Meant Well

Her father would not let anyone take care of her, not even her mother — especially her mother — so he brought her everywhere, even as a baby, her car seat parked nearby while he milked. Too big for the seat now, Ger stood with him in the yard, leaning against the wind in that one-piece coat like a stumpy starfish. They were dehorning calves, or Barry was — Ger chipped in with the quieter ones, snipping hair back from their budding horns, the scissors like shears in her tiny hands. When they reached the last, contrariest calf, 766, Ger tried to calm the little heifer with strokes on the nose, but 766 snorted and thrashed about in the calf crush.

Before the calf did itself an injury, Barry went to get another pin to tighten things up, and he wasn’t gone five seconds — had even looked back to make sure the dehorner’s scalding wand was where he’d left it, high on the wall — when he heard a thin scream. Out he ran and saw the dehorner, hissing in the mud where Ger had dropped it.

By the time they got home from the hospital, 766 had Houdinied — not just from the calf crush but from the yard itself — and was out in the garden nibbling flowers.

As for Ger, she kept her sight, and the wilted-petal scar.

Growing up, she knew all about horsepower, miles per gallon, tonnage. Friendships were flimsy things. Playdates seemed to be organized for days when the animals needed moving or dividing, and one too many of Ger’s classmates was returned home tired, dirty, and faintly traumatized from the free labor. Not a bother on Ger, though. She followed in Barry’s duckfooted steps, stole some of his speech. Even her tilt of the bottle for newborns was like his. Baby feeding the babies. Then a baby bedding, counting, and injecting them, before being old enough to help milk. She was as good as Barry in the parlors, and she needed to be — 766 was part of the herd.

Often, Ger thought of ways to kill the heifer, whose bold white head stuck out from a polo neck of black, who had maybe branded her — she couldn’t fully remember — and caused some of the rottenest rows with Barry. The number of times she’d been giving out milk and 766 decided, in her exhausting but inexhaustible fussiness, that the teats weren’t adequate, that more milk was to be had by repeatedly headbutting the feeder till it came off the railing. (A whole pen of calves could then