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My boss Tom Skinner was a ballbuster if there ever was one, but he’d agreed to let me leave the farm an hour early every Friday so I could go see Maggie. Visiting hours ended at six though, so by the time I was able to catch the bus to St. Regis Hospital, I only had about 45 minutes with her every week. Skinner docked me that hour of pay too, by the way, so I had to walk the three miles into work when I couldn’t afford the bus some mornings.
Of course I asked for more time off, especially once Janie started drinking more because she couldn’t bring herself to visit and see our daughter in that state. But Skinner would always say, “I need you, Harv. You know it’s our busy time. I can’t do it without you.”
It was always our busy time.
Always.
And I’ll tell you what, it never gets easier seeing your own little girl in one of those big iron lungs, barely hanging on. Eyes closed. Looking so tiny.
Never.
Maggie was still talking when I first brought her to St. Regis, but it had been a long time since she’d said anything at all. Three months. Maybe longer. I still talked to her though. Every Friday I’d roll up a stool among those long lines of horrible machines filled with sick kids and sit with her and tell her about all manner of things, stroking her straw-colored hair and acting like everything was gonna be okay.
I’d tell her about the latest scuttlebutt down at Greenbrier’s Corner Store and all the new ice creams and candies that had just come in. I’d tell her about her friends in the second grade. The latest mischief our neighbor’s crazy dog Roscoe had gotten into. How tall the sunflowers we’d planted together had grown. Even how the Yankees were doing and this new kid DiMaggio who was tearing the cover off the ball.
Sometimes I’d just make things up too: “Best get better soon. I heard school’s only gonna be on Mondays and Tuesdays now, and the rest of the days are gonna be for playin’.”
I’d never tell her about the bad stuff. About who else in her school got polio. About how her Momma ended up drinking so much she died in her sleep. About how I couldn’t visit more often because otherwise the bank would foreclose on our house. So I sure as hell wasn’t about to tell her what those doctors had just told me.
Instead, I told her about a cow that had been born that morning.
***
This particular calf I’m talking about slid out of her mother around 4:15 a.m. on April 17, 1936, with no help from me or any of the other farmhands. There wasn’t much special about her to be honest. She was jet black like her Angus momma except she had a patch of white under her right eye, and she was covered in blood and afterbirth just like all the other calves we’d been birthing. She struggled to get her first breaths but she finally did, so for the week we had only lost three calves out of thirty, which wasn’t too bad.
A while later, I put that calf in a headlock and swung her upright in the straw so Doc Patterson could check her over for any defects. He deemed her good beef cattle, and I drove a tag through her ear with a pop and a click. Number 1249 howled something awful, but it was short-lived, and we sent her straight back for her first taste of milk.
Skinner called me into the farm office before I left for the day, almost 15 hours after I’d started.
“You did a good job this week, Harv,” he said, a Chesterfield dangling from the cracked lips under his bushy mustache. “I couldn’t run this farm without you. I mean that.”
“Thank you,” I said, hoping beyond hope that the next words out of his mouth would be “bonus” or “raise.” But I couldn’t have been more wrong.
“You know everyone’s having hard times now,” he said, taking off his cap and laying it on his desk. “This farm ain’t no different, and the fact is I just can’t afford to keep as many people on as I used to. I gotta let some of the other boys go. They don’t know it yet, so keep it quiet. But it’s gotta be done if this farm’s gonna survive.”
The Great Depression had finally reached New Hope Farms.
“How are we going to manage that?” I asked. “Who’s going to do all that work?”
“You. Me. The other couple of fellas we’re keeping on,” Skinner said. “We’ll get it done.”
He paused to take a long drag from his cigarette and pushed a cloud of smoke from his cavernous nostrils.
“Now listen, I know your girl is sick, and I sure am sorry about that,” he said, his fancy new Westinghouse electric fan humming in the background. “But once I let these other fellas go, I just can’t keep giving you the time off. It wouldn’t be fair, you see.”
I didn’t know what to say, but my face must have said it for me.
“Be grateful you got a job, Harvey,” he said. “Lots of folks don’t.”
***
Dr. Dansbury was there to meet me in the gleaming, white-tiled hospital foyer that night.
“Mr. Hanson,” he said, extending a hand and quickly withdrawing it when he caught a whiff of me. I’d changed out of my overalls and boots before I’d left the farm, but there was little doubt I still reeked of shit and afterbirth and who knows what else. “I’d like to have a word with you in my office before you stop in to see Margaret, if it’s alright.”
