Earl's Cattle

Parish

Chapter 2: Earl's Cattle

Earl Fontenot's ranch sits on 2,000 acres north of Vidalia, on land that is flat the way all of Concordia Parish is flat, which is to say absolutely, the flatness unbroken by anything except the tree lines along the bayous and the occasional rise of a levee and the buildings that the Fontenot family has placed on the land across three generations, the house and the barn and the equipment shed and the hay barn and the working pens that sit in the center of the operation like a heart in a body, the place where the blood comes to be checked and cleaned and sent back out again.

The house is a single-story ranch house built in 1968 by Earl's father, Emile Fontenot, who built it on a slab because basements in Concordia Parish are swimming pools, the water table being three feet below the surface on a dry day and at the surface on a wet one, and Emile Fontenot built his house on the ground because the ground was what he had, and the having of ground was the Fontenot identity, the owning and working of land being the thing the family did, the purpose that organized three generations of decisions about who to marry and where to live and how to spend the years.

Earl was born in the house, in the back bedroom, in 1954, delivered by a midwife named Delphine Arceneaux who delivered half the babies in the parish between 1940 and 1975, including, as it happens, Earl's wife, Lorraine, who was born in a shotgun house on the south side of Ferriday in 1956, two years after Earl, delivered by the same Delphine Arceneaux, a fact that Earl mentioned once to Clem while Clem was treating a cow for pinkeye, mentioned it the way he mentions things about Lorraine, which is sideways, obliquely, approaching the center of his grief by way of the periphery, circling the thing he cannot say directly by saying the things that orbit it.

Lorraine died in April two years ago. Ovarian cancer, diagnosed in August, dead by April, the timeline of the disease being eight months, which is shorter than a cow's gestation, a fact that Clem noted and did not mention because the noting of such facts is the veterinarian's curse, the inability to stop seeing the world through the lens of animal biology, the gestation and lactation and morbidity rates that form the grid through which Clem views all duration, all timelines, all the intervals between the beginning and ending of things.

She died in the house. Earl wanted that. The hospice nurse came from Natchez, crossed the bridge every day for the last three weeks, and Earl sat in the chair beside the bed that he had moved into the living room because Lorraine wanted to see the front yard, wanted to see the pecan trees and the gravel drive and the gate that she had painted blue and the road beyond the gate that led to the parish that was the only world she had ever known, and the wanting-to-see was the last want, and Earl gave it to her.

Clem was there. Not at the death, but in the weeks before, the weeks when Earl still had cattle to tend and the cattle's needs did not pause for the dying, the cattle needing what they always need, which is feed and water and fence and medicine and the steady attention of the man who owns them, and Earl's attention was divided between the cattle and the dying and the division was the cruelest thing, the impossibility of being fully present in both places, the barn and the bedroom, the pasture and the chair, and Clem took some of the weight by coming more often, by checking things that did not need checking, by finding reasons to be at the ranch so that Earl could go inside, could sit in the chair, could be with Lorraine while Clem walked the pastures and looked at the cattle and did the looking that Earl could not do because Earl was doing the harder looking, the looking at the woman who was leaving.

Earl has not spoken about this directly. He has never said: Thank you for coming those weeks, for doing the work I could not do, for being in the pasture so I could be in the house. He has never said it because saying it would require acknowledging that he needed help, and Earl Fontenot does not acknowledge needing help, not because he is proud, though he is proud, but because the acknowledgment would require revisiting those weeks, would require standing again in the divided place between the cattle and the dying, and Earl has moved on from those weeks, or rather Earl has incorporated those weeks into the structure of his days the way the land incorporates a flood, by absorbing it, by taking the silt and the debris and the water's damage and folding it into the surface until the surface is smooth again, or appears smooth, or is smooth enough to walk on.

The roses.

