Unconsciously, he reached out and laid his hand on the smooth haunch of a nearby cow, taking comfort from its warmth. Now that he was here, surrounded by all that gave him sustenance, he recognized how foolish he’d been, and how, in fact, he might end up having to thank Marianne for dumping him.
Not that he was quite ready for that yet.
A sudden lowing from near the stable’s far wall made him move quickly in that direction, both the sound and his experience preparing him for what he soon saw. A large cow was lying in a calving pen apart from the stalls, her benign expression at odds with the obvious tension rippling through her body. From her hind quarters, a glistening, milky white sack, the size of a duffel bag, was working its way into the half-lit world.
Gently, Bobby entered the stall. “Hey there, Annie,” he said quietly, “you’re rushing things. You were supposed to wait a few more days.”
He positioned himself behind her and cradled the wet, slippery sack as it continued to emerge from the birth canal, the calf’s front feet and nose visible through the thin membrane. Excited and fearful at his lucky timing, Bobby seized the feet as the sack ripped open, and half caught, half eased the bundle onto the hay-covered ground, straining against both the weight and the awkwardness of his package.
Now on his knees, covered with blood, viscous fluid, and the wet, powerful smell of afterbirth, he struggled against Annie’s large, inquisitive nose as she tried to push him out of the way to conduct a maternal inspection.
“Easy, girl. Let me do this,” he urged, struggling with the small, slimy creature in an attempt to lift its hind leg and check its sex. Successful at last, he smiled at what he found. “Nice, Annie-a future milker. Good girl.”
Free to get to work, Annie’s enormous tongue immediately began rasping against the calf’s nose and eyes with surprising force, cleaning it off as it snorted and shook its head.
Bobby moved back and sat on his haunches, smiling broadly, all thoughts of Marianne banished, and admired the scene, pleased not only by the sight but also by the fact that he’d worked without direction or help. In the morning, he’d surprise his father with this tale of serendipity.
Which thought brought him back to reality. His job wasn’t done yet, and what he had to do was way beyond Annie’s capabilities. After cleaning up the mess and spreading more sawdust, he traveled back the length of the stable to the milk room and opened up the cabinet housing the drugs and medicines. After setting out two buckets to be filled with tepid water for Annie, he prepared one 2 cc syringe for injection into the calf’s nostril and loaded a pill gun so he could deliver a bolus of medicine straight down its throat. He then returned to the pen and distracted the mother with the water, which she gulped down in a thirsty panic while he set out to medicate the newcomer.
Now he was done, he thought, stepping back at last and slipping the syringe into his breast pocket for later disposal. Almost.
Still smiling, he made for the nearest shortcut to the vast hayloft overhead: a broad wooden ladder punching through an open trapdoor in the ceiling. The least he could do was supply the happy twosome with some fresh hay.
Climbing with the ease of a seasoned sailor up a ratline, Bobby broke through to the hayloft floor in seconds, its suddenly enormous, domed, black vastness emphasized by its emptiness. So late in the season, there was but one towering pile of bales left, against the far south wall. The rest of the expansive floor space was bare, aside from a six-inch layer of chaff rustling underfoot.
He started walking toward the bales, feeling confident and restored, when he froze abruptly, suddenly concentrating. Like most people brought up in a world dependent on tools and machines, he had an ear for mechanisms in action and often monitored this ancient and gigantic barn as much by ear as by sight.
There didn’t seem to be anything amiss. Bobby could feel more than hear the fans and pumps and motors throughout the building, as soft and delicate to him as the inner workings of a living entity. But he could swear that he’d heard a hissing of sorts-clear and distinct. And, more important, all his instincts were telling him that there was something very wrong.
He stood absolutely still in the near total blackness, searching for some form of confirmation. Slowly, as lethal as the message it carried, the smell of smoke reached his nostrils.
A farmer’s nightmares are full of fire, from a carelessly tossed match to a spark from a worn electrical wire to a fluke bolt of lightning. Even the hay itself, if put up too damp and packed too tightly, can spontaneously ignite and bring about disaster. More than one farmer in Bobby’s experience, Calvin Cutts included, wrapped up every day by giving the barn a final fire check before bed. To say that such vigilance smacked of paranoia was to miss the larger point: Fire to a farmer was like a diagnosis of cancer-survivable perhaps, but only following a long and crippling struggle, and only if you were lucky.
Bobby had two choices: to investigate and perhaps stifle the fire before it got worse, or to run back to the house, raise the alarm, and get as many people and as much equipment coming as possible.
Typically, but unsurprisingly, he yielded to a young man’s faith in his own abilities and set out to discover what was wrong.
Bobby’s sense of smell led him away from the bales and toward the sealed-off so-called fuel room that Calvin had built as far from any flammable materials as possible. Here was kept the gas and oil and diesel for their machines, locked behind a heavy wooden door.
He could hear more clearly now, as he approached that door, the hissing sound that had drawn his attention. But as he unhooked the key from a nearby post and freed the fire extinguisher hanging beneath it, he remained convinced of his course of action. It was a closed room; whatever lay within it was contained and could thus be controlled.
Which is when he heard a second sudden hissing behind him, accompanied by a sharp snap-harsh, like the bite of a rat trap-far across the loft.
He swung around, startled-frightened. He’d been wrong. The noise beyond the door wasn’t his only problem. And this second one, he realized with a sickening feeling, was accompanied by a flickering glow. A second fire had started near where he’d just been.
Bobby Cutts began to sweat.
Distracted now, not thinking clearly, he clung to his initial plan of action. First things first. Ignoring the heat radiating from the lock as he slipped in the key, he twisted back the dead bolt, readied the fire extinguisher, and threw open the door.
The resulting explosion lifted him off his feet and tossed him away like a discarded doll, landing him on the back of his head with a sickening thud. His mouth was bleeding copiously from where the extinguisher had broken several teeth as it flew from his hands.
Dazed and spitting blood, a huge, curling fireball lapping at his feet, Bobby tried scrambling backward, screaming in pain as he put weight on a shattered right hand. He rolled and crawled away as best he could, the smell of his own burned hair and skin strong in his nostrils. In the distance, at the loft’s far end, he could see a second sheet of flame working its way up the face of the stacked hay bales.
He got to his knees, staggered to his feet, and began stumbling back toward the ladder, his remaining instincts telling him to return below and free as many cows as possible before escaping himself.
It wasn’t easy. His eyes hurt and weren’t focusing properly, he kept losing his balance, disoriented from a brain hemorrhage he knew nothing about, and as he reached the top of the ladder, the injury to his hand returned like a hot poker. The only saving grace was that he could see anything at all, the hayloft being high-ceilinged enough that the red, glowing smoke stayed above him.