1. The Fire & the Name
The first thing you ought to know about cows is we’re all a bunch of gossips. You try standing in a field all day, chewing your cud and swatting at flies, then gathering ’round the trough to discuss who’s been sent to the north pasture or which rooster’s got notions about running the farm, and see if you don’t start flapping your jaw. Fact is, the life of a cow is interminable humdrum, and gossip’s the only variety to be had.
Of course, you already know me, on account of my celebrity: Clara the Clairvoyant Cow, star of John W. Robinson’s Traveling Circus & Mystery Emporium. I am discussed by parties bovine and otherwise—a cud chewed and rechewed from the stables in Cincinnati to the barns in Ypsilanti, and I can assure you it amounts to tin-pail clang and undigested cattle prattle. If their tongue-wagging had a salt lick of truth, they’d point their horns at the real menace: the frog.
It is a scientific fact that frogs are evil. They’re slippery, little green devils who will stop at nothing to ruin your life simply because they enjoy watching you suffer. Now that’s cleared up, we can put the lies out to pasture.
Here’s something you can take back to the trough: Clara’s not my real name. I borrowed it off John’s sister the day one of those green devils led me astray. Then the barn caught fire.
###
On the night the barn burned, John Boyle learned to low. The sound he made was thin and broken, but he put his whole chest into it; if you hadn’t seen him standing there on two legs, you’d’ve been excused mistaking him for a proper cow. I answered from the little hill—I’d just come over from chasing that frog along the creek—my knees gone wobbly at the sight of orange like wild hens’ tongues where the barn ought to have been.
You know him as John W. Robinson now, but back then, he was John Boyle, and he had a big sister, Clara. I, meanwhile, was a calf making up for my lack of a name with knees too big for the rest of me. If Ma needed to call me, she’d low; that was name enough. John mostly kept to the fields, and Clara mostly talked with Ma out in the barn. They had a deal: milk for stories. Clara brought gossip from the wider world, and Ma paid in cream. I hated it at first—those buckets were meant for me—but I loved Ma’s voice, so I excused the theft.
I don’t know how the frog got in. The door was open just enough. He slipped through, slick as sin, and fool I was, I followed. Ma lowed for me to come back. Her voice was the sweetest grass under heaven. I would’ve listened all day, but frogs have a way of making you do unspeakable things. My theory? Vapors of some kind. Being a young calf and naive in the world, I was susceptible to these insidious frog vapors, so that hop was irresistible.
Ma’s lowing grew fainter as I picked my way along the creek at the edge of the farm, which, to my mind, was the edge of the world. I don’t know how long I looked for that frog. Long enough that the sun dipped back toward its trough.
When I wandered back, the barn was ablaze.
My legs went wobbly as I tripped down that hill, knees knocking, bell clattering, and I met John’s eyes through the smoke. He wasn’t much more than a calf himself, but there he stood, lowing.
I’d never heard a human low before.
At first I thought he was grieving my Ma with me. We lowed together while the moon went across its pasture and the flames licked themselves down to embers. By morning, ash had sifted onto our coats. John stooped and pulled a scrap of fabric from a blackened beam. I knew it at once—Clara’s. She who’d milked Ma and brushed her and spoke as if Ma belonged to her instead of me.
Humans talk differently than proper cows. Their language is coarser and higher, more wheeze than low, like flies or sick roosters. But Clara’s voice fit with Ma’s, like they were part of a song. Some days Ma would low extra loud, and Clara would come out to hear the latest. The way I figure, she heard Ma calling when I went off chasing that frog, and that’s how she came to be in the barn when it burned.
Some other funny things about humans: they have soft hooves, stand on two legs, and wrap themselves in fabric like an extra skin, changing it nearly every day—unlike proper cows, who are always dressed appropriately. John held that patch of Clara’s dress in his soft hoof. After he’d lowed some more, he spoke to me the way his sister had spoken to Ma. He fished a coin from his pocket and turned it over a few times. He flipped it once, caught it, then threaded the fabric through my bell strap and knotted it.
