Copyright DIANNA HUNTER (Do not reproduce without permission)
The Artificial Inseminator's Wife
I felt, as much as heard, the drone of the vacuum pump grow louder, and I knew without looking that Mother had swung the milk house door open and would soon be marching down the aisle, swinging two calf buckets at the ends of her arms.
She was sixty-six years old, yet her arms-like her shoulders, back, and thighs-still gave the overall impression of strength. Her muscles had only begun to hint at the slackening which, she often pointed out, had so "positively spoiled" the looks of her friends in town.
"It's so stupid, Roxanne," she would say, "when a little real work is all it takes."
I would brace myself then, because the next thing to come was nearly always her mantra: "Thank God, you and I have the cows."
Always the cows. As long as I can remember, I've been told how much I owe them, the matriarchs whose milk has bought everything we own. Daughters of daughters of daughters, recorded in herd management books like Old Testament kings. Sugar came out of Milkey. Milkey came out of Babs. Babs came out of Gloria, and on and on--tracing back to the Holstein-Friesian heifer my Grandma and Grandpa Swanson bought at auction the year they were married.
While I squatted to massage the last milk from a leathery udder, Mother came and stood in the aisle beside me. She was dressed in her usual barn clothes. Cotton scarf. Tall rubber boots. Men's poplin coveralls with her own hand-sewn darts, a feminizing touch she found absolutely necessary. She asked, "Does that black calf still get milk or no?"
I took my time answering, looking down the line of cows to make sure the other two milkers seemed secure, sucking high on udders that still looked plump with milk. I said, "You asked me that yesterday."
She turned on her heel, her movements stiff and efficient. "Excuse me for forgetting!"
She had two buckets in her hands. The right number.
I took a deep breath and let the air out slowly. 1 like to meditate this way- in short snatches, standing between two cows. What it amounts to is a temporary unity with the universe-samadhi, the Buddhists call it-a fact I remember from a Philosophies of Asia class I took twenty-five years ago at a school my father, when he was alive, called "fancypants." As in, "Sending you to that fancypants school sure was the biggest mistake your Mom and me ever made."
Dad didn't just mean the B.A. in comparative religions, but I always pretended that he did. If he wanted to talk about my relationship with Cayenne, I wanted him to have the guts to come right out and say it.
"Anybody who handles cows ought to have a degree in comparative religions," I used to tell him. "Cows are actually highly enlightened beings. They just act stupid so we don't catch on."
Mother untied her scarf and let it trail like a pennant as she fluffed her hair. "What did Richard want?"
"He was just returning my call about that cow I wanted him to breed. Why?"
"Just wondering," she shrugged. "I didn't know if you'd answer it out here, so I picked it up in the house."
"Funny you didn't listen to the whole conversation then."
She grinned, showing a telling amount of tooth, like the collie when we've caught him in some embarrassing business. "I just wish you'd go out once in awhile."
I pulled the milk hose from the pipeline. "With Richard?" I snorted. "The guy who wanted to take me to a Stallone movie? 'A chance to see the Italian stallion in action,' he says?"
Mother threw her hands in the air. An exaggerated doubletake. She asked, "What's wrong with that?"
"Besides being dumb?"
"No one ever claimed he was the smartest."
"It's a little too suggestive. It's creepy, don't you think?"
The heifer's udder looked swollen. Painful. I patted her near the spine and let her feel my hand slide slowly down her side. When I touched her udder with the washcloth, she danced from foot to foot.
Mother stood in the aisle with her hands on her hips. "Where did you ever get the idea there was something wrong with ordinary guy-girl relations?"
I took in a breath. Deep. All the way through my diaphragm.
Sometimes the cows dream during milking. They chew their cuds and breathe, heavy and slow. When I step between two of them, carrying the wash bucket or the looped rubber hoses of the milking machine, my rib cage gets squeezed between theirs. Skin and fur intermingle then. Our breath becomes one breath, inhaling and exhaling the incarnations of grass. Dusty in the manger. Sweet on the tongues of the cows. Sharp and vinegary in the gutters behind them. It's a kind of ecstasy. A little bit like drugs. Sometimes I've even thought it was enough.
"Listen, Miss College Genius, maybe he asked you to a dumb movie, but Richard's no fool around cows. All I'm saying is time's passing, and I'm not gonna be around forever. You need a partner on this farm." The look on Mother's face was tired, resigned, almost sad as she disappeared into the milkhouse, easing the door shut behind her.
I bent down and reached for the heifer's udder, crimping the hoses so they wouldn't suck and scare her as I eased the rubber cups, like calves' mouths, onto her tits. I couldn't stop thinking about Mother's sudden interest in my love life. She'd gone through these periods sometimes, trying to get me to date men, but it hadn't happened in a long time. She must have picked up some hint that my love life had been revived recently. Maybe via ESP or pheromones.
