Stupid Cow

Sarah could hear a commotion across the water. Angry men shouting and the bellowing of upset cows. She’d been sitting on her porch eating breakfast—a cheese and spinach omelet, buttered toast, and berries with cream—and thinking about working in the garden when the noise started. It was hard to ignore, which is usually what Sarah did concerning anything happening at the farm, she being through with the man who lived there. She lived on the island now and had no plan to move back to the place that had been her home for almost all of her life.

He’d always had a heavy hand with the cows. No cajoling or gentleness for him, just harsh words and commands, and belittling of the very nature of the creatures he was intent on ruling. He’d never understood that cows were emotional beings. They can get upset and have a language to express it. They raise their ears or stomp their hooves. They snort. They bellow. If they’re mad and think they’re being threatened, they’ll kick anything or anyone that comes too close. Cows are intelligent, even though most people think they’re dumb because cows are mostly docile and good-natured. But they get bored and cranky without stimulation when they’re treated only as milky cogs in the vast machinery of a dairy farm.

Having grown up on the farm that had been in her family for five generations, Sarah knew an angry cow when she heard one. Which was ironic, because that’s what Tom had started calling her soon after they got married. Angry cow. Sometimes he called her a stupid cow, or a fat, angry stupid cow. The fat part seemed redundant to her. Cows were pretty much meant to be big.

Sarah had always thought Angry Cows would be a good name for a feminist punk band. She speared a cream-covered berry, put in her mouth, and chewed it into a swirl of tart, fat-coated sweetness. The blackberries were beautiful this year. Maybe she’d make some blackberry liqueur. It would be nice to have a glass while reading a good book in front of the fireplace when the weather got cold.

She’d thought she was in love when she married him, and maybe she was at the time. But young women were always thinking themselves in love and ignoring any red flags the universe waved in their faces to warn them of their misconceptions. He’d been young and nice-looking. He was tall; his back was strong and his shoulders wide. His insistence that she needed him to take care of her, and his stubborn, unbending belief that he knew better than she did had seemed like strength to her when she desperately thought she needed some.

Or maybe she got married to give her father some solace in the waning months of his life that his farm would carry on after he was laid to rest. Her father had approved of Tom because he’d been exactly like him: as hard and inflexible as the stones that worked their way up from the earth and had to be dug out of the field so the cows wouldn’t trip on them, and unwilling to give an inch to accommodate any but his own ideas and opinions.

It had taken her a long time to realize that stubbornness was not the same thing as strength.

She scooped up the last bite of omelet with her fork, laid it on the last corner of her toast, and popped it in her mouth. The gruyere she’d bought last week was delicious. She was glad she’d bought a wheel for the pantry.

The bellowing got louder, and when she looked across the channel of water, she saw something large flashing through the underbrush. A minute later, a brown Guernsey crashed through the scrub and scrambled down the muddy riverbank. Cows were much more capable of moving around than people gave them credit for. Probably because most people only saw cows standing in meadows as they rode by in their cars on a Sunday drive through the country. Or ground up and lying on a hamburger bun at their favorite restaurants.

The cow seemed to lock her big brown eyes with Sarah’s from across the water, and let out a long, drawn-out Moo as if she was sure Sarah would understand what she was trying to convey and would get off her fellow fat-cow ass and give her a hand.

Tom showed up a minute later, stomping through the brush and trees with Alfie and some young man she didn’t recognize. Alfie had been year-round on the farm for many years, but there were new hands every season, and she’d been on the island for over a year.

“Come here, you goddamn cow, before I kick you to hell and back,” Tom shouted.

The Guernsey took one look at the men and plunged into the river.

“Goddamn it!” Tom took the cap off his head and threw it on the ground, only to reach down and retrieve it, brush off the dirt, and stick it back on his head. “Where the hell do you think you’re going?”

That was another thing most people didn’t know about cows. They can swim. If the grass looks a little greener on the other side of the water, they’ll go for it.

The Guernseys were left over from her father’s dairy stock. When everybody else had Holsteins, her father always had Guernseys, known for producing high-butterfat and high-protein milk with a rich flavor and a golden tinge because of its high beta-carotene content. Harry, the old hippie cheesemaker who had lived out on Frying Pan Road, had loved their farm’s milk because he said it made his cheese better. She’d once heard one of the rich summer vacationers who owned a cottage along the southern side of the river call his cheese artisanal. But Harry had died not too long after her father, and his son hadn’t been interested in carrying on the business.

