Free Kinfolks by Lisa Alther Page A

belong to a slavering bull named Caesar. I wave to him with a middle finger.
    I let myself into the cabin at the bottom of the hill. It was built around 1820 by a saddle maker named Everett Mahoney on land stolen from the Cherokee. Mahoney was the son of an Irishman who came to Philadelphia from Dublin as an indentured servant in 1773. Much of our area was settled by former indentured servants and their children, who streamed south from Pennsylvania and west from the Virginia Tidewater once they served their terms. Mahoney built this cabin from squared chestnut logs and paneled it inside with planks of black walnut.
    I dump my gear in the front bedroom and climb into my father’s boyhood bedstead, completely exhausted. It’s not every day that I consider cuddling Christian copperheads or get chased by a homicidal bull. As I doze off, I make a mental note for my article that the impulse behind both snake handling and bullfighting is probably the same — to combat rural boredom by tormenting lethal creatures.
    The next morning I phone Len, the son of Caesar’s owner. Younger than I, he wears his hair hanging loose to his shoulders. He sometimes rides an ATV up the valley to check on the cows, leaping around the hills on it like a mountain goat on speed. Despite his mountain-man persona, no one could be nicer or more helpful. Except perhaps his parents, Paul and Wanda, who are probably the kindest and hardest-working people I’ve ever known.
    As a child, I used to watch them harvest tobacco in the field beside our pond. They cut each leaf from its stalk. Holding a stem in both hands, they’d impale it on a metal spike fitted over the end of a wooden pole. Once a pole was packed with leaves, it was pitched like a tepee with the leaves spread out around it to dry in the sun. Then the poles were hung in the rafters of our barn to cure. One time Wanda ran her spike through her hand. But she just wrapped it in a rag and kept on working.
    Whenever one of my brothers expressed interest in dropping out of school, my father would send him to work tobacco with Wanda and Paul so he could experience his future without a formal education. After a few days, he’d be thrilled to limp back to class.
    â€œLen,” I say when he answers his phone, “Caesar nearly gored me last night when I came in.”
    â€œOh, yeah,” he says, “we was having trouble with him, so we put him in your field.”
    â€œThanks a lot.”
    â€œIf he bothers you, just shoot him with your shotgun.”
    â€œI don’t own a shotgun,” I reply through gritted teeth.
    â€œWell, get you one, then.”
    â€œI don’t want a shotgun.”
    â€œWell, just reach down like you was gonna pick up a rock to throw at him, and he’ll back off right quick.”
    â€œLen, get that bull out of our yard!”
    â€œOkay, no problem,” he says amiably.
    I sit down on the porch and gaze out at the pond, where migrating mallards are paddling around on a rest break. A hunched blue heron stands in the shallows, still as a statue, waiting for some hapless minnow to pass by. Bluebirds and cardinals flit in and out of the bushes behind him.
    Beyond the pond stretches the valley. It’s narrow and flat with steep hills on either side. Clusters of black-and-white Holsteins are grazing all along it. At the turn of the twentieth century, a doctor named Home lived in this cabin and reportedly hosted horse races down that valley.
    The silence is soon broken by a racket of grunting and snorting. Len has evidently returned Caesar to his harem. He’s now standing at the electric fence that separates the dairy cows from the beef cattle. Opposite him looms the Black Angus bull, whose herd of cows and heifers is grazing behind him, oblivious to his heroics on their behalf. The two bulls snort at each other and paw the ground, as though they’ve been watching too many documentaries on Pamplona.
    They take a