I ought to have one for the farm. Keep all my records on it.”
“Maybe ya ought to.”
“I got me an old shoe box works plenty good enough.” Nobie hunches forward, pulls his dick out of his underwear, and starts pissing into the yard. “Once he goes to Rochester, John, I don’t expect we’ll be seeing much of him ’cept Christmas and summertime, when, if we’re lucky, he might help bring the hay in. I’m proud as can be a’ that boy, John, but he ain’t never took to farming and I can’t say his sister do neither. Guess I don’t blame ’em. World out there looks pretty exciting these days and, for sure, there’s no money in farming.” He puts his dick away, then turns toward John. Out on the hollow road an approaching vehicle whines. “We never had us a need for a full- time man before, John, but when Eban goes, it ain’t right his mother should have to take up the slack.”
John throws the last of the coffee he’d been drinking onto the lawn. He hears the vehicle downshift as it heads into the J-curve parallel to Nobies’, then a basso growl as it starts the long ascent up to Ira Hollenbach’s old place.
“If you could see your way round it, John, I’m offering you a job.”
John doesn’t answer.
“A good job. Long-term.”
John nods his head, just to show he’s heard. Nobie’s a fine farmer and, unlike John’s father, a good businessman too. To buy the Moon place, he’d sold, for plenty more than it was worth, the hilly, rock-infested one hundred fifty acres on Briar Hollow he’d grown up on to a real-estate developer who’d put up town houses. He kept John’s parents’ place looking as good or better than when they’d been alive. But work for him? As a hired hand? No way, thinks John. He’d as soon lay blacktop.
“Ain’t that a persistent sumbitch,” says Nobie, nodding at the road several hundred yards above his place.
“Huh?”
“That one nosin’ round Hollenbachs’.” He points a quarter of the way up the hill, beyond the thick foliage, where, glimmering like a beetle in the unobscured sun, a black Chevy Blazer climbs. John’s stomach rolls over. He feels like that heifer, neck deep in the quag. “Second time I seen it go by in twenty-four hours.”
John looks down at the coffee-soaked patch of sunburned grass at his feet, thinking how, from the single pull of a shotgun’s trigger, the world’s turned upside down.
“Maybe after five years somebody’s finally looking to buy the place. Got to be from out the area, though. Wouldn’t ya say, John?”
John shrugs.
“Hell yes! Nobody local, ’specially ones that remember Old Ira and Molly, gon’ move into that place knowing its history. Be like walkin’ on their grave! You believe in ghosts, John?”
“As much as I don’t.”
“Sure. Me too.” Nobie starts stripping off his skivvies. “Course it’s a nice piece a’ land and I s’pose somebody might buy it, tear the house down, and put up a new one, but I don’t think that somebody’d be me.” Naked, holding his underpants in one hand, he nods toward the garden hose. “How ’bout we hose some this muck off, John?”
“I’ll jis’ go up to the trailer,” says John. “Dive in the pond.”
“You sure?”
“Pos’tive.”
