ALL THE DEAD COWS
We’re driving down the highway, heading for Columbia City, when Mom’s cows die. We’ve been counting cows, as often happens on long trips, and a small graveyard scrolls by on my Mother’s side, putting her back at zero. My side of the car has barely had any cows thus far, and I smile as she “drats” and “darns.” Until now, I didn’t have a reasonable chance of catching up. Now, I’m sitting pretty.
Dad’s driving, listening to his boom box, a Van Morrison live album spinning inside of it. Both Mom and Emily always want the boom box off. Emily has the speakers to her brand new iPod tucked in her ears, but has complained about the boom box volume a couple of times anyway. Mom seems to feel that having music on eliminates the opportunity to talk, so always reaches over and turns it down whenever it momentarily gets loud enough to figure out what the musician is doing.
I like looking out the window. Most people look around while on long drives, but I like watching the landscapes intensely. Long, entirely silent drives are fine with me; time in the car has always been one of the best times for me to think about things.
Mom likes talking. Usually at the beginning of long car rides, we talk about things with some sort of substance, like how Emily is doing in school, or how projects I’m working on are going. Sometimes we talk about relatives, although we didn’t do any of that today. But, after about an hour, everyone else is ready for the conversation to stop. That’s when Mom gets out the crossword puzzles. This time, Mom decided to talk politics with Dad after the crossword puzzles had gotten boring. Conversations about politics are always fairly one-sided, since he’s the only one who really keeps up on politics.
The final resort is family games, and we’d hit that stage of the drive about forty minutes ago. Today, we settled on counting cows. Counting cows is fun enough. In fact, it’s perfect for me, because you have to look out the window to play. Your goal is to spot the most cows out of your own window. If you pass a graveyard on your side, all of your cows die and you have to start over. Those are the only rules. And, only cows count. If you can’t tell whether it’s a cow or not, you aren’t supposed to count it. But, some people do, especially Emily. One time she tried to count a dog house, but I caught her in the act. There wasn’t even a dog near the dog house.
We’re on the road to Columbia City when all of mom’s cows die for the second time. Columbia City, where my grandma had lived for the last ten years. Grandma lived in Indianapolis back when I was a child. She moved to Columbia City when she remarried. Her new husband, Roger, died a year and a half ago. She was taken to the hospital just weeks after his death, and stayed there for months and months, a string of surgeries keeping her alive without making her better.
Finally, a few months ago, she was placed in a nursing home. There, she has done alright for herself. She can walk around, as long as she has a walker, and she has a few friends among the smokers. Cigarettes are the only thing she leaves her room for. Four or five times a day, she’ll trek down the hall and out the door to the smoking area. Never mind that her lungs are the only part of her which still work right; she burns those slim white cylinders one after the other until she’s too cold to stay outside.
It’s only when I start thinking about her that I realize we’ve avoided discussing her the whole way. Now, we’re within a half hour of the nursing home, and both Mom and Emily are intently counting cows. Emily, since she’s the youngest, gets to count any cows she sees on either side. However, she also lost all her cows when the graveyard passed. Now, she’s looking everywhere, hoping to somehow match my 17 before we’re out of the farmland.
The last time I saw Grandma at her own house was right after Roger’s funeral. Roger had been there for her as her health got worse and worse. Then, one night, he died. He’d had cancer, which had spread quietly throughout his whole body, killing him as suddenly as....well, that’s the best way to die, I suppose.
After his funeral, we were all sitting on Grandma’s back porch, the echo of cars from a nearby highway sounding like an ocean. Grandma lit up a cigarette, diamonds from a half dozen rings lighting up as the sun hit them. All of those rings, gifts from lovers who had eventually left. Her right hand, thin and pale, carried the cigarette and the weight of all those diamonds. She placed it on the table, and as the smoke slid out between open lips, she said, “We’ve both lived good lives. I’ve lived a very good life.” There was something defiant about the way she said it, as if she expected the fact to be challenged. Her eyes drifted away from the family members on the porch, and down the row of suburban backyards, just flowers and swing sets as far down as could be seen. “I’ve been blessed.”
This is where we’re going, to Columbia City, to visit my grandma, who just survived surgery number 27. It’s hard to imagine anything killing her at this point; she has made it through surgeries with 40 or 50% survival rates, and been up walking around a day or two later. A handful of marriages, four children, a whole mess of grandchildren. Paintings, poems, and too many diamonds to count. This woman has a lot of cows.
