Chapter 12
“T his is the pasture where we have the fall herd. It’s my favorite one right now, because wherever the babies are is the one I like to stand and watch the most.”
Cash smiled at Ada. She was so mature, sophisticated, self-assured, yet she smiled like a teenager when she was talking about the baby calves.
They were cute, he had to admit. But he obviously didn’t get excited about them the way she did. It was interesting to find something that she loved.
He wondered if she loved human babies as much as she seemed to love bovine babies.
Babies weren’t something they’d talked about, and he was kind of surprised at himself for thinking about it. But he did want children.
“So are calves as exciting to you as human babies?” he asked, trying to sound casual. They had met that morning, and she had taken him immediately on a tour of the farm. She hadn’t mentioned what she had decided or even if she had made a decision.
He still had two days, so she had time. He had spoken with the pastor in town, and Ezra had as well apparently, because the pastor agreed to marry them, even though he said he usually liked to do marriage counseling before he agreed. But he’d said that Ezra had said there were extenuating circumstances and that he thought that Ada and Cash would be willing to go for marriage counseling after the wedding.
“I love babies of any stripe,” Ada said, her eyes glowing, her cheeks pink. She looked like she belonged in the outdoors, on the farm, or maybe that’s just the way she looked wherever she went. She just had a peaceful, happy glow about her. The kind of glow Christians who were totally content in the Lord often had.
He wondered if he had that glow. If people could look at him and tell that he loved Jesus. He wasn’t sure he wanted to know the answer to that question; he wasn’t sure the answer was yes.
“Oh, that doesn’t look good,” she said, looking off in the distance where he saw a cow lying down on its side. He wasn’t sure what was different about that cow than about any of the other ones that seemed to be enjoying the sunshine, but he could take her word for it.
“If you don’t mind, we better go check on it.” She turned to him, her brows raised.
He nodded, not sure what that entailed.
“He’s not that far from the fence, so I think I’ll just climb over and hurry out. You don’t have to come if you don’t want to. His mom...might not like us getting too close to her baby, and I might end up making a run for the fence.”
“Sounds like I’d better come, then,” he said. Although he didn’t know what he was going to do to protect her from the baby’s mom.
She gave him a grateful smile, and he thought that maybe he ought to remind her that he didn’t know anything about cows. Maybe it was just the idea of having someone beside her.
“So I really don’t have any idea what to do if we start getting chased by a cow.”
“Just run. That’s all you have to do,” she said, laughing.
He lifted his brows but had to chuckle. He supposed that was as simple as it got. “Is that what you’re going to do?”
“I’ll probably make sure that you’re running, and if you’re not far enough ahead of her, I might make myself bait, but usually a cow doesn’t chase you too far away from her baby.”
“You’re not going to make yourself bait for me.”
“Then just run,” she said.
They had almost reached the calf, and he kind of understood what the problem was. It didn’t raise its head when they got close.
“Yeah, this little fella definitely isn’t feeling very good.” She reached out and touched his ears and then ran a hand on his nose.
“What are you doing?”
“This is kind of the equivalent of your mom putting her head on your forehead when you were sick when you were younger,” she said. “If he has cold ears and a hot, dry nose, it almost certainly means he has a temperature. I am not sure what the problem is. These calves are too young to be vaccinated, but we’ll probably give him a shot of some antibiotics and maybe a B shot to kinda give him a little jolt of energy so he’ll get up and eat.”
“Is that the mom?” he said, seeing a shadow moving quickly out of the corner of his eye.
Ada looked up, and her eyes got big.
“Yeah. Let’s get back,” she said, her words clipped. Short, quick.
He wasn’t going to run away from her, no matter what she said, although it did sound like she would be safer if he was safe, so he made sure he stuck beside her.
They moved back, and just like Ada said, the mama cow did not follow them very far away from the baby.
“I’m texting Tobias. He is usually in charge of the calves, and I’m letting him know that we’re going to get this little guy a couple of shots.”
“We’re coming back?” he said, his heart beating hard from the little bit of excitement with the cow coming toward them. He couldn’t imagine how bad it would be if they actually had to touch the calf while its mom didn’t want them to.
“I’ll get someone to help me. You’ll be fine.”
“I can help you. If you tell me what to do. But I don’t want you to get hurt.” As the man, part of his job was protecting his wife. Of course, Ada hadn’t said whether she was going to marry him or not, but still, a man took care of the women in his sphere.
She smiled, as though she appreciated his concern and protection. “Thanks. But honestly, I’ve been doing this since I was little. I’ll be fine. I’ll just grab someone around the shed when I grab the shots and have them come and give me a hand.”
He didn’t like the idea that she didn’t need him. He wanted to be needed.
Maybe she understood that, because they took two more steps toward the fence before she said, “Unless you really want to help. In that case, there’s two jobs. One is to keep the mama cow away from the person who’s giving the shots, and the other job is to give the shots.”
