Craig Davidson - Sarah Court

“For cows. Drag a bale over so she can reach,” Michelle says. “Head through it.”

“She won’t bite,” James says.

“Your say-so doesn’t make it any less likely. I’m not getting my face chewed off.” She’s threading a needle with surgical catgut. “Thinnest gauge I’ve got. Use it to repair labial tears after cows give birth.”

She peels towels away to reveal Matilda’s wound. A near-bloodless gash: stiff white lips with a shiny red trench between. The needle works through Matilda’s hide. Michelle pulls the incision lips together, loops, ties. She swabs Matilda’s hide with rubbing alcohol. Paints the sutures with mercurochrome.

“Good as I can do for her.”

Back in their kitchen Matthew digs a gallon tub of ice cream out the freezer. Rinses it, cuts the bottom out with a utility knife, slices halfway up its hull. James works the plastic until it fits round Matilda’s throat. Matthew duct-tapes the cone in place. Matilda gives the plastic a desultory lick, chuffs, lays across James’s legs.

We want to let them get back to bed but they say it isn’t worth bothering. They’d have to be up shortly. Such are the hours of cattle ranchers.

“Before cattle Matt was a sharecropper,” says Michelle.

“What sort of crops?”

“Potatoes,” Matt tells me. “Little coloured ones. Boutique potatoes, they’re called. Funky colours: purple and orange and bright red. All the rage with top-flight chefs.”

“Rages come and rages go,” says Michelle. “Why not russets? Mashers, bakers, fryers.”

“But they aren’t niche ,” Matt says. “We’ve done better with cattle.”

“A wonder you didn’t suggest pygmy cows.” Michelle kisses the top of his head. “Bright purple pygmy cows.”

The hospital roomwas stark white. Abigail covered in a white sheet.

Her nipples were hard. I tried to fiddle with the thermostat but the box was locked. As my presence was a breach of the restraining order, I couldn’t ask for help. I smoothed my hands over the sheets. So glossy they could be made from spun glass. Somebody had trimmed her fingernails. Went too deep on the left pinkie: a rime of dried blood traced the enamel.

The brain is a funny organ and breaks in funny ways. Saberhagen says a damaged brain is an old car in a junkyard that, every once in awhile, you twist the key and it starts. If this was her forever after and she’d never remember anything of who she’d been— pre-September Abby — I could live with it. But some days the chemicals inside her head would surge, old doors would open and she’d be who she once was for an instant. An instant of complete confusion and rage and in the next she’d know nothing. A lingering sense, only, a taste on the back of the tongue.

A tray sat on the bedside table. Cold minestrone soup. Meatloaf. Lime Jell-O. How long would it sit before being taken away? Would another tray arrive for breakfast? I wanted to find the orderly who’d brought it and throw him down a flight of stairs. Above the tray sat the machines. Beeping, wheezing, heartbeat-spike-emitting machines. If I didn’t leave soon I might find myself fiddling with those dials and knobs. With the easy notion of it.

Imagine driving home one night. You hit a girl on her bicycle. That broken tapestry of limbs splayed over your hood. The sound of impact with the windshield — would it sound like so much at all? Twisted handlebars in the grille and the ironclad assurance that the existence you’d followed up until that moment was finished. Every overblown ambition harboured. Each foolish hope nursed. Now imagine it again. This time it’s your own girl. Realizing you’d settled behind that wheel the very night she was born. Guided yourself with terrible precision into that collision. No man can live inside his skin after reaching such an understanding. Even a one-celled organism, a planarian worm, would turn itself inside-out.

I walked down Queenston past a Big Bee convenience near the bus depot. An elderly man in what appeared to be pajamas exited a late-model minivan. He’d left the engine running. I hopped in.

Thus kicked off my short, silly career as vehicle thief.

The highwayruns north. James and I can’t return to the houseboat. I don’t even want to. I’m nearly where I need to be, anyway.

Dawn rises over tailback hills. I drive into the town of Peterborough. A bakery’s just opening on the main drag. I go in, buy coffees and rolls hot from the oven. James and I sit on the hood of the Cadillac. Matilda lays on the passenger seat. Cone-wrapped head lolling in the footwell. A pickup passes, its bed full of itinerant workers in snowmobile suits. The bus station lot lights snap off, halogen coils dimming inside their plastic shells as the sun breaks over the squat block of a Woolco store.

“Where now?”

“Back south,” James says. “I got a place. Niagara Falls. U.S. side. For tax purposes.”

“To do what?”

“I’m thinking — this may sound crazy — about raising earthworms. It’s a messy enterprise,” he admits, “but they’re gold. Not just for fishing: it’s the composting wave I’ll ride. Easy to start a worm farm. Couple kiddie pools, nightcrawlers, off you go. But you need quality worms. Good bloodlines.”

“Worms have those?”

“I’ve been told so.”

“Well… I got to go, James.”

For whatever reason he’s confused. As if he’d expected me to tag along the rest of his life. The sun carries over the low-rise architecture of this central Ontario town. In the Cadillac’s windshield stand James and myself, reflected. James with his bruised face, me with my scabby scalp. Matilda stares through the glass. With the cone round her head brightened by the sun she looks like the bulb in a car headlamp.

I catch a cab at the bus terminal. It heads to the destination I’d been given over the phone by a man with a Robert Goulet voice. Lakefield Research Centre. Some kind of metallurgy lab. It takes about an hour. I doze. I give the cabbie everything I’ve got left on me — everything in my pockets. Cash, half a pack of gum, a Subway Club card one punch-hole shy of a free footlong. He takes it all gratefully enough.

Lakefield is painted that industrial lime shade common in the seventies. Inside are the partially lit hallways, gypsum floors, and whitewashed concrete walls of any elementary school. I walk down halls, finding nobody, nothing but the hum of machinery through the walls. I come upon a chair and man sitting in it. Old, in a janitor’s outfit. I tell him who I am and he nods. I follow him down another hallway, up a flight of stairs. The reek of ozone. A green-tiled room. Riveted metal floors. Military cot. I lie upon it and fall into an exhausted sleep and awake to face my butcher.

Starling looks not bad, considering. Bandaged up, everything safety-pinned in place. He sits awkwardly in a wooden chair backgrounded by a man I find familiar. Starling sniffles. The other man wipes his nose with a Kleenex, which he balls and tucks up his sleeve as an old biddy would.

“The man’s dog?”

“Tough dog.”

“Tough,” Starlings agrees.

“So who cuts — you?”

“I’m not a professional,” Starling tells me. “Or a gifted amateur. Only The Middle. Your organs are point A. Their destinations point C. They meet through me. We have surgeons. Not, mind you, the best this world has to offer.”

“You can cut me to rags and throw my body to the dogs. But my eyes…”

“Your daughter,” says Starling. “You love her? You must. There will be various handler’s fees,” he explains. “Other miscellaneous expenses. Whatever’s left will be deposited into your account.”

I brace my arms on the cot’s edge. “How much do you figure I’m worth?”