Nancy Ludmerer’s fiction appears in Best Small Fictions 2016, Kenyon Review, Cimarron Review, Mid-American Review, and Masters Review’s New Voices. Her essay “Kritios Boy” (Literal Latte) was named a notable in Best American Essays 2014.
“A Simple Case” is the fiction winner of the 2019 Prose & Poetry Contest, selected by Lydia Kiesling.
I knew the basics from the Berkshire Eagle before I got the call in Estate of Mooney v. Wilkins and Jayce Farm. As usual, I searched the internet for background. That way I’m familiar with the spelling of names (assuming the papers get it right) and any technical terms—though in this case there really weren’t any. A simple car accident: Sheila Mooney, a nurse, run over and killed on a country road shortly after midnight. The driver, nineteen-year-old Audrey Wilkins, a student at Clifton Community, had borrowed her grandma’s car to visit her boyfriend one town over.
Audrey assumed she hit an animal. She didn’t stop. That’s what she told the 9-1-1 operator. We listened to the tape. Sheila Mooney’s car was on the shoulder with the motor running and blinkers flashing, the driver’s door open. They found Sheila in the right lane, her arm draped over a newborn calf.
They brought the woman and calf to the hospital morgue around one a.m. The witness list was as expected: the 9-1-1 operator and the cops; Audrey Wilkins; Sheila Mooney’s son and husband; Leland Jayce, the farmer whose calf was killed; and Brent Lampert, a worker at the farm.
The testimony of Sheila’s son, Joe Mooney, affected me the most. Like him, I’m a disappointment. He testified that he was a disappointment to his mother. She hoped he would become a trauma nurse, like she was, or at least a veterinary technician, since his dream as a kid was to work with animals. But he didn’t have the grades or stamina. Instead, at her suggestion, he went into what his father insisted on calling (even under oath) a “bloody business”—phlebotomy. He was good at it. It was his chance to make his way in the world. Gently, expertly, taking other people’s blood. The night his mother died she was coming to pick him up because after his last clinical, he’d gone out with the other students and drank too much.
After he was deposed, I wanted to tell him how much his mother loved him, the way she went out so late to get him even though she was tired from her fourteen-hour shift. I understood how he felt he had let her down. The way my mom wanted me to be a lawyer so no man could ever think he was better than me, and my dad wanted me to be a cop because he thought they were the only ones who could save us from Communism. So I became nothing that pleased either of them, nothing that either understood: a court reporter, an indispensable cog in the wheel of justice. Invisible and because of that, invaluable—that’s what one of the teachers said in court reporter school. “Your goal is to be invisible, a silent witness taking down others’ words precisely. You are friend to no one and thereby invaluable to everyone.” Invaluable. A word that had perplexed me since I screwed it up on a middle school vocabulary test, that a thing or a person can be both valuable and invaluable. Worth something and then worth something more.
So there I was and the lawyers were bickering as usual, and every question was geared toward who was responsible. The only two things the lawyers agreed on was that the calf, scarcely an hour old, ran away, and that Jayce was notorious for not fixing his fences. Everyone knows that cows wander—it’s their nature. Who caused the death of Sheila Mooney? It didn’t matter if you were human or animal or in between—you were a subject of interest.
Except for me. I was invisible.
The first person who testified was Audrey Wilkins, and it started out completely ordinary, with the usual questions: name, date of birth, occupation. She was seven years younger than I, a mere nineteen, attending community college, studying hospitality management. The night of the accident, she was driving her grandmother’s car, the same car she drove to class three days a week. Then the lawyer stopped asking specific questions, and instead asked her to describe in her own words what happened the night Sheila Mooney died. Many witnesses are taken in with an open-ended question like that; it happens all the time and this case was no exception. They keep talking, and like Audrey in her car on that lonely stretch of highway, they don’t know when to stop.
. . .
Audrey Wilkins: It was late when I got into Gran’s car—maybe midnight—but I knew where I was going, could get there blindfolded, Brent’s house, where he lives with his dad. I was driving extra careful ’cause I was driving for two or, if you count Brent, for three, since I was thinking about the family we would become, what kind of father he would be. He’s devoted to his own father, which I appreciated even though I didn’t think Mr. Lampert liked me. He worried I’d take Brent away, which wasn’t my intention.
