Month: July 2018

I stopped to get gas, watched from whirring pump as two boys emerged from the store, early teens, bikes leaned against the bench outside. One set down the plastic bag he carried – two liters of Mountain Dew, I’m pretty sure – and removed his flip flops (“no shoes, no service”), then mounted his bike and pedaled away. The other, sneaker-clad, followed. I filled the car, paid, pulled back on Main St, and rolled past the paving crew, laying down a fresh course of asphalt. The man on the roller was large, he rode it sideways, he had something clamped between his lips. Not a cigarette. One of those little cigars, Swisher Sweets, I bet. The new asphalt smelled hot to me, like summer.

I went home, tired from killing chickens, really, really tired, and hot as the smell of new pavement, sweating sitting still. I shed my clothes, dove into the pond, the water warm on top, but progressively cooler as I knifed deeper and deeper until my chest connected with the soft bottom-mud. I tried to stay but my buoyancy dragged me back to the surface and I breathed deep of the soft summer air.

But the boys on their bikes, the one barefoot, the bag of soda. I bet they’re drinking it even now.

Two nights ago I pulled home the day’s last load of hay. It was a little after seven, still in the mid-80’s down from a high of 95, the honeyed light of the evening sun washing over everything, me fatigue drunk and thirsty, wanting the pond, a beer, sleep. I crested a steep hill, gas to brake, easy, easy, 8,000 pounds of trailer and hay behind me. And then I could see – first only in profile, a shadowed outline – a man crossing the road at the hill’s bottom, leading what looked like a dog with a length of rope. Except as I got closer I could see it wasn’t a dog, it was a calf, and the man was shirtless and shoeless and wearing an outlandishly wide-brimmed cowboy hat, half pulling the reluctant animal behind him. There was a trailer house at roadside, and a bit of beaten-down pasture, but they were moving away from that, perhaps toward more plentiful feed. The man looked up as a passed, met my eyes, nodded the curt nod of men who do not wave (or men whose hand are otherwise occupied coaxing calves across country roads), and they were soon behind me.

I looked in my rearview mirror, but the bales piled high in the truck bed blocked my view, and soon I was too far down the road to see more, anyway.

Funny thing: This post was written about another calf experience, almost exactly a year prior, in almost exactly the same place.