A “No-Bull” Story
First published in print in my column, The Nature of Things
We all love a good underdog story. From children’s fairytales and famed fables to real life accounts down through history, the stories that stay with us are the ones where the low man (or girl, or turtle, or soldier) beats the odds.
This week, millions of Americans will celebrate Cinco de Mayo, or the fifth of May, even though it’s not actually an American holiday. It is a day that celebrates the date of the Mexican army’s victory over France at the Battle of Puebla during the Franco-Mexican War in 1862. It is not Mexican Independence Day—a popular misconception. Instead, it commemorates a single battle where the Mexican army was outnumbered by the French, 3:1, but still managed an unlikely victory. Not unlike the Battle of Stirling Bridge led by Scottish patriot William Wallace in the thirteenth century, when Scotland was fighting to gain independence from English rule—the historical account upon which the 1992 box office smash hit Braveheart is loosely based.
More recently, and a little closer to home, an underdog story of another kind came to me, involving a woman and a certain Brahma bull. The woman, who’s sensitivities should have precluded her from working anywhere near a slaughterhouse, was in such desperate need for employment that she found herself working six days a week on the kill floor of one of the largest beef packing plants in Nebraska.
Each day she would steel herself against the gruesome processes carried out before her—indeed, that she herself had a hand in executing—that turned live cattle into nicely packaged T-bone steaks, rump roasts and ground round.
Working near the front of the line where the beasts were first stunned before being shackled, inverted, and having their throats cut, the woman’s days were spent in intimate proximity to a never-ending line of cattle facing the last moments of life. Many times she would go home at night, weeping, remembering the cows she’d helped care for in her youth—her grandfather’s cows—their wide, kind eyes, and the docile sway of their heads as they walked, swishing their tails in rhythm, like so many of the cows that now crossed beneath the boning knife she wielded for a paycheck.
She hated the job. Hated the people she worked with who didn’t seem at all fazed by the repeated thud of one carcass after another collapsing to the concrete after being knocked in the head. She hated the cloying smell of warm blood that stayed in her nostrils long after she’d showered it off. What she hated most was the trusting way so many of the older cows entered the chute, as if expecting a section of hay or some routine treatment. When the woman closed her eyes at night, they were the ones that swam to the surface of her mind, stealing her sleep.
Until the day the big Brahma bull came on deck.
More than slightly aggravated and on the fight, the Brahma was far from trusting when he was forced into the chute. Wringing a sloppy tail over a splat-stained rump like a wind shield wiper gone haywire, he had a bellow low enough to make the shackle chains ring. Slamming his massive head from side to side, he butted the steel rails of the chute repeatedly, making it impossible for the knocker to get a clean shot. Once, twice, three times, then four. The bull would just blink and shake his head, bellowing in anger each time he was hit in the head.
Seven knocks. From below, on the boning line, she counted. When the seventh shot hit the bull in the head, he finally went down. The woman felt relieved, but then also sick. She kept working. Then a commotion. She dared to look up. The Brahma was back on his feet; they’d not gotten him shackled. And now he was loose on the kill floor. Wild with rage and terror, the bull charged down the line; workers scattered like confetti blown out of a shotgun. Head high and tail like a propellor, the bull tore through the plant, successfully reaching the loading docks where he launched himself out into the parking lot. The woman, amid the throng of workers chasing after the bull, witnessed this escape.
Out of the parking lot, down the highway, through several backyards, under a clothesline, down the alley, between lilac bushes and over a garden fence, to the woman’s ever-growing elation, the Brahma charged on.
Finally, stumbling onto a school playground, the bull found himself cornered against the high chainlink fence, one pink bra, a lilac branch, and a pair of Key overalls dangling from his horns.
The plant manager, winded from the chase, began barking orders to the other workers, to try to keep the Brahma contained until a trailer could be rounded up. It was that moment, the woman came forward to beg for the life of the bull. Having witnessed the Brahma’s valiant fight for survival, after watching so many hundreds—thousands—before him go down quietly, his brutal display of rebellion sparked something deep within her. Something immensely satisfying…and hopeful.
It’s that same spot any good underdog story hits when we hear it. Something in us wants the down-on-his-luck guy to finally get a break, or the outnumbered army to pull off some strategic magic that wins the battle. Or the bull that wouldn’t go down, to have his life spared, to live out his days grazing green pastures into old age.
Of course, that’s not how that particular story ended. The bull was rounded up and taken back to the slaughterhouse where he was finally successfully turned into hamburger.
So as you sip your margarita on Cinco de Mayo, it’d be totally appropriate to make a toast to the 2,000 Mexican soldiers who, 150 years ago, forced the French army into retreat. Or you might want to toast the woman who pled for the life of one escaped bovine. She’s the real underdog of that story. She might not have won that battle, but later on, she ended up using that experience to inform many decisions, and to this day, still credits that Brahma for entirely changing her life. And that’s no bull.
