Drive - A Memoir 27th Installment
If
we want that heifer to go somewhere, it won’t go there, no matter
how much we scream and wave our arms, and if we try to stop it, we’re
going to get hurt,” I picked up a stick, intent on inflicting
serious pain and charged after the heifer whooping, hollering and
wielding the club overhead. The cow actually seemed to sense my anger
toward it and raced out the gate before I could do damage in its hind
quarters with my club.
Russ
thought this was pretty funny; we laughed at each other quite often.
Russ said, “I remember when we used to take a bucket and the
one–legged stool and walk up to the cow in the field. Most of the
time, the cow would stand for us because it needed to be milked to
ease the pressure. Old Rosy would let down her milk when she saw us
coming, so by the time we would balance on our mono seat, bucket
between our knees, and grab the teats; the milk would already be
spraying out like four tiny squirt guns.”
The
cows, even though their care was difficult and infuriating, formed
our work ethic, the stimulus of our responsibility to animals. Russ
and I formed our ‘drive’ as much from the cows as from the
teachings of our parents and the owners of the many farms where we
worked. They needed care and feeding, but mostly the necessity of
milking every morning and every evening at the same time no matter
what. If they went too long and they let down their milk the cows
would suffer; at the least the milk would drain away to relive the
pressure but at the worst there would be damage to the utter causing
mastitis that would hurt them and also hurt us because we can't sell
mastitis milk. The mastitis milk and the colostrum milk (this milk is
pink) that cows produce the first five days after calving we would
feed to the pigs. The family never missed a milking! Once in a while
Russ and I would need to be away and Vernon and Linda did the chores
and milking, but that wasn't very often.
“Old
Rosy,” I filled in when Russ stopped. We named our cows. Let me try
to give you a rundown. There was “Boss,” the old cow with a
crumpled horn (truly) that would come in from the field when we
yelled for her. The Old Man would holler ‘CO BOSS, CO BOSS,’ and
Boss would come in on her own. The others, being simpleton cows,
would fall into line and follow her. Hence the term ‘cow path,’ a
trench worn into the earth by a long line of brainless cows following
each other. Boss could fill two or three buckets in one milking or
sometimes nearly five.
Buttercup
was a miserable bovine, if there ever was one, a real nervous Nelly,
constantly moving around. Sometimes the dance
500 more words tomorrow
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