Mechanical Love

If I had it my way, I would be nowhere near here right now.

I would not be optimally positioned to witness my tiny eighty-fiver-year-old grandma falling to her doom off of a twenty-foot-high stack of hay bales.

Instead, I’d be in the comparative security of my room, redoing one of my favorite snap circuits and relistening to select songs from two old Sarah Evans albums on earbuds. That’s what I’m normally doing at two-forty-five in the afternoon.

But today of all days, I was not allowed to leisure in peace—if you’ll allow me the liberty of verbing the word “leisure.” It almost feels necessary to treat it as a verb, as often as I seem to have to take deliberate action to be able to do it.

Today at around two-forty, my dad ambled into my room and casually told me to put on work clothes early, as if it were no big deal. As if I hadn’t just settled in and begun listening to only the third song in my playlist. He had a lot on his agenda today, with moving the yearling steers to a different pasture and bla bla bla bla bla a lot of other ranch life details that I can’t quite keep track of and definitely can’t recount in a mildly interesting way. The bottom line is that today I am needed early and there is no doubt in anyone’s mind that Ishouldbe willing and even eager to jump in and help.

My brother Fulton is always willing and eager to help. His twin Colton is never willing and eager to help, because he sucks and we all know it. Do I want to suck? Of course not. So whenever my dad drops an unexpected task casually in my lap, even though I feel like exploding and saying, “I wasn’t expecting to do this right now!” I keep my mouth shut.

Today in particular, I felt zapped from wrestling with my chemistry homework when he sprung it on me. I didn’t want to move, let alone go work. The thought spazzed through my mind that maybe my butt would spontaneously become glued to my desk chair. I’d try to stand up to comply, and instead I’d be forced to say, “Sorry Dad, no can do. My ass and this chair have spontaneously become inseparable. See look.” I’d force myself into a half-standing position, and the thing would be stuck dead onto my jeans’ pockets with a force stronger than super glue. He’d look at it and say, “Huh, how about that. I guess you have the afternoon off from ranch work. Oh well.” And be on his merry way.

Or maybe I could just yell at him, say what I really want to say and tell him he doesn’t pay me enough for me to be constantly on-call whenever he changes his mind about my work schedule. Let it all out, to hell with the consequences.

But I know damn well if I let out a hint of that I’d be forever on his shit list, thought of as a lazy-ass trouble-maker like Colton is whenever he acts like… well, like you might expect a fifteen-year-old boy with no interest in ranching to act. Although I’m a sixteen-year-old girl with arguably even less interest in ranching, I don’t act like that. I do what I’m expected to do, every time. Sometimes I think I’ll be able to fake it till I make it, and one day I’ll actuallybethe good helpful helper child that Fulton is to him. That would be handy. Life goals…

“Okay.” Like always, that’s how I responded this afternoon. And my dad went on his unnaturally merry way.

But right now, the thought zips through my mind that if I’d have responded in the way I wanted to, I wouldn’t be here to see this. Hear this. Take in this horrific and bizarre sight.

I would be in my room, far far away from the sight of Grandma losing her balance just a short distance away from me. Close, but much too far for me to reach… I wouldn’t see her arms flailing almost cartoon-like in the air. Almost like a person swimming. She is a tiny windmill, around and around her arms go. To no avail. She topples.

And what comes out of her mouth is a sound that basically amounts to this: “Bluuuuhowohwow.”

And I could swear, she is almost laughing. She knows she looks and sounds ridiculous. Even as she looks down and knows she is toast.

It is not a short fall. Her tiny four-foot-ten body sails toward the concrete right in front of my eyes, that cartoon yell of hers still ringing out the whole way down. She seems to look my way. I’m much too far away to try and catch her, even if I were strong enough. Her eyes look terrified for a moment, and she tries desperately to flail toward some loose hay on the ground to cushion her fall. But it’s no use and she knows it.

Her final facial expression is a look of amused resignation. Just before she hits the ground with a ridiculoussplat.

“Ahhhhh!” I am screaming and yelling, horrified and beside myself. “Dad dad dad dad dad! It’s Grandma!”

I stand rooted in place. My dad doesn’t come, he must not be close enough to hear me. But Fulton does. He dashes in around the corner on his white horse—not for real, he’s just sprinting—and he pulls his phone out, 911 already dialed probably through the mere potency of his amazing thought-power.

As 911 rings, he rushes forward to her, exclaiming in horror at her splatted little body. “Dad, dad!”