I remember driving right past Jayce’s farm, where Brent worked, hearing the crickets and the trees rustling. No commotion even though five cows were due. I can even name them for you—Marnie, Flossie, Nettie, Suze, and...I forget the last one. I even knew which cows were docile and sweet and which ones kicked during milking. Brent was in charge of them, checking for signs, and in charge of keeping things repaired, fixing the fences and the stalls, stuff like that. So I drove past Brent’s farm—no, I mean Jayce’s farm. Then at the turning, I saw a car on the shoulder, saw the blinking lights, wondered if someone got out to pee, or what, but I kept going. It was dark, I was alone in the car, no way was I going to stop.
. . .
Now she did stop. She’d been ignoring her own lawyer, or rather her grandma’s insurance company’s lawyer, who was grimacing and breathing hard as she spoke, even clearing his throat. Any minute I expected him to jab her with his elbow or kick her under the table.
“Do you mind if we take a break?” he asked the other lawyer. “There’s no question pending.”
“Do you need a break?” Mooney’s attorney asked Audrey Wilkins.
“No,” she said. “I’m okay.” That’s the kind of girl she was, missing the warning signs her own lawyer was flashing with his eyes, with his whole body.
She missed the warning signs on the highway, too: the blinkers flashing, the door ajar. The shapes—human, animal—were to her mere shadows. Not surprising, really. She’s equally oblivious to the blinding “Stop! Proceed with care!” headlights that even clueless Brent emits: her so-called fiancé, using his father’s dislike of her for camouflage.
If you ask me.
No one asks me, though, unless they want me to read back testimony. Like when a lawyer insists that his witness slurred a “not” or a “didn’t” or a “don’t” and wants to be sure I got it right in the transcript. The room can erupt—I’m a bystander, but the lawyers can really go at it. Sometimes the outrage is mere posturing, for the benefit of the client or the transcript.
Once, my mother, trying to make it up to me for my dead sister, whose birthday we celebrate every year with candles but no cake, said that Ellie’s birth was unplanned. To prove her point, she pointed to the wedding pictures; the bride not in white but in a pale flowered maternity dress, emitting a soft glow. She joked that Ellie was a “love child.”
“With you,” she said, “we planned. We wanted you and we made you. You,” she hesitated, then continued—a mistake, in my opinion—“you saved us.” That was supposed to make me feel good.
The crazy thing, given how careful I am with testimony, getting the names of people and things right, I couldn’t tell you whether my sister’s name was Eleanor, Ellen, Elena, Elise, or something else. She died before I was born, and I only ever heard her called Ellie. She was chubby for her age—at fourteen months, she looked two—but that didn’t save her. I found a red sweater, with Ellie appliquéd on it in blue yarn, in a box with Ellie’s things. Not Ellie’s things but things associated with Ellie. How many things does a fourteen-month-old have? There’s the sweater; a cuddly stuffed rabbit in a bowtie and tux; a bib that says “Eeyi eeyi oh!”; a lock of shockingly white blonde hair; a book of poems that someone gave my mother when Ellie was born. Odd present. Instead of Goodnight Moon or Beatrix Potter, they gave her a slim book of Robert Frost poems called You Come Too.
Mooney’s lawyer didn’t manage to get anything more out of Audrey. “You didn’t want to make that call, did you, Audrey?” he asked. She began going on about a photograph of Brent’s dead mother in the hall of Brent’s house, how it speaks to her. Good luck with that line of questioning, I wanted to say to the lawyer, who finally knew when to stop.
Stuart Mooney, the deceased nurse’s husband, was a talker, too.
. . .
Stuart Mooney: I should have been the one to pick up Joe, not Sheila. She put in fourteen hours that day, six a.m. to eight p.m., and was ready for bed. When she got home, she went upstairs to close her eyes, take a cat nap before dinner (our cat, Freddy, joined her) but she was too restless to sleep, even for the forty winks she said she needed. She was upset about something she heard, something that happened on her day off.
