Letters From a Silverware Thief

Last Friday afternoon Lachlan walked into the den holding the telephone in one hand.

“Are you available to work for Mr. P this afternoon?”

I looked at him. It already was the afternoon, and I was in the middle of editing work. I don’t like interruptions in my writing time, and even when I’m not writing I don’t like unscheduled odd jobs dropped into my lap. I tried to think of a polite way to decline, but then had the thought that the job in question might not be the normal odd job. Mr. P doesn’t normally call us up on a moment’s notice and ask if we are available right then.

I checked my desire to decline and said, “It depends on how desperate the work is.”

The job was urgent.

Mr. P is a small time beef farmer who lives down the street. Early spring is birthing time for cattle and Mr. P’s first calf came while he was recovering from surgery. The first he heard of this was when he came home from the hospital. As second hand stories from neighbors are wont, the information he had was confused.

The story went something like this: The donkeys from further up the street had escaped and taken flight down the road. One neighbor claimed to have seen the two donkeys chasing the calf down the side of the road. Someone else saw the calf lying in the ditch at the side of the road. It was now after one in the afternoon, and there were no calf sightings since yesterday.

How the calf ended up being (supposedly) chased by donkeys is conjecture, but Mr. P thought the donkeys running along the road probably spooked the calf, which then bolted through the fence and took off town the road in terror. Where the calf was now he couldn’t guess. Since the people who sighted the calf said it was the same dingy brown as dead grass the creature could be hiding anywhere. It was important for the calf to turn up before it starved, died from exposure, or was discovered by the coyotes.

Mr. P is retired, a tall big boned man now small time farming because he enjoys it. He has led a rough life, and for years one of his feet has troubled him because of serious injuries suffered earlier in life. When I heard that he had come back from surgery I guessed that he had undergone an operation to deal with the problems in his foot. This was not the case. When Lachlan and I met him at the side of the road he had a piece of cloth gauze taped firmly over his left eye.

I was a little taken aback, and tried to hide it. Cataract surgery, was my first thought. But wasn’t cataract surgery a minor affair? Why did he need his eye bandaged shut if it was only cataract surgery? My mind then leapt to other gruesome possibilities. Had a splinter of wood gouged his eye? Or had a flying piece of metal struck him in one of the most unguarded portions of human the anatomy?

At the first polite moment I asked him what had happened to his eye.

“Cataract surgery,” he said, and then went on to explain the unpleasant details.

What was initially just simple cataract surgery had gone bad. The cause was his eye–scarred from ancient head injuries. Instead of leaving it at that, Mr. P went on. What was supposed to be a twenty-minute operation had turned into a two hour procedure, he said, with him lying on the table, his eye all opened up while they tried to fix him. As if that wasn’t enough to create a revolting mental picture, he went on to describe how the scar tissue on his eye had made it difficult to remove the lens. The doctor was unable to extract the lens in one clean cut and was forced to extract it using many small cuts–”Like a can opener cutting off the lid of a can” Mr. P said.

Just wonderful. I can stomach many things that make other people queasy, but talking about eyeball dissection is one thing I’d rather avoid.

Mr. P continued. This took a lot of time, he said, and things were starting to get difficult because of all the blood. The doctor had trouble attaching the new lens due to the problem with scar damage. After much effort the doctor felt confident he had the new lens firmly attached to the eye.

The story didn’t end there. Mr. P went home and went to bed only to wake up the next day with terrible pain in his eye. In excruciating pain, he returned to the doctor only to learn that the lens had come detached and fallen back into his eye.

This was beginning to sound like a horror story. A lens falling back into an eyeball? It sounded like something worth screaming about. It sounded like the end of his eye.

Somehow, they managed to reattach the lens. Further difficulties came when the pressure in Mr. P’s eye rose too high. They gave him medication and drain some of the fluid from his eyeball. Then the pressure went too low, and there was the danger that the back of his eyeball would suck forward.

At this point I had heard quite enough about cataract surgery. I was very glad I could not see his eyeball, and, frankly, I just wanted to get on with finding the calf. I thought it remarkable that he was holding up so well considering it seemed possible he would never see out of his left eye again.

Leaving Mr. P at the edge of the road, Mrs. P, Lachlan, and myself began the search. It was clear from the start that nobody had even the faintest idea of the calf’s location. The ditches along the road searched before Lachlan and I arrived, and now we were supposed to fan out across the swampy ground leading down to the brook. If we didn’t find the calf there Lachlan and I were supposed to go up to the other side of the road and check the pines above the field.

This all seemed unlikely to have any success. The calf was no more than a few days old, and I couldn’t imagine that it had traveled very far, terrified or not. There were no good hoof tracks to show where the calf had left the road, and if it wasn’t lying in the ditch somewhere along the road, I doubted it was anywhere. But I kept my opinions to myself and crossed the swamp, checking every clump of brush or grass. What could have been very difficult turned out easy because the heavy winter snow had flattened all the undergrowth. The March melt was only recently finished, and no fresh greenery was up, so we had the clearest view of the land anyone would have all year.

We reached the brook with no sign of the calf. The first possible location was gone. Next Lachlan and I searched the two stands of pine trees across the road. We thought this was foolish because if the calf was going to hide in the pines it had to climb an embankment and cross a field. Highly unlikely, but when it is a $500 calf missing no corner can go unexamined. We dutifully combed through the bramble among the pines and found nothing.

From the pines we moved to the forest behind Mr. P’s house and circled back down to the road. Then we followed the fence line around the cow pasture. Still nothing. Next, we went north up the road and checked among the blue berry bushes of a U-pick. Not a sign of the missing calf, so we went south to the other side of the farm and began to systematically check the hedgerows around the fields, hunting for any sign of the creature.

By the time Mr. P decided we were so far from his farm that the calf couldn’t possibly be any further afield, we had spent nearly three hours tromping cross-country. With no more leads to follow, Mr. P called off the search. He was going to have Lachlan and myself help him retie some tarps back over his stacks of round bales, but I begged off and let Lachlan do it alone. Israel was supposed to come over to our house after work and I wanted to be there to greet him.

Lachlan came home with a little more information to add to the story.

The elderly lady who spotted the calf last had called Mr. P. Apparently, she had been driving home sometime after dark the night before and spotted the calf sitting at the side of the road. She had recently undergone foot surgery and couldn’t go after the calf herself, so she went home and called the nearest neighbor. When he went out the calf was gone and his flashlight was too weak to search the brush. The neighbor found a better light, but when he came back and looked there was no sign of the calf.

Based on this new information one last search was launched, but with no success.

It is my suspicion that the calf was snatched. It was last seen near the road, and to disappear so suddenly is suspicious. Someone could have easily spotted the calf, stopped, and tossed it in the back of a pickup truck. Or, they might have accidentally hit the calf, killed it, and decided to take away the evidence. Some people make venison out of deer they hit. Why not veal?

Mr. P’s eye continued to bother him. Lachlan thought the pain grew worse for Mr. P, but the farmer didn’t say much. His biggest comment, Lachlan said, was to mention that when he bent over he could feel his eyeball draining.

Draining eyeballs. I didn’t care to hear about that at the dinner table. I’m sorry about the lost calf, but I’m more sorry about Mr. P’s eye.