Christmas with Tucker (16 page)

IT WAS
light out when I woke up. It had been a long, snug, and secure sleep, but I wondered why no one had bothered to wake me. I threw off the covers and raced into the kitchen. My grandmother was standing over the sink, looking out the kitchen window. “What’s wrong, Grandma?”

“Your grandfather still hasn’t come back and I am worried.”

“Don’t worry, Grandma. He’ll be all right.” While I could tell my grandmother not to worry, I wasn’t so good at following my own advice. I couldn’t imagine where he was and was hoping he had not slipped off the road in the middle of the night, or worse. Pushing him the way I had to do something about the roads made me feel responsible.

We ate breakfast in silence. Perhaps because I just wanted to stay busy, I went straight to the chores. And since I got such a late start, I did the milking first and figured I would chop the pond ice later. After letting in the first six cattle, I milked as furiously as I could, working up a sweat despite the cold. The whole time my worry climbed and my mind raced to terrible possibilities. Why had he not told us where he was going or what he was
doing? I didn’t even know where to look. The milking seemed to take forever.

Finally, I got to the last six cows. When finished, I shut the barn door, closed the latch, and ran to the house, hoping that there was some good news.

My grandmother was dressed in her winter coat and was standing by the back door. “Where are you going?” I asked.

“I’m going out to find your grandfather.”

“Now?”

“Yes.”

“I’ll go with you.”

“No, you better stay here. In case he shows up, we can’t all be roaming around trying to find him. I won’t be gone more than an hour.”

I didn’t want her to go, but I knew I had no say in the matter. The door shut behind her and just like that I was left alone, more alone than you could imagine. It came to me that I had lost my father and because I lost my father, I lost my mother, albeit it to sadness, loneliness, and a move to Minnesota. She was alive but she was absent from my life. Now my grandfather was lost and that meant my grandmother would wander about in freezing weather looking for him. Losses compound and impact us like falling dominoes. It was just me—alone in the old farmhouse listening to the wind shake our house down to its foundation.

I pictured my grandparents pushing against the snow, determined to find each other. Needing to get my mind separated from my worry, I tried to read, but it was no use. I should have insisted that I go with her, but I was thirteen and generally did what I was told. We could have left a note. There was some solace in remembering how strong she was when we searched for
the Christmas tree. I paced about the house and tried to formulate a plan of my own. When more than an hour had passed and still no one had returned, I reassured myself that she probably did not have a watch and when she said an hour it was only an estimate.

When she got back, I would bundle up and go in the opposite direction. We could take turns like that, one-hour shifts each. I searched around for the heaviest winter clothes I could find and arranged them around the periphery of the downstairs furnace grate. As soon as she returned, I’d dress in my pre-warmed things and go out. I thought about survival. If I got lost I would need food. I placed a few apples and some cookies in a knapsack and went to the basement and dug up an old army canteen that had belonged to Dad.

Back in the kitchen, I took a drink from my grandfather’s tin cup, which so reminded me of him, and then pressed my face against the cold window. I peered outside and into the ice-land of meadows to the south of our old home, hoping for some sign of my grandparents’ return. Amid all of the worrying, a sickening realization came over me. I had forgotten to clear the ice on the pond for the cows.

Quickly, I pulled on my warm winter suit and headed out the door.

THE FASTER
I tried to go, the more I slipped and fell, which only caused me to worry more about my grandparents. It was hard going forward when the elevation increased and nearly impossible to stop sliding on the downhill sections. Fortunately, our farm sat on the top of a hill, and at least for the first several minutes, I could move across the barnyard using a skating motion.

Not wanting to take the time to skate over to the open gate, I squeezed my way between the strands of the barbed-wire fence that separates the barn pasture from the lake meadow. My extra clothing added to my girth and my jacket caught on one of the small barbs. Backing out, I reached around and pulled the fabric from the barb and tried again.

Once through the fence, I slid to the bottom of the hill and tried to make my way up the back side of the pond, where a dam held the water back. It was too steep to go over, so I followed the dam around to the east of the pond. As I made my way around the spillway, where the water overflows in strong spring showers, my heart sank.

Forty feet from the shoreline, two cows and two calves had wandered out onto the ice and fallen through a weak spot. They were treading water as best they could. One calf was barely holding his head above water. The remainder of the herd stood precariously close, tempting their own fate. Nausea and panic came over me in waves. There was no one home to help me. My grandfather’s words came back to me. “It’s an important job I’m giving you. Do you understand?”

How casually I had said, “Sure.”

Now I needed help, and a lot of it. I yelled as loud as I could. “Help!” My voice echoed over the hills and valleys and cruelly reverberated off the ice-covered ground. Again, I was alone.

I wanted to stop right there and just sob at my helplessness. I wanted to jump in with them. Give up. At least that way, we would all go together. The sight of the first floating carcass snapped me to my senses. The poor creature’s body bobbed up and down like a grotesque black-and-white ice cube. It was one of the two calves.

None of my options seemed reasonable. The cows weighed over twelve hundred pounds. I couldn’t lift them up and onto the ice. From my daily efforts at cracking the ice with the sledgehammer, I knew it would be impossible for me to clear a swath to the shore by hand.

There was only one way. I would have to pull them out one at a time with some rope and the tractor. Even though no one could hear me, I screamed again, as loud as I could. “Help!”

There was so little time. I ran across the ice back to the barn, driven by adrenaline and fear. More times than I could count, I fell. I got back up. I ran. I fell again.

First grabbing two ropes from the barn and a huge bucket of feed, I dashed to the implement shed and tried to remember
how to start the largest tractor we owned, the IH. I had driven it many times, but I was so panicked that the simplest task seemed impossible. I had to try three times before the engine turned over and started. There was no time to let it warm up. I released the clutch with my numb feet and backed out of the barn. I swung the tractor forward and the massive wheels spun on the ice. Backing the throttle off, I tried again.

Eventually, I gained enough traction to move forward. Not wanting to waste an instant, I crashed through the gate, without bothering to open it, and made my way to the pond. The tractor would have to be pointing downhill when I tried to pull the cows out or it would not work. As I approached the pond, I picked the perfect spot, stopped the tractor, put it in reverse, and tried to get enough steam going to make it up a gentle hill that approached the west side of the pond. I had over fifty yards of lariat and I prayed it would reach.

Parking the tractor as close to the pond bank as possible, I quickly secured one end of the rope to the steel clevis on the back of the tractor. Pouring the sorghum on the shore worked exactly as I thought it would. The remainder of the herd that was not already in the water ambled over to the edge to eat, unaware that death was only twenty yards away.

With the bulk of the herd out of the way, I raced across the surface of the pond, holding on to the other end of the rope.

There was no time to think about it. Perhaps I should have known better than to risk my life for a few cows. But to me, they were living creatures with beating hearts that I had cared for my whole life, and that stood for our family’s livelihood. I couldn’t let them die without trying to rescue them. I knew full well it was more than cows I was trying to salvage.

I jumped. The cold water sucked the breath straight out of
me. With the rope in my hand, I dove beneath the first cow. With hands frozen stiff, I managed to tie a knot around her. I tried to lift myself out of the ice but fell back in. My boots had filled with water and they were so heavy that they were pulling me down and making it hard to tread water. I kicked them off, but still I could not find a way out of the ice. A desperate cow’s hoof slammed into me and I screamed out in pain. Now I was stuck, too.

I remembered the rope, somehow managed to grab it, and pulled myself out to safety.

Running and slipping across the surface of the pond in my stocking feet, my body a shivering, freezing mass of ice, I struggled up onto the tractor and pushed it into first gear. The right tractor wheel was spinning and the tractor could not gain traction. I backed up a little bit and tried again. Still, the right wheel spun. The tractor was set up with a right and a left brake pedal, so I tried to lock down the right wheel to transfer more of the pull to the left wheel. It worked. The tractor moved slowly forward, oblivious to its load. The rope went taut and pulled the cow up onto the ice. She plopped out onto the surface of the pond and let out a frightened bawl as I dragged her to the edge.

She came to her feet but was too frightened to let me get close enough to untie the knot. To make matters worse, the harder she pulled, the tighter it made the knot.

I didn’t have time to wait for her to settle down. I remembered my father’s pocketknife, pulled it out, and just cut the rope.

The rope was losing its flexibility in the cold. I backed the tractor to the edge of the pond. My feet were frozen. I jumped off the tractor and yanked the rope back to the edge of the water. Holding on to the rope, I jumped in again. The water, being
warmer than the outside air temperature and my frozen clothing, was not as bad this time, but still I felt like my blood was freezing. The other calf was the first animal I got to. He was struggling to get up onto the ice to follow the cow I had just retrieved, his mother. He seemed so small and helpless that I thought maybe I could pull him out by myself. Taking one end of the rope, I looped it around his backside, just under his tail, and then pulled myself up and out of the water. I was exhausted and frozen, and I questioned whether I had enough strength to pull out much more than a minnow from the frozen waters.

I’d lost my socks in the pond, too. The skin on the bottoms of my feet was wet and stuck to the surface of the ice. As much as it hurt, it also gave me traction. I yanked and pulled and cursed and screamed. The calf probably weighed close to two hundred pounds, but he was buoyant in the water. With him kicking and me pulling, he was able to work his front legs out of the water and onto the solid ice. With one final heave of everything I had left, the bawling calf slid out onto the surface of the ice. We lay there together on the ice for a moment, both of us panting, exhausted. Some skin had ripped from the bottom of my right foot and it began to bleed.

I was tired, so tired. I wanted to just lay there, but I forced myself to my feet and untied the knot from the calf. There was one left. I stared at the water, ready to jump in. Perhaps I stood up too quickly, or perhaps it was fatigue, but the pond and ice started to swirl as if a giant tornado had uprooted me. I spun, turned, and fell to the ice with a thud. I could feel my eyelids flutter and I did not know what was wrong with me. I tried to fight my way back to consciousness, but everything was slipping away, getting darker and darker.

I don’t know how much time passed, but something warm
was licking my face. I tried to push it away and opened my eyes. Tucker was barking wildly. I tried to lift my hands to pull him close to me, but nothing would move. It went dark. Sleep. I had to sleep.