Calf Love

She heard him before she saw him.

She had woken before her uncle on the second morning—which surprised her, because at home she never woke before noon if she could help it—and she had pulled on her boots and gone outside into the blue-grey of early morning because something had called her. Not a sound. Just the feeling that something was happening.

The barn was warm and loud in a different way than the house. Loud with breathing and the soft shifting of large bodies. The stock moved slowly, as though there had never been any reason to rush.

And then, under all of that, something smaller. A sound she couldn’t place at first, thin and searching, coming from the far corner.

She waited. Then moved closer.

He was tucked against the wall in the straw, half-hidden in shadow, and he was making that sound, and when her boots scuffed the floor he went quiet and turned toward her. She stopped. He was small in a way that made her chest feel strange—everything about him slightly too large for the rest of him, ears and knees and eyes that looked as though they belonged to someone older.

Marlène crouched down.

He took three unsteady steps toward her and stopped.

She stayed very still.

He took three more.

Then he pressed his forehead against her outstretched hand, and she felt the heat coming off him—steady and specific, like a stone that had been sitting in the sun—and she stayed like that for a long time without moving.

—

Uncle Dries said nothing about the name she gave him. He watched her carry a bucket of water, watched her learn where to stand so as not to frighten him, watched her figure out, through some quiet negotiation she conducted entirely without words, that he liked to be scratched behind his right ear but not his left, liked the sound of her voice but not sudden movements, liked to lean into her the way tired things lean into solid things.

On the fourth day, her uncle said, “He’s taken to you.”

“I’ve taken to him,” Marlène said.

Her uncle looked at her. “Same thing, I suppose.”

—

She stayed with her uncle because her mother needed time. That was the word her mother used—‘time’—and Marlène had learned not to ask what kind. Uncle Dries had picked her up at the station without asking either. He fed her, showed her the farm, left her alone in the mornings. It was the most comfortable she’d been in months.

The days had a shape she hadn’t expected. At home, days were formless—long dissolves of screen light and waiting and the particular boredom of a house that didn’t quite function, where takeaway containers lined the counter and the smell of cigarettes had worked its way into everything. Here, days had edges. They began with the sound of boots on stone and ended with the light going gold across the fields in a way that made her reach for her camera every single time, even when she’d already taken that photograph, even when she knew the photograph would never be the same as standing in it.

She photographed him constantly. His knees. His ear. The way his eyelashes caught the light. The way he slept, folded down into the straw, trusting the world not to do anything while he was gone from it.

She sent one photograph to her mother.

Her mother replied: He’s sweet. How are you doing?

Marlène typed: Fine. Then deleted it. Then typed it again and sent it.

At night, through the curtains, she could see stars that didn’t exist in the city. She counted them for a while, then stopped, because you can’t count things that keep appearing.

—

In the evenings, uncle Dries talked. Not much, and not the way adults usually talked to her—not performing patience, not simplifying—just talking, the way you talk to someone you’ve decided can follow along.

He talked about the farm. About how dairy farming worked, the rhythms of it, the way the seasons organised everything. He talked about the cows by name—he knew all twenty-three of them, their personalities, their small dramas. He talked about his ex-wife, once, briefly, and Marlène didn’t say anything, just sat there, and he seemed to appreciate that.

He did not talk about the calves.

Marlène didn’t notice this for a while. Until she did.

—

“Where do the calves go?” she asked, on the eighth day.

They were at the kitchen table. It was after dinner. The light outside was soft and level and the birds were doing their evening accounting.

Uncle Dries set down his cup. He was quiet for a long moment—not the quiet of someone avoiding a question, but the quiet of someone deciding how much truth is the right amount.

“When they’re born,” he said, “we move them. That same day. To a separate pen.”

“Why?”

“The mothers make milk. The calf drinks it. So the calf goes, the milk ends up in the supermarket.”

Marlène was quiet. “And then?”

“Then they go to other farms. Within a few days.”

She looked at him. “So Star—”

Uncle Dries was quiet for a moment. “Three weeks old. He should have gone at two days.”

“Why didn’t he?”

“You’d arrived. It seemed a shame.”

She sat with that for a while. It felt kind. It hurt anyway.

“And the mother—does she—”

“Yes,” uncle Dries said. “Yes, she does.”

He hadn’t waited for her to finish. He’d known which question she was building toward.

—

She asked if she could keep him.

Uncle Dries looked at her steadily. “This is how farming works. He is not a pet. He was never going to stay.”

