Moonshine

The red cow kept pushing, pushing, after the calf was born, after the placenta was delivered. She pushed until her uterus prolapsed. It bulged out from her like a blown-up bag, pink and spongy, marked with red fronds that looked like flowers. The vet came. He pushed back, hands jamming what the cow would extrude like excrement. When he was able to push the uterus back, he sewed her vagina shut with a shoe-lace thread and a needle like a crochet stick.
She’d given up well before this rough stitching. She never looked at the calf, left him lowing and wet in a white-caked crumple by her hind legs. My brother and I rubbed the calf dry. He was wobbly and pale, like my mother’s over-creamed coffee. When he mooed, he slapped his tongue out, curling the end into his nose, and rolled up his eyes. We named him Moonshine and fed him powdered colostrum from a half-gallon bottle, the nipple longer and thicker than my father’s fingers.
Moonshine liked to suck on our hands and follow us around, lips slurping skin. The old mama cow was sold at auction for ground beef. We kept Moonshine for a year, taking turns leaning over his hips in the field and letting him buck us off. Toward the end, the calf started having seizures. He heaved under a wet sun, black-throated buzzards circling. The vet couldn’t cure him, and my father loaded up Moonshine for auction. I can’t remember the vibrating sound his bleating calls must have made, bumping into the sides of a too-big trailer as it rumbled down the dirt drive, only the way he licked at the air, tongue asking through the slats.