The Floating Cradle

Twelve

Mama and Felicity head to church at 8:30; Daddy and Lyle make cow-related excuses, Dan is still asleep (or possibly dead), and Pete and I flat out refuse. Mama curses her "den of heathens" as she pulls on her coat, giving Allie and the tantum a sort of strained half-wave on her way out.

"It's an improvement from the slap," Allie says once it's just the four of us in the kitchen.

"I can't believe we stayed after she hit you," the tantum mutters, picking a spot of congealed egg off his plate before loading it into the dishwasher. "I thought my mother could be difficult."

"Does she live on Cognata?" Pete asks. I look at him sideways over the toaster.

"Connecticut," the tantum replies.

"Jack's not your real name, is it?"

"No."

"What is it?"

"John."

"No, I mean the one your parents gave you."

The tantum stares at Pete for a second, then makes a sound like an elephant going through a meat grinder, rattling the glasses in the cabinet.

"But I prefer Jack," he says, pouring himself a cup of coffee.

Allie turns on the TV, where a roundtable of reporters debates the sincerity of a certain dictator's recent threats of war. She flips through the channels, but an "Urgent News Alert" continues to scroll at the bottom of the screen.

"Really puts you in the Christmas spirit," I say.

"It's ridiculous," the tantum says. "Cognata made it through a phase like this without ending in 'global thermonuclear war.' It's suicide. Self-preservation always beats out the urge to send the first bomb. And even if some lunatic did, the Whelk would disarm any missile in a second—they would never let a bomb drop on New York or L.A."

But we're not in New York or L.A., I think with a prickle of anger.

Pete and I show Allie and the tantum around the farm, killing time until lunch when everyone will gather to open presents in the living room. Allie links her arm with Jack's and chatters about how she and Dan built their own telescope in the barn loft—"A Dobsonian model, had to fix people's electronics for a year to afford the parts."

I don't tell her our parents sold it to the school during a lean period.

"Hey Sarah, what happened to the old oak?" she laments when we reach a fat, rotted stump at the far end of the field.

"Lightnin' hit it a couple years ago," I say.

"I used to spin you two silly on that tire swing Blake put up for us. Feels like yesterday."

She looks out across the pasture toward a small stand of trees, behind which sits Blake's one-room cabin. Grandpa and Daddy built it for him nearly thirty years ago, after his deadbeat dad ran him off their property (Dan says it's 'cause Blake walked in on him raping a Mexican girl, but what would he know).

"Blake's lived there forever..." Allie starts telling Jack.

"But he ain't for much longer," I hear Pete mumble, so faint it's almost carried away by the wind. I would interrogate him further, but Allie's jogging up the hill to the barn, calling for our mean old tomcat, Stonewall, and he pushes past me to join her.

"How's Sugarplum doin'?" I ask Gilberto when we reach the barn, fighting to keep a straight face. "Or was it Turtledove? Candycane?"

"Oh, she's dandy," he replies as Pete protests, "It's Holly! I named her Holly!"

Lucy and her calf have moved from their birthing suite back to a normal line stall with the other cows. The baby is nursing from its mother, but looks up at us as we approach with tame, mud-brown eyes. Soon—within the next day or two—Lyle and Daddy will separate the calf from the cow and feed it by machine, which sounds horrible, I know, but it's not. In a few weeks, Holly will grow big enough to join the handful of other calves born this season, playing and lazing around their own paddock like the Lost Boys in Neverland, and Lucy won't get her udder all chafed and bloody. I'm not saying it's the Four Seasons out here—their bodies are our business, it's true—but it's better than fending for themselves on the savannah like their auroch ancestors did. I don't see how there's any more dignity in being ripped to shreds by a tiger than there is in dying painlessly after a peaceful five-year run as a dairy cow.

But you can't ask the cows, I guess.