“A grown man’s stare is fearsome, but it’s nothin’ compared to a bull’s.”
Pop’s eyes glittered with admiration as he appraised the lumbering animal. Admiration and something like envy. Or maybe it was more perverse than that, and Pop’s eyes shone with a desire to be mounted by the bull himself.
No one could deny the bull was seductive. Spotless and bejeweled, he swaggered, all cool-like, across the pasture. Muscles contorted beneath the black, leathery skin of his back, and there was a bright sheen about him, like sweat.
“What a cocky fella,” Pop marveled. “He thinks he’s the fairest on the farm.”
I could tell the bull was just performing. He flared his nostrils. He huffed with the same pettiness that humans scoff, but his gaze remained trained on the herd of heifers in heat. I’d detected this behavior before in men: the maddening desire for a woman to glance their way, to validate their glory and be in awe. But the heifers simply noted the bull’s presence and moved on. Sleeves of grass floated from their mouths as they grazed lazily, taunting him with their standoffishness and their pheromonal rumps.
I was six when I learned that heifers are only heifers until they birth their first calf. Before then, I’d thought the term was slang invented by my mother.
Those are heifer women, Ma would say, sneering at the girls in town who were younger than her, fresher than her, with names like Rosie-Dae and Sally-May. They look like lard on legs.
When I told Pop about my pre-existing knowledge of heifers, he roared. “I don’t know much about heifer women, but I can teach you a thing or two about heifer cows.”
I was accustomed to waking at dawn, but on that morning, even the sun seemed to dawdle in its rising. Shafts of golden-red light fell upon the landscape, illuminating the rickety silos and rusted gates. In the distance, acres of rolling hills glistened like mounds of fat.
It was early spring, and the wind was still icy enough to crystalize the fields with frost. I’d wanted to warn Pop that it was too soon for the calves to come. I was concerned they would catch a cold. But when I peered down at our roving legs and the watered-down shoe prints our feet left in the grass, I realized how much smaller my strides were compared to his, and I kept quiet.
Pop handled the calving season better than anyone. He claimed he could smell the fertility in the air, that the scent clung to him like pollen. Each year, the neighbors sought him out as if he were an augur, and he predicted each of their cows’ labors with shocking accuracy.
“Our girl’s gonna burst any minute now,” Pop said, grinning, as he led me through the steel doors of the maternity pen. “Just you wait.”
Inside, the heifer shifted uncomfortably on her feet. She had a white speckled body and sharp, ribbed horns—like the illustration in my alphabet book beside the words C is for Cow. When she exposed her backside to me, her vulva was curdled like tree fungus, and she secreted a pungent discharge the color and consistency of sap. If I hadn’t been so transfixed by her beauty, I might have gagged.
Pop and I waited in the pen for several hours, keeping a log of the heifer’s contractions and caressing her through periods of reprieve. Around eight o’clock, the other inhabitants of the farm started to grow antsy. The horses nickered in their stalls. The hogs squealed as they jostled for portions of grub. Farther into the pasture, the deep-throated growl of our lone bull broke through the hubbub, a rumble that seemed to shake the earth and vibrate through the soles of my sneakers.
As if anticipating his cue, the heifer collapsed onto her side and began to contract uncontrollably. Her vulva expanded to an impossible width, unfurling like the petals of an enormous red flower.
“Easy now,” Pop murmured, escorting the expulsion of the fetal membrane. “That’s a good girl.”
Earlier, when Pop told me I was going to help him deliver a calf, I’d prepared myself for decisive action—to be clear-headed, responsible, as mature as a six year old could possibly be. But at the moment of climax, I became paralyzed by my own inexperience. It was as if my spirit had left me, my body had dissolved, and I could do nothing but bear witness as Pop performed a miracle with his hands, returning, over and over, to the monstrous vacuole of the female existence.
Then Pop called my name, and the ease with which he commanded me restored my sense of purpose: “Watch this.”
So I did.
I watched him clutch the knurled front legs of the baby in the birth canal. I watched him pull, then push, then pull again, until the poor heifer’s abdomen constricted so furiously I worried her ribs might fracture. And, after what felt like eons, I watched the calf glide delicately onto the blanketed floor, its body coated in some translucent, syrupy film, gurgling like every infant thing that has ever had its lungs clogged with new life.
Later on, when we’d finished tidying the corral, Pop held me at the top of a hay bale. His fingers, where they combed through my hair, were still slick with amniotic fluid, and his underarms enveloped me in their odor. Together, we observed as the heifer-turned-cow pushed her fat, pink tongue between her lips, and, with infinite patience, licked her calf clean.
“That’s birth, darling,” Pop whispered, “and once you’ve conquer birth, you don’t have to worry about anything else. Because you can conquer every other goddamn thing.”
As he spoke those words, I remember thinking I could finally smell it—the fertility. It was sugary, like honeysuckle, but within that sweetness, there was also something unspeakable. Something ancient and powerful, like undug earth, or the hard-earned musk of my father.