I felt a cold draft. I leaned around the heifer's flank and looked down the aisle as a large-shouldered man in black coveralls slipped through the door. Richard. The snowmobile suit made his body look sloppy and loose, but underneath, his muscles were real enough.
When he spotted me, he looked away. He asked, "Which bull did you want me to use, then?"
The question was so out of order it made my stomach drop. I'd known Richard his whole life. He was our neighbor, a man of habit. He'd been breeding our cows for more than twenty years, and he'd always had the same routine. He would come in, trot down the aisle to find me, then stand, tucking his lank, blond bangs under his cap while we talked about the weather and the neighbors. When he was ready, he'd ask, "Which cow was it you wanted me to breed, then?" Once I'd pointed out the cow in heat-and only then-he'd ask which bull I wanted him to use.
Something was dangerously wrong, but I decided to act as if I hadn't noticed anything. I said, "Commando."
"Sorry," he said gruffly. "No more customer-owned semen."
What was this now? Richard knew very well that I owned ten straws of Commando-ten doses of semen at a hundred dollars a straw. For years, I'd bought semen from different salesmen who came around. Richard had always said he didn't mind. He'd even encouraged me. He'd said, "What the boys in Madison don't know ain't gonna hurt 'em one bit."
I took a deep breath and let it out slowly. "How about Patton then?"
"Can't afford to carry him."
"Bombasto? Ike? Milk Czar?" I named some of Richard's company's better bulls.
After each one, he shook his head. "I just can't move them high-priced bulls. It don't pay to keep 'em on hand when you're the only one around who ever wants 'em."
I forgot to pay attention to my breathing. "You expect me to breed to your ten-dollar scrubs?"
He let out a yip that sounded like an animal's cry-so clipped and desperate I wasn't sure what I'd heard. I thought maybe a cow had stepped on the collie, then I saw the heads turning. One black-and-white neck cranked after another, like dominoes falling, as Richard lumbered toward me with his fists clenched.
I stood up and squeezed between the shoulders of the heifer and the cow next to her. I climbed over the heifer's neck chains into the manger so that he'd have to squeeze between the cows, too, if he wanted to get to me.
He stopped in the aisle behind the heifer. He brought one fist up to his chin, held it there a few seconds, then opened it. He spread his fingers as gracefully as a swallow spreads her wing across the nest that holds her young. I could see he was trying to calm himself. He said "Marie still tells me things, you know!"
So that was it. I'd known Marie was going to tell him about the two of us when she felt the time was right, only I'd hoped he'd take the news more calmly-and not just because he was the only artificial inseminator left in our corner of Bear Paw County. He glared at me across the cows' backs.
I said, "I was hoping we could all stay friends."
He choked out a nasty laugh that scared the heifer. She gave a kick and sent her milker flying. It landed in her bedding, making a sucking sound. All four tit cups started drawing straw and manure into the milk line.
Richard sliced the air with his hand. "Aw, come and take care of it."
He was, above all a dairy farmer-a practical man who dealt with life as he found it. Practicality, I'd come to understand, was a major saving grace. Rooted in acceptance, it's almost Zen.
I squeezed back beside the heifer and cut off the air to her milker. I jiggled her udder to check for milk. The whole time, Richard watched. He stood his ground, giving off waves of angry energy. He made me side-step him when I crossed the aisle to wash the next cow. He drew circles in the lime with his boot and growled, "Don't flatter yourself. This ain't nothing new for Marie."
I kept washing the cows, remembering to breathe. I knew about the women in the Navy and how Marie's passion for them had led to a witchhunt and a dishonorable discharge that scared her into trying to live a so-called normal life back here in Haywood. What I didn't know for sure was exactly how much Marie had found it necessary to tell Richard about me.
He said, "I s'pose it's been goin' on between the two of ya all these years."
"Not until you guys split," I lied.
He nodded. "You ain't gonna satisfy her for long."
"Probably not." I swallowed hard, telling myself I really had no choice but to listen to Richard's poison. He was entitled to feel hurt, even angry, but guys in his position had a tendency to go nuts and shoot everybody. They thought they had a corner on the world's sorrows or something, and I didn't plan to disabuse him of that idea. I wasn't about to confess my stolen afternoons with Marie or my in-between loneliness.
For awhile, neither of us talked. The milkers clucked their steady suck-and-release. Fifty-two beats to the minute.
All of a sudden, he pulled his boot back and kicked the aisle, spraying lime up at me. He stomped out of the barn and left the door open so that I could hear his pickup roar when he tromped the gas.
I finished the last cows and carried the milking machines to Mother. She was standing belly to the sink in the milk house, scrubbing calf buckets. I told her, "I'll need help with that cow after."
