The Resonance of Unseen Things: Poetics, Power, Captivity, and UFOs in the American Uncanny by Susan Lepselter

Author:Susan Lepselter
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
Published: 2018-05-15T00:00:00+00:00

Ordinary Marks and Monstrous Mutilations

Cut 1

It takes six men to brand the cattle. Harry explains it at the table in the café. One of you on a horse with nine inches of lariat, and you rope the calf and get it down, tie it, two men laying atop of it while another man brands it and cuts it (neuters it). You inoculate it then too; takes less Page 88 →than one minute. Then the calf is up and running again. You keep three branding irons in the fire at the same time, so one of them is always red hot for the next calf.

Harry and Pete work these big jobs together. They know this land as well as anyone can know land. Out of their nine siblings, only one went east for good.

One day, inside Harry and his wife Joan’s sweetly decorated, tidy mobile home, Harry illustrates the shape of his cattle brand with a finger tracing in some cornmeal scattered on a counter. Like a lot of things, branding is a fading art. Back east they don’t know how to brand, anymore. Just tag the cow’s ear. That’s all.

That brand on the body of the cow marks the way things were supposed to be done, in a dreamtime before things got out of whack. It was before, a time of pride and tradition. That cattle brand done right shows an order of things. What’s fading is the sign of a ranchman’s dominion over the animal, his ownership cut into it with his knowledge and skill.

The ordinary brand on the body of the cow is the way it was supposed to be. But the animal can be marked out here by alien forces too. Sitting in the café on another day, Harry listens while some folks are talking about how they—the government, or the aliens or both, just the unknown ever-present they—also cut cattle. They brand those cows with the mark of the uncanny. I’m wiping down the tables but hearing this talk and I sit down to join them now. I’ve heard this kind of story often in Hillview before I came out to Nevada—uncanny cattle mutilation is a well-known mystery. They—whoever they might be—cut the animals down the middle with a perfect edge, and suck the blood and organs out. Some people say it’s coyotes and vultures doing this. Yeah right, I heard in Texas and Nevada both. No way it can be coyotes and vultures with a cut that clean.

Human bodies have been found that way too, some say. Cut so clean it had to be done by a laser.

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