Why oh why, tell me why could it be, that when a cow's tied up, her calf won't leave

The expression surfaces in the novel as a sung refrain, a catchy little ditty that The Narrator and The Husband perform together, arms around each other, as they walk home. The song's words pose a simple, plaintive question: why, when a cow is tied up, does her calf refuse to leave her side? The question is posed in the singsong register of a nursery rhyme or folk song, yet the scene that prompts it is anything but innocent. Moments earlier, the couple had watched a herd of cows grazing peacefully together, only to see the animals suddenly separated from their calves. The bovine mothers raised a massive scene, mooing so loudly they grew hoarse, doing everything they could to resist — but their babies were taken away just the same. The Narrator waves goodbye to the calves, calling out "Bon voyage," while the stunned cows remain by the side of the road and vultures arrive in time for lunch, holding their cutlery and napkins. The ditty thus emerges directly from this spectacle of maternal anguish, transforming a scene of violent separation into a singable, almost comic refrain.

The Song as a Response to Separation

The timing and context of the song give it a double edge. The Narrator and The Husband sing it together, arms around each other, in a moment of apparent closeness and affection — "We love each other so much," the narration insists. Yet the song's subject is the bond between a mother and her calf, and the helplessness of that bond in the face of force. The cows' desperate, hoarse mooing and their futile resistance mirror a deeper pattern in the novel, in which The Narrator's own experience of motherhood is marked by ambivalence, resentment, and a sense of being bound to a child she cannot fully embrace. The song's question — why the calf won't leave the tied-up cow — carries an implicit answer that hangs over the entire narrative: because the bond is involuntary, instinctive, and indifferent to the will of either party. The calf's refusal to leave is not a choice but a compulsion, just as The Narrator's own attachment to her son is presented throughout the book as something she cannot simply walk away from, however much she may want to.

The Ditty and the Novel's Recurring Animal Imagery

The song belongs to the novel's dense web of animal imagery, in which human feeling is constantly refracted through the bodies and behaviors of nonhuman creatures. The Narrator describes herself elsewhere as a startled deer, a sad, sensitive deer, and the novel's menagerie includes dogs, stags, moles, barn owls, rats, and spiders, each carrying its own symbolic weight. The cow and calf fit this pattern precisely: they are creatures whose emotional lives are legible through their bodies — the hoarse mooing, the stunned stillness by the roadside — and whose suffering is observed from a slight distance, at once sympathetic and detached. The Narrator's wave and "Bon voyage" to the calves capture this double stance perfectly: she acknowledges the tragedy of the separation even as she frames it as a departure, a journey, something to be waved off with a cheerful farewell. The song itself performs the same operation, converting grief into melody, turning the cows' anguish into a catchy tune that can be sung on the walk home.

The Song's Place in the Couple's Dynamic

The fact that the song is sung by The Narrator and The Husband together, with their arms around each other, is significant within the larger arc of their marriage. The novel charts a relationship defined by conflict, misunderstanding, and the Husband's repeated attempts to control and correct The Narrator's speech — he tells her that when she speaks it is like a car alarm, unbearable, and urges her to take a pronunciation course or do a language exchange with a local. Yet here, in the aftermath of the cows' separation, the two are momentarily united in song, their voices joined in a shared refrain. The ditty thus functions as a rare moment of harmony between them, a brief suspension of the verbal warfare that otherwise characterizes their interactions. But the harmony is itself ironic, because the song they sing together is about a mother's loss of her child — a loss that, in the novel's larger structure, The Narrator both fears and desires. The couple's togetherness is built on a song about the pain of separation, just as their marriage is built on a child whose arrival The Narrator openly regrets.

The Song as a Lens on the Novel's Themes

The ditty condenses several of the novel's central preoccupations into a few lines of folk verse. It speaks to the inescapability of maternal bonds, the way attachment persists even when it is unwanted or harmful — the calf will not leave the tied-up cow, no matter what. It speaks to the cruelty of the social and familial structures that enforce separation, the way calves are taken away "just the same" despite their mothers' resistance. And it speaks to the novel's broader interest in the gap between feeling and expression, between the raw anguish of the mooing cows and the tidy, singable form of the song that contains it. The Narrator's own narrative voice operates in this same register throughout the book: she reports devastating events in a flat, almost cheerful tone, punctuated by bursts of rage and despair. The song is a miniature version of this entire aesthetic — a way of holding pain at a distance by turning it into something that can be sung, waved at, and walked away from. The final lines of the scene, "Someone else's misfortune is a swift kick from a horse," extend the same logic: the cows' loss is observed, acknowledged, and then converted into a proverb, a piece of folk wisdom that lets the observer move on. The ditty, like the proverb, is a way of managing grief — of making it singable, portable, and finally, survivable.