Lorraine's roses grow along the south side of the house, in a bed that she dug and amended and tended for thirty-seven years, the bed running forty feet along the foundation, the soil dark with the compost she added every fall, the rich black soil that is not the parish's natural soil, which is clay and silt, but is the soil she made, year by year, compost and mulch and bone meal and the particular labor of a woman who understood that roses in Louisiana require a different soil than the soil Louisiana provides, and the making of the soil was the love, the rose bed being not a garden but a marriage, the daily tending being the daily act of care that a marriage requires and that Lorraine performed in the soil the way she performed it in the house, faithfully, without complaint, with the particular devotion of a woman who understood that the thing you tend is the thing that lives.

Earl maintains the roses. He maintains them the way Lorraine maintained them, which is to say with weekly attention, with the pruning and the feeding and the watering and the spraying for black spot and the deadheading of spent blooms that rose culture requires, the culture being a set of practices that Lorraine taught Earl in the last months, taught him deliberately, understanding that the teaching was a bequest, the roses being the thing she was leaving him besides the house and the memories and the particular quality of silence that fills a house when the person who filled the silence with sound is gone.

He does not enjoy the roses. Clem knows this. Clem knows this because he has watched Earl maintain the roses and the maintaining has no pleasure in it, no satisfaction, only duty, only the performance of the instructions Lorraine left, the pruning at the right angle and the feeding at the right time and the watering at the right depth, and the performance is not love of roses but love of Lorraine, the roses being the medium through which Earl continues to love a woman who is dead, the way a priest continues to love a God he cannot see, through the rituals, through the daily practice, through the tending of the thing the beloved left behind.

The roses are blooming. May. The first flush. The bushes are covered in blooms, red and pink and white and a yellow that Lorraine favored, a variety called Julia Child that produces a butter-yellow bloom with a scent that Lorraine said smelled like licorice, and the Julia Child roses are the ones Earl tends most carefully, the ones he prunes most precisely, the ones he waters first, and the tending-first is the hierarchy of grief, the ordering of the dead's things by their closeness to the dead, and the yellow roses are closest, and the closeness is what Earl maintains.

Clem pulls through the gate at 6:30 on a Thursday. The cattle are penned. Earl's foreman, a man named Tully who has worked for the Fontenots for twenty-two years, has gathered the cattle from the south pasture and penned them in the working pens, and the penning was done before dawn because cattle move easier in the cool and the dark, the animals cooperating with the gathering when the gathering happens in the early hours, before the heat, before the flies, before the day fully arrives and the cattle's resistance arrives with it.

There are sixty-three head in the pens today. Cow-calf pairs and a few dry cows. The calves are two to three months old, black and red, the Angus genetics that Earl has bred into his herd over forty years, the breed being the decision that Earl's father made in 1972 when he sold the last of the Hereford cattle and bought Angus bulls, the breed change being a bet on the market that paid off because the market wanted black-hided cattle and the wanting made black-hided cattle worth more and the worth-more is the margin, and the margin is thin, and the thinness of the margin is the thing that every cattle rancher in the parish carries the way Clem carries the OB chains, which is to say: always, and with the knowledge that the thing being carried is the thing that matters.

The work today is vaccinations for the calves, booster shots for the cows, and a look at three cows that Tully says are not right, a phrase that covers everything from a mild lameness to a fatal disease, the phrase being the farmer's diagnostic language, which is imprecise and intuitive and based on the daily observation of animals by the person who feeds them, the person who sees them every day and who notices when something changes, when the animal is not right, and the not-right is the signal that the veterinarian answers with the specific tools of his training.

Clem lays out his supplies on the tailgate. The Bovi-Shield Gold, drawn up in syringes, one syringe per calf. The Ultrabac booster for the cows. The Ivermectin pour-on, measured in a dosing gun. He lays them out in the order he will use them, left to right, the order being the sequence of the chute work, calf first, then cow, then the pour-on, the sequence a choreography that Clem and Earl and Tully perform together the way three musicians perform a piece they have rehearsed for years, each knowing his part, each knowing the others' parts, the performance requiring no direction because the direction is in the work itself, in the logic of the chute and the cattle and the sequence.

The first pair enters the chute. The calf leads, confused, stumbling on the concrete, the mother behind, anxious, the anxiety expressed in the way cattle express everything, through the body, the tightening of the muscles, the widening of the eyes, the sound that is not a moo but a low, continuous vocalization that is the cow's language for: Where is my calf, and the answer is: Ahead of you, in the chute, where the man with the needle is waiting.

