“Ha-ha, Mister Pretty, you are so noisy today!” The girl hums a nonsense tune as she plaits Adams’s tail with geraniums.
Martin Van Buren is barn sour but even he shouts out impossible promises at the turkeys from the dim interior of his stalclass="underline" “You are my constituents, my turkeys,” Van Buren neighs, “and the love I feel for you is forever.” The turkeys promenade around the yard and ignore him. Rutherford wonders if they, too, have human biographies hidden beneath their black feathers. The presidents spend a lot of time talking about where the other citizens of the Union might have ended up. Wilson thinks the suffragettes probably came back as kicky rabbits.
“I don’t understand,” Rutherford says. “Don’t you gentlemen realize that you are stumping for nothing? What sort of power could you hope to achieve out here?”
Rutherford was ready for his term to be over. He was happy to keep his promise not to run for reelection. He had been a reluctant incumbent in the first place, unwilling to leave his war post to take a furlough for the stump. Mark Twain campaigned for him, and still he never expected to win. Rutherford never knew a generous margin in the whole of his life. His victory was the most disputed in American history. A single electoral vote would have given the presidency to Samuel J. Tilden. “It was a squeaker.” Eisenhower nods. “I remember studying it in school.” Often, Rutherford wonders what would have happened if Tilden had won. He wonders if he has unjustly displaced Tilden from this stall in the blank country sun of the afterlife.
If we could just reach a consensus that this is Heaven, Rutherford snorts, we could submit to it, the joy of wind and canter and the stubbed ashy sweetness of trough carrots, burnished moons, nosing the secret smells out of grass. I would be free to gallop. The only heaven that Rutherford has known in the Barn comes in single moments: a warm palm on his nose, fresh hay, a tiny feast of green thistle made nearly invisible by the sun. At dawn, Heaven is a feeling that comes when the wind sweeps the fields. Heaven is this wind, Rutherford knows for an instant, bending a million yellow heads of wheat.
By nightfall, though, the wheat has straightened, and the whole notion of an afterlife strikes Rutherford as preposterous. “All these arguments are nonsense,” he confides to Lucy. “We are all still alive. This is still America. The stars look the same,” he continues, “and we are fed. We are here.”
Shorn
One afternoon, the sheep is not waiting for him in his stall.
“Rutherford,” Jackson sniggers from the pasture, “take a gander at this. Looks like Fitzgibbons is doing something very untoward to your wife.”
Fitzgibbons is kneeling in the center of the field, shearing the sheep that might be Lucy. Wool flies up and parachutes down in the sun. Fitzgibbons clips off first one clump of fleece and then another, until the sheep is standing shorn and pink before him. All of a sudden Rutherford’s body feels too heavy for his coltish knees. He stares at the growing pile of fleece, heart pounding, and for a crazy moment Rutherford thinks that he can still salvage what’s left of his Lucy. Perhaps there’s some way to put this wool back on the sheep’s body, to cover her up again? He paws frantically at the white curls with his hoof.
The sheep rises up out of the green grass completely bald. Now the fleck in her eye looks bright and inhuman. Worse than meaningless, Rutherford thinks. A symptom of illness, cataracts, just like Woodrow first said. Rutherford hangs his head and keeps his eyes on the ugly dandelions. He swallows the grainy pear that he has been holding to feed the sheep with. “That is not my wife.”
Independence day
On the eve of the other presidents’ push for liberty, with a whistling nonchalance, Fitzgibbons leaves Rutherford’s stall door open. The latch bangs in the wind, a sound like open, a song like no accident.
Rutherford strolls through the doors into the dusk light.
“The Fence is just a wooden afterthought,” Rutherford thinks, coming as close to its rough posts as he dares. “We’re imprisoned already.” He can feel the walls of his new body expand and contract. Tonight it’s not an altogether unpleasant sort of Heaven to be trapped in. The stars are out, and for the first time in months Rutherford has swallowed his whole ration of grain at the trough. He can feel a forgotten strength pulsing through his body. “It’s our suspicion that there’s another, better Heaven behind the cumulus screen,” he murmurs into the grass, bending and tearing at a root that tastes beautifully yellow. “That’s the trouble. That’s what keeps us trapped here, minds in animals.”
Rutherford begins to run, lightly at first. What am I, Rutherford wonders, a horse’s body or a human mind? Both options are twining together like a rope, then fraying. They are disappearing, the faster he runs. The sound of his hoofbeats doesn’t trouble him now; it doesn’t even register. They thud and they vanish. His tail is still attached to him at the root. But Rutherford isn’t trying to outrun his horse tail anymore. It sails out like a black flag behind him, its edges in tatters.
Rutherford turns and starts running again, and this time he finds that he cannot stop. The Fence is right in front of him now. It takes on a second life inside his mind, a thick gray barrier. His blood feels hot and electric inside him, and Rutherford knows from the certainty of his heartbeat that he is alive, that there isn’t any “after.” There is no reason to believe that anything better or greener waits on the other side of the Fence. There is nothing to prevent him from jumping it. There it is, Rutherford thinks, the blue lick of lightning. His eyes still refuse to focus, but now he finds that he is no longer afraid of the blind spot. This is for the Union, Rutherford whinnies, and suddenly he stops worrying about cause and effect, about the impossibility that his hoofbeats could hold any Union together, or why any of this should matter, one horse running in an empty field: none of his speed, none of his grandeur, no droplets of sweat streaming off his hide like wings, and he runs. And nobody is watching when he clears the Fence.
Dougbert Shackleton’s Rules for Antarctic Tailgating
Perhaps it is odd to have rules for tailgating when the Food Chain Games themselves are a lawless bloodbath. And that is what a lot of fans love about the games: no rules, no refs, no box seats, and no hot pretzels — not below the Ross Ice Shelf! So take these rules of mine with a grain of salt. That said, I’ve seen too many senseless deaths over the years. Some people think they can just hop down to the South Pole with a six-pack of Natural Ice and a sweater from the Gap, and that is just not the way we do it for the Food Chain Games. The Team Krill vs. Team Whale match takes place every summer in the most dangerous and remote tailgating site in the world. With the -89°F temperatures and the solar radiation, not to mention the strong katabatic winds off the polar plateau, it can be easy to lose faith, and fingers.
Antarctic tailgaters know exactly how hard it is to party.
So: how to get ready for the big game? Say farewell to your loved ones. Notarize your will. Transfer what money you’ve got into a trust for the kids. You’ll probably want to put on some weight for the ride down to the ice caves; a beer gut has made the difference between life and death at the blue bottom of the world. Eat a lot at Shoney’s and Big Boy and say your prayers. Take an eight-month leave of absence, minimum, from your office job. Kill your plants, release your cat, stop your mail. It’s time to hit the high seas.