My Gentle Barn (18 page)

She made one incision on Buddha’s neck, large enough for the potato plus her hand to fit through, and another incision over the rumen—the first chamber of a cow’s stomach—to release the trapped gases. I, of course, only half-watched, waves of squeamishness forcing me to look away during the bad parts.

“OK,” Dr. Fox said finally. “I’m done.”

The potato was out, the surgery was over, and Buddha was still breathing. I took my first deep breath in a couple of hours.

As we waited for the anesthesia to wear off, the vet pulled her
evening gown back up and listed all the possible postsurgical complications. Then she gave me a lecture on bovine alimentation. “No vegetables,” she said. “Ruminants are designed to eat grasses, period.”

It took weeks for Buddha to heal. I had to reach inside the incision in her neck twice every day to clean out any accumulated fluids and disinfect the wound. From that day forward I watched her carefully at mealtimes, making sure she didn’t eat any of Susie Q’s vegetables. And each morning when I went into the barn to hug my cow, I was acutely aware that I had almost lost my precious Buddha. In the blink of an eye, she had nearly vanished from the world. Life, I realized—now more fully than ever—is a fragile thing and can never be promised. It can be here one day and snatched the next from under our nose with no warning.

As I moved forward I committed to live each day as though it were the last day I would see the ones I loved—human and animal alike. If I felt love, I expressed it. If I thought of someone, I told them. I recommitted to living in the moment as a hedge against regret, for I knew in my gut that regret could eat me alive.

Two things happened at the beginning of 2002. The first was that Jay got me a gift. On the morning of my birthday, at the end of January, he showed up in the barnyard and asked me to come out to his van.

“What … why?” I asked.

“Just come with me.”

I followed him down the driveway and when we got to his van, he pulled open the door. “Happy birthday,” he said. Inside the van was a crate, and the crate contained a turkey. She cocked her head and looked at me and made that soft purring sound turkeys make when they’re content. Jay had rescued her from the animal shelter and named her Spring.

I looked at Spring and then looked back at Jay. He had a huge grin on his face.

“There is nothing I would have wanted more for my birthday than Spring,” I said.

The second thing that happened was that Scott moved out. Not just out of the bedroom this time, but out of the house. From the moment he had unclogged the toilet on Thanksgiving, it was as though he had begun extracting himself from this “crazy life” I led. He had stayed through the holidays and into January, but he had clearly been pushed to his edge.

Finally, one day he said, “I can’t do this anymore.”

I thought it was just more of his usual disgruntlement, but then he said, “Really. I’m done.” He didn’t want to be anywhere near the Gentle Barn; he had had it with the animals and the visitors and the press. He said this was not the life he had signed up for. “We’ll have to work out how we can both spend time with Jesse, but I’m leaving by the end of the month.”

A week and a half later, as Scott loaded his stuff into a moving van, Jesse—now three—finally understood what was happening. He cried for two hours after Scott drove away and nothing I said or did calmed him. He finally cried himself to sleep in my arms, and I realized what an awful job we’d done with this transition. We had not properly prepared him for such a huge upheaval in his young life.

The next morning, after I dropped Jesse off at day care, I sought solace in Buddha’s warm hug. “What am I going to do, Buddha?” I had always had a boyfriend or a husband. I didn’t know how to do life on my own. And even though Scott and I had not actually been
together
much of the previous year, knowing he was in the house had been a comfort to me.

When Buddha’s neck was wet and salty with my tears I leaned back carefully against her, cautious not to press on either of the nearly healed surgical sites, and said, “Where is that man Chantelle promised me, anyway?”

Buddha shifted her weight under me and heaved a big breath.

“I know just what you mean,” I said.

Over the next couple of weeks, Jesse began to adjust; Scott had gotten an apartment very close by so Jesse could visit frequently, and our little boy was calmed by the realization that he could see his dad whenever he wanted.

With Scott’s move out of the house, it was the end of his financial support for my life. I still had help from my parents, and more donations were coming in all the time, especially now that Jay was writing grants for us, but I didn’t trust it yet. I didn’t have faith that the universe would support me or that the Gentle Barn would be OK. I felt like I was about to step off an enormous cliff.

In the weeks that followed, however, the cliff never showed up; the dreaded free fall never happened. The Gentle Barn and I just kept moving forward. Every week, we had more people coming to visit—about fifty or sixty each Sunday. More agencies for at-risk and special-needs kids were signing on; more donations were appearing from people who had heard about us. Also, as the media coverage grew, we started receiving more animals from people who had rescued a pig or a horse or a bunch of chickens but didn’t know what to do with them.

In late February we received eighteen rabbits from a rescue agency, who assured us all the rabbits were male, so none of them had to be neutered. Since we’d never had rabbits at the Gentle Barn, we had to build them appropriate accommodations. Jay and I went to work on an outdoor pen under the biggest shade tree—a fruitless mulberry in the corner of the barnyard—enclosing a large area over and around the roots of the tree. The rabbits would have dappled light, piles of straw, and little cubbies to nest in between the enormous roots. On the day the pen was finally finished, Jay and I were excited to transfer the rabbits from their temporary housing in the barn to their beautiful new atrium. When I entered the rabbits’ stall, all the bunnies flew into a frenzy—squealing, hopping in circles, and thumping the ground to warn the others of danger.

