Was it 1970? ‘71? There must be a photo somewhere, I’ll look, one of those black and whites with the date stamped in the pure white surrounding frame, delivered from who knows where (Binghamton? Albany?) back to the store in a rectangular paper sleeve filled with Kodak memories! How I loved opening those colorful envelopes to see what we’d got. My dad had found a partner for his business, an independent pharmacy in rural upstate New York, and was looking for things to do in his new, welcome free time. Why not get a calf? It was my mom’s idea, because, after all, he was forever grousing about grocery bills, we have all this acreage, honey, and he had been brought up as a farmer’s kid, so – doesn’t it make sense to buy a calf? Just pay a fee for butchering? They might possibly have come up with the idea jointly, but regardless, we got a calf. I have no idea from where, or whom.
It was cute. Baby anythings are pretty cute, generally speaking. We named it. Sam? Harry? Bucky? Chip? Beefy (one of my dad’s contributions, the heartless beast)? It kept breaking out of the enclosure my dad created, attached to a space in the barn, and after many attempts at keeping it inside the fenced area – given we lived in the only house at the end of a long dirt road – we just let the little buggar out. Hey, it will help keep the grass trimmed. And thus little Chip was allowed to roam freely on our very large lawn, where it began to ape the behavior of the family dog: caracoling and playing in the manner of a friendly puppy, curling up to sleep in the sun or shade near the stone patio, trotting out to meet and greet cars and people as they – we – arrived home. It was pretty endearing, but we knew, we all knew, where this was going to end, which was in Chip or whoever’s death, and eventual consumption on our family dinner plates in various cuts of meat. Cuts. There would be cutting.
The calf got big, bigger, as calves will do. It was a little scary, a little, when it came running at you, greeting you with the dog after school. But, okay, whatever, it’s a temporary thing, and our dad and our parents’ friends thought the thing was hilarious. It was. It was ridiculous and hilarious except to my mother, who did not think it was funny, and furthermore had begun to dread the slowly approaching and inevitable end. A woman who rarely went outside if she could help it, my mother was terrified of mice, didn’t like dogs, or any animal, really, tolerated cats because they hopefully eliminated the horrid, horrifying mice, and yet, here she was falling for a calf who was bound for slaughter, destined to be stored in packages of varying sizes in one of our several freezer compartments, after which ol’ Chip’d be consumed by her entire family of meat eaters.
She wept. She cajoled. She got angry. She said the kids would be traumatized (we were not). She called my dad heartless, cruel, lacking proper feeling, and he pointed out that it was her idea, originally, and she didn’t have to eat the beef if it bothered her that much. It did. I vividly remember the first meal we had from the calf, beef stew, in gravy. She would have made it, I am positive. Did she weep? That I don’t remember. She sat at her end of the kitchen table, hungry (when was she not?), yet unable to take a bite. If she eventually did partake of any of our calf, I don’t recall, but – I don’t think so. Our adventures in owning beef on the hoof were at an end.