Chapter 25
When Jojo left the state police barracks, she drove to her sister’s house to check on Miriam. At ten, Miriam was the oldest of Martha (Mattie) and Mark Beiler’s six children. Elias was eight; Ester, six; Elizabeth (Lizzy) five; Benjamin three and Lily, two.
An explosion of sound, little kids squealing—“Aunt Joanna! Aunt Joanna!”—usually hit her as soon as she stepped in the door. The children were more subdued today.
Elias was sitting on the floor with blocks, building a barn for the hand-carved farm equipment he had spread out around him. Usually, he’d be out helping his father on the farm. Jojo didn’t know why he’d been given the day off. He hopped to his feet and gave his aunt a hug.
Benjamin looked up at her and said, “Hi Aunt Joanna,” before returning his concentration to his plate. He was in a booster seat on a chair pushed up to the table and apparently, he had pulled apart his toast into little pieces and was arranging them into a pattern only he could see.
Lily sat in a highchair, banging a spoon. Jojo went to both the “littles” and kissed them on their foreheads, the cleanest spot on both faces, before she was almost knocked off her feet by Ester and Lizzy, who crushed Jojo’s legs with hugs.
“Guess what I got,” Ester said.
“A frog as big as a tractor?” Jojo said.
“Noooo.” Ester giggled. “I’ll show you.” She ran out of the room and returned with a doll. “Aunt Sarah made this for me for my birthday.”
“Your birthday’s not until next month.”
“She got it early because she saw it at Sarah’s house and …?” Mattie rolled her eyes as she dried the dishwater off her hands with a towel. “Now, I want you girls to go in the front room and start on your cross-stitch,” she told Ester and Lizzy.
Both girls groaned.
“But Mama, I can’t ever get it right,” Lizzy whined.
“You’re doing cross-stitch instead of helping with the breakfast dishes—that was the bargain. Shooo.”
The girls trudged as if to the gallows into the other room.
“Miriam’s in the girls’ room folding laundry,” Mattie told Jojo. “She wanted to be by herself.”
“How is she?”
Mattie held her hand out, turned it over, then turned it back.
Jojo gave her a quick hug and went to find Miriam.
Miriam dropped the pillowcase she was folding, rushed into Jojo’s arms, and burst into tears. Jojo held her tight, rocking back and forth, until the crying jag was over, then moved the mountain of clean clothes to the side of the bed and sat beside her, holding her hand.
“You doin’ okay, kiddo?”
The little girl shook her head, her black curls bobbing around her face. “No.”
“Good! I’m glad.”
“Why are you?—?”
Jojo tapped the little girl’s chest tenderly.
“Because it means your heart is mending.” She squeezed Miriam’s hand.
“It won’t always hurt like it does now, I promise.
You’ll feel good again when it’s healed.
” She leaned over and kissed the top of Miriam’s head.
“You’ll always have a scar, though. The bad things that happen always leave a mark. ”
Miriam pulled in a ragged breath. “Granny Oberman must have lots of scars on her heart.”
“I’m sure she does,” Jojo said. What she didn’t say was, “So do I.”
Chores awaited Jojo when she got back to the farm, and she was glad. Mindless tasks left her free to think of other things.
Ever since she left the state police barracks this morning, she had played and replayed in her head the conversation she’d had with Lieutenant Conor McCaffrey.
She wallowed the memories around in her head the way you wallow hard candy in your mouth—tried to look at the meeting from different angles, analyzing what she’d said, what he’d said, what she should have said, what she shouldn’t have said.
She was thinking about that, her movements on autopilot, not paying attention to the routine of feeding the calves in the calf barn.
She’d had to leave Trident outside the fenced fields because his presence freaked the animals out.
She thought in the beginning that they’d get used to it, that they’d get used to him, but they never did.
Maybe he looked so much like a wolf that somewhere buried in their DNA was a fear that even constant exposure couldn’t erase.
She’d finished with the calf feeding, closed the door behind her, and started back across the field when some kind of spidey sense kicked in.
That’s what they’d called it in Afghanistan.
A sense you got that something wasn’t right.
You’d look at an old man sitting beside the road with a basket and something somewhere in you would click and you’d suspect there was an IED in that basket.
It didn’t happen in every situation, of course, but it had happened to every soldier she knew often enough that they’d all learned to trust their gut.
If something doesn’t feel right, it isn’t right, and right now something felt very wrong.
The hairs on the back of her neck stood up.
She stopped halfway across the field, trying to figure out what in the world she could be reacting to.
Then she heard it, the snort, and her heart kicked into a gallop in her chest, pounding alarm and fear through her brain with every beat.
Roosevelt.
Roosevelt was Uncle Jonas’s black Brahman bull, and a meaner, nastier creature never walked the earth on four legs.
He had been foul-tempered when her uncle got him as a just-weaned calf from a farm outside Franklin, West Virginia, on the edge of the Monongahela National Forest. She’d been home on leave, drove the cattle truck to pick up the animal.
A burly farm hand had helped load the beast, and it went after him, tore a nasty gash in his face just inches from his eye.
When she told Uncle Jonas what’d happened, he suspected that maybe that man had mistreated the bull, because it wasn’t often that animals, even a bull, were as vicious and malevolent as Roosevelt.
Uncle Jonas had considered several times putting him down, but bulls were expensive, and he had to have one to grow his small herd of cattle.
But her uncles were very careful with the dangerous bull, kept Roosevelt in a special pen with reinforced corrugated steel siding and five-foot walls and a secure latch that kept him out of the fields where the other livestock grazed.
