Mad Cow Nightmare (6 page)

It was a pair of Land’s End denim shorts he’d ordered. The shorts had been back-ordered, he’d almost forgotten about them. He dropped the package on the kitchen table, popped two English muffins in the toaster. The woman looked like she could use some nourishment. He’d take one out to her, gain her trust a little, then go feed the sheep. Sheep were pretty easy to care for, they didn’t have to be milked, like cows. Just fed, kept healthy, lambed and sheared once a year, then sold. If he did well with the sheep he’d quit the counseling job. He didn’t like the suicides he had to work with, the weirdos he encountered. You couldn’t reason with them the way you could with the dying. The dying were grateful for any crumb you could throw their way. A bath, a pain pill—they looked at you like you were their savior. He liked that. They trusted him. He’d never touched a dying female, not once.

Of course they were mostly old, the ones he cared for, wrinkled and saggy—he wouldn’t want to touch them anyway.

Not like that woman in white out there on the grass. He watched her from his window: she was in a deep sleep, a sleeping beauty, trusting him, accepting his hospitality. He buttered the muffin, poured a glass of orange juice, placed them on a tray with a pansy blossom, and went out. Down in the pasture behind the house the sheep were grazing. He thought of the song “Sheep may safely graze”—how did it go? He couldn’t carry a tune but he loved good music. Romantic music.

The woman was still asleep. It was a beautiful sight. “I’m coming,” he called out. He was warm with his generosity. “I’m bringing food.”

The woman opened her eyes, sat up—he could see it was an effort to do so. She looked like she might flee but couldn’t get her legs to move.

“It’s all right,” he said, “I won’t hurt you.” He put the tray on a flat rock, stood with his hands at his sides to reinforce his words. She reached for the muffin, crammed it into her mouth like she hadn’t eaten for days. Swallowed it down with the orange juice. She seemed to realize then she was wearing only a nightgown—she hugged her chest with her thin arms.

“I’ll bring you something to wear,” he said. “You can’t go around like that. Where did you come from, anyway?”

The woman looked at him with huge violet eyes that seemed to consume her face. She didn’t answer, just put a hand to her head. He saw a purple swelling on the temple, like she’d hit it on something—a little dry blood. It occurred to him that she might be running from someone. There was a place he knew in Bran-bury, the Healing House. He should take the woman there.

But not in a nightgown. “Wait,” he said, “I’ll be right back.”

Upstairs he pulled an old house dress of Maureen’s out of a back closet, a pair of hipster panties their adult daughter had left in a drawer, and ran back with them. The woman was up on her feet when he arrived—head arched back like she was challenging him. Challenging him to do what? He squinted into the sun and studied her. She lowered her eyes, stood absolutely still. He held out the clothing. When she didn’t come forward to take it, he laid it on the rock beside the empty tray.

The dress and panties lay between them, spread out on the rock. He had that sensation again in his genitals. She saw him looking at the clothing and took a step back.

“It’s all right,” he said. “I’ll go away while you put them on.” He turned and started back toward the house. “I’ve coffee if you want any,” he called over his shoulder. “It’s hot. Then I can drive you to a safe place.” He had business at the Healing House, in fact, a client to bring over in a day or two. She’d come from a threatening husband. He hated that kind of man. Himself, he’d never strike a woman—some fool reporter put false information about “brutality” along with his photo, and he was sick, sick at heart, sick to his stomach reading it.

“They’ll take you in, it’s a kind of shelter,” he shouted back, already halfway to the house. He would definitely take her there. She’d be off his hands.

She didn’t answer and he kept on walking. Then turned when he reached the porch. He was cooling down. He felt triumphant, like he’d walked a tightrope to safety. He couldn’t see the woman at all now, assumed she was behind a tree, changing her clothes. He’d give her time to come round. He went into the kitchen and fixed himself a cup of coffee, then turned on the radio for the eight o’clock news. The White House defending war again, Dow dropping 120 points. Something about a missing Irish traveller woman, believed to be wearing a white nightgown. Wanted by a hospital in Canada—she’d left before being dismissed. A hospital, James recalled now, where another patient had been diagnosed with Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. “A fatal brain condition,” the newscaster said, sounding excited, “a spongiform encephalitis, a form of Mad Cow disease.” The announcer gave a number to call if anyone had information about the woman.

