Grazing the Dead - Part VI

copyright 2005 by Blake Lamar

He knew from what some of the kids said in school that there were people that believed you would come back in some form or fashion after you died. Reincarnation, they called it. You wouldn’t come back as the same person, though. Usually you would come back as somebody else. Some even believed that you would come back as an animal. He thought that was stupid though, coming back as an animal. A cow, even. One kid said that in India they thought you came back as a cow. Not everybody in India, just some segment of Hindu. Benjamin thought if he wanted to come back at all, he certainly wouldn’t be coming back as a cow. He’d end up in the supermarket wrapped in cellophane. But those people in India didn’t eat the cows, of course. They didn’t want to eat their relatives. They’d sit and starve while a cow walked right through their front yard.

Benjamin heard a loud moo right behind him. It startled him, his mind already thinking about cows like that. The cemetery was surrounded on three sides by pasture. The grass was near dead in the field and the cows would often saunter up by the cemetery and munch the fresh green grass near the fences edge where the sprinklers spilled over. But that moo had been too close. He turned around and saw several heifers and calves milling about the headstones, grazing the tall grass. He noticed that part of the fence in the corner was down, but he wondered if maybe Jim hadn’t left it down on purpose to recruit a little help from the cows to keep the grass down. But that didn’t make sense with Jim all the way on the other side and the front gates still open. He reckoned after staring at such plush, green grass for so long, the cows had finally put enough pressure on the fence to knock it down.

Benjamin tried to ignore the cows, but their incessant mooing at him was making it hard to think, much less reconcile his feelings about his grandpa. He had almost decided to give up on the idea when he heard a baby calf bawl. He turned around and saw a baby black baldy bull calf trundling towards him. The calf bawled again and stopped in front of him, reaching its head towards his hands.

His first reaction was to back off and try to shoo it away, but then he remembered the cows in India. He imagined if he lived there and a baby calf like this one, not more than a week old, came up to him and started bawling, he’d shout for joy.

“Grandpa,” Benjamin said, timidly at first. “Grandpa!”

He put his hand out and the baby calf licked it. Then he patted its nose and began to rub the fur between its eyes. Before he knew it, he had dropped to his knees and embraced the calf in a full hug, crying out, “Grandpa, Grandpa!”

Then he heard a disgruntled moo and felt something hard and heavy slam into his shoulder. His arms pulled free of the calf as he was thrown into the headstone of a neighboring grave. He bumped his head on the granite and fought hard not to pass out. He heard a vehicle drive up and start honking its horn. He thought it might be his mother, telling him to get home and eat something before he died of a broken heart. His heart was the least of his worries right now, however.