Clem catches the calf. He is fast with calves because calves are fast and the catching must be faster, the hand on the neck and the arm around the body and the calf held against his leg while the other hand finds the syringe and the syringe finds the muscle, the triangle of the neck, the injection site, the needle in and the plunger down and the vaccine delivered in the two seconds that the calf is still, the stillness not cooperation but surprise, the calf surprised by the bigness of the man and the grip of the hands and the brief sharp fact of the needle.

The calf bawls. The cow answers. Clem releases the calf and it runs to its mother and the mother sniffs it and the sniffing is the inventory, the mother checking that her calf is still her calf, that the calf has not been changed by the thing that happened in the chute, and the calf has not been changed, or rather the calf has been changed in a way the cow cannot detect, the vaccine working in the blood, the immune system responding to the modified live virus, the body learning to fight the disease it has not yet encountered, the learning being invisible, interior, the way most important learning is.

Earl stands by the headgate. He operates the lever that catches the cow's head and holds it, the holding being his contribution to the work, his hands on the lever, his body beside the chute, his presence the anchor around which the work turns. He does not speak for the first several pairs. The work is the speaking. The work is the communication between three men who have done this together enough times that the doing is the language and the language requires no translation.

But eventually, as it always does, the work opens a space, and the space fills with words, and the words are Earl's, and the words are about Lorraine.

He begins, as he always begins, with the roses.

"The Julia Childs are blooming heavy this year," he said. "She'd have cut them for the kitchen table by now. She always cut them when they were half open. Said they lasted longer that way. She was right. She was right about the roses. She was right about most things."

Clem is drawing up a syringe. He does not look up. He does not need to look up. The not-looking-up is the space that allows the words to come, the averted gaze that is the confessional's screen, the partition between the speaker and the listener that makes confession possible, and the partition, in this case, is the work, the syringe and the cow and the chute and the pretense that what is happening is veterinary medicine, when what is happening is a man telling another man about his dead wife while the work provides the cover for the telling.

"I cut some this morning," Earl said. "Put them in the blue vase. The one her mother gave her. I put them on the kitchen table. They look right there. They look like she put them there."

A cow enters the chute. Clem injects the booster. The cow flinches. Clem applies the pour-on, the Ivermectin running along the cow's backline in a narrow stream, the dewormer absorbing through the skin, entering the bloodstream, killing the parasites that live in the cow's gut, the parasites that steal the nutrition the cow needs for her calf, the parasites being the hidden cost of grass, the price the cow pays for eating what grows from the ground, and the dewormer is the veterinarian's answer to the hidden cost, the chemical that clears the debt.

Earl continues. He talks about Lorraine's garden, not the roses but the vegetable garden, the garden she kept behind the house, the tomatoes and the peppers and the okra and the eggplant, the garden that Earl has not planted this year and did not plant last year, the garden that is fallow, the beds empty, the wire cages stacked in the shed, the absence of the garden being the one surrender Earl has made to the grief, the one thing he has not maintained, and the not-maintaining is the admission he does not make about the roses, which is that the maintaining is a burden and the burden is heavy and a man can carry only so many of the dead's burdens before the carrying breaks something, and the vegetable garden is the thing Earl set down, the weight he chose not to carry, and the choosing was not a choice but a limit, the body's limit, the heart's limit, the limit that even a man who does not admit limits must eventually reach.

"She grew tomatoes like you wouldn't believe," Earl said. "Creole tomatoes. She got the seeds from her aunt in Plaquemine. Saved them every year. I've got the seeds in the freezer. In a jar. She labeled them. Her handwriting. I can't throw the jar away and I can't plant them."

Clem moves to the next cow. The work continues. The words continue. The two streams running parallel, the veterinary work and the grief, the chute and the confession, the cattle moving through and Earl's words moving through and Clem standing at the intersection, his hands on the animals and his ears open to the man and the intersection being the place where the practice happens, the real practice, the practice that is not listed on the invoice and not taught in school and not compensable by any fee schedule.