Almost immediately after her father died, Tom had decided they should expand the herd with seventy-five Holsteins, and he had slowly started to weed out the Guernseys by sale or by slaughterhouse.

Sarah always felt bad for the old cows. Just another bunch of middle-aged ladies judged to be past their prime and shipped off to get them out of the way. Get thee to a slaughterhouse, so to speak.

The Guernseys were one of the last remnants of her old, pre-Tom life. The life she’d been raised up in. Her objection against changing over the herd went unheeded. Maybe she hadn’t protested enough, but Tom had a way of blustering right through anything she had to say, and she’d gotten used to acquiescing to avoid getting swept into a storm of bickering.

She used her finger to scrape up a glob of cheese on her plate that had leaked out of her omelet, stuck it in her mouth, and hauled her butt out of the chair with a sigh. It was a short walk to the pier. When she got there, the brown and white cow had managed to climb the riverbank and was lying in the small meadow Sarah periodically mowed as a signal to any passing boater that the island was occupied and not a place for vacation exploration. The cow had her front legs bent under her, and her big brown eyes followed Sarah as she walked toward her.

“Mooooooo,” the cow said to Sarah, as if they were old friends who hadn’t seen each other in a while. Which they were.

“Hello, you silly cow. Did you have a nice swim? Come for a visit, have you?” Sarah said this in the happy voice she reserved for cows and small children, as she walked to the cow and plopped down cross-legged in the clover a few feet from her.

The cow had a white marking on her face that looked like a question mark: the white curve at the crown of her head and then a long, skinny patch of milky hair that came down between her eyes to end just below them. After a skip of a few inches, the punctuation mark was completed with a round dot of white right above the cow’s nose.

It had been a rare time of happiness when the question mark calf had been born the season before last. Visitors came to the farm and said it was an omen of good luck, but Sarah was sure it was a sign meant especially for her. A signal that she should question things. What was she doing with her life? Why had she married Tom? What should she do with the rest of the years she had left on the planet, instead of listening to him yell and rage whenever she opened her mouth and said something he didn’t like? She felt as if the universe had sent her a live WTF, Sarah? in the form of the cute little Guernsey calf that followed her around every time she was in the barnyard.

She’d looked up the definition of question in the dictionary, hoping for inspiration in answering the inquiries the cow with the funny marking on her face had brought to the farm:

…A problem for discussion or under discussion; a matter for investigation. A matter of some uncertainty or difficulty; problem. A subject of dispute or controversy…

There was unquestionably a problem for discussion and a matter of some uncertainty and difficulty in her life—no dispute about that—but she was drowning in an ocean of inertia. It was much easier to focus on the cute little brown cow messenger instead of making a decision about the message she was sure the universe, or God, or maybe even her dead mother in the afterlife had sent to her.

They never named the cows on the farm. They were a commodity—a way of life but an income—and she was a practical woman out of a necessity to be one. You don’t name an animal you’ll have to ship off to the slaughterhouse when they stop making you money.

When she was a little girl, on the days that cows were going to be taken away she had always stayed in her bedroom with the radio turned up loud to drown out the sounds of the animals protesting as they were loaded into the truck.

She’d much preferred working in the garden with her mother than helping take care of the cows while trying not to grow attached to them. She and her mother grew vegetables and herbs and had a farm stand out by the road in the summer and fall. They stocked it with the excess produce they didn’t put up for themselves, plus jams, chutneys, mustards, and pepper sauce they canned in their kitchen. They sold pickled plums, apple butter, and cinnamon pears made from the fruit trees in their small orchard. Customers loved the arnica liniment her mother had first made for her father’s sore muscles, and the silky skin lotion she perfumed with flowers from the lilac tree that grew at the corner of the house.

But then Sarah’s mother died, and things were never the same again. Sarah was only fifteen, and the stand was too much work for her alone while she was in school. One day, she came home to find that her father, who never really forgave his wife for having the audacity to die on him, had knocked down the unused stand and used the wood to patch up one of the outbuildings.

Tom had come along a handful of years later when her father was old and tired, and fading faster than a cheap stuffed animal from a carnival left in the back window of a car. With his strong arms, stubborn determination, and willingness to take up the reins of the farm, Tom seemed like the savior she thought she needed instead of the devil he ended up being. Some women were stupid in their judgments of men, and she should probably admit she’d been one of them, but she hadn’t been brave enough yet to get up from the bed she’d made and was forcing herself to lie in.

