C. Morgan - All the Living

Orren’s truck was parked before the porch and she traced a desperate full circle around the house, though she was half afraid to face him. Still, she sought after him. He was not in the shorn fields or in the curing barn where the first cuts of gathered tobacco now hung drying from the rafters. She did not see him down in the pasture or in the doorway to the barn, though she saw chickens scratching at the dirt in the foreyard. The door to the new house was not open. Aloma turned and looked directly at the sun then, as if she would find him there, but she could only close her eyes to its fierce ebullience. She realized that for once the night would be cool.

With nothing else to do, Aloma went into the kitchen and cooked. After an hour, there was still no sign of him. So she sat at the small table in the kitchen, though she could not bring herself to eat, listening for sounds of him. Birds passed overhead and called for the end of summer, then were gone. The noise of the day stilled into reverend silence and darkness fell. When she stood up finally from the kitchen table and peered out the back door and thought of wandering into the fields to find him, it was full black. The tobacco banked in shadow under the cold wink of Venus. Perhaps when all was said and done, Orren did not want her to find him. Her mind twisted around this new thought.

She went upstairs and sat on the bed in her clothes, but she did not lie down. She studied the dark room about her. Her mind strove for a place to rest, but could not settle. The lonesomest thing she knew, her childhood, rose before her like a shade, but she shooed it away with a blink of her dark-accustomed eyes. Her mind veered away from Bell and the shame that instantly burned her face and it tried to veer away from Orren too, who, she saw now with a clarity brought on by defeat, she had fought not to love even as she had asked him for love. But who had there been to teach her otherwise? As a lone girl growing into adulthood, she had only her own body to touch, her restless mind curbed by the borders of her own imagination. She’d never known the burden or the joy of contouring herself to another. She had only ever had herself. And when Orren came, love was only an accident, her spirit carried into the thing through the strivings of her body, her heart surprised suddenly to find itself a mortise. Bell was right, she was tenoned to Orren. And once the thing was done, it was too late to consider how they loved across a distance of three counties and two mountains, or that once the distance was crossed, distance would still remain. Aloma peered hard into the dark suddenly, thinking what a waste it was to ever think of going, how wasteful — not ungodly, as Bell had said, but wasteful of creation, which maybe was the same thing — to run and seek after another only to find that the gulf was there too, built into creation as one found it, bred into the act of love. And she did not know what to do with that, or how to reconcile any of it. She only knew that she had indeed been foolish, for thinking that the easy thing was the one worth wanting.

Then she heard her name being called and she could not tell where it was coming from, a revenant call from the house itself. When it came again, she rushed sightless into Orren and Cash’s old room, pushed up a window, and peered out into the indigoed land. This time her name sounded clearly across the distance and she saw a moving shape, Orren, barely visible as a shadow amidst the uneven shadows of the pasture. He waved his arm or seemed to, and without hesitating, she raced from the room and down the steps to the back door in her slippers, her heart rising as he called her name again. She stumbled down the hill toward him. Orren came up out of the pasture and met her halfway on the incline.

I need you, he said.

I didn’t know where you were, she said.

I got a cow that’s calving.

What? Why didn’t you tell me?

He raised his hands up in a useless gesture.

Orren, you never tell me anything, she said.

I can’t see how it’s coming, he said. Fetch me that flashlight from the kitchen — and when she turned toward the house, which she did instantly because of the need in his voice — he said, And a blanket too. Get a blanket and come back down here quick. She ran back into the house again and up the steps to the second floor. She yanked a woolen comfort from their bed and then she retraced her way out into the dark, quick but ginger, for she could see nothing. She found Orren kneeling beside the cow on the far side of the barn on a grassy patch of earth that had not been muddied by hooves. The cow had already lain down of her own volition without tying, her ribs carved meanly as she breathed, waxing gaunt as she inhaled, smoothing into her flesh again as the air passed through her open mouth and nostrils.

What I don’t know is if she calved ever… said Orren when he saw Aloma turn the corner with the comfort and flashlight in her hands. I don’t know how old she is, he said and ran his hands through his hair and then down across his knees, and with his naked arms, which he had scrubbed till his skin chafed in the kitchen sink, he reached into the cow. Into the wet warm birth canal, scooting forward, he reached farther into that pressing dark and said, Wait.

What?

That don’t pencil.

What?

Legs, but no head. Is it reared? But it don’t feel right. He spoke more to himself than to her. He pulled his hand out and looked down at the cow on her side, her barrel chest rising and falling rapidly, and then looked down at his own hand to cipher on his flesh what he had felt. Shine that light, he said, though it did little but show up the mucus and wet on his skin as he returned his arm into the rubied folds of the cow. She’s teeny, he said and with his arm still in her, he peered over his shoulder at Aloma and said, Now, that’s why I ain’t still got that bull here, see. She’s little — and he turned again to face the birthing — but what the hell is… Then he said, Oh goddamn, its neck is crooked back is what.

And she said, Should we call the vet? but Orren said nothing, all the force of his eyes and arms working to follow the steep curve of the calf’s grudging neck to its jaw, to pull it toward his own body and the brisk night air. Aloma saw he was sweating despite the cold. A contraction wrenched his arms against the implacable bones guarding the baby and Orren cried out softly twice.

Orren, should I call him? Aloma hoped toward it with her voice. The flashlight shone a yellow hoop on the ground between Orren’s muddied knees. He did not answer immediately, though he stopped the wrestling of his hand in the womb, feeling only the heavy, inert, perhaps already dead calf under his fingers. He said, Fifteen minutes.

That’s too long, she said, scared, though she did not really know.

No, it’s short. Shit, I don’t know, he said and he groped farther for the jaw. But the contraction caught him and he said, No, goddamn it, no no no, and he reached with the feeble remaining strength of his arm clamped in her spasm. The cow bawled like a living horn and Aloma cried, Orren, please!

No, he said sharp and she fell back a step, the hoop of light expanded so she saw all the muscles of his body gathered up in pure will. She said nothing further. The silence was broken only by the heavy breathing of the cow and the bawling that erupted from her as if in surprise or in anger. The night air was cool and the cow’s breath bloomed in the chilled air each time she exhaled. Grayed wisps like smoke rose from her damp hide. Aloma draped the comfort over her own shoulders as Orren knelt and pressed and turned and pushed at the calf’s submerged shape until finally the stubborn head came forefront and then with his own face nearly at the cow’s anus, Orren reached and found both legs.