Chapter 26 #2
Clementine was almost three years old by this point, and still an only child.
No longer a baby at all but a toddler. I’d never been around just one child before.
There was an intensity to our time together that I found exhausting and unnerving even when it was going well.
I was desperate for more children, not just because of my agreement with Doug but also because I was certain the arrival of another child would have an alleviating effect on my relationship with the one I already had.
Both of us, I think, were frequently exhausted from being the recipient of so much focus from the other.
The day the chicks arrived, I picked one up and placed it into Clementine’s hands. The chick began to squeak wildly, like a little ambulance siren, PEEP PEEP PEEP PEEP—
“He’s afraid,” she said. Just a moment ago, it seemed, she had said Mama for the first time, and already she was speaking almost exclusively in short sentences, ones that always felt like declarations of her mother’s failure. I’m hungry. You’re mad. He’s afraid.
“Hold on,” I commanded. She kept perfectly still as I took the picture, her face frozen in somberness, then she set him down on the floor.
The chick waddle-sprinted back to the cluster of other chicks.
Clementine stood back up and held out her hand, a small yellow-white dollop of excrement on her palm.
She looked at it for a long moment, then she stepped forward and wiped it on the thigh of my jeans.
All the chicks died shortly after arrival.
Whatever killed them caused their bodies to bloat like little tennis balls.
We tossed them. Then the dairy cow’s udders grew swollen and infected, and soon she was banging her head against the barn wall in a terrifying staccato rhythm, thud, thud, thud—out of boredom, Caleb thought. But how to entertain a cow?
“Look it up,” I said.
By that time, though, the online forum filled with experienced farmers was no longer receptive to Caleb’s questions.
While the men had been helpful at first, eagerly answering Caleb’s questions, they’d recently grown angry, telling him he shouldn’t have gotten a dairy cow, that he should sell the cow immediately and get some certifications first. What was he thinking, they asked.
Did he really think he could do this overnight?
And so he went on another forum, this one titled DIY Farmers. The men were much nicer there.
“Mastitis!” Caleb said triumphantly, five days into the head-banging issue. “She has all the symptoms of mastitis!”
“Great,” I said. “What’s mastitis?”
The cow died a month later. We stood over her body in the barn. I looked at Caleb. “What do farmers do with dead cows?”
They burn them. Or bury them in compost. Or call someone to pick up the body and take it to a facility where it can be processed into fertilizer, but only if there are no transmissible diseases, and even then, you should be careful, because too many calls for too many dead cows can lead to a formal investigation.
Caleb drove an hour to the Home Depot in town and paid three Mexican men to hop into the bed of his truck and help him drag the body out to a field. I watched from the kitchen window as the flames licked the sky. The bonfire smelled terrible.
Later that day, when the men were loitering by the truck, smoking cigarettes and waiting for Caleb to drive them back to town, I said to him, “I think it’s time to hire some workers, don’t you?”
He looked reluctant. “I guess so.”
“And,” I added, “I think it’s also time for something else.”
“What? Dinner?”
I raised my eyebrows, which was intended to give the appearance of flirtation, but just made him look further alarmed. “What? What is it? Are you sick or something?”
That night we had three minutes of close-lipped missionary sex. The next morning, a new dairy cow arrived at the farm. We would never actually see the wolves, but we heard them howling all the time.
Picture 4
The photo: Caleb and Clementine and me, standing alongside his parents and his brothers and their families onstage at an election-night party in Salt Lake City, confetti frozen in the air around our faces.
Caption: Proud to be an American!
The night Doug won his eighth Senate reelection campaign, one of Caleb’s older brothers, David, found Amelia passed out in Doug’s dressing room, her pink pantsuit splattered with chocolate-colored vomit.
“Jesus Christ,” George, another brother, said from the doorway, while David checked her wrist for a pulse. He gagged, then said, “Is that shit?”
“It’s pudding,” I said, and George said, “Thank God,” right as David said, “She’s breathing!”