Jojo turned slowly, 180 degrees, and there he stood, solid black with a hide like oiled leather, two thousand pounds of muscle and bone and horns and unspent rage.
He had a wide forehead, a thick neck, and an enormous hump of muscle over his shoulders.
His horns were short but deadly pointed, his chest massive, and legs like carved stumps supported a barrel-shaped torso.
Loose skin hung from his neck, a dewlap swinging when he moved.
His eyes were small, dark, intelligent, and mean.
She stared at him transfixed, noting the dried mud on his flanks where he’d been wallowing, the froth at his nostrils, and listening to the distinctive “bellering” sound—loud, deep, chest-shaking.
Doing the mental calculations in the space between one heartbeat and the next, Jojo knew there was no way in hell she could outrun that bull.
He could hit twenty-five miles an hour in seconds.
If she moved, he’d be on her like a freight train.
But she wouldn’t have to move to set him off.
He was territorial and she had invaded his territory.
And it took a whole lot less than that to piss off Roosevelt.
Jojo had been in dangerous situations every day she was in combat in Afghanistan.
Snipers and IEDs and villagers wearing suicide vests and mortar shells exploding.
Danger had been everywhere. It was a fact of life.
You were in a war. Danger was not everywhere here in Somerset County, Pennsylvania in the Laurel Highlands. It was safe here.
But of course it wasn’t. It hadn’t been safe for those people who’d gotten on a ski lift to see the world from the top of the mountain and never made it there.
And it wasn’t safe for her right now. Obviously, Uncle Levi had left the catch on the gate to Roosevelt’s pen unhooked when he’d gone in to—her mind stumbled.
There was no reason for Uncle Levi to go into the bull’s pen, no reason for anybody to.
They fed him by tossing feed over the fence.
Why would …? Uncle Levi was apt to do anything.
The bull snorted again and pawed the ground. With his ears pinned back, he shook his head in a classic threat display. When he lowered his head …
Jojo Kaufmann had one shot at survival.
“Trident hier!”
She yelled at the top of her lungs, unconsciously reverting to the German recall command for “here” that she’d used in combat.
Trident was on the outside of the fence.
He’d have to climb it, which he had been trained to do, or wiggle his way under it to get into the field.
All those thoughts flashed through her mind in a millisecond.
Then the bull lowered his head, and Jojo sprang toward the closest place to get over the fence, could hear the thundering hooves of the bull behind her, knew he would get to her before she got to the fence.
When he caught her, he’d slam his forehead into her with bone-breaking force, hook her with a horn and flip her over his head, then stomp her, crush all the bones in her body in a frenzy of rage that would leave her unrecognizable.
She actually felt the bull’s hot breath on her neck as she ran, cringed away from the pain of impact.
Then she heard a familiar bark, deep throated and threatening.
She chanced a glance over her left shoulder, watched Trident leap at the bull, sinking his teeth into the animal’s flanks sending droplets of blood flying through the air.
The bull whirled on him, enraged.
Trident barked explosively in the bull’s face, dodging his hooves and horns by inches, then darted away to force the bull to follow.
Bulls always chase a moving threat, and Roosevelt thundered after Trident, trying to gore the dog as the dog parried, leapt at him, parried, moved back, always one step ahead of the bull’s horns, as sharp and deadly as any knife Trident had ever faced in battle.
Jojo took three, maybe four more leaping strides and hit the fence at a dead run, grabbed hold and climbed for her life.
When she got to the top, she threw her leg over and looked back at the field where the bull and the dog were in mortal combat.
If Trident made one misstep, the bull would gore him.
It lunged, snorting and chuffing as Trident barked, nipped at him, leapt back, nipped again, distracted him, kept his attention focused away from Jojo.
“Trident, zu mir,” Jojo yelled, “to me!” the standard German recall command used by police and military dog handlers. Then she tried to distract the bull to give Trident a chance to escape, yelling from the top of the fence. “Hey ya, hey ya, hey ya, bull, yo, bull, Roosevelt.”
Taking her cap off, she slammed it against the corrugated metal, banged her hands on it.
“Hey bull, I’m right here, hey bull.” She stepped back down a couple of rungs on the fence.
“Come and get me, come on!” Yanking her scarf off, she waved it at him and the bull faltered, looked from Trident to Jojo and back at Trident.
Trident had backed off, was no longer attacking, just staying out of the bull’s range of horns.
She banged her hands on the fence and yelled as loud as she could, and the bull turned toward her.
Trident bolted, racing like lightning across the field.
The bull spotted him, attracted by the movement, turned and thundered after him, but Trident never paused, even for a heartbeat.
He judged the distance to the gate and leapt into the air with the bull only two or three feet behind him, sailed over the top as Roosevelt’s nose and horns slammed into the gate.
The whole fence shook and for a moment Jojo thought he might have knocked the gate down, but it held with Trident safely on the other side.
Jojo leapt back up the fence, threw her leg over and climbed down as the bull continued to batter the gate Trident had leapt over, Roosevelt bloodying his face in his fury.
Trident raced to her, sat down in front of her, panting.
Jojo dropped to her knees and threw her arms around the dog.
“Oh Trident, Trident!” That’s all she could say.
She’d seen the dog in danger before, had put him in danger before, but this was as close a call as she’d ever watched.
And yet again Trident had come through. As a soldier, Trident was her partner and she was his handler and she treated him as such, praised him when he did well, gave him treats.
But he hadn’t been her partner in combat for three years, he’d been her dog, her best friend, and she wasn’t a soldier anymore who had to keep her emotions in check.
She was a woman whose beloved dog had just saved her life, and she buried her face in his fur and cried.