Her eyebrows shot into the question mark position, but I hurried away without
explaining. I climbed the hay-mow ladder, threw open the trap door, and entered the half-empty mow. A pile of second-crop alfalfa bales lay there in a mound, and I couldn't help but remember how I had found Cayenne on a pile just about like that one years before. Her olive skin had gone clammy and almost as white as my own.
That morning, Mother and I had heard the warning on the radio. A fast-moving storm was coming out of North Dakota. It was supposed to stall out right over us, once it bumped into Lake Superior.
Cayenne shuffled into the kitchen, rubbing sleep from her eyes, just in time to hear us complaining. "Where did that come from?" she asked. "That's not what they said on TV last night."
Mother slid the carafe from the coffee maker and said icily, "You'd better get used to it if you expect to call yourself a farmer around here."
Cayenne shrugged. She'd had a lot of practice deflecting Mother's verbal assaults in the three years since Dad had been diagnosed with liver cancer and the two of us had come home to help on the farm. She'd handled it all so willingly, I'd convinced myself she was happy.
The day of the storm, I'd helped Cayenne hook the hay rake to the old John Deere. She'd leaned down and kissed me on the cheek before she headed out to the field, hoping to save a fresh-cut field of alfalfa. By noon, the dark clouds had started piling up in the west, and I started baling. The hay was damp. The bales came out packed tight, weighing 80 pounds, the kind of bales my Dad used to call "mankillers."
The first time Cayenne had heard him say it, she'd shrugged her shoulders and rolled her eyes in a mimelike, "so-what" gesture.
Dad had turned his head at exactly the wrong time. He'd caught her antics and my appreciative grin. The look in his eyes shocked me. It was not combative, as I would have expected, but full of sad, foggy resignation. I felt embarrassed. ungrateful. Ashamed.
In bed that night, I whispered that Cayenne should try to be more careful. I said, "I wish you wouldn't ever put me in such a divided position again."
She stiffened and moved so that no part of her skin was touching mine. "Have you forgotten they asked us to come here, Rox? They've never appreciated what we've given up. Sometimes I wonder about you, too.
I'd filled three wagons with heavy, wet bales. I pulled the first wagon into the yard and parked it beside the hay elevator. I got onto the wagon and started tossing bales to Cayenne, who stood on the ground, setting them on the elevator. They had to sit just so, squarely on the conveyor chain, where its steel teeth could grab them and carry them into the hay mow.
The air was close. The bales, as I've said, were heavy. I was looking at how the pile was dwindling when Cayenne yelled, "Heads up!
Up in the hay mow, a bale had turned crosswise, jamming up the bales that were coming behind it. Cayenne dashed for the barn and shut off the elevator. She said, "My turn to climb."
I grinned. It was a standing joke between us. Cayenne had a dancer's body, graceful and agile, while I was muscle-bound and solid. It was always her turn to climb.
While I waited for her, I carried the last bales to the front of the wagon, then sat on the wagon bed and hung my legs over the edge. I slowed my breathing, taking it deep. Seven times. Afterwards, I felt refreshed, but Cayenne still hadn't shown up. So I went looking and found her, collapsed across a pile of bales.
We'd studied heatstroke at Haywood High, so I knew what to do. I half-carried her to the haymow ladder. I made myself like a basket around her. Guided each step. Each handhold. When I got her into the barn, I pulled a bale from the wagon and dragged it in front of the big fan we kept for the cows. I sat heron the bale and pushed her plastery hair behind her ears. I ran to the milkhouse and got her a glass of water. She gulped it down and held the empty glass back out. I ran and filled it again. Without opening her eyes, she took it and drank it and gasped, "This is it, Rox. You've got to make up your mind. Me or the cows."
We talked about an auction for months. I even went to see an auctioneer, but he said we'd be idiots to sell. The Old Actor had gotten into office. He'd cut the milk price supports. The price of cows had followed right into the basement. And there was Mother to think about.
From the hay pile that had brought back memories, I took seven bales and dropped them through the haymow door. I climbed down behind them and broke each bale over my knee. While the cows stretched and craned to steal from their neighbors, I planned how I was going to keep on getting them bred. I had a little bull out of our best cow. I'd raised him to breed the yearlings. Was he big enough to breed the cows, too?
When Mother stepped from the milkhouse, rolling down the sleeves of her coveralls, I said, "Let's chase that cow outside with Ernie."
She looked at me with her head tilted.
"I'll explain at breakfast," I said.
I climbed into the feed aisle and unsnapped the cow's neckchain. She jumped right up and tried to mount the heifer next to her, but the ceiling was too low. When she slid her leg across the heifer's back, her head hit the ceiling. She fell backwards and ended up on her knees into the aisle. I worried that she might have broken a leg or something, but she jumped right up. No blood.