“It’s OK, guys. This is the big day,” I said. “You’re moving into your new atrium. You’re going to love it.” But this didn’t seem to calm them. I tried getting down on my knees, and they all just ran into the corners, as far from me as they could get. I tried approaching them slowly, cooing to them, but they still thumped and squealed and hopped in crazy circles.

“Oh my gosh,” I said to Jay, “you’d think we were the angel of death.” I could just imagine them yelling,
Run! Run for your lives!

When I managed to corner and catch one of the rabbits, all the others again ran frantically around, squealing and thumping.
Oh no!
they must have been yelling.
They got Bobby! Bobby, we’re so sorry they got you!

I carried “Bobby” out to the atrium and set him down inside, where he sniffed the straw-covered ground and hopped gently through the dappled sunlight.

“Not so bad, huh?” I said to him.

Jay caught the next rabbit, and that bunny’s compatriots again squealed and hopped frantically around the stall.
Oh my God, oh my God, they got Fred!

This went on with each and every one of the rabbits—the rest of the bunnies in the barn stall squealing and thumping and mourning the loss of the comrade who’d just been nabbed—until all eighteen rabbits were peacefully exploring their spacious new home under the mulberry tree.

“I wonder if that’s what death is like,” I said to Jay as we stood outside the pen and watched the rabbits hop contentedly through the straw and over and around the tree roots. “Everyone sobs and mourns for the dearly departed, and yet here’s the dearly departed in bliss over on the other side. But he can’t tell his friends how beautiful it is here in paradise.”

Jay laughed. “So they just freak out over and over every time someone dies.”

“Exactly,” I said.

Jay’s marriage had been falling apart for some time. When I next saw him, he told me it was finally over; he had left. He began spending more and more time at the Gentle Barn, stopping by nearly every day, working us in around his job interviews. Molli spent the week with Jay and lived with her mom and half-sister only on weekends. So Molli was at the Gentle Barn a lot too. Jesse was thrilled; he thought Molli hung the moon. He was eager to share toys and snacks with her and would follow her around and do anything she asked of him in her quiet little voice. And Molli was as at home in the barnyard as I was. She would watch me when I did my chores and mimic my every move. If I fed the chickens, she fed the chickens. If I raked up manure, she’d go looking for a rake. And just like me she was not afraid to get dirty. She’d sit her dainty self right down on the ground, dusting her pretty pink and yellow dresses with barnyard dirt.

One early evening toward the end of March, I was sitting in the rabbit pen when Jay arrived, this time without Molli. He came through the gate in the pen and settled into the straw with me. “Where’s Jesse?”

“He’s with his dad.”

We sat quietly for a moment, then Jay said, “How are the rabbits doing?”

“Great,” I said. “Look how elaborate their warrens have gotten. There are holes over on this side now too.” For days after we’d built the pen, I’d been spending an hour or more every day sitting with the rabbits in their little paradise. Slowly they came to trust me, hopping across my legs and sometimes even resting for a while in my lap. As I’d hoped, the crevices formed by the tree roots made for perfect nesting spots, but some of the rabbits also dug holes in the dirt, hollowing out warrens under the network of roots.

“It’s amazing how their natural instincts kick in once they have the right environment,” he said.

And just at that moment something caught my attention out of the
corner of my eye—something small and white popping up from one of the holes. I turned to look just in time to see a little white puff disappear back into the warren. “Look,” I whispered and pointed in the direction where the white fluff had disappeared. Jay and I inched closer and then sat quietly waiting for the apparition to recur. After fifteen minutes one of our big rabbits popped his head out of the hole, and I wondered if that was all I’d seen, the head of one of our big bunnies. But then the rabbit slid entirely up out of the hole and was followed by the little white puff that had caught my eye. A tiny white bunny. “He had a baby,” I said.

“He?” Jay said. Of course he was right. I wondered how many of our “all-male” rabbits were female.

Another white puff popped up then. Two baby bunnies! And Jay and I both started laughing.

“Definitely not all male,” he said.

As we sat there giggling in delight, one white puff after another came flopping out of the hole. Now there were four baby bunnies. Then another puff appeared. Five babies. And another. Six. And each time another little ball of fluff appeared we laughed harder until our eyes started to tear. I watched Jay through the tears in my eyes—this huge guy sitting in a pen full of bunny rabbits laughing to the point of crying.

When we had counted ten babies, the parade finally was over. “Congratulations,” I said to the new bunny mama. Then I turned to Jay and said, “Thank you.”

He raised his eyebrows, a quizzical look on his face.

“It means so much to me to have a friend to share this with,” I said. Scott would not have sat with me in a bunny pen and laughed at a parade of new babies. Scott would have said,
Great, now we have ten more mouths to feed
. “Thank you for enjoying this as much as I do.”

Jay scooted closer to me in the straw and took my hand in his. Then he looked directly into my eyes and got very serious. “That’s why I’m
here,” he said, and goose bumps spread over my entire body. Suddenly Jay seemed like a whole different person from the man I’d known since the previous fall.