The Truck

Parish

Chapter 1: The Truck

The truck is a 2014 Ford F-250, white, or what was white before ten years of parish roads turned it the color of the work it does, which is the color of dust over shell over gravel over mud, the particular khaki of Concordia Parish ground cover that is neither soil nor stone but something between, something alluvial, something the river left behind when it retreated to its engineered channel and the parish built its roads on top of what the water had deposited. The truck has 214,000 miles on it. Clem knows this because the odometer works and because he watches it the way a man watches a number that measures his life's distance traveled, which is to say not obsessively but with the peripheral attention of someone who understands that the number is a fact and the fact is a marker and the marker measures something more than miles.

The veterinary box sits in the bed. Custom-built by Thibodaux Welding in Ferriday, aluminum, six compartments on the right side, four on the left, a top compartment that opens upward on gas struts, and a refrigerated unit powered by the truck's electrical system that keeps the vaccines at temperature. The box weighs 340 pounds empty. Loaded, closer to 500. Clem had the suspension upgraded when he had the box installed, heavy-duty leaf springs in the rear and new shocks all around, because the box is not optional equipment, the box is the practice, and the practice must ride level on roads that do not cooperate with the concept of level.

He opens the compartments in order every morning. Right side, top to bottom: syringes and needles, sorted by gauge; injectable antibiotics, the bottles standing in foam cutouts he carved himself with a bread knife; anti-inflammatories, banamine and dexamethasone and the meloxicam he uses for the small animals when they come to him; and the reproductive supplies, the palpation sleeves and the lubricant and the CIDR devices for synchronizing estrus in cattle, the hormones that tell a cow's body when to cycle, which is to say the hormones that tell a cow's body what its body already knows but has been asked to know on a schedule. Left side: hoof-care instruments, the nippers and the rasp and the hoof knife, each in its leather roll; surgical instruments, wrapped in autoclave pouches he processes at his clinic on Tuesdays and Fridays; suture material; and the miscellaneous compartment, which holds everything that does not fit a category, the things that twenty-eight years of practice have taught him to carry because the one time you do not carry them is the time you need them, and the needing of the thing you did not carry is the veterinarian's specific punishment for insufficient preparation.

The top compartment holds the large-animal restraint equipment. Halters in three sizes. Lead ropes, cotton and nylon. A nose tong. A twitch. The OB chains, stainless steel, cold in the morning and warm by afternoon, the chains he wraps around a calf's legs when the calf is stuck and the cow is tired and the only way out is through, which is the only way out of most things in the parish.

The refrigerated unit hums. It is the sound of the truck at rest, the sound Clem hears when he sits in the cab with the engine off and the windows down and the unit running, keeping the Bovi-Shield and the Ultrabac at 36 degrees while the cab climbs to 105 and the parish bakes in its own humidity. The hum is the truck's heartbeat. Clem has rebuilt the unit twice.

He checks the box every morning before he leaves the house. This is not a ritual in the way that people use the word ritual, which implies ceremony or superstition or the performance of meaning. This is inventory. This is the systematic confirmation that the tools he will need are the tools he has, that the medications are in date, that the syringes are stocked, that the sleeves have not run out, that the truck is ready for whatever the parish will ask of it today, because the parish will ask, and the asking will come at 6 AM from Earl Fontenot's foreman or at 2 AM from a voice Clem does not recognize saying the words Clem always recognizes, which are: I have a cow down, or: My horse is colicking, or: Something is wrong and I don't know what it is and I didn't know who else to call.

The not-knowing-who-else-to-call is the practice.

Clem's morning. He wakes at 4:30. He has always woken at 4:30. This is not discipline and it is not habit and it is not the body's clock set by decades of pre-dawn calls, though it is all of those things. It is the hour at which the day begins for a man who has organized his life around the needs of animals that do not know what an hour is, and the not-knowing of the animals is the purest relationship Clem has with time, which is that time does not matter except when it does, and when it does it matters absolutely, the way it matters when a calf is stuck or a horse is colicking or a cow has a prolapsed uterus and the uterus is hanging in the air behind her like a question the cow cannot answer and Clem must answer for her.

He makes coffee. French press, dark roast, Community Coffee from the bag Renee buys at Brookshire's in Natchez because Vidalia's Piggly Wiggly does not carry the dark roast, only the medium, and the medium is not enough. The coffee is a fact. The coffee is not a metaphor. Clem drinks coffee because he has been awake since 4:30 and will not sit down until noon and the coffee is the fuel that a fifty-five-year-old body requires to do the work that a thirty-year-old body did on adrenaline alone.

