Blue and Green Music

By Barry Glynn

It had been a long, cold night. My father woke me up at around two in the morning. He’d returned from checking the cows and found a heifer that was struggling in labor. He said simply, “I need you to wake up and help me with a cow.”

I took a moment to realize what was going on. I was the notorious oversleeper of the family. A fact that made me the enemy of early-morning Puritans, but my father knew, or believed, that it wasn’t a matter of laziness – I was unsettled. He knew that he could wake me in the middle of the night and I would get my things together and would groggy-eye my way out to the pickup truck. 

There was a lot of snow that winter and it was very cold in the middle of the night in North Dakota. But, the weather was fine. It was a clear North Dakota night. I put on my long underwear and thermal socks and my snowsuit and snow boots, and I made my way out to the south of the house where the tractor was parked out of the way of the trenches where cars and pickup trucks could come and go out of our yard. I climbed into the tractor with my father. It was the only way we could drive around and check the cattle in the pasture without getting stuck. Out in the pasture of white we drove to the end of the shelterbelt of trees. I got out and easily walked the cow up the row and into the barn. Then we put the black angus in a pen and into a shoot and soon my father had a chain behind the heifer’s back legs and his arm almost fully into her vagina. He gave funny looks when he had his arm inside of a cow – sometimes a smile when the cow’s tail would flail and give him a little slap of shit in the face. Sometimes, like this time, it was a curious look as if he was trying to decipher a puzzle or do origami one-handed without looking. 

When you are trying to help bring life into the world everything seems to stop. You don’t think about how tired you are or what you’d rather be doing. The job gets very focused when you are trying to save a life. There was a dance of manipulation. Then the cow started the moaning and I got the chain ready on the puller. It’s not the same sanitary environment one might expect from a hospital, but nonetheless it is an emergency room atmosphere. No scalpels but we did get the curved end moved up after dad got the chain inside the cow and hooked it around the unborn calf’s legs. The ratchet sound as the chain pulled tight and then a break for the cow to contract and push. This intermittent ratcheting and pulling and pausing for the cow and then resuming went on. There was a small little cluster of the calf’s hooves sticking out the rear of the cow and the smell of animal and life began to permeate. In this case, eventually we realized the danger, and against the mother’s wishes, we pulled hard on the baby calf until finally the struggling cow was able to drop the calf with splat. The cow wanted to turn around and tend to the newborn but she was cut off by the gate pressed up against her. We took the calf and cleared the air and pumped the lungs. We cleaned the airways in a mad scramble. The minutes seemed eternal and I worried this would be one of those nights where we lost a baby in the dark and the unknowing world would be reduced to this barn and the smell of death. But then the calf took a soft but audible breath. We doubled our efforts and didn’t speak until we could confirm that this calf was getting air and was making it. There is a special joy in that kind of thing – especially if you’ve been on the losing end of it before. 

When we were satisfied that the fresh calf was healthy we let the mother turn around and tend to it. Standing outside the gate we leaned our arms on the metal bars and watched the maternal dance. We had smiles and said meaningless things like “she looks good” or “that was a close one.” We put some water in a tall rubber bucket in the pen, shoveled in some of the grains and feed, and scattered fresh hay all around until we were satisfied with the nursery. We did it all carefully and with love and returned to watching the happy mother and satisfied calf. 

Eventually, we realized how late it was, but we were not tired. We took our time making sure we had not forgotten anything. We drove the tractor around and checked all the heifers and returned to the barn one last time to make sure everything was all right. We both climbed into the tractor and drove back to the house. We carved out lanes for cars and trucks to drive – trenches in deep white snow, and when we were done we parked the tractor on the south side of the house. Our heads were hooded over stocking caps and our eyes looked down as we pulled the extension cord over and plugged in the tractor. Then we turned to walk to the house, Crunching the snow with our boots and coming up to the side of the house, I noticed my father’s eyes were fixed upward, and so I too looked up and was frozen by the dancing blue and white lights undulating like bullwhips into the high darkness. I was hypnotized by the dancing lights. We were stopped by the Georgia O’Keeffe Blue and Green Music that swirled and weaved in and out of the black night. I heard a thud next to me. I turned to my right, looking for the cause of the sound, and there I saw my father lying still in a perfectly shaped human imprint in the deep snow – he had let himself fall backwards onto the cushion of snow and laid there staring at the sky. No words, but I understood. Then I let myself fall backwards and crunch into the soft cushion of snow, alive with my father. We laid there on our backs facing the stars as the towering, twisting blue and green and white lights blinked indigos and violets and ambers, which bounced and pulsed in the cold and open sky. 

Barry Glynn is a middle-aged family man. He has a rural background and lives in the Midwest. Starting out as a singer/songwriter, Barry is currently a High School English teacher and holds an MFA from the University of Nebraska at Omaha.