Demon Box

He didn’t deny it, chomping away with altar-boy innocence; he didn’t brag about it, either. It wasn’t his style.

The seasons wheeled on. Our herd soon doubled and then some. We banded the baby bulls, ate the fatted steers, and spared the heifers toward the time when even I get it together enough to realize my dairy farm vision. As the herd got bigger, it got blacker. Better than two thirds were now three-quarters black, with fading smatterings of Guernsey, Jersey, and Oregon Mongol. Abdul got broader and less dainty, yet never lost his altar-boy demeanor; he never butted or assaulted a heifer with that typical show of cruel strength that gives origin to the name “bully.”

No one ever saw him score; taking advantage of his natural camouflage, he chose darkness for his wooing ground. If his midnight nuptials sometimes took him through a fence or two, he usually returned before dawn; when he didn’t, there was never any attitude but gentle obedience toward any of us who went to fetch him back. The only anger I ever saw crimp his brow was aimed at no human but at the bull who serviced Tory’s herd across the road, an old blowhard Hereford. It was easy to see why. After every broad-daylight hump of some sleepy heifer, this rednecked old whiteface had to parade up and down his fence and bawl his boasting across the road at our young Angus. Abdul never answered; whenever Old Blowhole across the road started, Abdul always headed for the swamp.

At length, Betsy began to worry about the number of our herd and about the size of some of Abdul’s daughters. They were getting “that age,” as it were (and as the nasty neighbor bull was quick to make clear whenever one of Abdul’s virgin daughters grazed past) and old enough to be capable of inbreeding. I personally didn’t think Abdul would stoop to incest, but who wants to take a chance on idiot veal?

“What can we do?” I asked Betsy. We were walking along the fence, checking our charges over. Across the road Tory’s bull was following, huffing up some new diatribe.

“Pen Abdul up, or auction him off, or sell him, or—”

She stopped, drowned out by the whiteface. When his harangue bellowed back down I asked, “Or what?”

“Or eat him.”

“Eat Abdul? I don’t want to eat Abdul. That’d be like eating Stewart.”

“Pen him up, then. That’s the way you’re supposed to keep breeding bulls…”

“I don’t want to pen him up, either. I wouldn’t give Tory’s bull the satisfaction.”

“That leaves sell or trade. I’ll put an ad in the paper.”

We found no one wanted to trade anything but deer rifles or motorcycles. And the cash orders came not from kindly cattle breeders but from local beaneries seeking bargain burger.

After a month passed without any results from our ads, and after a night helping Hock, our neighbor to the east, separate Abdul from the half-dozen Charolais Hock’d just bought, I decided to try the pen.

The tie had been replanted, the rails replaced, but not since Hamburger had the little square been occupied. Abdul entered without a squawk. To my surprise, he had to squeeze in the gate that Hamburger used to pass through easily.

“Abdul ol’ buddy, you’re big enough to know some of the harsh facts of life,” I told him as I fastened the gate. “It ain’t all free love and frolic.” Abdul stood without comment, munching the bucket of green apples I had used to lure him. Watching from across the road, Tory’s bull had a lot to say about his rival’s incarceration. He was terrible. All afternoon he kept up his needling of Abdul with bawled innuendos and sexual slurs. By the time I went to bed, the Hereford had worked up to downright racial insults. I promised myself to have a few words with old man Tory about his beast someday soon.

Old man Tory beat me to it. He was there at sunup, cracking at the windowpane of my front door with a flinty old knuckle.

“Yer bull? Yer gor-gor-gordam black bull?” He was shirtless and shuddering violently, from both the morning chill and the heat of some as-yet-unbottled anger. “Yer sell him er yer still got him tell me that!”

Tory is a toothless old veteran of some eighty embattled years of farming, with the face of a starved mink, and not much bigger. It is said that he once accosted a pair of California duck hunters trespassing after a flock of mallards they’d seen go down in the slough that gullies through Tory’s property, and had proceeded to chew them out with such snapping ferocity that one of the hunters suffered a coronary. Now, as I watched him shuddering and sputtering on my doorstep, toothless and scrawny in his bib overalls and no shirt, I feared that this might be his blood pressure’s time to blow. Soothingly I told him, why yes, as a matter of fact, I still had Abdul. “If you’d like to size him up he’s out in my bullpen—”

“The gordam hell if he is! He’s been over in my field since afore light, tearin’ up fences an’ gates an’ all sortsa hell. Now he’s into it with my bull—t’ the death!”