A short story about the brutality of life and the choices made in order to move forward. From R. M. Dolin’s novel, What Is To Be Done.
It’s the morning after a tumultuous Cinco de Mayo Saturday night that saw Dario bravely stand alone against a despicable band of desperados and Jake, in an unimaginable act of gallantry, win Sympatico’s freedom from human traffickers. To say Jake’s completely lost about how to deal with the aftermath is like describing the Niagara as a quietly quant waterfall. Alone in his predawn kitchen, Jake reflects on another pivotal moment when, as a young boy thrashed into the harsh world of men, he’s compelled to confront a brutal reality; namely, doing what needs to done is neither romantic nor heroic. Cowboy Coffee barters a rancher’s harsh reality for a metaphor about the brutality of life and the choices made in order to move forward. This short story comes from R. M. Dolin’s novel, What Is To Be Done.
Darkness peers through the kitchen window casting dawn in suffocating layers of stillness. A cold light hovers over the oval table casting a forlorn aura that stands in stark contrast to free form shadows forgetting to blend in. Jake stoically nurses the day’s first quiet coffee as he seriously considers what happens next, or whether he can be counted on to step up. Jake learned coffee etiquette as a ranch hand in the Black Hills when he was twelve and got into serious trouble. In rural South Dakota, folks didn’t appreciate the need to keep exceptional minds occupied, so the judge decreed it would either be work or reform school, but left the decision to Jake’s parents even while urging them to consider the structured discipline reform school offered. The ranch’s foreman was a surly cuss keenly hard on young Jake. He liked to taunt him with stuff like, “real men do this,” or “real men do that,” while glaring with crisp cutting eyes, “you want to be a real man, don’t you?”
As Jake inescapably does when wrestling with particularly vexing problems, he finds allegories in his past. Today he’s revisiting a particular morning at the ranch when he watched a heifer die giving birth despite the Foreman’s best efforts to save her. With the heifer lost, the pressing task was ensuring her calf survived. As fate unfolded, an hour earlier a reliable cow’s calf was stillborn, which created a situation requiring immediate, dramatic, and as young Jake was about to discover, horrific action.
“That calf needs to nurse,” the Foreman snorts in disgust while dragging the dead heifer out of the stall all the way outside leaving the still limp carcass on the cold uncaring ground. “Problem is his Mom’s dead.” He walks to the tool room returning with a rolled up canvas cloth filled with long wooden-handle knives that he unceremoniously unrolls. While the handles are worn and splotched with dried blood and matted fur, the blades are surgically clean and razor sharp. After cutting the dead heifer’s jugular so she bleeds out, the Foreman slits open her belly and scoops out the vitals with effortless precision. “No point letting her meat go to waste,” he tells Jake while wiping bloodstained hands in his button fly jeans. With ominous foreboding, the field-tested Foreman and his uninitiated protégé saunter back inside to the stall where the live Mom mournfully stands over her dead calf bellowing in anguish. The Foreman unapologetically reaches around the cow’s ballooning udder to drag her dead calf outside beside the heifer. “I’m gonna hobble that cow so the orphan can nurse,” he tells Jake devoid of empathy. “She ain’t gonna like it none, but otherwise she’ll get mastitis.”
As young Jake is about to learn, babies are eager to nurse on any available teat because they’ve yet to receive the imprinting that later forms the prejudices guiding adult behavior. Mom’s on the other hand, only allow their babies to suckle. Darwin might surmise it’s an instinctual thing devised to ensure her baby’s survival, while others may assert it’s situational, wherein a Mom cannot conjure the compassion needed to help another baby. It could even contain a narcissistic component preventing a Mom from hearing the hungry cry of a baby other than her own. Whatever the reason, a Mom who loses her baby will not allow another baby to suckle; even when it’s in her best interest.
It’s clear from the emotionally empty way the Foreman goes about doing what needs to be done that this is not the first time he’s played matchmaker. With the same determined detachment he demonstrates when shoeing a horse, de-horning a steer, or castrating a calf, he instructs Jake, “skin the dead calf while I work on Mom.” Jake stares at his orders with sudden horror, he’s never even touched a dead animal let alone removed it’s hide, and as disgusting as it might be to skin a cleanly killed carcass, this task’s gruesomeness is compounded but the fact the Mom didn’t lick the afterbirth off her dead calf, which left the hide covered in a gooey bluish elastic glob that is itself covered in birthing blood. It’s only after significant prodding, cajoling, and dry heaving that young Jake manages to complete his chore. He stands in the barn’s doorway, hands covered in goo and blood, too much in shock to feel anything. The Foreman though, is not yet ready to release his young assistant. He hands Jake a long curved needle with waxed thread attached. “Use this to stitch the cape around the orphan, when Mom smells her dead calf on the orphan, she’ll allow him to suckle.” The Foreman smiles with twisted irony. “She’ll likely need some persuasion though.”