He slapped a hand to his chest, massaged it. He had a terrible case of heartburn, his chest on fire. He thought of his sheep. Had he touched that woman? Oh, God—he’d picked her up. But he couldn’t have her coming into the house. And Christ, here she was! Coming up the path, in his ex-wife’s house dress, carrying her nightgown.

“No, no,” he called out, “you can’t come in. I’m sorry but you can’t. I have sheep, I have a daughter—” Well, he didn’t know where the daughter was now. She and her boyfriend had split up. She was somewhere out west.

He locked the kitchen door and yanked the shade. Waited. The knocking came once more and then stopped. When he peered out again through the window he saw her leaving. Oh, Christ, not into the sheep pasture!

But no, she was moving on down the road in that green print dress. She was sticking out her thumb. A beat-up car skidded to a stop, a man beckoned her in. He was sorry now for closing the door on her. She’d be better off with him, James Perlman. “Stop! Wait! Come back!” he shouted and ran toward the car.

But it started up again, churning up the roadside gravel, tires chirping. He saw the woman’s head snap back.

He picked up the phone to call the police—then hesitated. The police would ask
him
questions, and he didn’t want that. He didn’t want them drumming up his past. Though why should they? He was getting paranoid. He was just a good Samaritan, trying to help the woman. He hadn’t laid a hand on her. But Christ, she’d left the nightgown on his porch—what was he to do with that? Burn it? He stood there, confused.

No, he should leave it for the police. Someone would want to examine it, take samples or whatever they did.

He suddenly despised the woman. Bad luck that she’d picked his place, of all places, to land on. Where had she come from anyway?

Then he remembered. The newscaster had mentioned the Willmarth farm. The woman had been camping on the Willmarth farm. He was trying to remember where it was. Not far—on Cow Hill Road, yes. A mile away as the crow flies. The woman had walked that mile, probably through the woods, to get to his road. Why had she done that? Why wouldn’t she just give herself up, let them take her back to that hospital? Unless she already had some kind of dementia. The disease did that to people, he knew, made them unreasonable, confused. Crazy, running in circles.

He’d call the Willmarth woman, that’s what he’d do. He’d heard about her taking on problems, resolving them. He had sheep, he’d tell her, he’d found his Eden. Life was suddenly precious to him, even without his wife. More so maybe without his wife, damn her. The Willmarth woman had to find the sick traveller, he’d make that clear. James had work to do in the barn, a sick lamb to look after—it was his first responsibility. He’d finish his morning’s work and then he’d make the call.

* * * *

Franny Gates was feeling more upbeat after the call to Ruth Willmarth. This was usually the case after she’d vented all her concerns and got the other person harried and sweating. It was like the Aristotelian theory she’d studied in theater school. You poured all your pity onto the tragic person and then you felt better, you felt purged, it was a catharsis. You looked at the post-theater world with fresh eyes, and even in November the trees were green. Franny had spent a summer understudying at the Stratford, Ontario, Shakespeare festival; she’d lived through
Macbeth
night after night, and by the end of summer, even though she never got to perform the role, she felt she had been Lady Macbeth. She knew every line, every nuance, every twist of the heart and body. And always the grass was emerald green when she left the theater. Even afterward in the dark she could see the green in her mind’s eye.

So Franny wasn’t at all surprised when the phone rang and it was the woman who had broken the agreement to breed her government Morgan stud with Franny’s prize Lippitt mare. And lo! the woman had changed her mind. “I want her,” she gurgled, “she’s a gorgeous creature, looks healthy as a newborn. The foal will be mine and I’m thrilled.”

“I should imagine so,” Franny said.

“But I want to wait a little, don’t you know. I mean till they find that missing woman, give her a clean bill of health. Because the woman was on that farm up the road from yours, right?”

“Oh, really,” Franny said, waving her arms, though no one could see her. “But we never step over each other’s boundaries. I seldom even ride over there.”

“All the same,” the woman said, and asked if she could come over that afternoon—”and just take a peek at your mare?”

Ophelia was a gorgeous creature, it was true. Franny had fallen in love with her as a foal. Sired by True Diamond, a champion horse, Ophelia was of middling size, a light bay color, with bushy mane and tail; she was altogether smart and classy. If Franny hadn’t been drawn to her partner, Henrietta, whom she’d met in Falstaff ‘s Bar after the fifth performance of
Othello
that season, she’d have been happy enough to spend her life with Ophelia. There were nights she actually fantasized that Ophelia turned into a human being after midnight and the two of them rolled happily about in the hay.

