You only have to let the soft animal of your body 

love what it loves. 

 –– MARY OLIVER 

​

The calf inside me is soft and shy. Its head rests behind my breastbone. I feel it thinking,  Hayfresh, or, Dandelion, the flicking of its calf-dreams like a tail at my ribs. My calf’s heart  beats slower than mine. My calf frolics and the hooves tap-tap in my belly. My calf strains and  yearns and I push down its head, rough, and tell it, No, you are not ready for the open field, no,  you are not enough grown. 

It was my thirteenth birthday when the calf first stirred in me. I blew out the candles and  licked the buttercream from my slice and Arn with his bad leg propped on a chair told me I was  no longer a milky sop-boy and that as my father it was his job to beef me up. There’s a bull in  you waiting to burst out, he said. And he beckoned me close and cuffed the side of my head,  tenderly, tenderly. 

I felt my calf kick that night. Its thoughts shivered into mine: Lovelick? Beef you up, I  whispered back to it. Bull you. 

Arn takes me to see The Sire in the next-door field. The Sire is enormous and white with  dirty horns, his chest a ridge of flesh that swings as he grazes. See the brawn on him? Arn says,  leaning on his stick. One and a half tonnes of pure muscle right there. He points to the pouch  hanging below. That’s where the good stuff is, he tells me. The pouch is the same colour as The  Sire’s nose, a sweet damp pink, naked, vulnerable as an egg. I imagine cupping my hands around  it, keeping it safe. 

In the mirror I watch for signs of the growing bull but my chest stays thin and dinted. I  wait to feel the prod of horns nubbing from my calf’s head. Arn feeds me on boiled mince and  roast-in-the-bag chicken. In the evenings he sits and watches wrestling on the telly, his bad leg  stretched out on its stool, his chicken-greased fingers gleaming like the muscles that bulge from the wrestlers’ thighs. 

My calf gambols on tottery legs. It thinks its coddled thoughts: Nuzzle, cudsweet. Early in  the morning I go to The Sire’s field and watch him at the bale feeder. I concentrate hard on his  taut flanks, his piled-up shoulders, the ripple under the hide when he ambles to the water trough. I whisper to my calf, Pure muscle, that. My calf opens and closes its nostrils. It likes the hayish  scent of the bullfield, the sough of wind through the long grass. It likes the tickle when a ladybird  lands on my wrist. 

At the back of the house, Arn is using belts to tie pillows to a tree. Over his shoulder he  tells me it’s about time I learned to throw my chest out. We’ll get some heft on you yet, he says.  Your grandfather had me hauling stone at the quarry before the hair grew under my arms. You’re  from good stock, that’s what matters. He breathes hard and I can tell his leg hurts him. Arn took early retirement after his injury and had to shower sitting in a chair with a plastic bag on his leg.  I once found him lying on the bathroom floor after he’d slipped getting out. He’d been there  hours without making a sound and when I got my hands under his armpits he strained away from  me, his neck blotched like a smack. 

You’re hitting like a milky sop-boy, he says when I hurl my fist at the pillowed trunk.  And keep your legs wide. I think of The Sire, the heavy roll of him. Into my calf’s ladybird  daydreams I send bullish thoughts: Heft, pure muscle, good stuff, beef up beef up beef up. My  knuckles skid on a belt buckle and the sound that comes out of me is all yelp, no bellow in it. 

My hand throbs red and blue when I lie in bed. In the dark field behind my lids I come  face to face with my calf. Its hide is the colour of buttercream, a lick of forelock over one eye. I  set my hand on its bony rump. We’ll get some heft on you yet, I tell it. My calf’s nose is shiny  and wet and its song goes, Dewgrass, cometoyou, milklip. I harden myself and raise my fists. I  square myself up. 

The Sire hulks around his field and I eat my mince and wrap my knuckles in old socks  and flail at the tree while Arn frets over the slackness of my arms. When my calf soft-lips at my  insides I pummel it down and tell it this is for its own good, that we’re on the brink of bullhood. I  feel the pull of its bewilderment and sometimes I relent, let it lay its head close to my heart  where it dreams of dandelions. 

One morning comes sudden with a whitish spill, sticky on my thigh. I touch the wetness and weep over the milk that has spurted from me, milky sop-boy, the cow-calf I have failed to  rear into a bull. 

Downstairs, Arn is leaning at the sink, staring through the window to where the pillows on the tree sag with overnight rain. Beyond, the squarish bulk of The Sire moves slow behind his  fence. Arn tells me, He’s to be retired soon. No more siring. It’s the mincer for him. His voice is whispery as he says this and the skin around his eyes is pink and thin-looking. I am reminded of  The Sire’s naked pouch, and because of this I place my palm on my father’s cheek, and he lets  me, and the cow-calf in me rises tender to nuzzle, and behind my father’s skin I feel the slow thudding heartbeat of a wearied beast longing for a bed of straw, a slatted sky, and a loving hand to scratch those places hardest to reach.