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Was it a sane thing to do, to wake up at four in the morning to try and prove himself to the small woman two bedrooms away who clearly did not like him? No. Though buying the farm hadn’t been entirely smart either. But it was the first time in a very long time that Brendan had felt this much drive to doanything, so maybe it didn’t matter if he’d gone completely off the deep end. At least he wasn’t stuck anymore.
He rolled out of bed, rubbing his eyes and resisting the urge to crawl straight back under the warm covers. It was freezing, winter still hanging on with an iron will, and he hopped from foot to foot as he pulled on his jeans, boots and the thickest sweater he had. His coat wasn’t ideal for the weather, he hadn’t been prepared for how bitterly cold it could get out here, but it would have to do. Brendan pocketed his phone and made his way downstairs and out into the dark.
Standing on the porch before the sunrise was a surreal experience. Sure, he’d been getting up at dawn the last few days, but just a hint of sunlight peeking over the horizon was enough light to make everything seem normal. Brendan had never experienced anything like this sort of darkness before. It was an entirely different thing to a night in the city, where lights from houses, offices, thousands of apartments and restaurants and streetlamps were enough to push all of that darkness away. There was nothing out here. If Brendan hadn’t already had a recent near-death experience, then standing right there on that porch would probably have been cemented as one of the most humbling experiences in his life. Once his eyes had adjusted enough that he was confident he could manage the stairs without breaking his neck, Brendan started walking along the path out to the fields.
Then he looked up.
He’d never really understood some people’s fascination with the stars, but he’d never understood because he’d never seen them clearly before. Away from Houston’s light pollution, lights blanketed the sky so densely that in some places it was hard to pick out individual stars.
He stood there for an embarrassingly long time, looking up with his mouth open and giving himself a crick in his neck. It was only the bellowing of a few cows in the distance that snapped him out of it and got him walking towards the sheds again. It wasdefinitelya good thing that he hadn’t been out this early with Nicole there to see him gawking at the sky like a ten-year-old.
At the milking sheds, he switched on the lights, the sound of electricity buzzing as the fluorescent bulbs slowly blinked on one by one. They might have invested plenty of money in the milking machinery, but lights had apparently not been on the priority list. The whole place looked empty and eerie without any cattle around, like the set of a horror film. Brendan suppressed a shiver and set out exploring rather than jumping at shadows like an idiot.
He might not know what half of these buttons and switches did, but he could at least get familiar with where they were. He took his time, walking through the stalls where the cows happily situated themselves to get milked. He ran his hands over the equipment, getting familiar with the feel of it all, the weight and smell of it. During his mission he noticed multiple stools tucked into nooks and corners, obviously there for Nicole, who was a good foot shorter than he was.
The thought made him smile. It was just another example of her figuring things out for herself in what was probably a lifelong pattern of stubborn independence. Though he’d never admit to grinning at the thought of Nicole Brooke at four a.m., alone in an empty cowshed. His sister really would think that he’d lost his mind, maybe had a stroke as well as a heart attack. And Nicoledefinitelywouldn’t appreciate it.
And here he was again, thinking about her in a dark and empty shed… But if most of the women he’d known were sweet as pie,shewas like one of those sour gummy worms that made your whole mouth shrink, but for some inexplicable reason you kept on eating them. It seemed like an apt comparison, but he figured it was wise to keep it to himself. He explored as much as he could, wandering back to the house as the sun rose, feeling a fraction more capable as the day properly began.
* * *
The workday continued the same as the one before it. Brendan had never really had the time for pets. His sister had a cat named Peanut that he’d see on occasion, but that was about the extent of his animal interactions. He’d always liked dogs, and one of the secretaries from the office brought her sausage dog in on Fridays where it slept under her chair. He’d often thought about getting a dog of his own, wanting companionship, but the issue oftimealways came up. He didn’t have time for pets, for friends, forlife,because he was too busy with work.
He knew he wasn’t exactly cut out for this type of work, that he had a lot to learn, but it hadn’t taken long for him to grow fond of the cattle he now interacted with every day. They really were a lot like big dogs — even if Nicole had shot that comparison down — reminding him of his secretary’s dachshund with their large, warm eyes and the way their ears flicked about as they listened in on the world around them. Most surprising to Brendan was how much they loved a good scratch. The broom bristles that had been nail-gunned to the walls were pretty much always occupied. He wasn’t too proud to admit that he was a little afraid of their size, their bulk. He wasn’t an idiot; he didn’t want to get squashed. But he couldn’t help himself and found himself stroking their noses when Nicole wasn’t looking, or giving them a scratch along their necks since they liked the broom bristles so much.
The last of the cows left the milking sheds, taking her sweet time and lowing softly, content and happy at having an empty udder. Passing by the bristles, she stopped to rub her large head against the rough surface, eyes closed as she scratched herself.
Brendan wasn’t entirely sure what he should be doing right now or what his next task should be, and didn’t really want to give Nicole the satisfaction of having to ask her for directions every fifteen minutes, like a kid at kindergarten following the teacher around. So, to at least look like he was doing something, he approached the cow carefully, seeing how close he could get.
It turned out she really couldn’t care less about Brendan, which was fine by him. Each of the cows had a large white, plastic tag in its ear with a three-digit number stamped on it. Cow number 747 didn’t seem to notice her plastic earring at all, focused only on scratching her neck on the brush bristles.
Brendangot it, he did. They had to know which cows were which, and he’d already started making his way through all of the paperwork and records he’d inherited with the place. But numbering them just seemed kind of… impersonal. Sure, they weren’t pets, but it wasn’t like they were beef cattle either — that much he’d learned all too well, remembering Nicole’s unimpressed face when she’d told him exactly the sort of property he’d bought. He didn’t need to keep a distance before the animals went off to be made into hamburgers or anything, so getting to know them a little better couldn’t hurt, could it? At this point it would only help him figure out what the hell he was doing…
He had a permanent marker in his pocket from writing labels on all the different switches while Nicole had explained what each one was connected to, so he pulled it out and approached 747 with his hand outstretched for her to sniff.
“Uh, hey there. Do you mind if I look at your tag?”
The cow stood perfectly still, watching him placidly as he reached out a hand and stroked her ear. She didn’t react all that much, just fluttered her ear a little and didn’t look like she was about to either trample him or bite him, if cows could even bite people, so Brendan grew more confident and pulled the cap off of his pen with his teeth.
The animal’s ear was surprisingly soft as he took it in his hand and twisted the tag a little to face him. Under the seemingly random number he wrote in large capital letters “DIANE.” The cow, now christened Diane, shook her ear as he released it, as if he’d been nothing more than a slightly annoying fly, and went back to her scratching.
Much better,he thought.If something goes wrong with her, I’m going to remember Diane better than 747.
“Hey, Brendan?”
Brendan turned around, the pen cap still in his teeth, and there was Nicole, an empty bucket in each hand and her head tilted to the side. She didn’t have that judgmental look on her face that was so often there when she looked at him. Right now she just looked confused.
“What are you doing?”
Brendan, rather inelegantly, spat the pen cap out into his hand and put it back on his pen.
“Uh, well, I kind of figured the numbers were a bit cold, you know, and hard to remember. Kind of weird. So… I thought I’d name some of the cows…”
The longer he talked, the more perplexed Nicole seemed to become, looking between him and the tag.
“You named a cow Diane?”
Brendan shrugged, starting to enjoy her confusion. Maybe she wasn’t as impenetrable as she made herself out to be. “Why not? I’m more likely to remember ‘Diane’ than ‘747.’”