“There y’are, Clara,” he said.
John had lost his sister and barn and livelihood. I’d lost my Ma and barn and most everything else. But I had something new: a name.
2. Heads & Tails
After that, we traveled. We’d find a nice patch of grass, stay a while, then move on. Some nights were bright as milk. Others were rain-soaked and scratchy. I chewed the cud; he talked. At first I tried to set my low against his the way Ma fit hers to Clara’s. Then I listened and heard they weren’t alike at all. Clara’s had a ring to it—sort of a milk-pail-patter. John’s came like a bucket with a slosh—quiet, careful not to spill. Clara always looked Ma in her big lashed eyes. John watched his hooves.
He didn’t talk much. John chewed a different sort of cud. Whenever we came to a crossroad, he’d pull that old coin from his pocket.
“Heads we go east, tails south,” he’d say, then flip it high. Sometimes it flashed in the sun, and I’d shake the spots from my eyes. Sometimes a fly would bite my rear, and I’d swish my tail. He’d catch the coin, slap it to his wrist, and nod. “Tails it is.” Then he’d click his heels, and I’d follow in that direction.
I once had a chance to inspect John’s coin when he showed it to me. I could identify neither a proper head nor a true tail.
We traveled for a while that way. His coin flipping and heels clicking, and my bell clunking at every turn.
One afternoon, John came back from his grazing (humans call it “work”) with a contraption on his head he called a “hat.” “What’d’y’think, Clara?” he said, proud as a rooster in boots. I suspect the purpose of such contraptions is to conceal a lack of proper horns. He stooped to let me judge, and I took a bite right out of that silly brim.
He was distressed at first. Humans aren’t used to unvarnished truth. Cows’ll circle a thistle all day, but when it comes to our opinions, we speak plain. He studied the contraption, did that patter humans do when they’re amused, set the hat between my stubby horns, and stepped back.
“There y’are, Clara.”
###
It was around that time I started noticing peculiar things. It might’ve been the scrap on my bell. Sometimes I’d swing my neck, the bell would clunk, and I’d get a notion. The first time, I was eyeing a blackberry bush for breakfast when I notioned a weasel fixing to slink out. Foolishness, I told myself, until out he came. Two of ’em. Other notions followed. Nothing you could sell tickets for. Just a sense of which way the wind would turn.
The first time it turned useful was sometime later. I guess the moon had been out to its pasture and back a few times. Afternoon was stretching late, and we came to a spot by the road where it dropped toward a little brook.
“Nice spot, I reck’n,” John had said. “Tails we’ll stay.” He flipped his coin. A fly bit my rump. He clicked his heels.
That evening the whole place went orange and peaceful. We both fell asleep, him on the log nursing a glass bottle and me standing comfortably, when a flash and a crack woke me.
The trees swayed in the bristly dark, then rain fell in sheets. If not for the lightning, I couldn’t have seen my own hooves. In one bright flash, I saw John, head still tipped to his chest. My bell clunked. Then it was plain as weasels in a bush: all that water was fixing to rise up and carry John off, log and all.
I lowed and lowed. He just mumbled. So I tipped him with my horns until he woke, looked me full in the eyes. He saw the water falling and rising and tried to stand, but his body wouldn’t answer.
It is a lucky fact that regular cow bodies are sturdier than the human kind. I put my head down, he grabbed on, and I hauled him up the muddy bank just as a surge dragged the log away. Down had been easy. Up was slipping and sliding with all the branches creaking like pots and pans tumbling into the muddy torrent below.
John lay there on the road, soaked and shaking. When the sun poked out, he sat, looked at the roaring brook, then at me.
“There y’are, Clara.”
No sooner had his words warmed my chest when a frog appeared, croaked a statement impugning my mother’s character, and withdrew at a hop.
3. Frog & Fortune in Porkopolis
With that behind us, John took to ranging farther. Sometimes he’d be gone a day or two and come back with tales of tall buildings and men peddling thunder in bottles, and I told him what he’d missed when he was gone.
