Nebraska

Around noon Annette came over in Slick's Trans Am and we ate pecan rolls hot from the oven as she got the romance magazines out of her grocery bag and began reading me the really good stories. Gina played on the carpet next to my chair. You have to watch the little booger every second because she'll put in her mouth what most people wouldn't step on. Annette was four months pregnant but it hardly showed—just the top snap of her jeans was undone—and I was full of uncertainty about the outcome. Our daytime visits give us the opportunity to speak candidly about things like miscarriages or the ways in which we are ironing out our problems with our husbands, but on this occasion Annette was giggling about some goofy woman who couldn't figure out why marriage turned good men into monsters, and I got the ugly feeling that I was being looked at by a Peeping Tom.

Annette put the magazine in her lap and rapidly flipped pages to get to the part where the story was continued, and I gingerly picked Gina up and, without saying a peep to Annette, walked across the carpet and spun around. Annette giggled again and said, “Do you suppose this actually happened?” and I said yes, pulling my little girl tight against me. Annette said, “Doesn't she just crack you up?” and I just kept peering out the window. I couldn't stop myself.

That night I took another stroll around the property and then poured diet cola into a glass at the kitchen sink, satisfying my thirst. I could see the light of the sixty-watt bulb in the barn, and the cows standing up to the fence and rubbing their throats and chins. The wire gets shaggy with the stuff; looks just like orange doll hair. Ivan got on the intercom and his voice was puny, like it was trapped in a paper cup. “Come on out and help me, will you, Riva?”

“Right out,” is what I said.

I tucked another blanket around Gina in the baby crib and clomped outside in Ivan's rubber boots. They jingled as I crossed the barnyard. The cattle stared at me. One of the steers got up on a lady and triumphed for a while, but she walked away and he dropped. My flashlight speared whenever I bumped it.

Ivan was kneeling on straw, shoving his arm in a rubber glove. An alarm clock was on the sill. His softball cap was off, and his long brown hair was flying wild as he squatted beside the side-laying cow. Her tail whisked a board, so he tied it to her leg with twine. She was swollen wide with the calf. My husband reached up inside her and the cow lifted her head indignantly, then settled down and chewed her tongue. Ivan said, “P.U., cow! You stink!” He was in her up to his biceps, seem

ed like.

“You going to cut her?”

He shook his head as he snagged the glove off and plunked it down in a water bucket. “Dang calf s kaput!” He glared at his medicine box and said, “How many is that? Four out of eight? I might as well give it up.”

I swayed the flashlight beam along the barn. Window. Apron. Pitchfork. Rope. Lug wrench. Sickle. Baling wire. And another four-paned window that was so streaked with pigeon goop it might as well've been slats. But it was there that the light caught a glint of an eye and my heart stopped. I stepped closer to persuade myself it wasn't just an apparition, and what I saw abruptly disappeared.

Ivan ground the tractor ignition and got the thing going, then raced it backward into the barn, not shutting the engine down but slapping it out of gear and hopping down to the ground. He said, “Swing that flashlight down on this cow's contraption, will ya, Riva?” and there was some messy tugging and wrestling as he yanked the calf's legs out and attached them to the tractor hitch with wire. He jumped up to the spring seat and jerked into granny, creeping forward with his gaze on the cow. She groaned with agony and more leg appeared and then the shut-eyed calf head. My husband crawled the tractor forward more and the calf came out in a surge. I suctioned gunk out of its throat with a bulb syringe and squirted it into the straw but the calf didn't quiver or pant; she was patient as meat and her tongue spilled onto the paint tarp.

Ivan scowled and sank to his knees by the calf. The mother cow struggled up and sniffed the calf and began licking off its nose in the way she'd been taught, but even she gave up in a second or two and hung her head low with grief.

“Do you know what killed it?”

Ivan just gaped and said, “You explain it.” He got up and plunged his arms into the water bucket. He smeared water on his face.

I crouched down and saw that the calf was somehow split open and all her insides were pulled out.

After the sheriff and the man from the rendering plant paid their visits, the night was just about shot. Ivan completed his cold-weather chores, upsetting the cattle with his earliness, and I pored over Annette's romance magazines, gaining support from each disappointment.

Ivan and I got some sleep and even Gina cooperated by being good as can be. Ivan arose at noon but he was cranky and understandably depressed about our calamities, so I switched off All My Children and suggested we go over to Slick's place and wake him up and party.

Annette saw I was out of sorts right away, and she generously agreed to make our supper. She could see through me like glass. At two we watched General Hospital, which was getting crazier by the week according to Annette—she thought they'd be off in outer space next, but I said they were just keeping up with this wild and woolly world we live in. Once our story was over, we made a pork roast and boiled potatoes with chives and garlic butter, which proved to be a big hit. Our husbands worked through the remaining light of day, crawling over Slick's farm machinery, each with wrenches in his pockets and grease on his skin like war paint.

Annette said, “You're doing all right for yourself, aren't you, Riva.”

“I could say the same for you, you know.”

Here I ought to explain that Annette went steady with Ivan in our sophomore year, and I suspect she's always regretted giving him to me. If I'm any judge of character, her thoughts were on that subject as we stood at the counter and Slick and Ivan came in for supper and cleaned up in the washroom that's off the kitchen. Annette then had the gall to say, “Slick and me are going through what you and Ivan were a couple of months ago.”

Oh no you're not! I wanted to say, but I didn't even give her the courtesy of a reply.

“You got everything straightened out, though, didn't you?”

I said, “Our problems were a blessing in disguise.”

“I know exactly what you mean,” she said.

“Our marriage is as full of love and vitality as any girl could wish for.”

Her eyes were even a little misty. “I'm so happy for you, Rival”

And she was; you could tell she wasn't pretending like she was during some of our rocky spots in the past.

Slick dipped his tongue in a spoon that he lifted from a saucepan and went out of his way to compliment Annette—unlike at least one husband I could mention. Ivan pushed down the spring gizmo on the toaster and got the feeling back in his fingers by working them over the toaster slots. My husband said in that put-down way of his, “Slick was saying it could be UFOs.”

“I got an open mind on the subject,” said Slick, and Ivan did his snickering thing.