Tully brings the three not-right cows through last. Clem examines them. The first has a mild limp in the left front, a stone bruise probably, nothing that requires treatment, just time, and Clem tells Earl this and Earl nods and writes it in his notebook, the spiral-bound blue notebook that is the ranch's memory. The second has a discharge from the right eye, the beginning of pinkeye, the Moraxella bacteria that spreads through fly contact and that can blind a cow if untreated, and Clem injects the antibiotic under the eyelid and patches the eye with a cloth patch that he attaches with surgical glue, the patch keeping the light out and the flies off while the antibiotic works, the patch making the cow look like a pirate, a fact that Clem notes silently and that he would have said aloud to a different farmer, a farmer whose grief was not standing beside the chute.

The third cow. Clem looks at her. She is thin. Body condition score 4, which is not alarming but is lower than Earl's cattle should be in May, when the grass is green and growing and the nutrition is available. Clem runs his hand along her ribs. He feels the bones. He lifts her tail and takes her temperature: 102.8, slightly elevated. He listens to her rumen with the stethoscope and hears the contractions, slow, sluggish, the rumen not working at its capacity, the four-chambered stomach that is the cow's engine running on fewer cylinders than it should.

He checks her teeth. She is an older cow, twelve or thirteen, her teeth worn from years of grazing, the incisors smooth and short, the grinding surface reduced, the ability to harvest grass diminished by the years of harvesting grass, the body wearing out its own tools, and the wearing-out is not failure but use, the honorable deterioration of a thing that has done what it was made to do.

"She's aged out," Clem said. "Her teeth are smooth. She can't graze efficiently. She'll keep losing condition."

Earl looked at the cow. He looked at her the way he looks at things that are ending. He looked at her ear tag — 312 — and Clem could see him calculating, not the money but the years, the years this cow had been in the herd, the calves she had produced, the contribution she had made to the ranch that was the contribution Lorraine had made to the marriage, which was: steady, reliable, productive, unasked-for in its generosity, and the cow's ending was another ending, smaller than Lorraine's but shaped the same, the slow diminishment, the body's honest accounting of what it could no longer do.

"She was one of the first I bought with my own money," Earl said. "When Daddy turned the herd over to me. 2012. Paid $1,400 for her as a bred heifer at the sale in Alexandria. Lorraine was with me. She picked her out. Said she had a good eye. She did. Have a good eye. The cow. Lorraine too."

Clem waited. The waiting was the practice.

"I'll keep her through the summer," Earl said. "Feed her separately. See how she does."

This was not the veterinary recommendation. The veterinary recommendation was to cull her, to send her to the sale, to replace her with a younger cow that could graze efficiently and produce a calf that would pay for its mother's keep. The veterinary recommendation was the math. But the math was not what Earl was doing. Earl was doing the other thing, the thing that runs parallel to the math, the thing that is not economics but attachment, the bond between a man and an animal that has been in his care for twelve years, the bond that is the reason the man called the vet in the first place, the bond that Clem services when he services the cattle.

"I'll mix up a supplement ration," Clem said. "Something she can eat without much chewing. High-protein pellet, soaked. She'll hold condition through the summer if you feed her separately."

Earl nodded. This was the compromise between the math and the attachment, the veterinarian's gift, the ability to find the place where the practical and the emotional overlap, the place where the recommendation serves both the animal and the man, and the serving of both is the practice.

Clem wrote the recommendation on the invoice. He wrote the supplement formula. He wrote it clearly because Earl would take the invoice to the feed store in Vidalia and the feed store would mix the supplement according to the formula, and the mixing would be done by Raymond Prejean, who has run the feed store for thirty years and who knows every rancher's cattle by their ear tags and whose knowledge of the parish's livestock is a parallel knowledge to Clem's, the feed store and the veterinarian being the two pillars on which the parish's cattle industry rests, the nutrition and the medicine, the feed and the treatment, the daily care and the crisis intervention.

The work is done. The cattle are back in the pasture. The chute is empty. The pens are empty. The morning is gone and the sun is high and the heat has arrived, the May heat that is the prelude to the July heat that is the prelude to the August heat that is the heat itself, the essential heat, the heat that the parish endures and that the enduring defines.