I stood with Clementine in the hallway between the dressing room and the stage, watching the brothers hand out NDAs to the paramedics before they could step inside.
As they took Amelia away on a stretcher, her gaze drifted foggily toward me and Clementine.
She muttered something at us, but it couldn’t be heard beneath her oxygen mask.
“Say bye-bye to Grammy,” I instructed, and Clementine waved bye-bye, right as Doug’s voice boomed through the auditorium hallways.
“At this very moment, my youngest son is working day and night to revitalize a working meat and dairy farm in southwest Idaho.” (Vegetables, I thought.
Not meat. Caleb would be so disappointed.) “He could’ve been anything, my son, but he chose to get his hands dirty like a real American—and you know what? I couldn’t be prouder of him!”
“Do you hear that?” I told Clementine, over the waves of polite applause. “Grandpa’s trying to be electable. Can you say electable?”
“Electable,” she repeated, in a tone I could only describe as bored, and we both fell silent.
Picture 5
The photo: Caleb and I in the fields at sunset, kissing, him dipping me low.
The caption: I always wanted my very own cowboy.
“Let’s have sex,” I said one night.
Caleb gave my vagina a long, skeptical look. “Is it safe?”
“Of course it is. This is what we’re designed to do.”
“But what about—”
“For the last time: That wasn’t a miscarriage! It was just a heavy period!”
This is what my mother had encouraged me to tell Caleb a month earlier, after he walked into the bathroom to find me sobbing wildly, my hands and thighs covered in blood. We’d been trying to have another baby for more than two years now. The panic I felt about this situation was indescribable.
I tried my best to give a sexy look, but Caleb seemed put off by the expression on my face, so I dropped the put-on and said, like always: “You promised.”
I massaged Caleb’s penis for ten minutes, squeezing and twisting slowly at the base of the shaft with one hand and milking the tip with the other.
Usually, this worked to get him erect enough for us to have sex.
Tonight, though, nothing came of my efforts.
Each time I glanced back up at Caleb’s face, his eyes were closed and scrunched up, his mouth in a sort of grimace, so that I couldn’t tell if he was trying hard himself to get into the mood, or waiting for me to give up.
Finally I sat back, letting his penis flop away like a slinky. “What is it?”
“It’s nothing. I’m just exhausted.” He did look exhausted. He was working hard. Up at sunrise, outside all day long, then at the computer for hours each night. But wasn’t this, too, an essential part of being a husband? A relentless, almost mechanical drive to repeatedly impregnate your wife?
“But I’m ovulating. If we don’t have sex now, we’ll have to wait another month.”
“Shouldn’t we just leave this up to the Lord?”
He’d said this once before, several months earlier, after someone on one of his forums suggested it was blasphemy for women to track their menstruation in such a fashion.
These things should be left up to the Lord, full stop.
Now I cut him off before he could start on that tangent again.
“The Lord wants us to try, Caleb. He wants us to care.”
He didn’t respond. His eyes were closed now.
A second later, he was making soft little sleep snuffles.
Even his penis seemed to be dead asleep and snoring against the bed of his thigh.
Infuriating. I thought of what he said to me on the day of our wedding—I can’t wait to taste you—and then I thought of the horrible graphics I’d seen on his computer screen—Intense kissing leads to squirting orgasm!
!!!—and I swallowed the urge to crack a lampshade over his head.
Instead, I got out of bed and went to the kitchen, then came back into the bedroom with a cereal bowl and dropped it onto Caleb’s stomach, startling him awake.
“Wha? What’s this?”
“I don’t care how you get it done. Just get it done.”
“But—”
“You promised.”
Caleb was silent for a long time. Then he got out of bed.
Five minutes later, he came out of the bathroom and handed me the bowl.
“Thank you,” I said. “Now go to sleep.”
In the kitchen, I set the bowl on the counter then pulled a sauce baster out of the drawer.
Picture 6
The picture: Me, five months pregnant, with Clementine on my hip.
The caption: God bless this growing family!