She named the cow with the question mark on her head Amalea. It meant a hardworking, laborious female with a curious mind.

A reporter from the local news came to the farm and filmed her and Amalea, and one of the networks and a few cable stations even picked it up as one of those cute human-interest stories used to end a broadcast. Soon after, her husband came to the barn when she was there with Amalea and told her that it wasn’t good for her to get so attached to the calf. He’d been jealous for weeks of the attention she’d given Amalea. He said the Guernseys were on their way out; Holsteins gave more milk, and the co-op he was selling their milk to preferred the consistency of everyone having the same breed.

She knew he was lying about the co-op. Why would they care if their farm’s milk was a little yellower and richer than everyone else’s? Even if that were true, she could have sold to the cheesery in Middleton, or to the ice cream factory in Maryville. But now Tom did all the selling and decided where the milk would go. He wanted things his way, that was all, to take everything that had been one way before he got there and change it so he could claim it as his own, like a predator marking out his territory.

Sarah stopped spending so much in the barn and went back to the garden she’d resurrected as soon as she’d finished school and started helping her father run the farm. Sometimes when she was tending the plants, she would see Amalea in the field and moo, calling to her. Amalea would always rush to the fence, and Sarah would talk to her and rub the white mark on her forehead and ponder the question of where her life was leading her. She would talk to the cow and scratch under her jaw and feed her the carrots she always carried in her pocket.

Then one day, Sarah’s patience ran out like water from a leaky bucket, and her inertia disappeared. After an argument that started with Tom shouting about yet another stupid thing that stupid cow she had done, she ended the fight by turning around and hurling a cast iron frying pan across the kitchen with an amount of force that afterward had both worried and exhilarated her. It left a large dent in the kitchen wall by Tom’s head and a dumbfounded look on his face that was quite satisfying to her. When he grabbed his hat and sputtered that he was going to the Moose Hall while she got herself together, she packed a bag, took the boat, and went across the channel to her grandmother’s old cottage on the island.

A week later, he came to take her home where she belonged, he said. She was in no mood for his fake contriteness, which was sure to evaporate into thin air like ice in hell as soon as she agreed to go back to the farmhouse. She’d already gotten the cottage up and running, laid in supplies, and cleaned and oiled the old shotgun she found in the bedroom closet. She met Tom with it at the pier as he came over in Alfie’s boat, she having left Tom boatless when she took her father’s fishing boat to get to the island, a boat being a necessity when one’s home is surrounded by water.

When she told him she wasn’t coming home, he started in on her like he always did, blustering and swearing and waving his arms. She told him the shotgun was loaded with birdshot and rock salt, and that she’d shoot his ass if he didn’t get back in the boat and go home.

He started to yell about stupid cows and fat asses, and women who are the c-word that doesn’t mean cow.

She pointed the shotgun and fired at Alfie’s boat.

“Better get that boat back to Alfie right away, so the two of you can figure out if she’s got any slow leaks you have to patch before she sinks.”

He didn’t stop his blustering, but he left. Sarah was pretty sure she’d shot from far enough away that any harm to the boat would only be cosmetic, but the next time she saw Alfie on the water, he had a new boat.

She’d been back to the farm to pick up things she needed a few times, but only when she was sure Tom wouldn’t be there, like on Sundays during football season or Thursday nights when he went to the Moose Hall to play cards. Mostly she just ordered the things she needed and had them delivered to her cousin Stacey’s house, and then Stacey’s husband Brad would run over anything that was too big for her to handle.

It felt amazing to be on her own and accountable to no one. To not have to walk on eggshells and worry about saying or doing something that could be used as an excuse to verbally attack her, and to not have angry, hateful words constantly flying through the air like a barrage of swarming, stinging hornets.

She’d cleaned up the cottage and hired the Bascomb brothers to replace the rotting wood on the house and the porch, and paint outside and in. Sky blue with white trim for the house, yellow for the kitchen, and pale green for the parlor with its wood-burning fireplace and built-in bookshelves. Her bedroom was blush rose, and she had lace curtains, an old-fashioned three-mirror vanity, and one of her grandma’s quilts on the bed. She polished the old oak furniture until it shined, bleached and waxed the hickory plank floors, and tossed the hand-woven rag rugs over the clothesline and beat the dust out of them.