About a month after Roger died, Grandma requested that I go through all his clothes and take any of them I want. I went into their bedroom closet, which was a place I’d never been, even though I’d been to the house many times. The scent of cigarettes permeated from every suit jacket and pair of slacks. I pulled out a tan suit, with light brown stripes on it. It was cotton, with thin fabric. Clearly a summer suit. I took it into Grandma’s bathroom, which was bright and full of mirrors, including one of those scary makeup-applying mirrors that blows things up so big they look disgusting, regardless of what they are.
I slid on the pants, which were tight on me, but very wearable. The jacket was less of a stretch, and I turned, looking at myself in the mirror. I wondered what age Roger was when he bought it. I couldn’t help wondering if a young Roger had looked into a mirror wearing this suit. I wondered what that young Roger thought of himself in it. I felt handsome. Not like someone who arbitrarily grabs clothing in the morning, but like someone who could wear a suit in the summer and make sense doing it. At some point, my hand went into the jacket pocket, and found two peppermint wrappers. One of them still held a peppermint. The other was empty.
As I went through suit after suit, this is what I found: peppermints, toothpicks, and questions. I had never been close to him, and now he was gone. I felt like it was a small failure on my part. Now, I wanted to know about his experiences, and where he had been. But, I never would know. He had always been a guarded, quiet person. Wearing his suits, I found myself closer to him than ever before. Of course, it was all my conception of him, not the real Roger. Roger was smoke.
I don’t know, maybe everyone’s secretly thinking about Grandma as this game of cows drags on. I’m not going to talk about it unless someone else starts it. We’ll be hit with the bricks of it when we get there, to Happy Valley. That’s what it’s called, that place where tables of bored, BORED people eat bland food, watch TV, smoke cigarettes, and pray to be somewhere else. Back home, dead, I don’t know. I just know the way all eyes turn to us every time we pass through the cafeteria, looking at us like we’re something delightful in a shop window. I feel guilty as I smile at each person I pass. I don’t know if it’s guilt because I’m not there to see them, or if it’s guilt because I’m 24 and they aren’t. But, it’s guilt.
Mom still hasn’t seen any cows on her side. It’s 17 to 0. But, who really cares? Everyone’s going to pass a graveyard. Everyone is gonna go back to zero. Nobody keeps any cows. Roger’s suits and Grandma’s diamonds will stick around. Our cows stay. We go. I don’t know where, maybe little bits of us fall away like rain from a rain cloud, until there’s nothing united left. Maybe we’re reborn to count again.
I don’t eat peppermints. I don’t go to church, and I only wear a suit a few times a year. I would’ve never bought the suits that hang in my room now, but I’m going to keep them. I look good in them, whether I really own them or not. But, before I can wear them, I’ll need to take them to the dry cleaners. They all smell like smoke.
Dad’s driving, listening to his boom box, a Van Morrison live album spinning inside of it. Both Mom and Emily always want the boom box off. Emily has the speakers to her brand new iPod tucked in her ears, but has complained about the boom box volume a couple of times anyway. Mom seems to feel that having music on eliminates the opportunity to talk, so always reaches over and turns it down whenever it momentarily gets loud enough to figure out what the musician is doing.
I like looking out the window. Most people look around while on long drives, but I like watching the landscapes intensely. Long, entirely silent drives are fine with me; time in the car has always been one of the best times for me to think about things.
Mom likes talking. Usually at the beginning of long car rides, we talk about things with some sort of substance, like how Emily is doing in school, or how projects I’m working on are going. Sometimes we talk about relatives, although we didn’t do any of that today. But, after about an hour, everyone else is ready for the conversation to stop. That’s when Mom gets out the crossword puzzles. This time, Mom decided to talk politics with Dad after the crossword puzzles had gotten boring. Conversations about politics are always fairly one-sided, since he’s the only one who really keeps up on politics.
The final resort is family games, and we’d hit that stage of the drive about forty minutes ago. Today, we settled on counting cows. Counting cows is fun enough. In fact, it’s perfect for me, because you have to look out the window to play. Your goal is to spot the most cows out of your own window. If you pass a graveyard on your side, all of your cows die and you have to start over. Those are the only rules. And, only cows count. If you can’t tell whether it’s a cow or not, you aren’t supposed to count it. But, some people do, especially Emily. One time she tried to count a dog house, but I caught her in the act. There wasn’t even a dog near the dog house.
We’re on the road to Columbia City when all of mom’s cows die for the second time. Columbia City, where my grandma had lived for the last ten years. Grandma lived in Indianapolis back when I was a child. She moved to Columbia City when she remarried. Her new husband, Roger, died a year and a half ago. She was taken to the hospital just weeks after his death, and stayed there for months and months, a string of surgeries keeping her alive without making her better.