After further prodding and cajoling, young Jake manages to secure the freshly skinned hide around the orphan. Meanwhile, the Foreman finishes cinching the Mom’s head to a post in the center of the barn and hobbling her legs so she can’t kick. “Bring the orphan,” he shouts. With unspeakable apprehension, young Jake does as instructed and leads the wobbling calf with the freshly skinned hide draped over him like an illegitimate king’s deceit-filled robe into the stall. The calf approaches his new Mom without hesitation devoid of any potential for rejection and hungry for the milk she holds. The Mom bellows in grief-stricken sorrow and only after prolonged unsuccessful efforts to kick the unwelcome calf away and break free of her binds does she accept her fate and permit the hungry calf to nurse. “In a couple of days the bonding will be complete,” the Foreman says while wiping blood and goo in his jeans. “Then you can remove the cape.”
Young Jake washes up and immediately goes to his room but can’t sleep. He’s way too deep in shock to understand what to do or even how to feel. Instead he slides down the wall beside his bed until gravity comes to rest on the floor. Gingerly he pulls his legs to his chest, wraps his arms around his shins, buries his face in his knees, and only then, safely away from the Foreman’s condescension, young Jake quietly cries. What he’s done is the most horrific thing anyone ever could, and while the nightmares last for weeks, the morality of his actions and utter cruelty he now knows he’s capable of inflicting is something he wrestles with for years, struggling to reconcile the dichotomy of good in the face of evil and the fine line between being heroic and being a monster.
“What you did needed doing,” the Foreman told a despondent Jake the next day. “Both the cow and calf are better for it.”
“At what cost?” young Jake wants to know but is afraid to ask. “At what point can anyone say with clarity that the end justified the means?” This is a question that haunted him as a young cowboy as much as it did a PhD weaponeer – as much as it haunts him now as the leader of his subversive cohort.
The Foreman drank to deal with the harsh dilemmas of being a cowboy, but at twelve young Jake didn’t have that option. It changes a boy though, being a part of something like that. The nightmares only stopped after Jake accepted the hard truth that served him the rest of his life; as brutal and horrific as all that was, both the orphan calf and grieving cow would have died slow painful deaths had he done nothing. That in turn taught him an important lesson on the harsh absoluteness of life and the necessity of doing what needs to be done.
As a man moves through encounters and adventures, different voices linger. Sometimes they’re helpful, other times not so much. Two voices always emerge whenever Jake grapples with pointedly tough dilemmas: Emelia’s and the Foreman’s. Jake considers a situation from both perspectives, which are usually as diametrically different as logic allows, then analyzes what they’d do and what his course of action should be. This morning, the Foreman’s voice is particularly poignant. The Foreman taught Jake to drink coffee straight, “man up” he would taunt as Jake worked to swallow past his gag reflex. The Foreman could be so politically incorrect, he would always add, “if coffee don’t float a turd, it’s sissy shit.” Jake wonders if there’s a place left in the modern world for men like him and if not, does that make the world better or worse? If the Foreman can’t be counted in the pantheon of modern man, the lingering question is both why not and who is?
“Pretty much mute,” Jake whispers to the solemn freedom of predawn quiet and the unencumbered way it allows him to chase thoughts while brewing over today’s issue, which sadly is the same as yesterday’s. Namely, what the hell to do with the woman sleeping in his guest bed? After two days and a dozen failed plans one thing’s painfully clear, he’s as clueless now as when he started. It doesn’t help that the sudden rattling of cans and bottles emanating from down the hall, fills him with a melodic mixture of anticipation and trepidation. Most mornings rattling cans routinely emanated from the Foreman’s room. To this day Jake can distinguish the sound of empty Blue Ribbon’s being kicked against the wall by a hung-over cowboy stumbling toward another day of trying to contain catastrophes he can’t control.
Jake’s intrepid guest enters the kitchen still wearing Emelia’s white dress from yesterday. He wonders if she slept on the bed or curled in the corner but when she returns his carving knife to the wooden rack, he has his answer. The woman sits across from Jake without saying a word or betraying any expression. Jake smiles warmly, pleased when he detects a sort-of-smile and it’s not until he enjoys his next sip that he remembers his manners. “Let me get you coffee.” He pushes back his chair, but before he can stand, the woman pops up with silken agility and slips silently to the cupboard for a cup. “There’s milk in the fridge and sugar in the cabinet,” Jake tells her without turning to watch. It doesn’t occur to him that she speaks Spanish and he gave her directions in English, but if he were paying attention, he’d associate the fact she goes to the fridge for milk and the cabinet for sugar with the fact that she may understand him.
