The Hybrid Project

Chapter 2: Gretchen is Family

May's POV

When they were finished, they left the way they always did, in a scatter of boots and noise. John went to the north field. The three eldest went to their wagons and their fine, pale, guarded clinic, with Dean whistling and Harlan scratching his stomach.

Eli went back upstairs to nap.

Eve took her sewing to the porch and began the long, slow business of watching the yard.

I cleared the plates.

I scraped the pot.

I ate the cold crusts standing at the counter, with the sunlight just starting to climb the wall, and I felt the house go quiet around me, one room at a time.

Calvin was the last to go.

He paused in the doorway, with his coat over one arm. I felt it before I saw it, the way you feel a change in the weather.

I didn’t look up.

I scrubbed at a bowl that was already clean...

“Be good today, Mary,” he said.

His voice was gentle.

It was always gentle.

And it made a cold shiver crawl down my spine...

I nodded at the bowl.

For a moment I thought he’d go. Then I felt the weight of his attention, settling over me like a hand. I didn’t need to look to know what his face was doing. It was the way a man looks at a fence post, or a plow, or a horse he’s thinking of buying.

Measuring.

Counting.

Working out what a thing is worth...

“Good,” he said softly.

And then he smiled, and went out, and the door closed behind him.

I stood very still, with my wet hands on the edge of the basin. I listened until the sound of the wagon had faded all the way down the lane.

Then I dried my hands.

I took the water pail.

And I went out through the back door into the cold, bright morning, with my feet quiet and my head down. Toward the only quiet that had ever been kind to me...

The barn took me back the way it always did: all at once, and without asking me for anything.

Warmth first...

Then the smell of hay and dust and animal and the sweet, sour breath of the milk shed. Then the sounds, rising one by one. Like a crowd noticing that somebody important had come in.

The hens saw me first, and told everyone...

I called them the Ladies of the Parish, because they knew everybody’s business and shared it all at the same time. They came streaming out from under the feed bins in a tide of brown and speckled feathers, talking over each other and scandalized about something that had happened in the night and could not possibly wait. I knelt, and scattered the corn from my apron, and let them tell me all about it.

Is that so? I asked, stunned by their recent discovery of their eggs missing--- and returning each morning. Dreadful. I’d never have guessed.

I didn't have the heart to tell them I was the thief...

From the second stall came a sharp, rude, offended meh!

That was Mrs. Higgins, the goat, who regarded every sunrise as a personal affront and my arrival as a delay. She had a long, clever, sneering face and one yellow eye that never quite looked at you straight.

I loved her desperately...

I gave her an extra handful of oats, and she accepted it the way a duchess accepts a bribe - without thanks and without apology...

Mr. Tolliver, the old mule, lifted his head from the far end of the barn, and gave me one slow, patient blink. He’d been patient his whole life, and I’d always thought it was a kind of wisdom. He liked a scratch under the jaw and hated to be hurried. And in all the years I’d known him, he’d never once raised a hoof to anyone; even Harlan, who had given him cause...

The Duchess, the old sow, grunted from her pen. A long contented rumble like a sack of gravel being rolled downhill.

I had names for all of them...

John never gave the animals names. He said animals was food and you didn't name food...

I understood the idea....

It was easier to feel nothing when a thing was gone if you’d never called it anything. But I’d decided, a long time ago, that this was one rule I would break, quietly, every day, for the rest of my life.

It seemed only polite.

I did the rounds the way I always did, before the sun was properly up. Feed, then water, then a look at each of them...

That was the part nobody had ever taught me.

I’d taught myself.

The Duchess had a cough, a small wet one, like somebody clearing their throat in church. I watched her breathe for a long time, with my hand on the rail.

It wasn’t the bad kind.

It was the dust in the old straw, and I raked it out and laid fresh. She sighed and settled in it like a woman lowering herself into a hot bath.

One of the hens, a plump gray one I called Mrs. Pennyfeather, was favoring her left foot. I caught her in the third try, and she complained bitterly the entire time. I turned her foot over and found the swollen place, hard and hot and shining.