Mother sent her running out the door with a slap on the hip, then turned to me. "Highly enlightened beings?"
"They can't let us find out how intelligent they really are."
"Yeah, well, very funny, but I want to find out what's going on around here."
I shrugged. "At breakfast."
I hurried out the back door and flipped the switch on the conveyor that carried silage to the yearlings. The cow and the bull had found each other. They stood apart from the yearlings, who were shouldering and pushing to get at the silage. The cow was much bigger than Ernie, but he was nuzzling her. He licked her all around the tail, curled his upper lip in appreciation, and flipped his eyes in their sockets so that only the whites showed. After awhile, she had had enough of this foreplay and allowed him to mount her. He was so short, he had to stretch his legs and hop, but she stood quietly, letting out murmurs of encouragement.
My plan was going to work.
The path to the house was icy in spots. The porch door caught on built-up snow, and I had to lift on the handle to open it. Inside, the smell of coffee and bacon hit me, and I realized how hungry I felt. Still, I wasn't anxious to explain things to Mother. I took my time washing at the sink in the hall. My face in the mirror was sobering. Crows' feet and laugh lines made a messy map of my life, a passage that was getting more and more complicated as I moved through middle age. I rubbed on Corn Husker's Lotion and began what I expected would be the first of seven breaths. Deep and slow.
"Hurry up! It's getting cold!" Mother bellowed from the kitchen.
She had put a heaping plate at my place. Firm potatoes from our garden. Our own chickens' eggs with healthy, orange yolks. Lean, brown bacon from our own pig. I took the paper towel she had put beside my plate. I unfolded it. Spread it across my lap for a napkin.
She had taken off her coveralls. Sitting across from me in her daisy-print blouse, she looked fresh and intent. "So what gives, Roxanne?"
I took a sip of coffee. "Richard and I had a falling out."
"About what?"
I let the burnt fullness slide slowly down my throat before I answered, "He found out that Marie and I are having a relationship."
Mother sat back and blinked while I patted my mouth with the paper towel, congratulating myself for leaving the words so clean and spare. After a few seconds, she said, "Why am I surprised?"
"I don't know," I said. Her surprise felt like a fake. An insult.
"Ever since that fancy school," she said, "the biggest mistake your Dad and me ever made."
I told myself to breathe. We'd been living under our own version of don't ask, don't tell, but the time for that had passed. Silence was the same as erasure, and she was trying to wipe out twenty-five years of my life. I looked her in the eye and said, "Marie was the first."
"What?"
"In high school."
"Those 4-H meetings and all that? The county fairs?"
I nodded. "And on and off since Cayenne left. It's been hard. But now that her kids are grown, she's feeling like she can finally afford to be herself."
Mother's mouth pulled into an unsteady line, an expression I hadn't seen since Dad's funeral. "I suppose I should have known," she said.
I wasn't going to let her get off that easily. "I expect that you did know."
"I most surely did not." She looked away. Fixed her eyes on something in the hall.
I got up and walked around the table. Put my hands on her shoulders and started to knead. The muscles felt like stretched wire. I was working hard with both hands, digging with my thumbs.
After a few minutes, she sighed, "That other one was never right for you, was she? "Cayenne? Probably not."
"But Marie. . . ." Her voice trailed off, and she pushed my hands away.
I finished the evening chores by myself. Fed calves before milking. Washed milkers after. In the morning, Mother stayed in her room. When I got back to the house, late, after doing chores alone, I found her frying pancakes. She was spooning smooth, yellow batter from Grandma Swanson's stoneware bowl.
She said, "I suppose you'll want her to live here."
"Yes."
"Well, I'm the boss of the kitchen. And the calves. Let's get that much straight right from the start."
So Richard still won't breed our cows, and I can understand that. Marie says she's going to go to artificial insemination school herself one of these days, but for now, Ernie's got a lot to do. Every morning when Marie runs the silage, he trots to the cow yard gate. He leans his chest into it. Stretches his neck. Weaves from side to side.
I like to stand in the barn door and watch.
Marie is like one of those 1 9,000-year-old goddesses they've been digging up in Turkey. As she stands at the feed bunk, her double-X shirt pulls a little across her breasts and belly. Her eyes are keen, her round face inscrutable as she checks out the herd. She's seen births and deaths and all the uncertainties in between. I trust that she won't miss a swollen joint or a runny nose around here. She makes me feel safe and well provisioned.
She's the answer to our prayers and wishes.
My partner on this farm.
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"The Artificial Inseminator's Wife" was published in Peregrine XVIII (1999) and nominated by the editors for a Pushcart Prize.. Copyright Dianna Hunter. Do not reproduce without permission. To contact Dianna Hunter: dhunter@facstaff.uwsuper.edu. |