Over dinner, chicken thighs and green beans, she told me. At first she thought it was amusing, like everyone else. On Wednesday night, when she was off, a deer was hit by a car, not far from Mercy, apparently. That deer walked on his own—on his own, mind you—through the automatic doors of the ER. The deer seemed to know exactly where he was going. He went twenty feet towards triage before they stopped him. There were two sheriffs at the hospital dealing with a domestic violence situation. They strapped the poor thing to a gurney. Then it was put down.
That bothered her tremendously—that an animal so smart, so determined to survive, that did all the right things to save itself, was put down.
“If you’d been there,” I asked her, “do you think it would have gone any different?”
“Maybe. At least I could have tried to save it.”
She was so upset. I tried to get her to relax with a glass of wine. Although she normally has a glass or two with dinner, she said Joe might call and need a ride so she wouldn’t. I’d already had a couple of beers by then. After dinner, I took some Jack Daniel’s and went out on the porch swing. At that moment, with her so unhappy, I worried, as I sometimes did, that I had failed her.
I used to bring her breakfast to our bedroom on a tray, along with the newspaper, before she had to head out for her early shift. Now I can barely drag myself out of bed.
. . .
Spare us the self-pity, I wanted to say, but, of course, I just kept typing. When Stuart’s testimony was done, I wondered whether anyone at the hospital other than Sheila Mooney, who wasn’t even there when the deer walked in, really cared about that deer? Sometimes I fantasize that I’m the older sister and that my little sister, Ellie, is ill, but I’m a brilliant doctor, and I cure her. What makes the fantasy doubly ridiculous is that there is no way I would ever become a doctor or a nurse or even, like poor Joe, a phlebotomist. No bloodletting for me. I’m an observer—at most, an accurate reporter; at least, an accurate reporter.
And then there was Joe.
. . .
Joseph Mooney: I called home because I didn’t want to risk getting stopped after so many beers—we were celebrating TGIF at NTI, otherwise known as Phlebotomy for Dummies. I assumed Dad would come, since Mom just came off a fourteen-hour shift at Mercy, but she said he was dead to the world on the porch swing. She said she didn’t mind. She had a story to tell me about something that happened in the ER last week. Then she said, let me stop gabbing and go.
I waited on the bench outside Clifton’s. Twenty minutes went by, thirty. I kept thinking her car was pulling up but the car would keep going. A few times, I was sure I saw her headlights, but then no car, nothing.
By then I was stone sober and could have gotten in my VW bug and come home. But you have to understand—my mom is the most reliable person alive. I couldn’t just leave. I figured something had to be wrong, maybe with Dad. After like the twentieth ring, he picked up, groggy as hell.
“Where’s Mom? She should have been here ages ago.”
He yelled: “Sheila! Sheila!” Then he went to check if the car was there. It wasn’t.
Eventually a police car drove up to Clifton’s and two officers got out, an older guy and a girl not much older than me.
When they found her, Mom was wearing my hoodie with the broken zipper over the t-shirt she slept in, and some old rubber boots she clomps around in.
. . .
After a break, Joe said he kept trying to figure out how his mother died, whether the calf was obstructing the road, whether it was already dead, or whether it was injured and she was trying to save it. Some things it seems he’ll never know; no one will.
I’ve never been able to ask my mother anything about Ellie. Well, I can ask, but she won’t answer. Over the years, I’ve gathered that it was a simple case of flu that went downhill. I think maybe she didn’t tell me because she thought I’d be scared any time I got a runny nose. My parents never spoke about what Ellie was like as a baby other than that she was an early talker. By the time she was fourteen months, she had quite the vocabulary, apparently. I asked my mother once if she read to Ellie from the book of Frost poems and she said no, she was waiting until Ellie got older. “Maybe we can read the book together some time,” I suggested. She said maybe—but as if it were a dubious proposition. I never mentioned it again.
. . .
Brent Lampert: I wasn’t expecting Audrey that night, especially not so late. If she’d called first, I would have said, don’t come. I was dead tired from working two shifts: helping deliver calves, all seven of them! What a night. Then Leland calls after me as I’m heading to my car. He says before I go home, could I check the fences and if there are any breaks, plug up the holes or put up netting—anything to make sure none of them cows or calves get out. I pretended not to hear him at first. Then I said, can we compromise? I’ll come in early. Five-thirty a.m. on the dot, I’ll take care of it. It was already ten-thirty by then. He looked at me, shook his head, didn’t say anything. I didn’t know then that poor Marnie’s calf would get out. He was the smallest born that night, staggering and reeling on his spindly legs like a drunk. And Marnie the heifer wasn’t havin’ any of it. She gave him a shove and he went sprawling. He’s the last one I’d think would get out. The last.