I cleaned it, and bound it with a strip torn from the hem of my petticoat, and set her back on her feet with a pat. She stalked off in outrage.

But a moment later she was walking better...

Mr. Tolliver was standing with his rump to the east wall, and his ears turned toward the lane. The swallows had been skimming low over the yard since sunrise, snapping at the damp air. Even the cows were on their feet, restless and sniffing. And Mrs. Higgins had stopped complaining, which she only did when she knew something.

It's going to rain tonight. Maybe sooner, I realized, making a mental note to get all my outside chores done before then.

No one had asked me.

No one ever did.

But if John had, I could have told him that the rain would hit the north field before the sun was down, and that he should bring the hay in. I could have told him which of the cows was about to calve, and which of the hens would stop laying come winter. And which of the apples in the cellar had gone soft and would spoil the rest.

I had never told him.

He’d never wanted to know.

But the animals knew.

They knew that I knew.

When I came into the barn, they turned to me the way flowers turn to the window. They didn’t call me "Mary", or "Mary May", or "girl", or "thing", or "you there!"

They didn’t call me anything...

They simply looked up, and looked glad, as if I were exactly the person they’d been hoping would walk in. I’d never had anyone look at me like that, until I had animals...

And then there was Gretchen!

She stood at the far end of the barn, in the last stall, where the morning came through a gap in the boards and laid a stripe of gold along her back. Her coat was the color of toasted crust, and good soil, and honey held up to the light. She had a white blaze down her nose that wandered like a river on a map. Her big, brown eyes were soft and so sweet that I had, more than once, forgotten what I was doing and simply stood there, being looked at.

She lifted her head when she saw me, and said, in a long, low voice like a door opening onto a warm room:

Mmmmwh...

Good morning, I told her, with my hand, two fingers by my eye, then pointing.

I see you!

I was never able to say it out loud. But I’d said it to her every morning of my life since the day we met. And she had never once failed to answer...

I was small when I first came to the barn alone.

Very small!

I think it was maybe 8 or 9. I barely remember living somewhere else, and then suddenly I was in a wagon, and we pulled up to the farm...

Eve had forced a pail into my hands so hard, it had nearly knocked me off my feet. I watched her stand over me with her arms folded and her mouth tight.

“You’re big enough to earn your keep, Mary,” she'd said and pointed towards the barn. “Girls who can’t be pretty and can’t be useful in the house can at least be useful in the barn. Produce food, or else!”

She hadn’t said what the or else was.

She never did.

She never needed to...

By then I’d already met a few of the "or elses", and they weren’t things you wanted to meet a second time.

So I stood in the doorway of the barn with the pail in both hands, shaking.

I didn’t know how to milk a cow!

I had seen it done...

I’d watched from behind the fence, through the gaps in the boards, the way I watched everything. I knew there was a stool, and a rhythm, and a way of squeezing the hand from the top downward...

But watching isn’t doing.

And nobody was going to show me. Nobody was going to explain. If the pail wasn’t full by supper, then it was "or else". And I knew with perfect, cold clarity that this was going to be the worst one yet.

And at the end of the barn, enormous and golden-brown and breathing like a bellows, stood the cow.

She was the biggest living thing I had ever been close to, aside from John. The top of her back was higher than my head. Her hooves were the size of dinner plates. Her breath rolled out in great warm clouds. And as I stood there, rigid, with my knees knocking together, she turned her massive head and looked at me.

I genuinely thought she was going to kill me!

I thought it very calmly. The way you think something that was already decided...

But she didn’t move.

She just looked at me. Her eyes were enormous, and wet, and dark, and fringed. With lashes so long they looked drawn on.

They had no cruelty in them.

They had no calculation.

There was no arithmetic.

She simply looked. The way no one in that house ever had. As if I were a thing worth looking at...

I took one small step toward her.

She didn’t charge.

I took another. Then, because there was nothing else I could do, and because I’d run out of ways to be afraid, I lifted my hand and pointed at the stool in the corner.

Please, I thought.

