The German Wife(4)

“There’s clean water right there,” Henry complained. We’d set up a brand-new trough for them against the fence, just a few dozen feet away. “Why the heck do those stupid cows keep getting stuck?”

“They’ve been drinking from that pond since they were born, that’s why,” I told him. “We need to face facts and sell them. We’ll run out of feed in that field sooner or later anyway.”

Not one but two cows were in the mud now—one in mud halfway up her legs, the other buried up past her shoulders and left weak from struggling all day.

Working together, me, Dad and Henry managed to push the first cow out of the shallow mud by hand. The other cow’s rescue operation was more complicated because she was too tired to help herself. Daddy looped some rope around her neck and tied it to the tractor, and I drove it slowly away from the pond’s edge, pulling her, while Henry and Dad stood in the mud and pushed her from behind.

We were all exhausted, filthy, and deflated by the time we finished—coated in a thick layer of mud that smelled so bad, it would stick to our skin for days.

“We should sell the cows,” I said.

Dad sighed impatiently. “It’ll rain any day and soon enough that pond will be full again. And anyway, the cows will eventually realize there’s an easy way to drink without risking their neck.”

“Well, the way things are going in this county, the price per head is sure to drop,” I said.

“Leave the business decisions up to me,” Dad said abruptly. “We’re not selling the damned cows.”

With that, he stomped back to the tractor and started off toward the barn without us. That was fine by me and Henry—the house was only a few hundred feet away.

“So in the meantime we just keep pulling the cows out of the mud every damned day?” I complained.

“They’ll have to learn to use the trough when the last of the water dries up.” Henry shrugged. Then his tone softened. “You need to stop assuming the worst all the time.”

I groaned and started walking toward the house.

“You’re as stubborn as the cows, Lizzie,” Henry called after me, chuckling. I ignored him, stomping all the way up to the house. I washed up as well as I could with cold water from the hand pump. As I was finishing, Mother brought me a towel.

“What’s got your father in such a low mood?” she asked quietly.

“Cows in the mud at the pond again,” I muttered, taking the towel gratefully. “I told him we should sell them.”

“He’s convinced the rain is coming,” she sighed, then shrugged easily in that gentle, patient way of hers. “Daddy is doing his best. We all are.”

I couldn’t sleep that night. There was so little I could control. I couldn’t make it rain; I couldn’t make Dad face reality; I couldn’t move the cows away from the mud.

My family accepted it was a problem that could not be solved. But in the depth of that night, I considered the same situation and decided it didn’t have to be a problem at all.

The next morning, I pulled a wide leather hat over my orange-red hair and popped the collar up on one of Henry’s old shirts to protect my neck from the sun. Then I took a shovel and I walked back to the pond.

“What in God’s name are you doing?” Henry asked. It was lunchtime but I was still working, so Mother sent him down with a lunch pail and some water. If I’d been a little dirty the previous day, I was utterly filthy now that I’d been shoveling sloppy mud for hours.

“Exactly what you told me to. I stopped assuming the worst and started expecting rain.”

I stuck the shovel into the firmer mud so that it stood upright, then dropped onto my haunches beside the pond. Henry watched with obvious amusement as I tried to clean off my hands so I could eat the sandwiches. After just a moment or two, I realized that was a futile exercise and I was famished, so I picked up the sandwiches anyway.

“So what’s the plan?” Henry asked, squatting beside me.

“I’m going to scrape every bit of wet soil from the pond to expand its capacity.”

Henry looked from me to the pond, then back to me incredulously.

“That will take you days.”

“Yep.” I narrowed my eyes at him. “Unless someone helps me.”

He threw back his head and laughed.

“You’re crazy, sis.”

Henry went back to plowing with Dad that afternoon. Mother came down and helped me for a while, but she had her own jobs to do, so didn’t stay long.

And for three long days, mostly on my own, I scooped and dug and smoothed mud all over the dried field in a thin layer, so it was no longer a danger to the cattle. With no alternative, the cows finally figured out they needed to use the trough.

We sold the cows a few months later anyway, when their ribs started to show through their skin. The price of fodder had gone up so fast we couldn’t justify the cost to keep them. By then, the market was flooded with skinny cows just like them, so we sold those girls for a pittance.

The pond was soon a huge, dried crater in the field—twice the depth it was once, ready to store a heap more water than it ever had before.

I was a realist who loved my land and my life enough that when a moment called for it, I thought nothing of working until my hands were red-raw if it meant turning a problem into an opportunity.