His pastures grew bigger. Meadows turned to market-square. John’s face got less smooth. Once it came back covered in fur. I informed him this was not becoming. He removed it, though weeds have a habit of returning.
By the time my legs stopped looking knobby, our road led us to a place as different from a farm as a milking stool from a steamboat.
“Cincinnati,” he called it. I noticed the smell first: mud, smoke, and pig you-know-what. Instead of a creek, it had a Big Muddy River where giant river-cows bellowed smoke and made enough racket to scare a rooster bald.
To a cow that’d just grown into her knees, Cincinnati was a barnyard full of open doors. I wandered off every chance I got. No coin needed; I figured I’ve my own head and tail to follow.
The first time, it was to the river. The “steamboats,” as they’re called, are river-cows of fearful size: steel-ribbed and fire-bellied with iron horns that belch colossal thunderclouds, which must make them thirsty, because they’re always gulping in the Big Muddy. You can hear their gossip for miles; I reckoned any creature that makes its own fire might have answers about the fire that took my Ma.
The river cows did not answer. They let out a bellow that rattled both my stomachs, then shouldered off to pasture without so much as a nod.
Any beast that answers a civil inquiry with smoke is not worth a clover; I resolved to confer with creatures of finer sensibility.
No sooner had I shaken the dust from my hooves than I became acquainted with Cincinnati’s other appellation: Porkopolis, a sobriquet earned on account of its innumerable swine. I encountered one in an alley and made an attempt at small talk. He replied in a dialect devoted to matters of excrement. To illustrate, he managed to express a surprisingly nuanced view on weather using only terms related to pig you-know-what. Though admiring his artistry, I withdrew to consult a more civilized creature.
I had barely selected a pigeon when I heard a familiar ping, then “There y’are, Clara.”
We turned toward the city’s edge, where John had his own barn picked special for its patch of grass big enough for one cow. It pleased John to live in his own barn, even if it lacked a hayloft. The doors weren’t big enough for me, so he built a little roof with my own trough. John spent his days grazing at the stable by the Big Muddy River. He always came home smelling like horse you-know-what.
Evenings, we’d chew the cud. He’d tell me about his day, like the time a horse jumped its stall to neigh at another horse who ran off dragging a cart of squealing pigs, and I told him about my wanderings.
Sometimes I’d wander too far. John would always find me. He never scolded; he’d just pull out his coin, flip it. “There y’are, Clara. Let’s go home.” He’d click his heels, and I’d follow. Heads or tails, that’s how it was.
Over time the moon made its rounds out to its pasture, and I wandered less. The best grass was in my own little patch, and for the first time since naming me, John Boyle smiled.
Then came the frog.
###
Maybe you’re thinking it was a frog that saved my life; else I’d have been in the barn when it burned. Bless your heart, you just haven’t learned the diabolical nature of frogs.
It was a muggy afternoon when the devil jumped right out of my lunch and landed on my nose and croaked an unprintable epithet. Then I had a notion. John had his coin; maybe I had my frog. If I could catch that frog, I could see what happens if I flipped him a few times. He might tell me why he saved me and not my Ma. If he happens to find the ordeal unpleasant, I suppose it just has to be so.
I followed with new resolve. The frog bounced straight into Cincinnati as if the city were his private pond. He hopped under wagons and over the canal bridge, my hooves clicking on the hard-packed streets. That is how I found myself ranging the riverbank for days, drifting miles and miles from the city, nosing every patch of weeds for a dastardly amphibian that did not wish to be found.
One night—I don’t know how many it had been—I was about to drift off when the ground began to rumble. A giant metal beast came charging down the tracks by the river. It was a one-horned cow with smoke belching from its head and one eye glowing in the coal-black night. It hauled a chain of smaller beasts with tidy rows of windows all lit with orange glow—so you could see the poor souls headed to damnation. I reckon you’d’ve clattered your hooves too, if you’d been there.
