Ethan Chatagnier - Warnings from the Future

When they got the floodlights on and made it out to the well, she was a dark lump on the ground. They saw that a thirteen-foot stream of blood had frozen over where it ran from her neck into a wide low puddle. She’d taken several steps before collapsing, and her forelegs looked like they’d been dipped in chocolate.

With a chain come-along they were able to pull her into the front loader of the backhoe without scooping up a mess of dirt, but its cab was too high to get them more than a few feet inside the barn door, and they had to fashion a sled on the top frame of the tractor’s disc attachment. Eli commanded the whole thing, so that while five of the young men were getting Columbia into the front loader, five were wheeling the disc into position, five were gathering lead ropes from the tack room and tying them onto the disc, and the other thirteen were set to haul tables from the workshop into the barn, cover them with plastic sheeting, sterilize them, and prepare for the other requirements of butchery. The disc sank and cut grooves in the clay as fifteen of them strained to pull it, but there was no question of using the horses, which smelled Columbia’s blood and were stamping and whinnying. The biggest challenge was lifting her carcass onto the table. A half-ton heifer divided among thirty people was fewer than fifty pounds each, but it was impossible for even half of them to get a clean purchase, so they looped furniture straps, tie downs, ropes, halters, and anything else at hand to allow those in the outer circle to shoulder a few pounds of the load. In one great heave, they got her up and onto the flat surface.

They worked in quiet concert. Eli said a few names, and those he called joined him in the tasks of skinning and gutting Columbia, of separating her into primal cuts, but none of the others went back to bed or to breakfast or milled about watching. Those not called to help Eli threw blankets over the horses and cows, since the barn door had been left open to bring down the temperature. When they ran out of horse blankets they brought blankets from their own beds. They broke up ice and transferred it to coolers to carry the meat, what would fit of it, to the deep freeze. Others set about washing and soaking the hide once Eli and his helpers had finished cutting it off. The work was serious and perhaps sad, but it was why most of them had come, for the power of a community in accord, doing the work that needed to be done, doing work that was apparent and abundant. There was a rhythm to it, a muscle memory, and none of the dwelling on past or future that came with idle time.

Only when the butchery was done, along with all the associated cleaning, did the eeriness of the situation start to settle in. They’d sprung into action together, and done it well, and had left out of their minds that what started the process was the murder of a favored cow. A killing that served no purpose, that seemed too far afield even for random malice. Especially after what had happened to the dog. They all sat together around the well, still warm from their labor. Sunlight put a shine on the snowcaps to the west now, and a damp peach light was in the air. The diorama of cow’s blood was still frozen in the dirt, but the top was starting to shimmer and bead with droplets.

Who could have done such a thing? The first hypothesis was bored townie punks. Home-cooked meth had come to nearby Bishop recently, if in a small way, and unpredictable behavior had stopped being unfamiliar. But several of the students pointed out that it was a bit hard to imagine someone getting freaked out on meth, driving thirty miles on country roads in the dark, finding a cow—and not just any cow—in the barn, getting her out to center of campus, and slicing her throat, not to mention doing so without making enough noise to wake anyone up.

The quiet that followed was uncomfortable.

“Anybody got a crazy ex?” Neil asked with a stillborn chuckle.

It was Wesley Denniston who spoke up, a wiry second-year with the haircut of an orphan, which always made a surprise out of the clarity, the beauty, of his voice, even though he was never shy about using it. In every seminar, his voice was the first raised, and it was absent the upward lilt of a question mark. Everyone’s eyes went to him. Eli stared him into the dust, but Eli was behind the rest of the group where they couldn’t see him, and Wesley went on anyway.

“We all do,” he said. “Hugo.”

“That seems a pretty wild speculation,” Eli said.

“Just how wild?” Wesley said, staring right back.

WESLEY

I know Paul tells us our salvation is not by works but by faith. When James argues for the importance of works, however, he is not contradicting Paul. He says that a faith apart from works is dead, that a living faith will produce works. The point is that acts are not irrelevant. What draws most of us, and certainly me, to Battle Creek College is the idea not just that faith affects works, but that works affect faith. So when we are lugging sandbags or harvesting vegetables by hand or working all together to drive cattle through the corral to tag, horn, brand, and vaccinate them, that is its own kind of prayer. By adding it to traditional prayer, we enrich our faith. Many know the motto Simple Work, Complex Faith, but few understand it. Still, the school works well as a magnet: the ones who seek it are the ones who belong. Those who don’t believe in work don’t come.

Hugo was the exception. From the moment he arrived I sensed something off about him. He lacked a certain gravity. He was not serious enough. During work hours, students’ faces displayed the turning over and sorting out of the day’s lectures; you could see the smelting of ore into iron through the furnace of labor. But not with Hugo. He would look off at the mountains, or get lost in the sunset, and his pace would slow. If it was line work, he would throw off the rhythm of the whole crew. And his quiet in the seminar was unlike those who waited, listened, and processed thoughtfully before speaking, like Eli. Hugo’s silence was simply disengaged from the high life of the mind this place is designed to serve.

Eli, on the other hand, looked like a healthy thirty-year-old man even though he was only twenty-two. He was the type who had looked full-grown at thirteen. He looked like a cowboy, like a man who knew the land through a communion with the One who made it. He had finished his degree two years earlier and was in the second year of his ranch steward fellowship. He guided us not just in the upkeep of our crops and livestock, but in the classroom, where he was a sort of graduate assistant, and he let the students air their first thoughts and prejudices before diving in with a comment, or more often a question, that made clear the issue, or would rattle around in thirty skulls during our duty hours. Both the professors and Pastor Dale shifted their tone when talking to Eli, conversing with him as with an equal.

You can see why I could not have predicted or even believed that Hugo’s bad spirit could worm its way into this man. And yet the Book tells us that Adam and Eve fell, that the great David fell, that Saul fell, that even the Apostles denied and doubted their Lord. So it was some speck in my own eye, a naiveté or a boyish lack of confidence, that kept me from seeing the corruption of Eli sooner. How I wish that I had seen it sooner. But once I saw it I could not simply let it go. A living faith sometimes requires action.

ELI

I’d worried about Hugo from the start. Most kids came to the college with a drawer of secret anger, which the ranch work helped them burn off safely. You could see their fathers perched on their shoulders, doubting them. Others came with good-boy haircuts and a missionary good cheer. Hugo had a look I hadn’t seen before here. He was soft in the middle and had a mooning look in his eyes that the other students didn’t care for. I assigned him to my own work detail so I could look out for him and make sure he adjusted okay. Our main duty that fall was irrigation, and we’d ride out along the canals kicking the taps on and off, checking levels, and mucking out any debris we happened to find. September in Battle Creek meant sweltering afternoons with cold evenings, and as the sun got low one of those first days, Hugo, who was still an unsure rider, had to dismount to put on his coat. I rode up next to him and said: