On the eve of the first Shabbos of Av, Ben wakes to a sliver of moonlight, shining in through the grain of the slats. He gets up amid the small space, finds a rusting, whirlwindreaping scythe propped lazily in a recess, against the woodenwall sunk in straw, makes to hack His way through the lock, slices it down to splinters, rips a gash of door in the door in a single sharp sweep: there’s darkness without, still’s quiet, a night. Free and about to quit the cow-shed, make an escape, He hears a lowing the sound of a shadow within, a low and susurrant moo, full of loneliness, sympathetic grief. What else but the cow, the Joysey, the heifer red and as huge as its sound: red the shade of its odium, it’s never been yoked. Insistent on following Him from town to nowhere as these reformed Amish of greater York, they make their rounds to plead help; curiously, it wouldn’t milk unless it’d been allowed to follow, and no one intended to grieve it, foolish to even tempt at its vex: God forbid it should die or be rendered otherwise impure before it goes for undreamt gelt at Philadelphia market or auction, hope, to that mensch from the Temple up north made an offer, in the big city, who trusts them, who’d afford not to these days…that deal means future, survival — a refurbished kindergarten, just think of it, the new mikveh, the lease of a new cemetery, too, and a bier bought to own; and so they’d tied the cow off to the cart, led it on, never letting it tow, not even thinking, such defilement, shtum.
Ben stands — His legs flung doors apart, facing the open. As the heifer stampedes its charge straight ahead, at Him, determined and quick, its horned head down underneath Him, carrying Him over then onto its mass hairily red and pulsing in muscle, and then out and into the night. As if told to Him, but it’s no talking cow, not all of them are — revelation transmitted up from its beating, breathing hide dirtily wet to His tush and then into His mind, Ben understands He’s not to lead but to follow, to be led, only to ride. He surrenders Himself to the heifer, winding its ambly ramble down the pike east into the liberty of Philly, toward its columns and cobbles, its kites, keys, and cracked bells, through its ritzy, Rittenhouse streets, heading for the riverfront alleys, Penn’s Landing past the statues tugged fallen, monumental malfeasance, skyscrapers lacking for glass; the heifer hoofing them through the following dark, a slide across the Delaware’s ice, enacting Washington’s crossing but now in reverse; through the hushed middle night of wharf and warehouse collapsed, of boats frozen to shelter slips and gullish middens — Ben tightening His thighs around the heifer’s flanks, holding fast with the fist of His loins.
