Page 34 of The Bride
Anyway, it was summer and that meant I needed to start learning about ranching full time. This morning after breakfast Jake was going to introduce me to semen.
Don’t be gross. Not that kind of semen. Bull semen.
I was following Jake to the pen, wearing my cowboy boots, jeans, and a T-shirt. I followed his tradition of using a baseball cap to keep the hair out of my eyes and the sun off my face.
I realized how much I liked this. I liked working outside. I liked that we had this thing we needed to do every day. Of course I had grown up with chores. Feeding chickens, gathering their eggs, mucking the stable, taking care of Petunia. I knew what ranch life was. But I didn’t know what being a rancher meant.
Maybe because I hadn’t ever thought of myself as a rancher. That was my dad. What I told Jake was true. I had come to grips with understanding that this was my destiny. My responsibility.
What I didn’t know was if I was going to enjoy that destiny. It was a little scary to think… what if I hated it? What if this was my life, and I was totally not good at it. Or freaked out by it.
We were talking about bull semen here. I was going to have to handle bull semen.
I wrinkled my nose and tried to be cool about it. We got to the pen and I followed Jake up the wood slats so that I was above the fray of cows. Currently we had a little more than four hundred cows, which translated to sixteen herd bulls. Jake explained everything I needed to know about cow fucking.
“See that one there, that’s Guss, he’s your most fertile,” he said, pointing to one of the large bulls, who was currently doing the nasty on the back of a cow.
“Tell me how you can tell again?”
“He’s the strongest, and tracking the DNA through the calves each year he’s inseminating over thirty cows per cycle. That’s a lot. But Hank over there, he’s getting on in years. He’s probably going to have to be replaced next year.”
“And I want a four-year-old?” Jake had been through this, but the more I went over it the more it helped to stick.
“Four is okay, you have to be careful he’s not getting in the way of Guss. Sometimes the younger ones will get a little ornery. If they’re doing all the breeding and you’re not getting calves from it, that’s a problem. And remember you have to check the…”
“Penis. Yes, I know.”
That’s right. Some bulls overworked their dick, and it broke their penis. Seriously, this was information I had in my head now.
We watched for a while as the bulls kept banging it out. You could tell by the cows’ tails, which were up and crooked, which ones had already been tapped. The best part about using herd bulls was that you didn’t have to worry about knowing when the cows were in heat. Evolution and biology took care of all that, and the bulls just knew when the time was ripe.
All this sex, even if it was cow sex, made me squirm a little. I looked over at Jake, who I knew was taking all this banging very seriously. This was work, after all. Our livelihood, when you thought about it. We needed baby cows to grow up and become sellable meat. That’s how we lived.
Still.
“Does it get to you at all?” I asked him.
“What?”
“You know… all this sex. I mean it’s this constant stream of… well, sex. Does it make you think about it? After all you and Janet have been broken up for months now…”
I stopped talking. He was giving me thatI’m disappointed in you, Ellielook. Not one of my favs.
“This is serious business, Ellie.”
“I know. I’m taking it seriously. I’m only asking, is it hard for you? Literally?”
He huffed. “I’m not having this conversation with you.”
“Fine. I’m saying it’s a little hard for me and I don’t even know what sex is like. You must be on edge.”
“I’m fine.” He said it, but it was this clipped hardI’m fine. Like he wasn’t really fine.
“Maybe you should do something about it.”
He gave me a hard look. His jaw tight. This was territory we didn’t typically encroach on, but I thought it was important to… give my permission, so to speak.
“Dude, I get it. You’re a guy. You don’t have a girlfriend and your job for the foreseeable future is to monitor animal breeding. If you need to find a little relief… well, you should feel comfortable doing that with someone. We’re married, but we’re notmarried.”