Finally, a few months ago, she was placed in a nursing home. There, she has done alright for herself. She can walk around, as long as she has a walker, and she has a few friends among the smokers. Cigarettes are the only thing she leaves her room for. Four or five times a day, she’ll trek down the hall and out the door to the smoking area. Never mind that her lungs are the only part of her which still work right; she burns those slim white cylinders one after the other until she’s too cold to stay outside.
It’s only when I start thinking about her that I realize we’ve avoided discussing her the whole way. Now, we’re within a half hour of the nursing home, and both Mom and Emily are intently counting cows. Emily, since she’s the youngest, gets to count any cows she sees on either side. However, she also lost all her cows when the graveyard passed. Now, she’s looking everywhere, hoping to somehow match my 17 before we’re out of the farmland.
The last time I saw Grandma at her own house was right after Roger’s funeral. Roger had been there for her as her health got worse and worse. Then, one night, he died. He’d had cancer, which had spread quietly throughout his whole body, killing him as suddenly as....well, that’s the best way to die, I suppose.
After his funeral, we were all sitting on Grandma’s back porch, the echo of cars from a nearby highway sounding like an ocean. Grandma lit up a cigarette, diamonds from a half dozen rings lighting up as the sun hit them. All of those rings, gifts from lovers who had eventually left. Her right hand, thin and pale, carried the cigarette and the weight of all those diamonds. She placed it on the table, and as the smoke slid out between open lips, she said, “We’ve both lived good lives. I’ve lived a very good life.” There was something defiant about the way she said it, as if she expected the fact to be challenged. Her eyes drifted away from the family members on the porch, and down the row of suburban backyards, just flowers and swing sets as far down as could be seen. “I’ve been blessed.”
This is where we’re going, to Columbia City, to visit my grandma, who just survived surgery number 27. It’s hard to imagine anything killing her at this point; she has made it through surgeries with 40 or 50% survival rates, and been up walking around a day or two later. A handful of marriages, four children, a whole mess of grandchildren. Paintings, poems, and too many diamonds to count. This woman has a lot of cows.
About a month after Roger died, Grandma requested that I go through all his clothes and take any of them I want. I went into their bedroom closet, which was a place I’d never been, even though I’d been to the house many times. The scent of cigarettes permeated from every suit jacket and pair of slacks. I pulled out a tan suit, with light brown stripes on it. It was cotton, with thin fabric. Clearly a summer suit. I took it into Grandma’s bathroom, which was bright and full of mirrors, including one of those scary makeup-applying mirrors that blows things up so big they look disgusting, regardless of what they are.
I slid on the pants, which were tight on me, but very wearable. The jacket was less of a stretch, and I turned, looking at myself in the mirror. I wondered what age Roger was when he bought it. I couldn’t help wondering if a young Roger had looked into a mirror wearing this suit. I wondered what that young Roger thought of himself in it. I felt handsome. Not like someone who arbitrarily grabs clothing in the morning, but like someone who could wear a suit in the summer and make sense doing it. At some point, my hand went into the jacket pocket, and found two peppermint wrappers. One of them still held a peppermint. The other was empty.
As I went through suit after suit, this is what I found: peppermints, toothpicks, and questions. I had never been close to him, and now he was gone. I felt like it was a small failure on my part. Now, I wanted to know about his experiences, and where he had been. But, I never would know. He had always been a guarded, quiet person. Wearing his suits, I found myself closer to him than ever before. Of course, it was all my conception of him, not the real Roger. Roger was smoke.
I don’t know, maybe everyone’s secretly thinking about Grandma as this game of cows drags on. I’m not going to talk about it unless someone else starts it. We’ll be hit with the bricks of it when we get there, to Happy Valley. That’s what it’s called, that place where tables of bored, BORED people eat bland food, watch TV, smoke cigarettes, and pray to be somewhere else. Back home, dead, I don’t know. I just know the way all eyes turn to us every time we pass through the cafeteria, looking at us like we’re something delightful in a shop window. I feel guilty as I smile at each person I pass. I don’t know if it’s guilt because I’m not there to see them, or if it’s guilt because I’m 24 and they aren’t. But, it’s guilt.
Mom still hasn’t seen any cows on her side. It’s 17 to 0. But, who really cares? Everyone’s going to pass a graveyard. Everyone is gonna go back to zero. Nobody keeps any cows. Roger’s suits and Grandma’s diamonds will stick around. Our cows stay. We go. I don’t know where, maybe little bits of us fall away like rain from a rain cloud, until there’s nothing united left. Maybe we’re reborn to count again.
I don’t eat peppermints. I don’t go to church, and I only wear a suit a few times a year. I would’ve never bought the suits that hang in my room now, but I’m going to keep them. I look good in them, whether I really own them or not. But, before I can wear them, I’ll need to take them to the dry cleaners. They all smell like smoke.