Nativity: A Short Story

The cows are mostly standing when I enter, shuffling hay from foot to foot, some inherited dance or ancestral trait handed down, like dogs turning in baskets. They huff in greeting. Great sleek beasts, leaking steam like trains as they approach me. Some come to push their noses against me. Their coats are thickest now. This many together keep the barn warm. Their heat is visible, airstreams of yellow around planes of black and white. I lean into a flank. Smell dust and dried grass, something ammonia and deeply animal. Behind it, the bite of ice and pine. Sounds reverberate. Rain on the roof, the dull bray that gets echoed around and passed back again. The flick of a tail, teeth on teeth.

I think of other men with cows on other farms. Herds that I will never know. Do they gather like mine? Do they press and sway to music that only they can hear. Am I the music? When the tree creaks and the windows rattle, I lay on my back beside my wife, who sleeps tight and small. Shrouded in blankets, an oyster in its mollusc shell, and I wish to be among them, cheek to jowl in the dense silence.

I run my hand down the length of the cow with the white face and dappled nose. Slow, smooth stokes. She groans from all four stomachs. I feel her knees bend, her body quiver at my touch. I push my face into her neck, the thick veins that bulge. The hair above her eyes is whorled, tufty. My fingers tug gently. She would follow me if I let her. Would amble, shifting her bulk, hooves tapping out the Hymn of the Shepherd on the iron cold earth. This bleak midwinter. Poor as I am. She would not turn away from me. When I milk her, she stands without fuss. I can hear her heart from a certain spot. She lets me listen to her like this. As though she is open before me. She wears patience like a cloak.

Inside the house, my wife sleeps on, hands on her belly. Underneath thin skin, her life and mine is doubling. Seconds pass and with each one something inside her unfurls like a Chinese flower in water. The snow falls and the lamp dims and the cows shift and ruminate, long eyelashes lowered.

They lay neatly, feet pinned beneath them like a picnic table. They pierce the white silence with a wet lick of tongue across a shoulder, a flap of tagged ear. The world is held together by small sounds.

Before coming here, I stoked the Aga and cracked the ice. I gathered the eggs and left them, warm, on the table. Speckled and brown. I love my wife like this. When we touch, she moves like water. I am a fish in a river of sheets, breathing out of gills, flapping and gasping while she flexes beneath me. I am caught in the moment, hooked, reeled. Gutless.

Afterwards she rolls away, keeping some vital part of me for herself. I collect myself like small change. Wash in cold water, my neck, my face, my hands. Dress in layers and lace heavy boots like armour. The bed is no longer an ocean. I am not that man. She turns her magic on and off. I am bovine. Archaic. When she moves, the sun makes her hair look like a sheet of gold.

She keeps a string of pearls on a bed of red silk. Warms them in her hands before placing them around her neck. I do not tag my cows with such reverence, am not christening them when I make them mine. I did not buy my wife those pearls. Will never add to the lonely jewellery box on the table that she dusts as I stand in the barn.

I do not want to be distinguishable from them. My herd. This conflux. Were the gate to open at night by some unseen hand, some midnight predator to arrive. A fox, sleek and vulpine. Were some great white bear to walk the ice from their silver world to this winter, this barn, I would huddle up beside them, my slumbering beasts. I would lay like a giant dog, face tucked into neck, some faithful Labrador. I would low quietly, as cattle do.

When I lock the gate, I do not turn back, but head for the house. My boots fall and I do not righten them. I crack the eggs in a pan with all the butter in the crock. Salt and pepper and bread dragged through it. Upstairs my wife sleeps on, pin stars in the bright sky look down where she lays.