Neither one of them sounded like jobs he could do. They certainly weren’t jobs that he’d ever done before. But he wasn’t the kind of person who didn’t do something just because it sounded hard.
“Which job is more dangerous?” he asked, figuring that should be his job.
“Well, it depends on how good the person who’s keeping the cow away is. That would probably be the more dangerous job, unless the person isn’t very good at it, and then the person giving the shot is in a bad predicament. You can’t really look up to see what the cow’s doing, not if you’re paying attention to what you’re doing, so you could be blindsided pretty easily.”
“All right. It sounds like I’ll keep the cow away, and I’ll yell at you if I’m not able to.”
“All right. It shouldn’t take long to give two shots. So, I’m just going to need you to keep her out of the way for about five seconds. And then we can run for the fence.”
Running for the fence didn’t exactly sound like a safe activity either, but again, Ada had been right when she said that the cow wouldn’t chase them very far.
“So you’ve done this a good bit?” he said as they climbed the fence and dropped down on the other side.
“I sure have. Over the last ten years, I’ve probably spent more time in the house than I have outside with the animals, but as a teenager growing up, I loved working outside. I still do.”
He could tell. She just seemed to glow. It was obvious she was happy.
“You strike me as the kind of person who is happy wherever you are.”
“I try to be.” She paused for a moment as they headed toward a building that he assumed was the shed she talked about, where they kept the shots and medicine. “But I realized last night as I was thinking about how I should answer you, that maybe I was happy because my life was good. You know? It seems like when trials come along, they can really get us down, and it’s not as easy to be.”
“Marrying me would be a trial?” He didn’t like the sound of that. As much as he was hoping that she would say yes, and they would get the billion dollars, and as much as he was hoping that she would start to like him as much as he was starting to like her, he didn’t like the idea that she considered him a trial.
“No. Leaving my family would be a trial. Leaving the farm, the ranch, everything that I love. I’m so happy here.”
She looked down at her feet, and then she looked over at him, her arms swinging at her sides, the sun shining down, and a soft breeze lifting her ponytail off her back and blowing a few strands of loose hair around her face. She looked much younger than he knew her to be.
“I couldn’t imagine anyone not being happy here. It’s a great place.”
She paused, almost as though she wanted to say something about that, but if she did, she didn’t allow herself to do so. “But if we end up going somewhere else, somewhere even far away, like being missionaries to Africa or to a cannibalistic tribe in Brazil, would I be just as happy?”
“I think you would be. I think you know that your joy comes from the Lord, not your circumstances.” He hadn’t done a very good job of that though. When his circumstances had come crashing down around him, had he continued to be happy? Or had he questioned God, wanting to know why God would treat him so terribly, as though that was some terrible thing and he was someone special that shouldn’t have to deal with any hardship. Who was he to think that God shouldn’t allow him to go through trials just like everyone else did?
“Head knowledge, but sometimes not practical knowledge. At least not at first. So it’s kind of shocking when something terrible happens, isn’t it?”
He nodded. Then, he followed her as she opened the door and walked in, the suddenness of the sun disappearing causing him to pause until his eyes adjusted to the dim interior.
“We have a little refrigerator over here, where we keep some of the medication. The B vitamins don’t need to be refrigerated.” She spoke as she worked, getting a syringe and sticking it into a bottle which she turned upside down, pulling the stopper out and filling it up to a certain amount.
She must have already known the dosages. Which made sense, if she did this a good bit.
“It seems like you guys are all prepared.”
“We need to be. Calves get sick and die really fast, and you can’t always wait around for medicine to arrive or even for a vet to get there. And without taking expensive tests, the vet can’t really tell you what’s wrong anyway a lot of times. So, we do the best we can with what we’ve got, to save as much as we can.”
This was a world of difference from what he knew. And Ada was so much different than Abby, his ex. She was practical, cheerful, and down-to-earth. Whereas Abby was very spiritual, according to everyone who knew her, but she was far more concerned about looks and appearances than about practical matters. She couldn’t have been more different than Ada, although they were similar in a lot of ways as well. Ada seemed like a very spiritual person, although she didn’t have the air of superiority about her that Abby had, now that he thought about her in hindsight. It was the reason she couldn’t be with him when there was any hint of scandal attached to him. The way people looked at her was too important for her.
“All right. I’ve got them both. Are you sure you want to be the chaser?” she asked, grinning at him as she led him back out of the shed.
She waved and talked to a couple of people who passed by them, and everyone called him by name. Word must have gone around that he was here to see Ada. Maybe the idea of their marriage had even got around. Speaking of, Ada still hadn’t given him an answer. Maybe when they were done giving this calf his shots, if they survived, he would ask her.
“You’re going to need this,” Ada said as she grabbed a long narrow pole-type thing from the side of the shed where it leaned.
“What’s that?” he asked; it looked like some kind of prod.