Tom would have hated it. Which was fine with her because the cottage was her heart’s content, and he was the embodiment of the discontentment she’d left behind.

She loved to sit on the old porch swing and watch the sunrise in the morning or walk around the island and whistle to the birds until they whistled back. She loved to sit on the lumpy old couch—her feet propped up on the ancient hassock and a pot of tea on the table next to her—and read for hours. She liked to just…be…and not have to worry someone was going to come along and tell her she was doing it wrong.

But now Amalea had come to visit her, as if to remind Sarah she didn’t really have the answer yet; she’d just run away from the question.

She reached over and ran her hand up and down the question mark on Amalea’s face, and the cow rolled over and laid her head in Sarah’s lap. She laughed out loud. Cows can be cuddly; that’s another thing most people didn’t know about them. She wrapped her arms around Amalea’s neck and put her head against hers.

She had to admit it felt good to hug another mammal with a beating heart and feel the warmth of a body next to hers. Even one slightly damp from a swim across the river.

The sound of their breathing together must have drowned out the sound of the boat docking.

“You always were too attached to that cow. All because of that stupid question mark on her head. Just what every farm needs—a philosopher cow.”

Amalea jumped up from the ground—as much as a cow can jump up—and Sarah stood up, too. Amalea was mooing in distress and slowly backing away from Tom, who was standing with a rope lead coiled around his hand and Alfie next to him.

“What do you want? I told you not to come here,” Sarah spit the words at him. She was at a disadvantage. She hadn’t thought to bring the shotgun with her. The only weapon she had was her bluff and bluster, which was really no weapon at all against her husband.

“Don’t worry. I didn’t come for you, you stupid cow. I came for the other stupid cow.” He pointed at Amalea.

She looked over at Alfie, who had always been a good and kind man, and he looked down at the ground sheepishly.

“I’m sorry about your boat, Alfie,” she said.

He looked up and smiled. “That’s okay, Sarah. I needed a new one anyway. Old one weren’t worth fixing. I put the repair money toward a new one instead. Now I have less worry I’ll have to swim back to shore ‘cause my boat might give up the ghost while I’m out fishing.”

Amalea had retreated to the far end of the small meadow and was staring at them, mooing her disapproval.

“That’s enough of the socializing,” Tom said, bouncing the rope against his leg. “Let’s get on with it, Alfie. I’ll go at her from the front, and you circle around behind in case she decides to bolt that way.”

“To paraphrase a famous movie quote, I think you’re going to need a bigger boat,” Sarah said. He always hated when she made a joke. He thought women who made jokes were disrespectful. To whom, she had no idea. How had she married a man with no sense of humor? “She’ll never fit in Alfie’s boat.”

“I’m not putting her in the boat, smartass. I’ll put a lead on her and pull her across the river. I sold her and ten more of the Guernseys to Chuck Opinsky over in Meadville.”

“No,” Sarah said. “You can’t pull her across the river. She might panic and drown. Or hurt herself. Maybe even break a leg on a rock.” She turned to Alfie. “Don’t help him, Alfie. Don’t let him use your boat. You know that’s not right. She’ll probably swim back home all by herself later.”

Alfie looked uncomfortable being stuck in the middle of their dispute, but she’d known him since she was a kid and he’d first come to work for her father, and she was sure in her estimation of the type of man he was.

“I think she’s right, Tom. We can save ourselves the effort and just see if she comes back on her own. I doubt she’s gonna swim away down the river, at any rate. She probably just wanted to come and visit.” He smiled at Sarah again. “I remember how she used to follow you around and how you always carried some carrots in your pocket for her.”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake,” Tom said, and he stalked off across the meadow, peppering the air with swear words. “Stupid fucking cow will be the death of me yet.”

Sarah wasn’t sure if he was talking to her or Amalea. She ran after him. “No, you will not take that cow. She’s mine, not yours.”

He ignored her and marched across the field toward Amalea.

She’d had enough. She’d run away and hid on this island. She nurtured and healed herself from the pain of the years she’d been with him, and the sad years before him, too, but now she was ready to put away her fear, be strong, and fight for what she wanted and was rightly hers. And she was starting with Amalea the cow, who seemed to show up whenever it was time for Sarah to get off her ass and do something.

