Mad Cow Nightmare by Nancy Means Wright

Author:Nancy Means Wright [Wright, Nancy Means]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Mystery
Publisher: Belgrave House
Published: 2005-08-27T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter Fifteen

There was no placating Ruth, Colm knew that. Still, he tried. He stood over her where she had flung herself back, exhausted, on the horsehair sofa. Standing gave him better leverage. He loved the woman, but jeez, she was hard to control. Not that he wanted to control—Colm was a man of the twenty-first century (more or less)—but he at least wanted equal influence time.

“You have to give up fighting the feds, Ruthie. They’re bigger than you are, they’re an organization.”

“I hate organizations. I hate the establishment. I hate—”

“Ruthie, please. The sixties are over. This is two thousand—”

She covered her ears, scrunched up her eyes. “I don’t want to hear your argument.” Her forehead was one wide wrinkle.

He sighed, sat down on the edge of the sofa, but she didn’t move to give him room. She had to understand. This was bigger than both of them. This was a plague. “Two contaminated calves, Ruth, can lead to a total wipeout. The whole of Vermont sick. The world. You have to open your eyes.”

She sat up, grabbed his arms, pinched. “But that’s just it. We don’t know they’re sick. We don’t know that Nola woman is sick—not with CJD, anyway. There’s no grounding for this. You read this morning’s Free Press. They’ve lowered the Mad Cow death forecast. Only one hundred thirty-two people have died of it—and most of them in Britain.”

“I read it, yeah. And they admit they don’t know. They just don’t know. It could still be a hundred thousand, the way it takes years to incubate. And there’s no blood test to find out how long it does take. Some Nobel prize neurologist saying we don’t know where and how prions move through the body before they show up in the brain.”

“And they tried to take all my calves, Colm, all eight of them—with no prior notice!”

She wasn’t listening to him, that was a fact. He sighed, and kept trying to quiet her. “So that was a mistake. The head honcho called this morning to apologize—you told me that yourself. The guys who came for them got it wrong. Human error, that’s all. You got to allow for mistakes. They only want the two calves.”

“But the rest are in quarantine! I can’t sell the bull calves, I can’t sell the milk from my cows. We still have to milk but then we spill it into the ground. And we’re not supposed to tell anybody! As though Agri-Mark wouldn’t know, for one, when they come for the milk and we turn them away.” She had a point there, he thought. “They might as well lock me up, Colm, build a wall around the farm, put up a sign that says Polluted.” She put her face in her hands, pushed her fingertips into her skin.

“Ruthie, don’t cry. I can’t stand to see you cry.”

“I’m not crying. I’m angry. I’m furious! I’m a one-woman mad machine!”

She was crying, spilling snot and tears all over the black horsehair sofa. Okay, he wouldn’t mention it again.

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