After that, I started finding pudding cups hidden in the trash beneath coffee filters and banana peels. I began to suspect Amelia was having herme timemore than once a day. As for Doug, he was away more frequently, appearing on the news as many times as the networks would have him. He came home one day looking permanently frightened, and when I asked him if he was all right, he paused, then leaned into me and said confidentially, “It’s just a little bit of Botox. The consultants said it would keep me looking youthful.” He hesitated, then asked gruffly, “Is it obvious?”
Picture 3
A photo carousel: a cardboard box of yolk-yellow chicks; one chick peering through Clementine’s cupped hands; a single black-and-white cow standing alone in the paddock by the barn, staring at the camera with an almost humanlike expression of confusion; Caleb, grinning and covered in dirt, leaning his arm on a shovel stuck in the dirt.
Caption:#farmlife #happyhubbie #chickens #cows #blessed
From the first time Caleb suggested it, I told him it was a stupid idea. There was no reason to get farm animals so soon. But he did it anyway: he ordered a shipment of chicks, a dairy cow, and two packages of exotic vegetable seeds to arrive a day after we moved onto the farm.
Clementine was almost three years old by this point, and still an only child. No longer a baby at all but a toddler. I’d never been around just one child before. There was an intensity to our timetogether that I found exhausting and unnerving even when it was going well. I was desperate for more children, not just because of my agreement with Doug but also because I was certain the arrival of another child would have an alleviating effect on my relationship with the one I already had. Both of us, I think, were frequently exhausted from being the recipient of so much focus from the other.
The day the chicks arrived, I picked one up and placed it into Clementine’s hands. The chick began to squeak wildly, like a little ambulance siren,PEEPPEEPPEEPPEEP—
“He’s afraid,” she said. Just a moment ago, it seemed, she had saidMamafor the first time, and already she was speaking almost exclusively in short sentences, ones that always felt like declarations of her mother’s failure.I’m hungry. You’re mad. He’s afraid.
“Hold on,” I commanded. She kept perfectly still as I took the picture, her face frozen in somberness, then she set him down on the floor. The chick waddle-sprinted back to the cluster of other chicks. Clementine stood back up and held out her hand, a small yellow-white dollop of excrement on her palm. She looked at it for a long moment, then she stepped forward and wiped it on the thigh of my jeans.
All the chicks died shortly after arrival. Whatever killed them caused their bodies to bloat like little tennis balls. We tossed them. Then the dairy cow’s udders grew swollen and infected, and soon she was banging her head against the barn wall in a terrifying staccato rhythm,thud, thud,thud—out of boredom, Caleb thought. But how to entertain a cow?
“Look it up,” I said.
By that time, though, the online forum filled with experienced farmers was no longer receptive to Caleb’s questions. While the men had been helpful at first, eagerly answering Caleb’s questions, they’d recently grown angry, telling him he shouldn’t have gotten a dairy cow, that he should sell the cow immediately and get some certifications first. What was he thinking, they asked. Did he really think he could do this overnight?
And so he went on another forum, this one titledDIYFarmers.The men were much nicer there.
“Mastitis!” Caleb said triumphantly, five days into the head-banging issue. “She has all the symptoms of mastitis!”
“Great,” I said. “What’s mastitis?”
The cow died a month later. We stood over her body in the barn. I looked at Caleb. “What do farmers do with dead cows?”
They burn them. Or bury them in compost. Or call someone to pick up the body and take it to a facility where it can be processed into fertilizer, but only if there are no transmissible diseases, and even then, you should be careful, because too many calls for too many dead cows can lead to a formal investigation.
Caleb drove an hour to the Home Depot in town and paid three Mexican men to hop into the bed of his truck and help him drag the body out to a field. I watched from the kitchen window as the flames licked the sky. The bonfire smelled terrible.
Later that day, when the men were loitering by the truck, smoking cigarettes and waiting for Caleb to drive them back to town, I said to him, “I think it’s time to hire some workers, don’t you?”
He looked reluctant. “I guess so.”
“And,” I added, “I think it’s also time for something else.”
“What? Dinner?”
I raised my eyebrows, which was intended to give the appearance of flirtation, but just made him look further alarmed. “What? What is it? Are you sick or something?”
That night we had three minutes of close-lipped missionary sex. The next morning, a new dairy cow arrived at the farm. We would never actually see the wolves, but we heard them howling all the time.
Picture 4
The photo: Caleb and Clementine and me, standing alongside his parents and his brothers and their families onstage at an election-night party in Salt Lake City, confetti frozen in the air around our faces.
Caption:Proud to be an American!
The night Doug won his eighth Senate reelection campaign, one of Caleb’s older brothers, David, found Amelia passed out in Doug’s dressing room, her pink pantsuit splattered with chocolate-colored vomit.
“Jesus Christ,” George, another brother, said from the doorway, while David checked her wrist for a pulse. He gagged, then said, “Is that shit?”
“It’s pudding,” I said, and George said, “Thank God,” right as David said, “She’s breathing!”