As the beast thundered by, something tumbled out from one of its windows, spinning end over end. It smacked me between the horns and plopped in the mud at my hooves.
A satchel, like the kind John carries.
Only John’s never moved by itself.
First it was just a little shake. Like something underneath trying to worm out. I gave it a nudge. It was heavy, so I had to bump it a few times. Finally it tipped over and—to my surprise—out stumbled that frog! Green, naked, and smeared with mud. I said a prayer of thanks.
John makes it look easy. Flipping coins, I mean. Frogs aren’t coins, I learned, and cow hooves, though superior in nearly every way, are different from soft human hooves.
The little cretin escaped.
###
Morning found me where I stood. My legs were damp with river mist. The rails clacked. My bell gave a small, hollow clunk.
I was just about to slip into a sad, sorry sleep when something caught my eye. A man trudging up the road, hat in his hand, eyes on hooves. John! Seeing him then was like the sun come out after a storm. I lowed my hello.
John’s eyes landed on the satchel. It was still there in the mud, right where it should’ve flattened that frog. He strolled up. Stooped, hefted it, then opened it. Inside it was all paper leaves with men’s faces. More than a pasture full.
John looked at me. He looked at the leaves.
Quietly, he reached into his pocket and pulled out that old silver coin.
He didn’t speak. He just flipped it.
It spun in the misty air. He caught it, slapped it to the back of his hoof and looked.
His shoulders set.
John closed the satchel, slung it over his shoulder, and turned toward the city.
He didn’t click his heels.
4. From Gamble to Grandstand
For this part of my recollection, I’d just as soon go ’round rather than go into the barn, or avoid it altogether. But you asked for the honest story, and every pasture has both sweet alfalfa and thistle. We’re fixing to hit a patch of thistle.
Watching John walk away with that satchel, waiting for him to click his heels, my hooves sank into the mud.
If I’m looking in a clear pond, I ought to admit that ever since the fire, John’s about all I knew. Without him, I don’t even have so much as a name, but for the one he let me borrow. That day when we were both calves, lowing into the blackened char, he’d flipped his coin and plugged my leaking bucket. And I guess I’d plugged his; without each other, our buckets would be dry as a mouthful of cobwebs.
###
I did not see John the next day, or the day after that. By the second evening, I set my hooves toward the city. Given time to ruminate, both my stomachs did peculiar things. First it was like a fencepost wedged sideways in my ribs, then a heat climbing to my horns. By the time I saw the city barns and smelled all the horse and pig you-know-what, I’d resolved that when I found John, I’d punch a few more holes in his bucket.
Cincinnati’s a different pasture when you’re looking to rattle a bucket: less saltlick and sweetgrass, more thistle and chamberpot. Can’t hardly cross a thoroughfare without some high and mighty carriage horse claiming the road like it owns the grass underneath.
I followed the streets and went back across the canal bridge to the lane of shouting and shoveling John had called “work.” My bell gave a little clunk. Usually that brings a notion. This time, it rang flat as a dented pail. “Stable,” I thought. I followed that wrong notion to an empty stall with a musty broom. “Left,” the bell insisted. I met a brick wall.
Having neither heads nor tails to lead, I found some humans and followed them to the place where their herd was thickest, and shouts were loudest.
I waited.
Pretty soon, the moon was up and had been for a while. That’s when I found John, outside a brick and windowless barn, clutching the satchel. Some of the fir had grown back on his face. He had a new hat, and he sloshed in the door like a goat got itself tangled in a windmill. Other humans were crowded around, stretching their mouths and swatting flies from John’s shiny new coat. One had a coin like John’s, letting it dance on his knuckles like a cricket on a cornstalk. John stretched his mouth back, but his eyes were dancing with that coin.
That’s when he saw me. I was about to give him a piece of my mind when—
“There y’are, Clara.”
By disposition, cows are not forgiving. But right then, I would have forgiven John for near most anything. My knees knobbed toward him, and he sloshed toward me.
