My $2 Million Bull Broke Through the Fence Into the Convent Next Door. The Nuns Refused to Give Him Back

The phone rang at five in the morning.

“Mr. Brady? This is Sister Agatha, from Mercy Hill. Your bull is in our chapel garden.”

I sat straight up in bed.

“Is anyone hurt?”

“Only the roses,” she said. “He’s eating them. He seems to prefer the yellow ones.”

I’m Colm Brady. Forty-eight, Irish-American, single, and the owner of the best Angus herd in northern Missouri. Four thousand acres outside Kirksville, and a bull named Thunder who weighs twenty-two hundred pounds and is insured for two million dollars.

Thunder doesn’t leave his pasture. Thunder doesn’t leave anything. Thunder is the laziest animal I’ve ever owned.

Except that night, apparently, he’d walked through a fence, across a creek, and into the garden of the Sisters of Mercy Hill.

I was there in eleven minutes, with a halter, a bucket of grain and my foreman.

The garden was a disaster. Rose petals everywhere. A birdbath on its side.

And in the middle of it all, lying in the grass like a very large black dog, was Thunder. His chin was resting gently on the knee of an eighty-one-year-old nun in a gray habit, who was sitting on a garden bench scratching between his ears.

Five more sisters stood around him in a protective half-circle.

“Sister,” I said carefully, “I’m so sorry. We’ll pay for everything. And I’ll take him right home.”

Sister Agatha looked up at me with very calm blue eyes.

“I’m afraid not, Mr. Brady,” she said. “We’ve voted. He’s staying.”