"I missed you."
"I missed you, too. Do you understand what I'm saying?"
"Yes."
"Are you ready to leave?"
"If the time comes…"
"The time is pretty close. Rest until then. But we might have to hurry. You understand, Diane?"
"Simon," she said faintly. "Disappointed," she said.
"You rest, and I—"
But I didn't have time to finish.
A key rattled in the door. I flipped the phone closed and pushed it into my pocket. The door opened, and Aaron Sorley stood in the frame, rifle in hand, huffing as if he'd run up the stairs. He was silhouetted in the dim light from the hallway.
I backed away until my shoulders hit the wall.
"Tag on your license says you're a doctor," he said. "Is that right?"
I nodded.
"Then come with me," he said.
* * * * *
Sorley marched me downstairs and out the rear door toward the barn.
The moon, stained amber by the light of the gibbous sun, scarred and smaller than I remembered it, had risen over the eastern horizon. The night air was almost intoxicatingly cool. I took deep breaths. The relief lasted until Sorley threw open the barn door and a raw, animal stench gushed out—a slaughterhouse smell of excrement and blood.
"Go on in," Sorley said, and he gave me a push with his free hand.
The light came from a fat halide bulb suspended by its power cord over an open cattle stall. A gasoline generator rattled from an enclosure out back somewhere, a sound like someone revving a distant motorcycle.
Dan Condon stood at the open end of the pen, dipping his hands in a bucket of steaming water. He looked up when we entered. He frowned, his face a stark geography under the glaring single-point light, but he looked less intimidating than I remembered. In fact he looked diminished, gaunt, maybe even sick, maybe in the opening stages of his own case of CVWS. "Close that door back up," he said.
Aaron pushed it shut. Simon stood a few paces away from Condon, shooting me quick nervous glances.
"Come here," Condon said. "We need your help with this. Possibly your medical expertise."
In the pen, on a bed of filthy straw, a skinny heifer was trying to birth a calf.
The heifer was lying down, her bony rump projecting from the stall. Her tail had been tied to her neck with a length of twine to keep it out of the way. Her amniotic sac was bulging from her vulva, and the straw around her was dotted with bloody mucus.
I said, "I'm not a vet."
"I know that," Condon said. There was a suppressed hysteria in his eyes, the look of a man who's thrown a party but finds it spiraling out of control, the guests gone feral, neighbors complaining, liquor bottles flying from the windows like mortar rounds. "But we need another hand."
All I knew about brood stock and birthing I had learned from Molly Seagram's stories about life on her parents' farm. None of the stories had been particularly pleasant. At least Condon had set himself up with what I recalled as the necessary basics: hot water, disinfectant, obstetrical chains, a big bottle of mineral oil already stained with bloody handprints.
"She's part Angeln," Condon said, "part Danish Red, part Belarus Red, and that's only her most recent bloodline. But crossbreeding's a risk for 'dystocia'. That's what Brother Geller used to say. The word 'dystocia' means a difficult labor. Crossbreeds often have trouble calving. She's been in labor almost four hours. We need to extract the fetus."
Condon said this in a distant monotone, like a man lecturing a class of idiots. It didn't seem to matter who I was or how I'd got here, only that I was available, a free hand.
I said, "I need water."
"There's a bucket for washing up."
"I don't mean for washing. I haven't had anything to drink since last night."
Condon paused as if to process this information. Then he nodded and said, "Simon. See to it."
Simon appeared to be the trio's errand boy. He ducked his head and said, "I'll fetch you a drink, Tyler, sure enough," still avoiding my eyes as Sorley opened the barn door to let him out.
Condon turned back to the cattle pen where the exhausted heifer lay panting. Busy flies decorated the heifer's flanks. A couple of them lighted on Condon's shoulders, unnoticed. Condon doused his hands with mineral oil and squatted to expand the heifer's birth canal, his face contorting with a combination of eagerness and disgust. But he had barely begun when the calf crowned in another gush of blood and fluid, its head barely emerging despite the heifer's fierce contractions. The calf was too big. Molly had told me about oversized calves—not as bad as a breech birth or a hiplock, but unpleasant to deal with.
It didn't help that the heifer was obviously ill, drooling greenish mucus and struggling for breath even when the contractions eased. I wondered whether I should say anything about that to Condon. His divine calf was obviously infected, too.
But Pastor Dan didn't know or didn't care. Condon was all that was left of the Dispensationalist wing of Jordan Tabernacle, a church unto himself, reduced to two parishioners, Sorley and Simon, and I could only imagine how muscular his faith must have been to sustain him all the way to the end of the world. He said in the same tone of suppressed hysteria, "The calf, the calf is red—Aaron, look at the calf."
Aaron Sorley, who was posted on the door with his rifle, came over to peer into the pen. The calf was indeed red. Doused in blood. Also limp.
Sorley said, "Is it breathing?"
"Will be," Condon said. He was abstracted, seemed to be savoring it, this moment on which he genuinely believed the world was about to pivot into eternity. "Get the chains around the pasterns, quickly now."
Sorley gave me a look that was also a warning—don't say a fucking word—and we did as we were instructed, worked until we were bloody up to our elbows. The act of birthing an oversized calf is both brutal and ludicrous, a grotesque marriage of biology and crude force. It takes at least two reasonably strong men to assist at an outsized calving. The obstetric chains were for pulling. The pulls had to be timed to the cow's contractions; otherwise the animal could be eviscerated.
But this heifer was weak unto death, and her calf—its head lolled lifelessly—was now obviously a stillbirth.
I looked at Sorley, Sorley looked at me. Neither of us spoke. Condon said, "The first thing is to get her out. Then we'll revive her."
There was a movement of cooler air from the barn door. That was Simon, back with a bottle of spring water, staring at us and then at the half-delivered stillbirth, his face gone startlingly pale.
"Got your drink," he managed.
The heifer finished another weak, unproductive contraction. I dropped the chain. Condon said, "You take that drink, son. Then we'll carry on."
"I have to clean up. At least wash my hands."
"Clean hot water in buckets by the hay bales. But be quick about it." His eyes were closed, shut tight on whatever battle his common sense was conducting with his faith.
I rinsed and disinfected my hands. Sorley .watched closely. His own hands were on the obstetrical chain, but his rifle was propped against a rail of the stall within easy reach.
When Simon handed me the bottle I leaned into his shoulder and said, "I can't help Diane unless I get her out of here. Do you understand? And I can't do that without your help. We need a reliable vehicle with a full tank of gas, and we need Diane inside it, preferably before Condon figures out the calf is dead."
Simon gasped, "It's truly dead?"—too loud, but neither Sorley nor Condon appeared to hear.
"The calf isn't breathing," I said. "The heifer's barely alive."
"But is the calf red? Red all over? No white or black patches? Purely red?"
"Even if it's a fucking fire engine, Simon, it won't do Diane any good."
He looked at me as if I'd announced his puppy had been run over. I wondered when he had traded his brimming self-confidence for this blank bewilderment, whether it had happened suddenly or whether the joy had drained out of him a grain at a time, sand through an hourglass.