strains with a push. When she relaxes, she closes them—long, sweet eyelashes that make her look young despite her years.
“Hey, Mama,” he mumbles as he reaches down and scratches the cow’s ears, then runs his hand down her neck, over her bulging stomach, across her rump, down her legs. He wants her to know he’s there, behind her, so that she’s not surprised when he reaches inside her. He lifts her tail, hopes to see what he should—a tiny yellow hoof or two poking out. But there is nothing except for a small stream of blood. Kneeling in the snow, he slides his hand inside her.
He feels the plunge into warmth; tight muscles close around his forearm. His fingers reach out and touch the slick coat of the unborn calf, soft and warm, and his hand glides along the animal. Instead of a nose or a hoof, his fingers close around something slender, and he follows it down until he knows it’s the tail. He yanks on it, hoping to get a response, but there is no movement.
He pushes in farther, until his arm is in past the elbow, going lower, deeper, feeling for a hoof. He’s done it a hundred times before, turned a calf around inside a mother. But this calf is enormous; he cannot find a good hold, and when he does find a hind leg and pulls it, the calf doesn’t move.
Ben pulls his arm out, away from the warmth. His wrist feels the sudden release from the cow’s tight muscles, and his hand throbs as his blood resumes its normal flow.
As he steps back from the cow, he considers what hands are capable of. All they need is a little blood to flow through, and that’s enough to pull a trigger, write a letter, post one up, take one down. He doesn’t make special trips to the store, but each time he’s there, he takes down the letters that Renny tacks up. He hates the feel of glances at his back, the attention his actions attract. But he’s gotten used to smoothing over Renny’s excesses, which is what removing these letters is all about.
He’s got a stack of them now, crammed inside a notebook that’s sitting in his truck. Ray writes that he’s sorry, sorry because he really did love their daughter. It was a funny kind of love, he admits, funny because it made him crazy. He’s sorry that the craziness is all the family thinks existed; more often than not, he writes, they held each other, made each other laugh. He assures them that good times did exist, and he describes them in detail. Rachel and her children shared their dreams with Ray and Ray shared his dreams with them, and they were nearly there, to the place where their dreams would have come together.
It all sounds, to Ben, like his own marriage in the early years. Enough energy came from Renny to make them both crazy. Each had hit the other, and it’s a good thing, he thinks now, that he never thought of a gun. He was about to break, one night, a night he just might have aimed the barrel and felt the trigger beneath his finger. Instead, his hands had curled up in fury. He managed to strike the kitchen table instead of his wife, and he managed to walk out of the house instead of toward her. That night he slept in a hotel. When he woke to the silence and rolled over in the clean sheets and regarded the simple room, he came to a conclusion: he would fight no more, even if it meant that in the end, he would lose.
He’s not yet sure if he has. Now that he has moved away, the solitude and peace he encounters feel more like an upset, an unexpected win. Victory. But some gains are illusions, and he knows he might come tumbling down and find himself the loser. There are the nights, after all, that he misses her crazy banter, her misplaced energies. Though she could be cruel, her love was ferocious, and maybe he misses that most of all.
Renny and Ben are both staring at the cow, although they know that she won’t offer a solution. The snowflakes are huge and circling as they fall on her red hide. A crow squawks, and then there is near silence, quiet falling snow and the sounds of breathing. The cow shifts slightly, pushes, then sucks in breath and moans.
As if in answer, there’s a crunching of tires on snow. Renny begins to pull out the remaining curlers from her hair as she listens to an engine idle and then stop. “Over here,” she yells as soon as she’s sure the vet has stepped from his truck. In a moment she sees Dr. Andrews trudge toward them, ducking his head against the snow. He is thin and tall; even the tan coveralls don’t fill him out. As he climbs up and over the fence, his green eyes flick to Renny and he nods at her, then he looks at Ben.
“Thanks for coming,” Ben says.
“About time,” Renny says. “She’s been in labor for God knows how long.”
“Huge calf, turned backwards.”
“It’s dead.” Renny jams her hands into her pockets. “Would have lived if you’d got here sooner.”
“Cow’s a tame one, Dr. Andrews,” Ben says, as if to offer the only good news he can. “She’s worn out. She won’t give you any trouble.”
“What a hell of a way to feed protein to the world.” Renny raises her eyes skyward and shrugs, directing her confusion toward the heavens.
“All your cows are tame, Ben,” Dr. Andrews says, slapping Ben’s shoulder as he walks past him. “Get up, Mama.” He picks up the rope halter and pulls. Ben pushes the cow’s rump and Renny prods her gently with her boot. The cow rocks and then heaves herself up. Her head hangs down and she moans as she flicks her tail.
Andrews ties her up to a corral post and pulls on thin plastic gloves as he walks to the cow’s rear end. “Let’s see what we have here,” he mumbles, gliding his hand inside her. He closes his eyes and tilts his head toward the cow, as if listening for an answer.
Renny looks beyond him, to the rim of fields, an expanse of grass half covered with white. Bumps of yucca and sagebrush rise above the snow on the foothills that lie between their fields and the blue peaks beyond. Hell’s Bottom Ranch. They bought it the year they were married. Fell in love with each other and with this section of land below the Front Range at the same time.
Ben used to joke that it was named for the place from whence Renny came. No, no, Renny would say, it’s where I’m going. You better believe it, is what he’d say back. Their daughters learned this dialogue and would chime in, filling in one line or another. An old joke, but Renny liked to believe there was a little truth in it, too. She wanted to be the type of person who was a little hell swirled in with heaven. A little ornery to keep everyone on edge, intriguing enough to keep them around.
The truth is this: she and Ben had bought the ranch after the river flooded. Branches and debris were strewn everywhere along the bank. Walking along, they’d found a wallet, a cow’s skull, a beat-up canoe, old fence posts, rusted barbed wire.
“Looks like the bottom of hell,” she’d said to Ben, meaning that this land, protected with low foothills and a slow mountain river, was close to paradise.
“Hell’s Bottom it is, then,” he’d said. “Our heaven.”
It’s been a little of both. She’s closer to hell now than she’s ever been. A daughter dead, a calf that doesn’t move, a husband who doesn’t love her anymore. Heaven or hell? She rests her forehead on the cow’s silky neck and repeats the question over and over. Either way, it’s got her soul.
“Yep, dead,” Andrews says, nodding to Ben. “We’ll do a fetotomy, I guess. I’ll need your help.”
Ben watches Andrews head for his truck and then looks past him, toward the mountains, and thinks he might see, circling above the river, the bald eagle that’s been hanging around. He wants to say something to Renny about it, and also about the young fox he saw yesterday and how it yapped at him—a strange sound, more of a raspy bleat than a bark. He’d like to tell her that he lets the dogs sleep with him on the bed, so that there’s some weight and warmth beside him. He would like to ask her if she does the same thing, and if she responds with a yes, he’d like to make a joke about how the dogs’ situation, at least, has improved since their separation. He clears his throat and faces Renny, who is staring in the direction of the river with some thought that has stilled her. She is blanketed in light snow, a dusting of white that has settled on her hair and jacket. She shakes herself and rubs at her nose with a hand he’s sure is cold. She turns toward him, but looks past his eyes at Andrews, and so he, too, turns and faces