“But he could,” she said. “If you wanted him to.”

“No,” he said. Simply. Not cruelly. “No.”

She walked out without answering, the screen door hitting the frame behind her harder than she meant it to.

She sat in the straw next to Star with the barn door pulled half-shut behind her, and she pressed her face into his neck and cried until she was empty and her throat ached. Star stood very still. She didn’t know if that meant anything or nothing.

“They can’t,” she told him. “I won’t let them.”

He shifted slightly. She tightened her arms around him.

“You could run,” she said. “I could open the gate and you could go into the field and nobody could take you.”

She looked toward the open barn door. Outside, the yard lay silver beneath the moon. The gate to the pasture stood only a few dozen steps away.

She got to her feet before she had really decided to.

“Come on,” she whispered.

Star followed her without hesitation, stopping whenever she stopped, as though the game belonged entirely to her.

The latch was stiff. It gave with a dull click that sounded impossibly loud in the night.

She swung the gate open.

“Go on.”

He didn’t.

He looked past the dark field and back at her, waiting.

She waved her arms, shooing him the way she had seen her uncle move the cows.

Star took two uncertain steps into the grass, then turned and pressed himself gently against her side.

“You’re supposed to run,” she whispered, her voice breaking.

Behind her came the crunch of slow footsteps on gravel.

Uncle Dries said nothing.

He walked past her, rested one weathered hand on the gate, and quietly swung it shut again.

The latch clicked into place. Somewhere in the dark, a cow coughed.

For a long moment they stood beside each other without looking at one another.

“He doesn’t know he’s meant to be afraid,” her uncle said softly.

Marlène wiped at her face.

“No,” she said.

“Only the people do.”

When she came back to the house, uncle Dries had left a plate on the table. She looked at it and went upstairs, her feet loud and deliberate on each step, and pulled her door shut behind her with a bang that said everything she hadn’t said downstairs. In the morning he said nothing about the plate. She said nothing about the plate. She came down pale and hollow-eyed and he put bread in front of her without comment, and she ate it standing up, looking out the window at the barn.

—

She spent every free hour with Star. He was bigger now, his legs more certain beneath him. He moved through the barn with a new confidence, and she was proud of this in a way she couldn’t explain. She wasn’t teaching him anything. Not really. He wasn’t teaching her either. At least, that was what she thought. They were simply together, and she hadn’t known before this that that could be enough.

Years later she would think of the expression. Calf love.

She photographed the place along the fence where an old elm had once stood, the way the grass grew differently there, as if the ground still knew something had been taken from it.

—

The night before her mother came, uncle Dries sat down across from her after supper.

“He will go to good people,” he said. “The farm I chose—I know them. He’ll be fine there.”

Marlène looked at the table.

“Can I visit?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t know if that would help.”

She went to the barn one last time that night.

Star was awake. He stood in the straw and looked at her and she crossed the space between them and pressed her forehead against his—the way he had once pressed his against her hand—and stayed like that until she felt her breathing slow.

She didn’t say goodbye. She didn’t know what goodbye meant to him. She scratched behind his right ear until his eyes closed. Then she went back to the house.

—

Her mother arrived in the morning.

She looked different in person than she had sounded on the phone—more careful in the way she moved, like someone still learning to trust the ground again. She hugged Marlène for a long time. Marlène let her.

Uncle Dries made coffee. They sat in the kitchen and her mother looked around the room with a kind of relief she didn’t put into words, and uncle Dries received it the same way, and Marlène watched them—these two adults with no idea what to do with each other—and felt something in her chest ease, just slightly.

As they were leaving, her mother stopped at the car and looked across the yard at the barn.

“Can I see him?” she asked. “The calf. The one you told me about.”

They walked together across the gravel, Marlène and her mother, and stood in the door of the barn. Star was at the back, his mark visible even in the low light.

Her mother was quiet for a moment.

“Oh,” she said softly.

“I know,” Marlène said.

They stood there together for a while, not saying anything. The barn breathed around them. The cows shifted and settled.

Then her mother put her arm around Marlène’s shoulders, and Marlène put her arm around her mother’s waist, which was new—she hadn’t done that in years, she had stopped without noticing when she had stopped—and they stood like that, leaning into each other, the way tired things lean into solid things.

The drive home was long. Marlène sat in the passenger seat with her camera in her lap and said nothing and her mother said nothing either, and the fields went past and then the fields were gone, and then the farm was a small thing in the window and then it wasn’t there at all.

She didn’t take a photograph of it going.