Please. I need to sit there!

I need you to stay still...

And she turned her great body, slowly and carefully, as if she were maneuvering a wagon through a narrow gate, and shifted her weight to her far side. She made room.

I stared at her!

It must have been a coincidence.

I knew that!

A cow does what a cow wants. But I put my hand up, flat, the way you tell a dog to stop. And she stopped. I pointed to the ground at her feet, and she shifted her hooves back. I pointed at her flank, and then at the pail, and she held perfectly, patiently still...

Please don’t step on me, I said, in my head, to the vast brown warm shape above me.

She didn’t.

And that was it!

That was the moment. I’ve gone back to it so many times that the memory’s worn smooth, like a stone in a creek.

Because in my whole life up to then, I had asked for things, with a nod, a point, a shake of the head, and been answered with silence, or sighs, or the back of a hand.

I’d asked for water, and been told I was lazy.

I’d asked, with my eyes, to be let into the house, and been told to stop sulking.

Everything I’d ever said, in the only language I had, had gone into the quiet and never come back...

But this huge, golden, warm-eyed creature had answered.

She’d heard me!

The thing underneath, the part that was always shouting and never heard. She’d listened to all of it, and she had decided to do what I’d asked.

Not because she was forced to.

A cow that size could never be forced.

She’d done it because I’d asked, and she’d wanted to...

I sat down on the stool, and I put my forehead against the warm flank of the cow.

And I cried...

I cried until I couldn’t breathe!

She stood there the entire time.

And she never moved...

It took me most of the afternoon to fill that pail. My hands cramped, and the first few squirts went everywhere but where I’d aimed them, and a great deal of it got on my face.

She never kicked.

She never once swung her tail. She just stood and chewed, and now and then turned her head and looked at me, as if to say:

Take your time...

When I carried the pail into the kitchen, shaking with the effort, John glanced at it and grunted. And that night, for the first time that I could remember, I wasn’t sent to bed hungry.

But I didn’t care about the supper.

I was thinking about the cow...

Every other animal on the farm was the goat, or the mule, or that brown cow, but I couldn’t call her that. A person who looks at you like that has a name.

She was somebody!

And I wanted her to have the best one I knew...

I remembered that from before the farm; there was a woman who kept the bread stall. I’d gone with Eve to carry the baskets. The woman was round and flour-dusted and red-cheeked. She’d looked at me, small and gray and standing behind Eve’s skirt. And without a word she’d pressed a heel of warm bread into my hands, wrapped in a napkin.

“You look like you could use that, love,” she’d said, and smiled with her whole face.

It was the first time a stranger had ever given me something for nothing.

I’d never forgotten it.

I’d never forgotten her name, either, because her husband had bellowed it across the square...

Gretchen! Gretchen, where’s the till?

It was the kindest name I knew...

So when the cow looked at me, with those sweet eyes, and listened to a thing I hadn’t been able to say, I gave it to her.

And she never once seemed to mind...

I think that was the day I understood what a family was. It wasn’t blood, or a table, or a name on a door. It was the creature who listened when you spoke...

I had a family!

She was golden-brown, and she weighed more than a wagon, and she smelled of hay and warm milk.

And she was mine...

I milked her the way I’d done every morning since, with the stool tucked under me and my forehead resting against her side. The milk rang into the pail in thin bright streams. The barn was warm, and gold around us, and the Ladies of the Parish muttered in the straw, and the whole world was very small and very quiet.

Eve says the oats were burnt, I told her.

I told her all of it, in the voice I’d never been allowed to use. She turned an ear toward me. I could feel her listening, in the slow rise and fall of her side...

They weren’t burnt, of course.

Eve thinks they’re always burnt.

And Eli wanted honey, and there wasn’t any, because he ate it all!

I wanted to call him a toad, Gretchen. In my head. I called him an absolute toad!

Her tail flicked once, and settled.

I grinned.

I know, it’s not much.

But it felt very good...

