Shiva on the North Coast

My sister asked me for this story of the little black and white calf. I was going to send it just to her until I was part of a conversation at the cattle market this past Monday. My husband and I sat over soup and bacon rolls with my brother in law and sister in law and another long time farmer. He said that even after all his years of farming, he still struggled with the death of a calf, and everyone around the table just nodded silently. So this story is for them as well as my sister.

No one wept for the dead almost calf. Black and white and eyes open staring as if still trying to catch that first breath. And so neither did I. I am a newcomer, an in comer, an outsider, an other. A blue passport in the land of red passports. I want to belong. I want the differences not to show. And so like all newcomers I try to look like the others. If I behave that way, then surely the understanding will come in time, and, if it doesn’t come, no matter.

But of course it matters. The elation at the first snotty nosed breath of a newborn calf must have its corollary in the silent infinite stare of the little black and white one. I abandoned the poem—an elegy to a calf that never breathed or ran or sucked and so today another day another calf and the tears will have their way.

What can I tell my husband? He is a kind man and I love him but he can speak of skinning a dead calf and putting the dead calf’s skin on another calf in order to complete a masquerade for life with no sense of the grotesque. The mother of a dead calf is deceived into taking the costumed calf as her own and so it seems a triumph for life and the living, but the image of the silent calf deprived of life and breath and now bereft even of its skin appals me.

I walk in the garden to calm my nerves and look for signs of hope and plenty in the garden. Among the overgrown, lichen clad trees, sharp-thorned rose brambles and long matted grass turned back defensively upon itself, I see the first daffodils in bloom and many more in bud. One odd little flower that starts pink and turns purple when in full bloom now has dozens of companions in bud or in bloom, the fuschia and purple against the gray green stones of the garden wall like a jester. A natural fool. I need the perspective that a jester brings.

From my Indian friends I have learned about Shiva and the integral relationship of life and death and growth and decay. I know the dead calf and the live calf wrapped in its skin are a marvelous metaphor for this concept, but this perspective gives me no comfort.

I pick the clippings of flowering currant that have been chopped from the bush whose branches had tangled among themselves and trailed over the remnants of the path. The abandoned stems with their buds and green leaves now lie orphaned in the pathway ready to be taken to compost or to the pyre. I pick up a few of the branches and trim off the ends. They will have a day or two in a vase in the sun before they join the others in the compost.