He eats. Toast, two slices, with butter. Sometimes an egg. He eats standing at the kitchen counter because sitting down to eat alone in the dark before Renee wakes is a loneliness he has chosen not to practice, and the standing is the compromise between eating and not-eating, between the body's need and the heart's preference, which is to be in the truck, moving, the parish unspooling in the headlights or the early light or the full hot light of a Louisiana morning in May.

May. The month when the parish turns from spring to the thing that is not yet summer but is no longer spring, the month when the temperature crosses 90 and stays there and the humidity arrives and does not leave until October, the month when the cattle work begins in earnest because the spring calves need their first round of vaccines and the cows need pregnancy-checking and the bulls need their breeding soundness exams and the work is the work is the work, and the work fills the truck and the truck fills the roads and the roads carry Clem across the parish in the pattern he has driven for twenty-eight years, the pattern that is not a route but a web, the connections between farms and ranches and backyards and barns that constitute his practice, which is to say his life, which is to say the thing he does that is indistinguishable from the thing he is.

The roads. Louisiana 15 runs north from Vidalia to Waterproof, a town whose name is either an aspiration or an irony, depending on the year and the river. Louisiana 65 runs south from Vidalia toward Ferriday and then Jonesville, the parish roads branching off like capillaries from arteries, the numbered roads and the named roads and the roads that have no name at all but only a destination, which is always a farm or a house or a piece of land where someone keeps animals and the keeping of the animals is the reason Clem turns the truck off the blacktop onto the gravel and off the gravel onto the dirt and off the dirt onto the grass and stops where the fence begins or the barn stands or the man is waiting by the gate with the look that every farmer has when the vet arrives, which is the look of a person who has been carrying a problem alone and is now sharing it, and the sharing is a relief that the farmer does not acknowledge because acknowledging relief is admitting that the problem was too heavy to carry, and farmers in Concordia Parish do not admit that things are too heavy. They carry them. They carry them until the vet comes, and then they share, and the sharing happens not in words but in the gesture of opening the gate.

The gate opens. Clem pulls through. The gate closes behind him. He is inside.

This is the geography of the practice. Outside and inside. The road and the farm. The public and the private. The place where the farmer is a man you see at the co-op or at the gas station or at the parish council meeting, and the place where the farmer is a man standing beside a sick animal, and the sickness of the animal has opened the farmer the way illness opens everyone, the way vulnerability is the door through which confession enters, and Clem stands in the doorway, and the confession comes through, and Clem holds it the way he holds everything the parish gives him, which is carefully, without judgment, in the hands that were made for holding.

The truck crosses the cattle guard at Earl Fontenot's place at 6:45 AM. The cattle guard is a set of steel pipes welded over a trench, the pipes spaced so that cattle will not cross them because their hooves fall between the pipes, and the cattle guard is the boundary between the road and the ranch, the threshold that Clem's truck crosses every Tuesday and Thursday during spring cattle work, the tires singing on the pipes the way they have sung for twenty-eight years, or for the fourteen years since Earl moved his operation to this property after his father died and left him the land that his father's father had bought in 1952 from a man who had bought it from another man who had received it as a land grant, the provenance of Louisiana land being a chain that extends backward through the French and the Spanish and the native people who were here before the French and the Spanish, and the chain is in the soil and the soil is under the cattle and the cattle are what Clem has come to service.

He parks by the working pens. The pens are pipe and cable, heavy-duty, designed for the movement and containment of cattle in a system that begins at the pasture gate and ends at the squeeze chute, the narrowing funnel that compresses a thousand-pound animal into a space just wide enough for the animal's body so that the animal cannot move and the veterinarian can work and the work can be done safely, which means safely for the animal and safely for the veterinarian and safely for the rancher who stands beside the chute and operates the headgate, the lever that catches the cow's head and holds it, the holding of the head being the essential act without which nothing else can happen.

Clem gets out. He reaches into the box. He pulls what he needs. He carries it to the chute.

The carrying is the practice.

He has carried instruments and medications and supplies to working pens and barns and backyards across Concordia Parish for twenty-eight years. He has carried them in the dark and in the light and in the rain and in the heat that is not weather but a condition, a permanent state of Louisiana being, the heat that begins in May and does not end until October and that sits on the parish like a hand pressing down on a chest, the heat that makes the instruments hot to touch and the medications warm despite the refrigeration and the veterinarian's shirt wet by 8 AM and the work harder than it needs to be but not harder than it is, because the work is what it is, and what it is is this: Clem carries the tools to the place where the animal is, and he uses the tools on the animal, and the use of the tools is the care, and the care is the practice.