I told her about Dean’s jokes, and the Barrow girl, and how I’d nodded and nodded and had no idea what I’d agreed to. I told her that I hated the way Harlan chewed. I told her the third floorboard from the stove was my sworn enemy and that I’d never forgive it. I told her all the things I’d saved up since yesterday. And every single time she shifted her weight a little, or blew warm breath across the back of my neck, or leaned.

As if she were saying:

Go on! I’m here...

I told her about my daydream about Captain Dawn...

I told her everything. How she had a red coat and a stubborn chin. How in the third book there was a bridge that was burning, and Captain Dawn had a broken arm, and blood on her chin.

And a monster standing over her with a hundred teeth.

She was protecting a child behind her.

And I think, Gretchen, I told her, in the dark, with my forehead against her. I think she’d have a cow, if she could. A hero needs somebody to tell things to...

Gretchen lowed, low and long. The sound went through the whole of her body, and straight into my bones.

You’d be her best friend, I said with a dimpled smile that made my freckles even more visible. You’d be the one who kept the hero company on the long nights.

I milked for a while in silence.

And I think, I told her, finally, and this was the thing I’d never told another soul.

I think I’d like to be brave.

Someday.

Even if I’m afraid...

I felt the whole barn go still.

It was only a moment...

But Gretchen swung her great head round, slow and heavy, and pressed her nose to the middle of my back. She breathed out, long and warm, the way she did when I was sad.

And she held it there.

As if to say: You already are!

I laughed.

It didn’t make a sound.

It never did...

It was only a shake of my shoulders, and a breath through my nose. And a wet smile I could feel stretching the corners of my mouth.

But it was real.

It was the realest thing I’d felt all morning...

She’d listened, and I’d been heard, again. As I had been every day for as long as I could remember.

By the time the pail was full, the sun had risen the width of a hand over the far hills. I set the milk in the cool shed and covered it with a cloth.

I scratched Mrs. Higgins behind her horns, which she pretended not to enjoy. I told Mr. Tolliver the rain was coming, and he flicked an ear to say he already knew. I told the Ladies of the Parish to behave themselves, and they ignored me, with enormous dignity.

And then I went back to the last stall, and untied Gretchen’s halter, and I held out my hand.

I didn’t have to pull.

I never had to.

Come on, I told her, with a small movement of my fingers, and a tilt of my head toward the far door.

The grass is good this morning...

She came.

We went out through the back of the barn, away from the house, where Eve couldn’t see us from her porch. The air was cool and bright and washed clean. The yard was empty, and the road beyond it was empty. Nothing moved at all but a lone crow, high up, turning slow circles against the sky.

I didn’t look at it for long...

The pasture lay along the edge of the Sweet Acre, in the soft green fold of the land where the creek bed bent. I pushed open the gate, and its hinges gave their old familiar squeal. And as soon as I stepped through, I felt it. The way I always did, up through the soles of my boots...

The hum!

Warm and low and slow. Like the breathing of something enormous, asleep underneath the earth. It was in the grass, in the soil, and in the little patch where the frost never settled even in the deepest cold.

I’d never told anyone about it.

There was nobody to tell.

But I’d always thought, privately, that the ground knew me, in some way.

That it was glad to have me there...

Gretchen felt it too, I think. She always went straight to the same place, a dip near the creek where the grass grew thick and sweet and a deep green that no other pasture in the valley could match. She lowered her great head and began to graze, with a long, contented sigh.

I stood beside her for a while, with one hand resting on her warm shoulder. Watching the light climb the grass.

It was a good morning...

I remember thinking so. I remember thinking it very clearly, the way you do when you’re holding something precious and some small, unnamed part of you suspects you might have to put it down.

Behind us, the house sat quiet in the sun.

The yard was empty.

The crow had gone.

And the swallows, flying low, kept circling over the barn, as if the weather were already on its way...

I took my hand from Gretchen’s shoulder, and I walked on. Further into the field, toward the creek and the warm green hollow where the sun lay thickest.

I didn’t have to turn around.

I could hear her behind me, in the long grass, her great soft footfalls keeping time with mine.

I walked.

And she followed...