Miss Wigglesworth was devoted to him. She fed him four times a day from a bucket with a rubber nipple at the bottom of it; she wove daisy chains to hang around his neck and marigold crowns for his head. There was no time for fairy tea parties, and it got to be December without “Ode to Autumn” being memorized as Miss Wigglesworth trudged back and forth from the springhouse to the barn with her milk bucket. The time to castrate the little bull came and went, but no one thought of it, and before long, in spite of his size, he began to behave like a bull, rearing back and lowering his head between his scrawny shoulders, swatting his tail from side to side, and pawing up dirt with a tiny hoof.

Of course Miss Wigglesworth named him Toro, and when she wasn’t looking, the children would climb into the paddock and flick a red rag in his face and shout, “Toro! Toro!” Then, when the little bull got so big that they could no longer snatch him up by the front legs and prance him around, or grab him by his little nubs of horns and fling him over on his side, they left off the red rag and took to tormenting the young bull from the loft overhead, where they would lie in the hay, calling, “Toro! Toro!” The bull would snort and stomp and ramp from one end of the fence to the other, looking for them, and they would throw sticks down on him.

After a year he had grown to his full height, and by the time he was two years old he had filled out, with a hump on his massive shoulders. The delicate shadings on his face darkened and spread so that the powerful front parts of him were a gleaming black. He grew out of his capers and twirls and feints, and now he mostly just stood in the middle of his little paddock, glowering out through the fence and munching the armfuls of tender grass Miss Wigglesworth brought him from the edge of the pond. The children stopped throwing sticks at him, and instead, grown men would come and lean on the fence and gaze in at him and say, “Uunh-unh.” Miss Wigglesworth’s bull would leave off his chewing, make a slow turn, lower his head, and glare at the men out of all that darkness. The dust would settle and everything would grow still. It seemed as if even the birds would stop singing, until there was nothing left but the sunshine and the bull’s stare, and finally the men would turn away from the fence and say, “Whoa!”