The practice. Twenty-eight years. LSU School of Veterinary Medicine, class of 1998. He was twenty-seven when he graduated because he worked for four years between college and vet school, worked on a cattle ranch in Rapides Parish, worked as a tech in a veterinary clinic in Alexandria, worked because his family did not have the money for vet school and the working was how he earned it and the earning was slow and the slowness taught him patience, which is the veterinarian's primary instrument, more useful than the scalpel, more necessary than the antibiotic, the patience to stand beside an animal and wait for the animal to tell you what is wrong, because the animal will tell you if you wait, the animal will show you in its posture and its breathing and its eyes and the way it holds its weight and the way it does not hold its weight, the animal's body being the text that the veterinarian reads, and the reading requires patience, and the patience was learned not in school but in the years before school, in the working years, in the years of carrying feed buckets and cleaning stalls and holding horses for the vet who came to the ranch, the vet whose hands Clem watched the way an apprentice watches a master, not the techniques but the tempo, not the knowledge but the patience with which the knowledge was applied.

He graduated. He could have gone anywhere. The large-animal shortage was already acute in 1998 and has only deepened since, the economics of veterinary education producing graduates with $200,000 in debt who cannot afford to treat cattle for the fees that cattle producers can afford to pay, the math of rural veterinary medicine being a math that does not work on paper but works in practice because the practice is not a business, the practice is a vocation, and the vocation pays what the vocation pays and the veterinarian lives on what the vocation provides, which in Concordia Parish is a three-bedroom house on Carter Street in Vidalia and a truck with 214,000 miles and a wife who runs the library and two daughters who left for the cities and a life that is measured not in income but in the number of animals that are alive today because Clem drove through the dark to reach them.

He chose Vidalia. He chose it because Renee was from Natchez, across the river, and because the previous veterinarian, Dr. Arceneaux, was retiring, and because the parish needed a vet the way a parish needs a priest, which is to say desperately and without the ability to articulate the desperation, because the desperation is not for the service but for the presence, not for the medicine but for the man who brings the medicine, the man who comes when called and does what is needed and stays until the thing is done, and the thing is never only the medical procedure, the thing is always also the standing-beside, the being-there, the witnessing.

Clem chose Vidalia and Vidalia chose Clem and the choosing was mutual in the way that all relationships between a man and a place are mutual, which is to say the man shapes himself to the place and the place shapes itself to the man and after twenty-eight years the shaping is complete and the man and the place are the same shape, and the shape is the parish, and the parish is the practice, and the practice is the truck pulling through the gate at 6:45 in the morning with the veterinary box loaded and the coffee still warm in the thermos wedged between the seat and the console and the day ahead, the day that will ask what every day asks, which is: Are you ready? And the answer, which is the truck, which is the box, which is the hands, which is the man, the answer is always the same. The answer is: I am here.

The sun clears the tree line east of the river. The light crosses the soybeans. The soybeans are six inches tall, maybe eight, the dark green of early growth, the fields stretching flat to the levee and beyond the levee the river, always the river, the Mississippi moving south the way it has always moved south, carrying the continent's water to the Gulf, the river that made the parish and that the parish has spent a hundred years containing, the levee the long argument between the people and the water, the argument that the people are winning, for now, the for-now being the thing that the parish carries in its collective awareness the way Clem carries the OB chains in the top compartment, which is to say: ready, always ready, for the moment when the thing that has been held back breaks through.

But today the levee holds and the river is at its ordinary May level and the soybeans are growing and the cattle are lowing in Earl Fontenot's working pens, the sound carrying across the flat land the way sound carries in a place with no hills to stop it, the lowing of cattle being the parish's ambient music, the soundtrack of the place Clem has chosen and that has chosen him, and the choosing is the story, and the story is the practice, and the practice begins now, this morning, this May morning in Concordia Parish, Louisiana, with the truck parked by the pens and the box open and the instruments laid out on the tailgate and Earl Fontenot walking toward him across the packed dirt with a cup of coffee in one hand and a cattle prod in the other, the coffee for Clem and the prod for the cattle, and Earl's face is the face of a man who is seventy-two and who has lost his wife and who keeps four hundred head of cattle on two thousand acres because the cattle are the connection to the land and the land is the connection to the wife and the connection is what Clem is here to service, though the service will be listed on the invoice as: pregnancy check, 47 head; vaccinations, Bovi-Shield Gold FP5/VL5, 47 head; deworming, Ivermectin pour-on, 47 head; and the invoice will not list what the service actually is, which is: the maintenance of a man's connection to his dead wife through the bodies of the animals they raised together on the land they worked together, and the maintenance is the practice, and the practice is the truck, and the truck is here, and the morning is beginning, and the work is the work is the work.

Clem takes the coffee from Earl. He drinks. It is strong and black and slightly burned, the coffee of a man who makes it in a percolator on the stove because his wife made it that way and the making of the coffee the way she made it is the keeping of her, and the keeping is in the small things, the percolator and the roses and the gate she painted blue and that Earl repainted blue last spring, the same blue, the exact same blue, because he took a chip of the old paint to the hardware store in Natchez and had them match it.

