The Calf

Two sisters in a convent tend to a birthing cow on the last day on Earth

Olivia Evans is an alum of the University of Michigan’s undergraduate Creative Writing & Literature program. Her work has been recognized by the Hopwood Program and affiliated contests at the University of Michigan. She currently resides in Ypsilanti, Michigan.

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The calf was born on that last day when the TV in the rec room wouldn’t switch from the EMERGENCY BROADCAST and all the sisters sat clutching their forearms through the rough canvas of their robes. The air was like acid on their skin when they walked past the chapel to the barn where the heifer was crying out —  animal sounds of life, brutal and baying. The sister and the novitiate stood side by side at the barn door like a pair of crows in their habits. From inside the cow stared back at them, her black eyes wide and wet. 

The sister, who was old and puckered around the lips, placed a hand on the cow’s side and breathed in deep. She was six weeks into a vow of silence that had brought none of the peace the Mother Superior had promised. 

We are going to have to help her, said the novitiate, and she kneeled in the hay and rolled up her sleeves. She had strong arms and hands that never shook, even when she had said those first vows. The sister remembered the name the girl had taken that day and how she had gazed out past her veil to look upon the crucifix. The blood of it all. The gash in God’s side. The cow’s shuddering breath. The sister with her hands in the mother’s cervix and the way it all felt raw like it did the first calving. Ten years on the ranch and ten years in the habit and it never got simple like she thought it would. I am brittle, thought the sister. I am not going to make it and neither will she. 

The novitiate brushed the hay off her skirt and moved to take the sister’s place at the cow’s back legs. The sister nodded slowly, stood and stepped back to consider the cow again. The world is ending, thought the sister. She wanted to grab the mother by her muzzle and press their foreheads together. Did you know that? That you are not the only one who will die today?

The novitiate’s hands moved skillfully inside the cow as the legs of the calf crested and life began to slowly appear. Feet first. A calf can walk within thirty minutes of its birth. A deep moan left the cow and the novitiate cooed over her, moved to pat her back. He’s coming strong, said the novitiate, and the sister could hear the smile through the scarf wrapped around the girl’s face. Back inside, the others still prayed over the TV set and counted water bottles and canned beans in the pantry. How blessed they were to be here in the barn with the red sun against the dirt where life was still being made. 

The sister was not holy or sturdy, though she had always wanted to be both. A cattle ranch in Colorado had once looked like a door to Heaven. A girlhood marked by suburban saltboxes that smelled like catshit and sweat. Her aunt with the cigarettes in the car and the windows up. Her mother’s house and the stacks of newspapers and her uncle said, don’t crinkle your nose, say please and thank you, and she took her shoes off on the asphalt and let her feet turn black. Her mother who never was one, who had always breathed heavy. The first year on their own they drove through North Dakota, with all the wind turbines and the flat expanse of the land. An inhale came easier there. 

The church had never saved her but it had always been familiar. Even after the fights and the sickness and the skin mottled up the arms, the mother still took the child every Sunday. A pretense of parenthood. In the pews on her knees with the carpet and its specks of red and green. Everyone said the right words then and now too. Rituals to keep them breathing. 

The calf moved in the hay, slick with the water from the mother’s body. He tried to stand. He kept trying to stand.

The novitiate sunk down on her knees, beaming like this meant something. She tugged the makeshift mask down from her face. Her skin was unmarred by the acrid air, her face still pink — not gray like the locals and the older sisters who coughed blood and phlegm into the rows of sinks at night. The sister gestured to her own mask, nodding anxiously for the novitiate to cover herself again. 

It’s just a cloth, she responded. It won’t change a thing. Still grinning. 

The mother won’t make it, said the novitiate. We’ll have to bottle feed him. The sister wanted to laugh. The calf won’t make it either, she thought. She wanted to spit it out, bitter and chiding. She wanted to shed tears for the novitiate’s faith. Instead she nodded. I am going to die silent. I am going to go softly like the mother. And again came the desire to hold the cow’s face, to shut her eyes against the fur of its forehead and listen to its breath go out slow. 

When she was young, on a church retreat, the deacon had taken a busload of kids to a farm owned by a family who walked barefoot through their land. She had watched the man wrangle his herd with a stick of goldenrod. Gentle words. The big beasts, bulls and the rest, all walking strong and soft among the children who gasped at their size. They spent half the day learning how to milk the dairy cows and by the end of it the child’s hands were cramped and withered and she ached for a week. Tense to the heart of her, her body full of cricks and twinges as it was to this day. 

At their feet, the calf started. He had done it — the world’s last victory, standing on shaky legs as he reached his tongue out of his mouth towards the mother. 

Hello. The novitiate shuffled back. There was a moment of knowing as the mother turned her body slow and hurting towards the baby and its wet legs and its head so heavy. A nuzzle and a slow lick across his forehead where a patch of brown fur grew against his white body. The cow shuddered. The cow barely stood. She will go quick and the calf will go hungry because they could not spare milk for the cattle.

Who will remember this, thought the sister. They had built museums and they had brought children to see, to aid in the memory of it — impressions of ancient hands against stone walls and fossils of creatures long extinct. Whole lives dedicated to imagining and re-imagining the worlds in which they lived. Now it is beginning again. A Sunday school question in her mind: Did God make the dinosaurs too? Or will he go out with us? Suddenly the answer mattered very much. 

The calf mewled low at the mother’s body but his legs were already stronger now. The novitiate wrapped blankets around the both of them as the sun went down for the last time and the stars were hidden by the dust and the smog. A third fleece offered to the sister. She had not noticed the tremor in her own limbs. 

We should wait to see if she lets him nurse. The sister nodded, wrapped her arms around herself.  It is not so much that she wanted to be remembered but that she wanted whoever came next to know how it ended. How they spent the last of days bringing life back into this world. They might name that cruelty, or selfishness — or maybe they would be kinder creatures. Call it faith. 

After her mother had died, the sister had been given leave to travel home for the funeral. In the backyard her uncle had sat waiting in his wheelchair, her little cousins buzzing around him. They dragged her to the backyard where the garden had grown wild, and the children tumbled over their own tongues, shot out questions in one long breath: did she know the path in the woods with the stepping stones? Had her fingers ever got all sticky from the tree sap? And the sister said yes, yes, I got it stuck in my hair when I was little. The eyes went big on the little one. You have hair under there? The tallest of the children took a pine needle and poked it to his finger and said, you can catch a bug in this stuff and the body sticks together for-ever. I saw it in a movie. Yes, the sister said. Resin. She walked back with them to the garden with the plastic lawn chairs and the overgrown weeds and the cicadas buzzing loud. Stepped careful on the stone path. Pulled her fingers through the sap on the trees.

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