Part 2
“I said there hadn’t been one.”
Mara placed the care sheet on the bench between them. Janice reached to keep it from blowing away, and her daughter moved her hand aside long enough to add one more condition.
“Dr. Voss needs to hear that before he assesses this place. You can tell him yourself. But he’s going to hear it.”
Janice looked at the sentence Mara had written: No further pen transfers pending facility assessment. Across the yard, Amos had begun eating from the fresh pile of hay.
Luke had been twenty-eight when the gate caught him against the curb. Janice had stood at the controls. She remembered the sleeve of his work shirt, his hand against the gatepost, and her own voice telling him to hold on when there was no useful way for him to do that.
In the days afterward, people brought food and avoided the word preventable. Janice had accepted every account that began with how quickly accidents happened. When Mara said her brother had complained about the gate, Janice told her she was too upset to remember things properly.
“I shouldn’t have said that to you,” she said now.
“Which part?”
Janice rubbed at a smear of ink on her thumb. She could not seem to find an answer small enough to get out of her mouth.
Mara picked up her bag. “I’m coming tomorrow to check him. That doesn’t settle anything else.”
Janice nodded, and this time she let her daughter leave without offering supper as though it were an answer.
The next morning she called Graham and explained what they had seen. She asked him to authorize Dr. Peter Voss, a livestock veterinarian who also consulted at Westridge Agricultural College. Mara knew him through work, but he had no personal ties to the family and had never worked at the yard.
Graham listened without interrupting. When she finished, he asked a question she had not prepared for.
“If he can’t hear, can that be fixed?”
“We don’t know that he can’t. We need somebody to examine him.”
“Then do that. But don’t start telling people we hurt him because we didn’t know.”
“I’m trying to find out how to move him without hurting anybody.”
“So am I.”
He authorized the visit and sent the available veterinary records.
Over the following days, they began teaching Amos to approach a blue square held beside a feed tub. Janice used the sorting cloth she had nearly waved at his back. Now she kept it still and visible, removing it after he approached rather than making him follow it indefinitely.
At first he attended to the hay and ignored the cloth. Later, in the same quiet setting, he began looking toward the square before Janice brought the feed. She kept the sessions short and the barriers between them substantial.
She came to recognize his smaller habits. Before drinking, he lowered his nose almost to the surface and paused; after a meal, he rubbed his forehead against the same smooth section of post. Sometimes he stood with hay caught across one horn until she found herself wanting to reach through and pluck it off.
She never did. When he came to the fence, she kept her fingers curled around the cloth and watched him examine her from the other side.
Mara came after her clinic rounds when she could. One evening she found Janice trying to tape the torn cuff of her chore jacket so it would stop catching on a latch. She took a small pair of scissors from her bag and trimmed the loose threads before wrapping the tape.
“You used to fix that with baling twine,” she said.
“Still would. Can’t get it tight one-handed.”
Mara turned the sleeve to smooth down the tape. Janice remembered that concentration from when her daughter was nine and refused to let her mother finish a knot for her.
“There,” Mara said. “It’ll hold until you wash it.”
“So, Christmas.”
Her daughter made a small sound that almost became a laugh.
Then she went back to watching the bull, and Janice kept the cuff turned inward for the rest of the evening so it would stay clean.
Danny called on Thursday. Graham had given him Janice’s number, and he wanted to know whether Amos was eating. She told him Amos was eating well and asked if it was all right to take notes about the accident for Dr. Voss.
“As long as you write down what I say.”
“I will.”
He described a bull that had stopped in the collection alley, a powered gate moving behind him, and a sideways surge that drove the gate into Danny’s arm. He had noticed for weeks that Amos sometimes failed to react until somebody entered his sight. He had mentioned it, but neither he nor the crew had understood what it meant.
“I thought he was ignoring me too,” he said. “Some mornings I got mad.”
Janice stopped writing. Through the window, she could see Amos’s pale back beneath the shade roof.
“Put that in too,” Danny said. “Me getting mad. I didn’t know what was wrong with him. But I’m not going back in there just to show them I can.”
“Nobody should ask you to.”
“They keep saying I can come back when I’m ready. I’m ready to work. I just can’t do that job yet.”
Janice read her notes back to him, including that last sentence. He corrected the position of the gate, asked her to remove a word she had supplied herself, and thanked her when she did.
Dr. Voss came the following afternoon. He examined the layout before going near the occupied pen, then spent time observing Amos and reviewing the responses Janice and Mara had recorded. He agreed that severe hearing loss was a reasonable concern and that Amos should be managed as though spoken commands could not reach him.
He would not name a cause from observation alone. A more complete examination would require appropriate restraint and a setting they could reach without forcing Amos through the old equipment.
“I wouldn’t treat him as a gentle bull,” he said. “But I’d stop expecting him to move because somebody calls from behind him.”
Janice told him about Luke while they stood outside the chained alley. She left out the neighbors who had reassured her afterward, the sleeplessness, the reasons she had come to repeat that account. Voss asked whether the warning had been included in the original investigation, and she told him it had not.
He made no effort to comfort her. He wanted the unused equipment kept isolated and a qualified contractor to assess the loading approach before they moved Amos again. Janice agreed and wrote down the name he gave her.
When Voss left, Mara carried the empty cups into the office. It was the first time she had crossed that threshold since arriving to see the bull. Janice followed her to the sink.
“He could stay,” Janice said. “If I fixed what needs fixing.”
Mara turned off the faucet. “You mean for good.”
“The pasture lease ends in November. There’s room.”
“Who helps when you get sick?”
“I haven’t decided every detail.”
“Who covers you? Who moves him if he needs treatment? You can’t do all this alone.”
Janice looked at the second cup, the one Mara had finally used. “You could come sometimes.”
Her daughter put it in the drying rack.
“I have a practice, Mom.”
“I know that.”
“Sometimes I’d like to come over without a job waiting for me.”
Janice wanted to say the yard had paid for that practice, for the education before it, for nearly everything when the children were small. The old argument was ready. She held it behind her teeth until the urge passed.
“If I offered to keep him,” she asked, “what would you tell Graham?” Mara dried her hands before answering. “That he shouldn’t leave him here…”
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