Gravel and Hawk: Poems

Missing

45 Missing Papaw shoulders the wasted calf like an ox yoke, its wan yellow drizzle dribbling down his shirt: the thing’s just rawhide slung on a slack sawhorse. We were an hour finding it, near dead, sunk to its ribs in a creek bed. Its mother—lowing? bawling?—had given up, lumbered off to graze spring grass: head down, eyes forward. But we’re determined, fashion a teat from an empty longneck and a length of rubber hose, milk the startled dam and hold her withered calf across my lap, try forcing life down it in the shade of the pole barn. It’s hot, we hadn’t meant to be here this long. Papaw pulls the Old Crow from under his pickup seat, says, “Here, you’re working like a man,” and pours a hot dollop down my throat. I’m eight, wearing a Stetson he just bought me in a fire sale, pearl-button shirt, Nocona boots. The calf’s red-brown fur is mudcaked, 46 matted, except along its spine where its rich color shows it’s new. It was born to be a steer, moves now only in its weak breathing, seems blind. And so it doesn’t work, what we’re trying. But I won’t know that till tomorrow night, that it will die next morning while I sit in school, my thighs holding the memory of its rawboned weight, its trembling, and the teacher trying hard to keep us interested in social studies. ...