. . .
If you’re like me, you went into this thinking all cows are maternal. In the Frost poem, the mother licks the calf with her tongue, to comfort it or at least to clean it. But first timers, heifers like Marnie, don’t always bond right away. It might take between twelve and twenty-four hours for that to happen. Marnie’s calf, though, must have felt unwanted. Maybe even threatened. I don’t blame him for heading out on his own—a gutsy little thing.
Brent didn’t know nearly as much about cows as he pretended to, but Jayce, the final witness, sure did.
. . .
Leland Jayce: They’re saying the calf got out because of some malfeasance on my part. I don’t really know what they expected me to do. I hire a kid, Brent Lampert, to repair the fences, do odd jobs, help with the calving. He never told me Marnie rejected her calf; he never told me a fence was down. I take responsibility for Marnie’s calf nonetheless; Marnie was my heifer; the calf was my calf; it was up to me to keep him safe, keep all of them safe.
But don’t blame me for the lady who got out of her car and was killed. The nurse. She didn’t have to get out. She could have kept going and if she felt so inclined, she could report what she saw, or thought she saw, to the cops: an injured animal on the highway. The young girl who hit her. She’s the guilty party. I know that girl. She’s been out to the farm to visit Brent when he should be working. She’s a distraction. Audrey. And if she wasn’t so distracted on her way to Brent’s house in the middle of the night, she wouldn’t have hit that nurse.
The craziest thing is they’re saying I destroyed evidence. I got a call from the hospital morgue telling me to come pick up my dead calf. If the lawyers have a problem with that, they should complain to the hospital. I went and got the poor thing. I’m not sure how the calf got on the road. Brent tells me after the fact that Marnie kicked the calf, didn’t want anything of it, at least not right away. That calf got up on its skinny legs and went looking for what? If you ask me, looking for love, as the song goes, in all the wrong places, and—smart fella!—he found the hole in the fence, the absolutely wrong place, within an hour of being born.
An Einstein of calves, that one was.
What does one do with a dead newborn calf? I can only tell you what I did. I didn’t have just a dead calf on my hands, I had a mourning mum—that Marnie, she must have been full of regret for rejecting her young’un, she was lowing and miserable, wasn’t going to produce milk nohow. I said some silent blessing over that calf, in a forgotten language, and then I skinned it, rinsed the hide, drilled holes in it, and tied it, with the tail hanging down, around another calf, another reject. This new calf’s mother, Suze—who would have guessed it, sweet Suze—had twins and chose the other one, rejected this one completely.
Marnie the heifer knows the smell of her own calf. She knows that the calf nuzzling her teats—pardon my French—is him and isn’t him. It’s like the live one carries the dead one with him in some undefinable way.
Marnie let him nurse while she chomped hay, her appetite returned.
Care? Of course I care. But life, especially life on a farm, goes on.
. . .
I couldn’t get Marnie and her calf out of my mind. I imagined Marnie when she realized the calf was gone. Maybe she was dreaming about the birth and woke up roaring. She dreamed she was on her side in the field when the calf slid out and she glimpsed him for the first time. In the dream, she’s filled with the smell of him and licks him with her tongue, butts him with her head, not to hurt but to guide him to the milk.
In the dream Marnie doesn’t do what she actually, regretfully, did in real life—turn her back on this dark thing on the ground struggling to stand up. In the dream, when the calf manages to stand on his own, she doesn’t kick him and send him reeling back to earth. She doesn’t ignore her calf lying there until, in an unexpected burst of independence and willfulness, he rises unsteadily once more, and ambles away.
. . .
The calf keeps going. It’s dark but stars are out and he is amazed that his legs can carry him. A world of sounds and signs, and mossy grass, and smells, and a dark ribbon unfolds in front of him, and something white and broken lies in his path. He lifts one leg and then another and then another.
. . .
Sometime later, the calf looks up.
A woman in a hoodie is kneeling beside him.
•
