The Habitation of the Blessed - Catherynne M. Valente [17]
Truthfully, my contempt for the farm was no fault but his. Since I was a babe my mother had told me I was promised to God, and upon my twelfth would be delivered to You. What should I care for cows, then, knowing the comfort of a monk’s bed and the gentle work of paper and ink and prayer and song were to be my vocation? If one morning had risen fresh and pink to reveal all our cows lying dead on the frozen field I would have rejoiced. I have no shame left on it: I was a bad son.
But my father dragged me anyway, out to the stable with the cold cracking like broken bones, and the stars overhead so bright and sharp and white, streaked with milky, diaphanous mist. Take me now, God, I prayed silently, sure You would Hearken, as I was Your promised child and so specially loved.
The heifer lay in her straw, mewling pitifully and glaring with spite at myself, a little furry ear sticking out of her rear. But there was much blood, and other fluids besides that I dared not guess at, the secret wetness of women, be they cows or angels. But my father could not content himself to let me watch and learn and quickly forget the whole affair. He got me into the great beast up to my shoulders, hauling at the calf. The hotness of her pressed all around me, the smell buffeting me, barnyard and blood and fear. I could feel the calf in my arms, its complicated bones, its hooves and its ribs, and my skinny arms wrapped around it, pulling, weeping along with the mother as she lowed. Finally the babe came free, and I fell back with a huge lump of cow and blood and white mucus in my arms, so sopping I could not even tell where its eyes might be. My father righted the creature and scooped muck from her eyes with a tender grin such as he never had for me—for it was a heifer, and that meant good milk and breeding with my uncle’s brown bulls.
“Life is like this,” quoth my father. “Ugly to begin with, ugly to end with, and hard to manage all the way through.”
The girl-calf wobbled on her new legs in a way I suppose others might find endearing but I saw only as a clever attempt to curry favor with humans. I refused to love it. The creature plopped herself down in my lap and proceeded to fall asleep while my father tended to the mother, whose privates were torn and miserable. And as I sat there with the calf snoring lightly against my knee, I could not help but think of the Christ child, and His birth in the hay and stink of what was surely not a very clean barn. Was it like this, I thought? Did Joseph or some other poor country midwife struggle against the close hotness of Mary, hear her pain and smell her blood, pull the Divine king from her body like so much cow? Perhaps Joseph did not much care for babies, as I did not, and stared stupefied at the son who was not his son, and wondered how something as big as a man could grow from a wet lump of squalling?
Of course, one ought not to entertain thoughts of the close hotness of Mary, or, for that matter, of the squalling of Christ. Yet I have always considered these practical things, and wished to know not only what is written, but what it was really like, if I could have been there. If You were troubled by human ugliness and the workings of women, I suppose You would have chosen some other way to be born. Yet I wonder if I could have stood by and held Mary’s hand in her travail. Would I have been steadfast? Would I have loved a wet, unhappy child?
I am not too much bothered by cows or blood anymore. And if I could have been there when a priest called John stumbled onto this kingdom, if I could have held Hagia’s hand as she drank her strange draughts, I believe I could have been stalwart. I believe I could have stood with them. Though surely it was not the Fountain of Youth, not that oozing, disgusting mountain crevice she believed to be the holy Font. The Fountain of Youth is no such miasma—it is crystal and gold, trickling in perfect melodious