Clem drinks the coffee and it is good.

He sets the cup on the tailgate. He pulls on a palpation sleeve, the long plastic sleeve that covers his arm from fingertip to shoulder, the sleeve that is the instrument of pregnancy diagnosis in cattle, the sleeve that goes on the arm that goes in the cow, the arm that reaches forward and up and finds the uterus and palpates it and feels for the calf inside, the calf that is the size of a cat at forty-five days and the size of a beagle at ninety days and the size of a Labrador at six months, the calf growing in the dark of the cow's body the way everything grows in the dark, unseen, unfelt except by the hands that reach for it.

He pulls on the sleeve. He applies the lubricant. He walks to the chute.

The first cow is in. She is a black Angus, maybe 1,200 pounds, her ear tag reading 847 in the yellow plastic that fades in the sun but that Clem can still read because he has been reading ear tags for twenty-eight years and his eyes know the shapes of the numbers even when the numbers have faded, even when the tags are muddy, even when the cow is moving and the tag is swinging and the morning light is still low and the reading is an act of faith as much as it is an act of vision.

He reaches in.

His hand finds what his hand always finds, which is the warm, muscular interior of a living body, the body doing what bodies do, which is to be alive, to contain life, to carry in its darkness the next generation of the thing it is, the cow carrying the calf the way the parish carries its future, in the dark, unseen, knowable only to the hand that reaches in and feels for it.

He finds the uterus. He palpates. Sixty days, maybe sixty-five. The calf is there. The calf is alive. The cow will calve in February, which is a good time, which is the time Earl wants because February calves are weaned in September and sold in October and the October market is the good market and the good market is what pays for the hay and the feed and the vet and the fence and the diesel and the property taxes and the paint for the gate, the blue paint, the exact blue.

Clem withdraws his arm. He strips the sleeve. He nods to Earl.

"Bred," he said. "Sixty days, give or take."

Earl marks it in his book, a spiral-bound notebook with a blue cover, the kind of notebook that children use in school, and the notebook is Earl's herd record, and the herd record is the ranch's memory, and the memory is written in pencil because pencil can be erased and the erasing is necessary because cattle die and cattle are sold and cattle are culled and the records must reflect the herd as it is, not as it was, and the herd as it is is what Clem is determining, cow by cow, in the chute, on this May morning, in the parish.

The next cow enters. Clem reaches in.

The morning passes this way. Cow by cow. The work that is the work. The sun climbing. The heat arriving. The coffee cooling on the tailgate. Earl's pencil on the notebook. Clem's arm in the cow. The finding of the calf or the not-finding of the calf, the bred or the open, the pregnant or the not-pregnant, and the not-pregnant is the one that costs, the not-pregnant cow eating grass and taking space and not producing a calf, the not-pregnant cow being the rancher's loss made flesh, and the loss is what Clem reports, cow by cow, tag number by tag number, because the reporting is the practice, and the practice is the truth, and the truth is what his hand finds in the dark.

Forty-seven cows. Forty-three bred. Four open. Earl writes it down. He does not speak about the four open cows, does not calculate the loss, does not do the math that he will do later, alone, at the kitchen table, with the notebook and the calculator and the coffee from the percolator. He simply writes the numbers and nods and moves to the next cow and the next and the next until the pens are empty and the cows are back in the pasture and the morning's work is done.

Clem strips the last sleeve. He washes his arm at the spigot by the pens. The water is warm from the pipe sitting in the sun. He washes his hands and his forearms and the water runs off brown and he dries his arms on the towel he keeps in the truck's cab, a towel that is not clean and has never been clean, not in the way that clean means free of the work, because the work is the towel's purpose and the purpose stains.

He loads the truck. He closes the box. He writes the invoice in the truck's cab, on the pad he keeps on the clipboard that hangs from a hook he screwed into the dashboard, the hook that Renee calls an eyesore and that Clem calls necessary, the hook holding the clipboard holding the pad holding the invoices that are the practice's paper trail, the documentation of every animal he has touched and every farmer he has served and every morning he has spent in a squeeze chute with his arm inside a cow, the documentation being the proof that the work was done, though the real proof is not on the paper but in the pasture, in the calves that will be born in February, in the cattle that are healthy, in the ranch that continues, in the man who stands by the gate as Clem drives out, the man who raises one hand, not a wave but an acknowledgment, the acknowledgment that passes between two men who have shared a morning's work and the work is the relationship and the relationship is the practice and the practice is the truck crossing the cattle guard and the tires singing on the pipes and the road ahead and the next farm and the next gate and the next animal and the next confession that comes unbidden from a person standing beside a vulnerable creature in the Louisiana heat.

The truck turns south on Louisiana 15. The parish unfolds. The day continues.

Clem drives.