Dansbury plainly told me it could be days or weeks or months but that the end was inevitable now. Her lungs were too far gone and the iron version could only do so much. Her brain — and her body — were slowly dying from a perpetual lack of oxygen.
The walk through the hospital to her first-floor room seemed endless and impossibly cold after that. And because of the office visit I now only had fifteen minutes with my girl. So why did I choose to use that short time to tell her about that calf? I can’t tell you.
But as far as she knew, that baby cow came out of her mother standing up, ran straight to the barn door, kicked it open, and ran right out into the pasture so she could smell the daisies.
“Damnedest thing I ever saw,” I told her.
***
The next Friday, Skinner didn’t want to let me leave early but I told him I’d quit if he didn’t, and it would have left him in a pickle with all those boys already gone. Sure it was a risk on my part, but there wasn’t much he could do about it because so much of the farm ran through me at that point.
So every Friday, I kept leaving early whether Skinner liked it or not, and every Friday, I kept telling Maggie more about that cow.
By the next Friday, the calf had a name: Daisy. And by the end of the second, Daisy was stealing pies from Mrs. Skinner right off the farmhouse windowsill where she had left them to cool. That cow had a particular taste for huckleberry, it would seem.
A month later, I let Maggie know us farmhands had started noticing some strange things about Daisy. How she looked at us a little funny when we were talking, like she knew what we were saying. Or how she always seemed to hover around the barn door when we’d open it, like she was learning how to open it herself. And then a couple weeks later she surely did, stealing the keys right off Skinner’s belt and waltzing out into the night. Half the town searched for her till morning, I told Maggie, but it wasn’t until Mr. Greenbrier opened his shop at 10 a.m. sharp that he found her snoot deep inside his ice cream cooler rooting through a half gallon of Rocky Road.
Each day I’d show up at work, I’d wish more and more that I was back at Maggie’s side, telling her another story. But each day, I’d keep working — shoveling shit or ordering supplies or drawing up the feeding schedule for the chickens and swine and cattle so Skinner didn’t have to do it. And I always made sure that little calf with the white patch under her eye got a little extra food. A little extra attention. My hand would often linger on her warm ribs as I felt her chest rise and fall, and my mind would turn to how those doctors never could tell me exactly when the end was gonna come. But they surely kept telling me it would.
Yet a year later, Maggie was still lying there. And Daisy just kept getting more and more extraordinary.
She would draw pictures of sailboats and puppy dogs in the dirt with her hoof. She could count. She could dance. She could tell time. She listened to the Yankees and mooed every time Joltin’ Joe DiMaggio got a hit. And those pies. Oh my, did she love escaping and stealing pies. Huckleberry, boysenberry, cherry, apple, pumpkin … you name it.
And still I worked. Even with everything they told me, I just couldn’t bring myself to consider a day when Maggie wouldn’t come home. So that home needed to be there for her when she got better.
Eighteen months after her birth, that little calf — our little Daisy Doodles the Dancing Darling — weighed more than half a ton and stood nearly 4 feet 6 at the withers. And Maggie was still alive.
One day in early autumn, when that season’s sunflowers had yet to wilt, Skinner called me in again to tell me what a good job I was doing. How he couldn’t do it without me. How excited he was that we had made it to another slaughter.
“You helped me save the farm,” he said, that familiar stinking Chesterfield between his yellow teeth. “Thank you, Harv.”
He never asked about Maggie.
Not then.
Not ever.
“Bring ’em all but the breeding stock,” he said, running his fat finger down a list of available cattle, checking off the ones that he’d have me drive to the slaughterhouse.
- 1245. 1247. 1248. 1249 …
I called the slaughterhouse the next day and set it up for the following Friday, meaning the boys and I would drive trailers full of about 30 cattle down there early that morning and then go back the next week to pick up the meat for market.
Only problem was, once I got there, my load was one cow short.
“Damned if I know where it went,” I told Skinner. “Must have been a mistake on the list.”
That evening, I told my darling Maggie — so tiny, so fragile, so silent save for the whooshing and pumping of the machine that helped her breathe — that Daisy wanted to meet her.
“You ain’t gonna believe this, Mags,” I said as I gently ran the back of my callused hand across her pale cheek. “Daisy jumped so high over the pasture fence last night that she jumped right over the moon. And you’ll never guess where she landed.”
Then I bent down so close that my lips were practically touching her ear.
“She landed right in our backyard, Maggie,” I whispered. “And that’s just where she’s gonna stay.”
Maggie’s buried in the family plot out near the sunflowers now, right next to her Momma, and Daisy keeps a watch over them when I’m at work. Maybe next time I get a break, I’ll plant some huckleberries out there, too.
