Rural Exposition, Slaughterhouse Dreams

We could have just gotten an extension for the hose. There was no running water to the barn that may not really have been a barn at all, but rather a misappropriated garage with ramshackle additions of mismatched materials.

My shoulders and neck seared, and the metal wire handles of the buckets pinched at the soft skin of my fingers where the flesh met the joints. The relentless noonday sun doubled its efforts against me, baking the water into the air and punishing the animals into drinking more.

What little resolve I may have had buckled quickly under the weight of the sun and the water, and that old, familiar dread began to creep forward from the shadows of my mind. I wasn’t going to be finished in time.

Picking up the pace of my stride in the one hundred feet from the end of the hose to the barn only caused the water to slosh, mercifully drenching my legs and causing my feet to squish in my shoes. Less water for the cows; they’d need refilled sooner.

I hadn’t even started on the stalls yet, but sweat stung my eyes anyway, inspiring them to drop the tears I knew that “men” weren’t supposed to cry.

“Men” kept the animals watered. “Men” got the stalls cleaned. “Men” didn’t play in the sandbox or pretend about superheroes or use their mouths to make sound effects for their action figures.

I tried to imagine the young “men” in my third grade class. My stepfather was right about at least some of them. Chris, the best friend who sat next to me in class when he hadn’t been moved for talking or distracting the other students in some way, had to help out at his Dad’s junkyard when he wasn’t at school.

I guess he and I must have talked about that. The evidence was smeared on the thighs of Chris’s jeans, and it showed in the holes where battery acid drops had eaten through his faded sweatshirts. His 8-year old hands already had cuts and calluses that even mine didn’t have. Because Chris probably worked like a real man.

Still, I wasn’t sure that most of my classmates did. They didn’t talk about it or look like it, and they had other interests that seemed to me at that age to be mutually exclusive. They had video games and skateboard gear.

I had a gravel driveway with limestone chunks so large that they sometimes turned my ankles as I stumbled over them, sloshing more of the water out of the buckets and onto the parched and greedy ground.

I made it to the barn, put one of the two buckets down, and hoisted them one by one onto the hooks that were just an inch or so too high for my shoulders to comfortably lift the handles onto. The cows wouldn’t have been able to reach them on the outsides of the stalls if they’d been any lower, I was told.

The horse’s water was either a little above or a little below the level it was supposed to be when I was to fill it again. I couldn’t tell, or I told myself that I couldn’t. That bucket was bigger, though, and heavier. I had to carry it stiff-armed in front of me with two hands, and it always swang back against my shins painfully, threatening to take my feet from under me.

I made the choice not to refill the horse water, knowing that the decision had the potential to make me sorry later. The stalls still needed cleaned, though, and there was so little time until the mandated deadline of his arrival. I couldn’t for the life of me figure out how I’d somehow squandered the amount of time I knew he was going to label as “plenty”.

The sight of the stall floor hit me in the gut like calf’s head as I opened one of the long, heavy gates we’d fashioned from two-by-fours. I was crestfallen; I was already defeated. The muck in the stall sat three inches deep below the golden straw we’d thrown night after night over top of it.

Stamped into a densely packed 8-foot by 10-foot brick under those hefty hooves, it took all of my strength to pry even a pitchfork-full loose so that I could sling it unsteadily into the wheelbarrow. Arms burned; back muscled throbbed; sweat pooled, dripped, and pooled some more.

It wouldn’t be long before the wheelbarrow was only partially full, but still teetering on the brink of being too heavy for me to lift and push. More than once I would lose control, and it would topple over, dumping its stinking contents into the sunbaked yard well-before the permitted dumping area.

Wiping my sweaty blonde hair off of my scarlet forehead, I’d utter a short cry of frustration to the soupy air and begin re-forking the manure. Time ticked by, and even in my young mind I knew that 12-square feet of stall cleaning progress was not going to expand into 160 square feet by late afternoon.

When he arrived home from work, the two of us marched together out to the barn. He yelled, threatened, maybe even acted. He’d told me a million times to make sure the horse had this much water, and the stalls were not properly or completely cleaned. There was no reason I shouldn’t have been able to get those simple chores done in a day.

I thought about the day, and how much better it would have been to have spent it with my dog, fishing down at the pond. I was good at that. Instead, I spent the entire day hot, tired, upset, and benefiting no one. Despite all of the sacrifice, all of the earnest effort, I’d done a poor job and had been reprimanded for my troubles.

I’d have gotten the same response from enjoying most of the day at the pond and not trying too much at all.

I lay in bed that night listening to the tractor trailers roar past on the highway at the edge of our front lawn, straining around the bend past the dilapidated slaughterhouse. It hadn’t operated for years, and it just sat there, useless and ugly, a bastion of bygone pain and cruelty. It’s cobwebbed windows and sky-blue paint peeling off in curling, ragged sheets that made me feel it was rotting from the inside out.

The headlights from the highway lit my room. I was too hot to sleep, and my legs ached from what my mom called “growing pains”. I didn’t want to struggle with the heat of the night; I didn’t want to return to the barn in the morning. I wanted to be anywhere else and anyone else. I wanted to be whatever “gone” was.