After an excessively long time, the woman returns to the table clasping a cup of coffee. Jake is so lost in thought he doesn’t notice the process employed to prepare her brew, which began by mixing a small amount of milk along with a teaspoon of sugar into her cup. After tasting the mixture, she immediately spits it in the sink and dumps out half the cup. She replenishes with milk and two additional teaspoons of sugar and tastes the concoction again. However, it’s still too bitter so she repeats the process of adding milk and sugar two more times until finally the coffee is tolerable.
Together they sit several minutes enjoying the quiet until Jake’s unable to hold the serenity. “It occurs to me, I don’t know your name.” He continues when the woman doesn’t respond. “If you don’t want me to that’s fine, I do however have to call you something.” While waiting for her answer, he considers all that’s happened, the still surreal events on Cinco de Mayo, the details he assumes about her journey from wherever she’s from to his breakfast table; from whomever she was to the person she’ll re-become. He replays Dario’s unwavering chivalry and Miguel’s utter evil. Jake considers Padre’s dog while re-evaluating his decision to take his guest to mass. Slowly, a soft smile betrays his seriousness as he rewinds the gentle way she whispered prayers at mass with the same serenity she whispered ‘thank-you’ in his ear.
“Sympatico,” Jake simply states to himself as much as to her while looking at his undocumented guest, “if I had to distill the last few days into a name for you, it would be Sympatico.” He flops back in his chair with satisfaction. “I have to tell you, it’s good to finally know your name.” He points to himself, “soy Jake,” then at her, “usted es Sympatico.”
Sympatico keeps her head down to conceal the fact that for the first time, in a very long time, she’s allowing herself to smile. The simple act of naming her would probably seem silly to most but for her, it’s deeply profound. Being named is tantamount to getting a new lease on life and it momentarily pierces her quasi-comatose condition. Deep within her damaged psyche, far below the barriers she’s erected, one cascading layer on top of the other to protect her from dealing with the trauma and abuses she’s endured, below memories and emotions, to that subatomic remnant of the person she was, a synapses fires; a tiny spark in a desperately dark, distressingly drained place. And with it, a timid voice calls from the abyss of her infinite despair, “he is good.” The voice speaks without words, but is nevertheless as profound as the gasping breath of a surfacing diver.
“I have to run to town,” Jake says not realizing they’re sharing a moment. “I need a part for my pump.” He points to a note pad on the table. “I’ll be back in an hour, in case I’m not, this note is for, Theresa. She works for me and starts at noon so don’t be alarmed when she lets herself in.” Jake walks to the pocket door separating the kitchen from the tasting room and lifts a key with a red tag from the rack. “I have to get my pump part from the shed,” he says before walking out the front door. As he passes through the courtyard a motion sensor turns on security lights that illuminates the kitchen as light pours in from the large window looking into the courtyard and the smaller window that looks across the parking area to the distillery.
Sympatico scurries to the smaller window to watch Jake cross the parking lot. When he reaches the narrow metal shed nestled between two large stucco buildings, he fumbles in the dim light to open the padlocked door. She waits in nervous apprehension as he disappears into the shed, relieved when after what seems like forever, he re-emerges with his pump. She watches in unsettled anxiety as Jake methodically locks the shed then places the key back on its hook when he returns. “Okay,” he announces while filling his travel mug with coffee. He looks at Sympatico in an attempt to convince himself it’s alright to leave. “I wish I didn’t have to go, it’s just my Still’s had cooked mash sitting since Saturday. It’ll only take an hour.” He studies Sympatico but can’t read whether she’s okay being left alone, even though he knows she’s not. “It’s a quick run into Española and I’ll come straight back.” Sympatico nervously offers a strained smile that barely cracks her swollen lips. Jake realizes it’s one of acknowledgment and nothing more, which only serves to feed his rising trepidation. “I left a note, for Theresa, you know, in case I’m not back by noon. Stay in the house, watch TV or something; I’m pretty sure I get the Spanish channels.”
After an awkward silence, Jake backs into the tasting room on his way to the parking lot. Sympatico again dashes to the smaller window to imprint the truck’s subtle sounds. As taillights disappear down the long driveway only to teasingly re-appear before again escaping, she feels the safety this awkward man provides dissipate like driveway dust settling on senseless sand. Only after compelling herself to acknowledge he’s really gone does she abandon her vigil and slowly walk to the counter to retrieve the chef’s knife. Then begrudgingly, she makes her way down the hallway where once inside her room, she re-stacks the intruder alert. With previously practiced fear, she retreats to her corner and slowly slides down the wall curling her knees against her chest as manic anxiety rises inversely to gravity settling her onto the cold floor. She grips the knife almost certain she believes he will return.