“Well, lookey at that. I’ll be darned,” the man with the coin said, like a weasel eyeing a hen coop.
That’s when two things happened.
First: the frog.
I don’t know where the slick sinner had been hiding, but the blasted thing had the audacity to let out a croak and hop onto the post where John was leaning. The very same green devil, mouth full of libel, naked as ever, still smeared with mud.
I swung to knock that petulant pest off its pedestal—and as I swung, the second thing happened: my bell spoke. It rang clear as Ma’s voice on a frosty morning. John must’ve heard it too, because his head cocked. The men stopped stretching their faces and watched him stumble forward, dropping his satchel.
“Clara?” It wobbled out of him like milk from a pail set down too quickly.
Then the devil sprang from the post onto John’s satchel. Forget flipping; I should have flattened that sorry miscreant. Instead, all I managed was a nudge. The bag slid a few inches and thumped a stack of boards leaning against a fence. The frog hopped; I missed again and took a bump in the snout.
My bell rang a second time, clearer than ever, and then the world tipped.
Sweet hay filled my nose. My knees were knobby again, and morning light sliced a cloud of familiar dust. I was back in the barn, and then Ma was swishing her tail, like she always did, telling me, “I notice you.” I tried to step closer, but my hooves were planted. I tried to say something, but my lowing caught in one of my stomachs. Clara—John’s Clara—sat on the milking stool and talked while her hands kept time over the pail. She was telling Ma about a circus she’d seen: big gray cows with long snouts and floppy ears and humans who’d learned to be birds with a rope—her voice and Ma’s voice and the pail making one song. I drank it in. The fire hadn’t happened. I had no name. I was so moved, I don’t mind saying, all I could do was smell the morning dew and listen to their song and look at every little thing right down to the scratch in the plank beneath Clara’s boot—
A thud brought me back. The boards I’d bumped had fallen flat, smacking the dust. Letters were scribbled on the other side: M. ROBINSON.
The frog, having announced himself as the author of my misery, bounced into the knot of men. The man flashed his coin. “Call it for the hat, Boyle.”
John’s head jerked up like he just got bit by a pesky fly. He nodded.
The man tossed his coin. The silver turned over in the air and plopped onto his palm, and he smacked it to the back of his other soft hoof.
That’s when the frog grabbed hold of my tail. If you’ve never had a frog grab hold of your tail, then you may consider yourself lucky.
So, there I was, swatting my tail at this ignominious varmint trying to accomplish heaven knows what with my posterior. I may have spoken my mind some while swatting. John caught my eye, and with a crooked grin: “Tails, gentlemen.”
Tails it was.
While the frog rejoined itself to the fencepost, a few men made that inside-jump sound humans make like they just swallowed a grasshopper.
Coin-man scowled. He flipped again, harder. The frog leapt, and my bell rang.
Slap. “Call it!”
The frog landed between my horns.
In an effort to dislodge the dastardly devil, I nodded. John’s eyes met mine. “Heads.”
And that’s how it was.
“Ain’t fair. Boyle’s got a cow,” someone said. There were chuckles as the little green imp mocked me from a fencepost. That’s when I had a right devilish idea. A spark of fire that might’ve leapt from a lantern and swallowed a barn whole. My notion was this: it’s my swishing and nodding that determined the coin. What if—
I resolved to put my idea to the test.
Another flip. Ring. The frog stayed put. My ear had a twitch, but I did not give in. I swished my tail instead.
“Tails,” John called out.
And that’s how it was. I felt one of my stomachs shake. I couldn’t be sure just yet. The frog was up on a rain barrel now, watching with an evil glint in his eye. Cretin.
The coin flipped. I felt a bite on my rump, but I nodded instead.
“Heads.”
John’s back was turned to the man, eyes locked on mine. The knot in my stomachs found its way to my horns, and I knew the one way to be sure.
The coin flipped.