“We-ell, after lunch then,” Franny said. “Shall we say two o’clock? You can ride her if you like—perhaps a half hour? And we’ll sign the contract? Set a date to bring your stallion over. Ophelia should be in heat in two weeks or so. I don’t know about that missing woman. Who knows when they’ll come to terms with her? But I do have another breeder interested—a prize stallion with impeccable credentials. I’m not sure we can wait.”

It was a lie, there was no other stallion panting at the gates, though there were possibilities. At any moment the phone might ring. Though with that woman missing from Willmarth’s . . . She silently cursed the dairy farm. What stupidity anyway to allow gypsies to squat on one’s land, a virtual encampment. She’d ridden past one night and heard all the singing, stopped to listen. What had Ruth been thinking about? She seemed a practical woman, but really! Gypsies! And now the whole neighborhood in peril. They’d come in with armed troops, she’d read, to take the sheep from those people over in East Warren. Imagine! Yet there was still no proof of any disease, and it had been five years since the removal. There was only the fear, the suspicion.

Franny and Henrietta had come to Vermont to avoid that kind of suspicion. For the most part folk left them alone here in Vermont. The fight had died down over the civil union legislation. Would it crop up again? There were still people trying to overturn it.

Oh woe. Alack a day! She felt a scourge coming on the land. “A plague of sighing and grief!” she quoted from one of the Henrys— she’d forgotten which. “It blows a man up like a bladder.” And she and her partner in the middle of it.

She hung up the phone, then realized she hadn’t said good-bye. But the woman had already committed to the two o’clock visit.

“Franny?” It was Henrietta, calling from the bedroom where she was still in bed at ten o’clock—she’d been up till two writing her fifth lesbian romance. The first four lay unpublished in a drawer.

“Orange juice in the fridge and freshly squeezed,” said Franny, who was the breakfast cook, while Henrietta was pastry chef. “I made pancakes. You’ll have to heat them up.”

“You know I don’t eat pancakes,” Henrietta said, her voice groggy with sleep. Henrietta was on a new diet. She weighed 170 pounds and no diet had ever removed an ounce, not the Atkin’s protein diet or Weight Watchers or a macrobiotic diet or Dolly Parton’s portion control diet where you ate ten tiny meals a day, or the one where you could eat all the cake and ice cream you wanted just so you ate them all within a single hour. That diet had actually added 5 pounds to Henrietta’s buttocks. Though Franny didn’t mind a fat partner at all; the weight made her partner sexier than any skinny femme. It was seeing Henrietta’s fat butt leaning over the bar at Falstaff ‘s that had attracted Franny in the first place.

“You love my pancakes, you know you do,” Franny yelled, and added, “Louella Clark is coming over at two to have a peek at Ophelia. She still wants to breed. But we have to hurry. Get up, will you? Make a batch of those chocolate orange cookies, we’ll woo her with those. I’m off to the barn. Might take a quick ride with my—” She hesitated. She had almost said “my darling.” But Henrietta was jealous of Ophelia. My, yes, Franny had to be careful. Franny needed both Henrietta and the horse. She wanted no ménage à trois, no jealous outbursts here.

“Shit, Fi,” Henrietta screeched from the top of the stairs, where she stood in a pink polka-dot nightie that would envelop two Frannys, “I don’t have the ingredients. I don’t have any chocolate bits. I don’t feel like going to the store. I had a bad writing night. The plot just won’t jell. I think I need a new heroine. I’m sick of this tall, robust Caucasian.”

“Try a gypsy,” Franny called back. “A lean, hungry, violet-eyed gypsy beauty with a mass of curly black hair and skin like Snow White.”

Then she realized she’d been quoting the radio description of the missing woman and she shivered. “No, no gypsy. Absolutely no gypsy. They’re the worst kind. Trouble-makers, the lot of them. Oh God, God.” She ran out of the house, waving her arms, down the path to the horse barn. She was the pot calling the kettle black.

“Ophelia,” she called out, “Phelia, darling, Mommy’s coming, we’ll go for a nice ride in the woods. Phelia, baby!”