The Bull Whisperer

My father rode a red 1952 Ford tractor with a bushhog
always in the back, rusty and tearing through grunting
shrub stumps and grass. He loved it so much, the sore
he felt in his neck and knees, putting it to rest at day’s end.

One fall day my father was shaving the dusking hillside,
admiring the smooth tan of the sky, pat-patting the struggling
Hemlocks on the back as he wove his monthly pattern over
the underbrush, atop the Ford, his chariot,

and my father spotted through the trunks a vague lone cow
rested in a heap at the pasture’s edge, swollen but breathing.
Easy girl, he eased up. Death and birthing, the prediction
similar in animals—they separate from the rest of the herd,

that being their habit. Where my father’s fingernails rubbed
the unflipping ear, that was the center of his 67 acres. She was
to calve soon. He remembered how to assist. It was serene,
the auburn dark, the autumn thick-body companion. That moment

the bull lifted its heavy tractor body, faced my father
gathering himself, all he could do in the evening separation was
whisper easy big boy, ease away and on to the sitting Ford, easy
and the true owner, of the cattle and their ways, named him

the bull-whisperer.

- J.S.