“It’s a cattle prod. It’ll work for you to keep the mama cow away. It’ll make you look bigger.”
“This little thing will make me look bigger?”
“It gives your arm a bigger reach. You put it in one hand like this,” she said, “and that looks like part of your hand to the cow. This cow isn’t going to be too bad, and it should work just fine with her. Some cows don’t let a little thing like a person with a cattle prod stop them from getting to their calf or stop them from killing whatever is between them and their calf.”
She grinned and said it so cheerfully that he blinked.
“Kill?” he asked, wondering if maybe he wasn’t getting in a little bit over his head.
“You know. It’s the mama’s job to defend her baby. And if we’re trying to do something to her baby that she doesn’t think we should be doing, she’s going to try to get rid of us. I suppose she’s not really thinking to herself, ‘I’m going to kill them,’ because I wouldn’t want to assign that much intelligence to a cow. As much as I love them, they’re just not smart.”
She was still being so cheerful that he found himself chuckling with her, although the idea of dying wasn’t something that he really thought was funny.
But she didn’t seem too concerned about it, so maybe she was just...exaggerating. Although Ada didn’t seem like the kind of person who exaggerated on a regular basis.
“I’m feeling a little uncertain about this whole trusting me thing.”
“If I truly thought that you were in a great deal of danger, I wouldn’t be letting you do it.”
“I think that should be me saying that to you.” Maybe Ada was a little bit too tough for him. He wanted to marry a woman who needed him. Not someone who could face down a killer cow and laugh while she was doing it. Although, he did want a woman who was brave and not afraid to go wherever God wanted her to. Maybe this was just what that looked like.
“You can give the shots. I have more experience keeping cows away, so like I said, this one’s not going to be hard. There are some that can be pretty scary, but this old girl will give us the five seconds we need.”
“I’m going to trust you on this,” he said.
“Good.” They were about halfway to the cow. “What you’re going to do is get your cattle prod and keep her back. You might have to snap her nose with it if she gets a little close. She’ll back up and probably try to run in a circle, getting around you to be able to get to her calf. You’re just going to look big and mean and scary, and you’re not going to let her get around you to get to her calf, because I’m going to be there. And I really don’t want her ramming into my back.”
“No. I don’t want her to do that either.” He felt that the cow would have to plow him over in order to get to Ada. He could do at least that much.
“All right. It’s always a little easier if you get to the calf before the mama does, but she’s still standing right there beside him. But since this one’s down, we won’t have to worry about catching him or him running away.”
He couldn’t even imagine running after the calf as the mama cow was running after them, trying to catch it. It seemed like it would be the kind of video that got posted on social media and made everyone involved look silly.
Not that he would mind looking silly for Ada, if it meant she didn’t get killed by a cow.
“All right. I’ve never done anything like this before. I’ve never actually been in a pasture with a cow before today.”
“Wow. I really did throw you in the deep end, didn’t I?” Ada said, like it was her decision to have him out there, instead of him insisting that he could do it. What was he thinking?
He felt his feet dragging as they got closer and closer to the cow, but Ada didn’t slow down. She seemed to speed up, waving her hands over her head and yelling at the cow. It took two steps back, although it obviously did not want to leave its calf.
“You think you can do that?” she asked as she glanced at him. “The other thing is, I wouldn’t turn your back on her. A lot of times, a cow will run from a face but will go right past your back. But when she’s a protective mom, she will charge your back.”
“Good to know,” he said, hoping he didn’t sound as sarcastic as he felt.
She had uncapped both syringes and had them in her hand. “All right. It’s all yours, I’ll give this fella his shots as soon as you get between her and me.”
He supposed that was his cue. So, he said a short prayer, telling Jesus that perhaps they would be meeting soon and asking Him to help him at least be brave and protect Ada if nothing else. And then, with a shout, he took two lunging steps forward and raised the cattle prod, waving it around. He figured that he probably ought to at least pretend to be confident and know what he was doing.
Even if it wasn’t the slightest bit true.
To his surprise, the cow stepped back and stood staring at him, her head lowered, her nostrils flaring as she breathed out. There could have been flames coming out of her nostrils or smoke or something.
Then, Ada said, “I’m done. Step backward until you’re beyond the calf, then you can turn around.”
He listened to her, almost tripping over the calf. Ada put a hand on his arm to help him, and he appreciated the gesture. His heart was racing a million miles an hour, and he was breathing like he had just run a marathon. His legs felt weak, and he wasn’t sure if he could walk the entire way to the fence.
“You did great. I think you’re a natural,” Ada said, like she had no idea he was so flustered and scared.
“I wasn’t entirely sure I wasn’t going to pee my pants,” he said, and he wished he’d kept his mouth shut. That wasn’t exactly a manly thing to say.
But it made Ada laugh. “I felt the exact same way. Not just now, but at different times. That’s a really good way to put it.”
He wasn’t sure he realized that she would understand so completely, but they shared laughter, and it felt good.