Something Rich and Strange: Selected Stories Read Free Page B

the children’s doors, he could watch them a few moments as they slept, then lie down himself as Doris turned or shifted so that some part of their bodies touched.
    The road forked and Carson went right, passing a long-abandoned gas station. The cell phone lay on the passenger seat. Sometimes a farmer called and told Carson he might as well turn around, but this far from town the phone didn’t work. The road snaked upward, nothing on the sides now but drop-offs and trees, an occasional white cross and a vase of wilted flowers. Teenage boys for the most part, Carson knew, too young to think it could happen to them. It was that way in war as well, until you watched enough boys your own age being zipped up in body bags.
    Carson had been drafted by the army three months after Darnell joined the marines. They had not seen each other until the Seventh Infantry supported the First Marine at Chosin Reservoir, crossing paths in a Red Cross soup line. It was late afternoon and the temperature already below zero. The Chinese, some men claimed a million of them, were pouring in over the Korean border, and no amount of casualties looked to stop them. Let’s make a vow to God and them Chinese too that if they let us get back to North Carolina alive we’ll stay put and grow old together, Darnell had said. He’d held out his hand and Carson had taken it.
    The road curved a final time, and the battered mailbox labeled COE appeared. Carson turned off the blacktop and bumped up the drive, wheels crunching over the chert rock. The porch light was on, from the barn mouth a lantern’s lesser glow. Carson parked next to the unlatched pasture gate, got the medicine bag and canvas tool kit from the truck box. He shouldered the gate open and pushed it back. This far from town the stars were brighter, the sky wider, deeper. As on other such nights, Carson paused to take it in. A small consolation.
    The lantern hung just inside the barn mouth, offering a thin apron of light to help Carson make his way. He took slow careful steps so as not to trip on old milking traces. Inside, it took a few moments to adjust to the barn’s starless dark. Near the back stall, the cow lay on the straw floor. Darnell kneeled beside her, one hand stroking her flank. A stainless-steel bucket was close by, already filled with water, beside it rags and a frayed bedsheet. Darnell’s shotgun, not his rifle, leaned across a stall door.
    “How long?” Carson asked.
    “Three hours.”
    Carson set the bags down and checked the cow’s gums, then placed the stethoscope’s silver bell against the flank before pulling on a shoulder glove.
    “I think it’s breeched,” Darnell said.
    Carson lubed the glove and slid his hand and forearm inside, felt a bent leg, then a shoulder, another leg, and, finally, the head. He slipped a finger inside the mouth and felt a suckle. Life stubbornly held on. Maybe he wouldn’t have to pull the calf out one piece at a time. At least a chance.
    “Not a full breech then,” Darnell said when Carson pulled off the glove.
    “Afraid it isn’t.”
    Carson spread the tarp on the barn floor, set out what he’d need while Darnell retrieved the lantern and set it beside Carson. Inside the lantern’s low light, the world shrank to a circle of straw, within it two old men, a cow, and, though curtained, a calf. Carson did a quick swab and pushed in the needle, waited for the lidocaine to ease the contractions. Darnell still stroked the cow’s flank. As a young vet, Carson had quickly learned there were some men and women, good people otherwise, who’d let a lame calf linger days, not bothering to end its misery. They’d do the same with a sheep with blackleg. Never Darnell though. Because he’d witnessed enough suffering in Korea not to wish it on man or animal was what some folks would think, but Carson knew it to be as much Darnell’s innate decency.
    “Why the shotgun?” Carson asked.
    “Coyotes. I’ve not heard any of late, but this