“She’s not yours,” she yelled, trying to keep up with her husband’s long, determined strides.

“They’re my cows, not yours. The farm is mine, the land is mine, the barns are mine, the island is mine, and all the fucking cows are mine!” She was angry now. Years of pent-up anger was boiling up and being tunnel-visioned on one thing—protecting Amalea from him. She hadn’t been able to protect herself for the longest time, but she’d be goddamned if she was going to let him hurt her cow, who had inspired Sarah to finally stand up for herself and escape from him. “The farm is in a trust, and I’m the trustee,” she yelled at his back. “Just because I let you do what you wanted didn’t mean it was your right to do it!”

He stopped and turned around so quickly that she almost ran into him. “I’ll do whatever I damn well please. And if you try to stop me, I’ll put a lead on you and drown you in the river, too.”

She narrowed her eyes at him and spoke in a quiet but determined voice. “You just go ahead and try, you son-of-a-bitch, and see what happens.”

His arm came up as quick as lightning, and a second later she was flat on her back in the clover, and he was striding away toward Amalea. The wind had been knocked out of her, and she was so shocked she couldn’t move. He’d never hit her before. He was a miserable, raging, unyielding, unfeeling, unimaginative, humorless prick, but he’d never hit her.

She heard Alfie call her name and Amalea bellowing from the opposite direction. She slowly rolled over and got up on her knees to look, and Tom ran full tilt right past her toward the river, arms pumping, the rope nowhere to be seen. A thousand pounds of angry cow charged after him, the white question mark blazing on her face.

Then Alfie was next to her, reaching down to help her up, and they both turned to watch the cow catch up with the man who had been determined to drag her across the river. With a loud, clamorous moo, Amalea head-butted him down the rocky river embankment. Sarah heard a wordless shout of surprise and the crack of bone breaking, and they ran toward the water.

He was lying on the rocks at the water’s edge, gritting his teeth and moaning in pain, his leg bent at an unnatural angle.

Amalea had gone back to the meadow and was calmly munching on grass.

“Tom, you’ve gone and broke your leg,” Alfie said, as they scrambled down the bank.

“The stupid cow butted me down the hill,” he hissed through his teeth.

They pulled him up the bank, and Alfie helped him stand on his one good leg. With Sarah on the other side, they hopped him to the boat as he gasped and swore and vowed he’d come back to butcher that goddamned cow and have a barbecue in the meadow.

“You’ll be able to handle getting him to the hospital by yourself?” Sarah asked Alfie.

“I’ll call the rescue squad and have them meet us at the pier. They can take it from there.” Alfie untied the lines and threw them in the boat. “You okay, Sarah? I think you’ll want to get some ice on that bruise.”

“I’ll be fine.” She didn’t tell him that she wasn’t going to put ice on her cheek because she wanted it to look as bad as possible when she went into town tomorrow to file a restraining order against her soon-to-be ex-husband. Looking at his leg, she was sure he’d be in the hospital for at least a few days. She hoped it hurt like hell. She didn’t want him dead, of course. She was a decent human being, even if he wasn’t. She reached up and touched her cheek, wincing at how much it hurt. Yes, a little pain would do him some good.

Maybe he’d need surgery or one of those traction contraptions with the weights. Either way, she’d have plenty of time to go home to the farm, pack up his stuff, and send it to a storage locker someplace, right after she called a lawyer. She was sure the one her father had used to set up the trust could recommend a good divorce lawyer.

Sarah watched Alfie pull away from the dock, and then she walked up the hill to the meadow. Amalea watched her approaching with her big brown limpid eyes, and when Sarah was only a few yards away she spread her arms wide, and the cow met her and put her head over Sarah’s shoulder. Sarah hugged her, inhaled her warm animal scent, and felt a solid, dependable mountain of cow to lean on. Big could be good. That was another thing that most people didn’t seem to know. Cows were big, and sometimes feelings were big, and it was good to be big when someone was trying to make you feel small and insignificant.

Amalea gave a gentle moo as if she knew what Sarah was thinking and agreed with her, and Sarah broke their hug and rubbed the question mark on the cow’s face.

“Come on, you stupid cow,” she said, in the happy voice she reserved for cows and small children. “Let’s go up to the cottage. I’ve got some carrots in the refrigerator. We’ll have a snack and then talk about swimming home.”

She walked up the gravel path toward the house, and Amalea followed.