The pending arrival of the bull had required some preparation. Over the years, Brassard had kept the farm’s old breeding pen—a strongly built board-fenced paddock set into the near pasture—in pretty good shape. Still, the morning before Cat’s telephone call, Will and I had gone out to check the condition of the fence. We hammered in every nail head, checked every board and replaced older ones with fresh lumber, tested gate hinges and latches. As we worked, Will told me horror stories about bulls trampling and goring farmers, injuring cows so badly they had to be put down, killing farm dogs, crashing through fences. They were preposterously strong and had volatile tempers—another reason farmers preferred AI.
By the time we finished battening down the pen, my imagination had conjured a new and unsettling image of bulls. They weren’t Ferdinand, the callow youngster sniffing flowers under the cork tree, nor chivalrous bovine Clark Gables. They were monsters, demons so savage they were effectively carnivores. Max’s imminent arrival added to my anxiety about Erik and his van: I envisioned the bull coming to the farm strapped and chained to a sort of a dolly, the way Hannibal Lecter got transported, to be rolled to the breeding pen.
Chuckling, Will also cautioned me about Pelletier himself. He was Brassard’s age, but he had a lascivious persona, liked to chat up women and exploit his profession and his animals for suggestive narratives. I could expect some ribald commentary.
Lynn had moved the harem into the breeding pen while Will and I did the milking, so by the time Pelletier arrived we were ready.
Brassard and Pelletier talked some more, then Pelletier started up his truck again and expertly backed up so that the trailer was closer to the paddock gate. When at last he swung aside the doors to reveal the monster, I was impressed but not terrified. Max had shoulders and chest like a pile of boulders, and a neck thick as a tree trunk, but he did not have horns or a surly attitude. He was not Hannibal Lecter and this was not Pamplona. He clomped daintily down the ramp from his trailer, lifted his nose, then moved toward the cows. He actually was quite handsome. Jack Pelletier walked next to him, holding the rope to his nose ring as Brassard flanked him on the other side. Charged with gate duty, I stayed well ahead, intimidated by Max’s sheer mass more than his disposition. Earnest followed with an extra rope in case of any unexpected turns of events.
Pelletier told me he had a particular fondness and great hopes for young Max, who was fourteen months old and had a scrotal circumference of thirty-eight centimeters. Mistaking me for someone who knew anything about the subject, he rambled happily on, using acronyms and specific measures of health, vigor, muscle-to-fat ratios, and so on.
This was Max’s first date, Pelletier explained cheerfully. Sure, he wanted to pen test the boy’s service capacity, but just as important, it only seemed fair that a bull—most likely doomed to mechanical mates for the rest of his life—should experience the real thing at least once. Six or eight mounts in a day, Pelletier said, would be good for the boy’s morale and qualify him as a gigolo or porn star with excellent career prospects.
The men introduced Max to his harem, and we all lingered to watch. There were no fireworks. The cows didn’t seem to care much, and even the heifers showed very little agitation. Max didn’t rip around, snorting and kicking up turf, but just nosed his way among the girls, mildly interested in their behinds but not aggressively so. None of them seemed particularly focused on the task at hand—tails switched at flies, ears swiveled this way and that as they listened to sounds from around the farm.
I was standing next to Earnest, arms folded over the paddock fence, watching, when hands came around my waist and held me hard. Erik kissed the back of my head, Cat joined us at the fence. At the far end of the pen, the small mountain of Max’s body reared high as he made his first mount of the day. “Attaboy,” Pelletier said quietly, fondly. The cow seemed hardly to notice. When Max came back to all fours, he rested his big head on his mate’s hindquarters.
“And people ask what you do for fun up here,” Cat said.
Erik looked much better—last night, he had indeed been exhausted by his drive. Now his face was smooth and shiny, and though my immediate desire was to demand information about him and the contents of his van, nothing about him struck me as cloaked or caped. His eyes showed only interest in the proceedings, not calculation.
“He took a shower, an ice shower, in your stream water. Your brother is a hunk, Annie! He’s got muscles on his muscles! And then he shaved with your dish soap and a straight razor, which gave me the willies to watch.”
“I invited you to not observe my ablutions,” Erik said dryly, “if you didn’t want to.”
Earnest chuckled. Cat turned back toward the slow-moving commotion in the pen.
Later, Pelletier drove off on other errands, leaving Max with us for the night. Cat and Erik, Earnest and Brassard and Will and I went to the house and milled around the kitchen and dining room, improvising a lunch of leftover shepherd’s pie, leftover chicken, a two-pound chunk of cheddar, loaves of bread from a local bakery, coffee. The oven, reheating the shepherd’s pie and chicken, cozied the rooms with warmth and savory scent.
It was a gathering that would change the lives of everyone there, though only one
