Drive - A Memoir 28th Installment
would
take you and your bucket in full circle before you were done; or
worse, she would pick her hoof up high and step down, so you would
have to constantly protect the bucket. You could be almost finished,
stripping out the last drops and maybe not protecting the bucket, and
she would raise up her hoof and stomp down inside the bucket. The
milk would spill, but what was worse, the pure white milk would turn
greenish brown from the manure on the milk soaked hoof.
Then
there was ‘Pet,’ getting her name from being so tame. When Pet
calved for the first time as a yearling, the calf was stillborn.
Vernon picked up the dead newborn, and as he carried it to the
tractor, Pet followed him. From that day onward the doe–eyed cow
figured that humans were her babies. She was so tame you could do
anything around her or on her. We could put Eddie or Jerry on her
back, and the cow would walk around in a circle giving our little
brother a nice ride.
There
was ‘Rosy’ and ‘Linda’ (named after the parents first born)
and ‘Jinx’ and ‘Whitey’ and several others I don't remember.
Then
there was ‘Spot,’ the meanest #@!*%@ in the herd! This cow's real
danger was her kicking style. Spot was a sweep kicker. Here, let me
explain. Every cow in the history of dairy cows kicks differently.
Whitey would kick back straight behind, a real danger to someone
strolling by the rear end of that cow. Linda would slowly raise her
foot up front to her belly and then swiftly kick back to where she
was standing. Whitey, you could handle by pushing your head into her
flank (the narrow indention in the cows side between her leg and her
belly). If you were a hard headed farm boy and could take the
pressure of the huge animal trying to raise her leg forward with all
her strength, you could stop the kick. That was the good news – the
bad news was by doing this you usually got a head full of lice from
the cow. When our head would itch we would go to the cinder block
shop where there was a fifty gallon drum of rotenone (DDT), a gift
from the great Hamer train wreck, and work a handful of the powder
vigorously through our hair with our fingers. Lice cured.
Okay,
Spot! This cow's roundhouse kick was the most devastatingly lethal
kick of all time. She would raise her leg, kick out to the side, and
then kick back with a sideways kick like a demented side–arm
baseball pitcher. The sweeping kick would gather up the bucket, the
milk stool, the human, and even the cat waiting for a squirt of milk,
and throw the whole kit, cat, and kaboodle against the back of the
barn.
“We're
very clever boys,” I told Russ one day as we clamped Spot into the
500 more words tomorrow
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