His yells bring Colton running in. Colton pulls up short, knowing what’s up ahead is horrifying. But even he has the decency to take some solid helping actions. He sprints back off in the other direction. “I’ll get him, he’s in the tractor.”

And still I stand there. “Bluuuuhowohwow,” her falling voice says in my head. I try to push the intruding thought out, as Fulton reaches forward, phone to ear, checking for her pulse.

He tells the 911 operator, “Her body is so mangled. Where should I try for the pulse at?” His face shows he knows, and I know she’s gone.

The funny thing is (here I mean weird funny, not hilarious) she was just talking about dying the other day. She’d gone to church an extra time, not on a Sunday, out of the blue. And she made some comment about how old she was getting that she really could kick the bucket at any time so she might as well get prepared. Most of us ignored her, as my excessively upbeat parents tisked and shook their heads. “Oh Margaret, you’ve got years left in you,” my mom said with a laugh.

Grandma actually grimaced a little and muttered, “I hope notyears.” But I’m not sure anyone actually heard her. Except for me. I picture her grimacing little face now. Better to picture that than what her face must look like currently. “Bluuuuhowohwow…”

My dad comes sprinting in from the field, Colton at his heels. I hear sirens in the distance and realize they’re coming our way from the fire station across the valley. Fulton is still on the phone with the 911 operator even though he knows he can’t do anything.

My dad falls to his knees at her side, horrified. “Mom, Mom!” More beside himself than I’ve ever seen him in my life.

The sirens are right by us now, stopped in the road and waiting for someone to let them in through the gate to this area. I can hear the nearby pen of calves startling, spooking and running like the sound is going to kill them from the other side of the haystack. But no one is worried about them right now. Even if one of them falls and breaks a leg or pops a hip out, it would be inconsequential.

Colton takes charge of the ambulance, running to get the gate open for them. Fulton puts his hand on Dad’s back in comfort as Dad’s shoulders shake with a sob.

Then Fulton turns and barks at me, “Call Mom!”

Now I realize that I haven’t moved. I’m not sure I’ve even breathed since, “Bluuuuhowohwow!” happened. I try to imagine what it might have looked like if I had sprung into action immediately, knowing just what to do to make everything as non-horrific as possible. If I had done all the things my two younger brothers were doing, if I had responded like you’re supposed to respond in the middle of a horrifying accident. I try to picture this, and I can’t. “Bluuuuhowohwow,” she says again in my head, and I begin to notice the corners of my mouth twitching upward. Horrified, I try to stop the smile that is begging to make its way onto my face.

“What’re you waiting for? Call her!” Fulton yells at me.

Yes, action, a thing to do to help. I pull my phone out, hit her name in my recent calls. It rings twice, and I realize what the hell am I about to say to her. Crap.

She answers. I begin, “Hey. Um. Something happened.”

“What! What does that mean? What’s wrong?” she demands.

“You’d better come out here. It’s Grandma.”

“What happened!” she yells at me. I don’t know what to tell her. I pause, frozen. And I feel something like panic fizzling inside as I try to figure out how to break the news that her mother-in-law has just met a horrifying and obliterating death.

Instead, I hang up.

The paramedics have taken over. My brothers both stand with my dad in support. It’s mere moments before my mom is here, holding my dad.

Feeling more like an intruder than anything else, I silently back away.

An emergency slash tragedy has just gone down here, but I also know that there is time-sensitive ranch work that needs to be done.

A very big part of me feels like an insensitive robotic jerk, but I go anyway to mix a bottle of milk replacer to feed to the little orphaned Angus heifer calf that’s been yelling for one of us to feed her for the last ten minutes. I glance behind me as I go, and I’m almost confident that no one notices I’m leaving.

I don’t have any love of bottle-feeding calves, but it is part of my job and it needs to be done. Her mother went crazy and tried to trample her, kicked her away when she tried to nurse. This pathetic little thing was injured and actually could have died when we pulled her out of the birthing pen. She’s been recovering decently this past week and seems pretty hardy now as she drains this quart bottle of milk replacer.

The goober-milk bubbles flow and drip down my hand around the edges of her mouth. I look at her, knowing she’s just a dumb animal but also feeling like her brush with death makes her someone I can say this to: “That was messed up. Really messed up… So why do I want to laugh?”

But I know why: “Bluuuuhowohwow!”

If we were the kind of family who goes to therapy, it’s probably something I would be breaking down with a therapist. We’re definitely not that kind of family though.

For now, I try to forcefully make the thought leave my head. Which would normally be an impossibility. But today, I am saved from this predicament when I see out the barn window the perfect mind-consuming sight:

Jesse.