My rump itched. I did not swish. I did not nod, either. I held perfectly still, looking steadily at John Boyle.
The silver glinted in the lamplight, a single spark at the peak of its spin. Then a green streak exploded from the rain barrel. With a flash of sticky tongue, the coin simply vanished from the air.
That darned frog had leapt out and swallowed it!
The crowd went quiet as a gaggle of geese in church. Some of ’em had their hooves on their foreheads. Then it was stomping and shouting, and a few were chasing after the green devil that had just taken the man’s coin for his supper like it was a fly. Coin-man was cussing and stammering and blaspheming and turning red; the frog simply watched the hubbub from atop that barrel with a peculiar look on his face.
But John Boyle—he put his hand on my shoulder. He was looking at the bell strap with the old piece of his sister’s dress threaded through it.
“Clara?” His voice was quiet.
For a flash his face looked like the barn before the fire. Things were where they ought to be.
The crowd hushed.
“What you got there, Boyle? A pet or a prophet?”
John did not look at them. He turned his face to the sky. A wild, broken laugh escaped him, like the screech of a rooster who’d just learned a secret. He spun and pointed a trembling hoof at me.
“A patch of Providence, Clara!” The men exchanged uneasy glances.
He stooped and snatched up the fallen boards then leapt onto the low railing, holding them aloft like a holy tablet: M. ROBINSON.
“He’s gone mad, you say!” John bellowed, voice raw. “He’s listening to a cow, you say!”
He swung the sign, nearly taking off the coin-man’s hat. “That’s when I knew! Time to stop shoveling feed… and start selling FATE!”
He jumped down, eyes blazing like coals. The men stepped back.
John took a deep breath and pointed the sign at me.
“Gentlemen,” he said. “Before you stands the only bovine in Cincinnati—nay, in these United States—who possesses knowledge of things which have not yet come to pass.”
A wicked grin spread across his face. He flung the sign aside and snatched the satchel from the ground, holding it over his head.
“This very night,” he boomed, “I looked into the eyes of this cow, and I heard, clear as a bell, the voice of my sister, rest her soul.”
John’s eyes found mine. Then he was only talking to me. His cheeks were wet, and his voice was breaking. “We were going to the circus that day…”
He snapped back to the crowd, voice rising from a broken whisper to a roar that could shake a mule.
“Providence, gentlemen! You have not witnessed a game of chance! You have witnessed the BIRTH of the greatest traveling show this side of the Mississippi! The inaugural performance of its star attraction! CLARA! THE! CLAIRVOYANT! COW!”
John stood panting. His knuckles were white around the satchel’s handle. The men were frozen.
Then, he dropped the bag into the dust. He leaned in, and his hat fell to the ground beside the sign. The “M” had landed upside down. He tilted his head.
“And, gentlemen,” he said, looking down at his hooves. “I am no longer John Boyle.”
He straightened, gazing out over their heads. “I am John W. Robinson.”
The herd of men must not have known what to do. A few backed away slowly. A rooster called in the distance; the sun would be up soon. The man with the coin just stared with his mouth open, making him look an awful lot like the frog. Then, one by one, they turned and shuffled out of the alley, leaving the quiet and the dark to settle back in.
John stood there for a long moment, and he looked like a calf again, knee-deep in blackened rubble. He picked up the splintered boards with his new name, put them under the crook of his arm.
Then he looked at me. Walked over, mud squishing under his boots. Smelling like dust and lightning; trembling like a rabbit who just outran a fox.
“There y’are, Clara.”
The sun poked its head over a building, and it was the truest thing he’d said all night.
There I was.
And there he was.
The frog, I mean. Slick as sin, he hopped from the top of a rain barrel and landed without a sound on the brim of John’s new hat, like a little green king on a felt throne.
John didn’t swat him. Maybe he didn’t feel him. Maybe he didn’t mind. Maybe it was the frog vapors that got to him. He just reached into his pocket, pulled out his coin, and gave it a flip.
I swished my tail, and I nodded my head.
