Meet Mama Red

On rare days, if I’m lucky, I catch a glimpse of the divine.

I caught such a glimpse one November morning on my father’s farm, in light so early it still could be considered dark.  I caught it in a gathering of mama cows, a dozen of them, all huddled and straining against the corner of an old barbed wire fence, each with her chin shoved high into the air and sending forth sounds.  They were guttural.  They made me shiver.

Above their mouths, a mist hovered.

I had been in bed asleep in my father’s house of brick when their sounds woke me and drew me forth into his pasture.  I stood some ten feet away from them in my pajamas and boots.  The air was chilled, but I wasn’t cold.

Mostly I could see their eyes, these mamas, their lids pulled back as if with rope and showing a vast sea of white surrounding circles of brown.  One mama had her eyes cut towards me.  She stood the closest to the corner, and as she bellowed, she looked my way.

This was the cow who would become Mama Red.

I would not see it yet, but she and the others had pushed forward with such force that the end post angled out as if it was an arm waving at something familiar.

And it was.  Their babies.   They were some thirty yards away, at the other end of a grassy lane that had lost its color in the first frost.  Like their mothers, they stood huddled at the corner of a barbed wire fence.  They, too, sent forth sounds.  Deep ones.  Long ones.

I would come to know they were steers, neutered males, aged six to eight months.  My father, the afternoon before, had separated them from their mothers.  It’s called weaning.  It’s what farmers do.  Otherwise, the mothers would continue to let their babies nurse, and that is not good, they tell me, since likely these mothers were carrying again.  Carrying another baby inside them.  This is the process.  As is what would happen later that morning when the sun came up full and strong.  A trailer hitched to a truck would pull into my father’s driveway and come around the back of his house, past the corral where the steers stood, to the chute on the back of the barn, where the steers would be herded and loaded into the trailer and then taken to the cattle barn to sell to other farmers, who would feed them and fatten them for the only thing many believe steers are good for, slaughter.

The sounds that morning were deafening.

A flock of geese flew into the air from my father’s pond, set into the earth down the hill.   They flew past the mamas and towards the babies, but then stopped short and made a sharp turn and flew away from us all, as if not wanting to flaunt their freedom.

Mama Red’s eyes stayed on me, and I knew in my bones what she wanted.  She wanted me to get her baby back.  To knock down her fence and his, so he could once again place his mouth around her teat and draw forth all that she would freely give.

My eyes flooded.

She let out another sound that joined in the chorus around her.  And I fixed on the mist just released from their mouths, and I imagined it floating my way, to my face, which I would hold chin up in the hopes that the mist, surely holy, would come find me.  And save me.  Like a baptism.  Like what my Sarah, the protagonist in my novel, has been needing from the moment I created her.  Needing to find the salvation she has spent her whole life seeking.

I told Mama Red and the others that day, and I said it out loud, I said I can’t get your babies back, but I can write a book that honors the way you love them.

The trailer came.  The steers left.  The mamas continued to stand at the corner and call for them, even though no sounds came back their way.  This would continue for a couple of days, and then the cows, one by one, would leave the fence and go back out in the pasture, where they would fill their bellies to feed out the new babies inside of them.  Occasionally, they would look back towards the corral and bellow.

Mama Red would be among them.  And like her, those that had claimed the fence line, would have dried blood scattered up and down their necks and chests, where the barbs from the wire had penetrated their hair and skin as they had sought freedom.

I would have a dream some days later that the grassy lane was a channel of water.  And in that water were cows, mama cows, moving past me, their heads working hard to stay high.  I was standing in the pasture where they had stood.  I was standing on holy ground.  Except I was behind no fence.  It no longer was there.  When they passed my way, they kept their eyes cut towards me, and all over again, I made them my promise.  To show the world this piece of divine that I had encountered on a November morning on my father’s land, one that will teach my Sarah what the cows already know in their bones – that children do matter, maybe even the most.