Clem washes his arms at the spigot. He loads the truck. He writes the invoice. The invoice lists the work: vaccinations, boosters, deworming, examinations, the numbers and the procedures and the costs, the document that is the practice's record, the paper that proves the work was done, though the proof of the work is not on the paper but in the pasture, in the cattle, in the calves that will grow and the cows that will calve and the ranch that will continue because the cattle are healthy and the cattle are healthy because Clem came and did the work and the work is the practice and the practice is the continuation, the keeping-going, the daily maintenance of the living things that the parish depends on.

Earl walks Clem to the truck. This is the custom. The rancher walks the vet to the truck. The walking is not ceremony but courtesy, the old courtesy of a man who was raised to walk a guest to the door, and the truck is the door, and the gate is the threshold, and the crossing of the threshold is the end of the visit, the end of the work, the end of the confession until the next time, which will be next Tuesday or Thursday or whenever Earl calls because something is not right, the not-right being the signal that brings Clem back through the gate and across the cattle guard and into the place where the work and the words happen.

They stand by the truck. Earl looks at the pasture. The cattle are grazing, spread across the green, the calves beside their mothers, the bulls in the far corner, the herd doing what herds do when the work is done and the humans have retreated, which is to return to the grass and the shade and the water and the slow rhythm of grazing that is the cow's meditation, the chewing of the cud being the cow's prayer, repetitive and constant and sufficient.

"The roses look good," Clem said.

Earl nodded. He looked toward the house, toward the south wall where the roses grew, the blooms visible from the pens, the red and pink and white and yellow, the Julia Child yellow that was Lorraine's yellow.

"I pruned them wrong last year," Earl said. "Cut too far back on the Queen Elizabeths. They were slow coming back. But they came back. They always come back. She told me that. She said: You can't kill a rose by pruning it. You can only slow it down."

The sentence was about roses. The sentence was about everything.

Clem got in the truck. He started the engine. The refrigerated unit kicked on, the hum returning, the heartbeat resuming, the truck alive again and ready for the next stop, the next farm, the next gate, the next animal, the next man or woman standing beside a creature they care for and caring for the creature being the way they care for themselves, and the caring is the parish, and the parish is the practice, and the practice continues.

He pulled through the gate. Earl closed the gate behind him. In the rearview mirror, Clem saw Earl walk toward the house. Not toward the barn. Not toward the equipment shed. Toward the house, toward the south side, toward the roses.

Clem drove south on Louisiana 15. The parish opened before him, flat and green and vast, the soybeans growing, the cotton fields (the few that remained, most converted to soybeans in the 1990s when the math of cotton stopped working) showing the first white bolls, the landscape that was the parish's body, the body that Clem tended by tending the animals that lived on it, the cattle and the horses and the goats and the dogs that were the parish's livestock and the livestock was the parish's livelihood and the livelihood was the reason the people stayed and the staying was the parish.

The truck moved through the morning. The veterinary box rode level on the heavy-duty springs. The tools were in their places. The medications were at temperature. The invoices were on the clipboard. The practice was organized the way Clem's mind was organized, which is to say: each thing in its place, each thing ready, each thing waiting for the moment when it would be needed, and the waiting was not idleness but preparation, and the preparation was the practice, and the practice was the driving, and the driving was the parish, and the parish was the road ahead, and the road led to the next farm.

Clem drove. The heat rose. The day continued. The parish held its cattle and its people and its stories in the flat green cradle of the river's floodplain, and the holding was the thing, the holding was always the thing, the way the land held the water and the levee held the river and the man held the hoof and the rancher held the grief and the roses held the blooms that the dead woman planted and the living man tended and the tending was the love and the love was the practice and the practice was the day, this day, this Thursday in May in Concordia Parish, Louisiana, where the cattle graze and the roses bloom and the veterinarian drives his truck toward the next gate, the next animal, the next opened place where a person will say the thing they cannot say anywhere else, because here, beside the animal, in the presence of the man whose hands are on the animal, the saying is possible, and the possible is enough.