Maggie's Farm

by Sherry, John;

  “What’s that mean?”

  “She won’t have her calf for a week.”

  “You mean we’re going to have a cow and a calf?”

  “So it seems.”

  “I thought we were going to get just a plain cow.”

  “Well,” I said with a certain tone of superiority, “cows do have to have calves, don’t they?”

  “Are you nervous? You certainly look nervous.”

  “Of course, I’m not nervous,” I said with what I hoped was a sufficient show of conviction. Inside my head, I was repeating the phrase, “a week”. I had a week’s grace. Like a condemned prisoner, I did not really believe that the moment would actually arrive when I would mount the gallows. That night however, I slept fitfully.

  At the crack of dawn the following morning, a horn sounded in front of the house. I staggered to the window and peered out blearily. A large covered truck like a moving van stood before the house. Clearly, my new cow had arrived. I threw on my clothes and hurried out.

  “Mornin,” the livestock dealer said.

  “Mornin,” I replied, trying my best to maintain a suitable rural calm.

  “Funny thing about that little old cow,” he said, “I would have bet my boots she wasn’t gonna come fresh for a week or two.”

  “So you said,” I replied, icy fingers clutching at my heart.

  “Be durned if she didn’t throw that calf last night. Bull calf, I’m afraid. Sorry about that.”

  I could not believe my luck had deserted me so cruelly.

  “You mean there’s a cow and a calf in that truck?”

  “Take a look.”

  Heart quaking, I walked to the rear of the truck and peered in over the tail gate. What was actually in the truck was a very pretty little Jersey cow and her new-born calf. What seemed to be in the truck was a combination of Cerberus and the Loch Ness Monster with its young.

  “Ain’t she a beauty?” the livestock dealer asked enthusiastically.

  “She certainly is,” I lied.

  “Where do you want her?”

  “Down at the barn, I suppose.”

  He pulled his truck into the dirt drive and moved slowly along it towards my tumbledown barn. I followed morosely on foot. Courage, I told myself, forward and don’t show the whites of your eyes.

  We unloaded the cow and calf and ensconced them in a sort of loose box within the barn, nailing a couple of planks across the entry so they could not escape. I now abandoned my pride.

  “What do I do now?” I asked the livestock dealer, a note of desperation in my voice.

  “Well, you know how to milk a cow, don’t you?” he asked in some surprise.

  I could not bring myself to admit the truth. I lied in my teeth and said that I did. The livestock dealer undoubtedly had begun to suspect the truth. Fortunately, he was a gentleman.

  “I brought you along a couple of bales of alfalfa hay that’ll see you through the next few days. You just give her some hay and leave her alone with the calf for a day or so. She won’t be ready to milk till then. For the first day or so, she won’t give nothin but colestrum so you just let the calf have that. If her bag seems to be getting too full, just relieve the pressure my milking some of the colestrum out on the ground.”

  I nodded as if he were not suggesting feats as far beyind me as a ten-second hundred-yard dash. We unloaded the bales of hay and then went back to the house to conclude the financial aspects of the transaction. As the livestock dealer folded away my check in his wallet, he said, “You got yourself a fine little family cow there, Mr. Sherry. You ain’t gonna have a bit of trouble with that little old cow.” I nodded bravely in agreement and he took his departure. For the balance of the morning, my wife gave me a wide berth, aware that I was contemplating my own personal Golgotha.

  During the morning, I made several visits to the barn. The cow and her calf seemed to be getting along as well as could be expected. In truth, Vacca (as she came to be called) was a small cow even for a Jersey; to me, she appeared to be the size of a full grown moose and I though I could detect a baleful gleam of resentment in her dark brown eyes. God, how I hated and feared that cow and the life that had brought me to such a pass.

  During the course of the day, we had one or two casual visitations from neighbors who wished to examine our cow. Although we had been in residence little more than a week, we had been visited several times by neighbors tendering small gifts with the quiet, inbred courtesy of hill people. We were as strange to them as Martians but the advent of the cow seemed to enable them to place us in a more operative perspective. The concensus of opinion among those men who came to look over our cow was that we had made a good purchase. Then, late during the afternoon, as a neighbor and I were examining the cow, he said, “I’ll tell you somethin, Mr. Sherry, that cow don’t look right to me. In fact, that cow looks downright poorly.”

  I looked at the cow and realized immediately that he was right. The cow had suddenly grown very unsteady on her feet and, as we watched, she slowly sank to the ground. Panic rising rapidly, I asked the neighbor what he thought the trouble was.

  “Probably milk fever,” he said.

  “What do I do?” I asked, trying to keep my voice from rising.

  “Well, you got to get the vet. He’ll give her some kind of shot and she’ll likely be all right.”

  “What if I don’t?”

  “She could die on you. No, you better call the vet. One thing though, Mr. Sherry is that milk fever shows you bought yourself a pretty good cow. Sorry cows just don’t get milk fever.”

  Clutching this frail reed of consolation, I telephoned a veterinarian and explained the situation. He said he would be along directly and was as good as his word. Having examined the cow, he concurred with my neighbor’s diagnosis: it was milk fever. He explained that this was a sickness resulting from calcium deficiency and prepared a hypodermic containing a massive injection of calcium. The cow responded with amazing rapidity to the treatment. Within two hours, she was back on her feet, eyes alert and showing interest in her feed. The vet told me that what my neighbor had said was true by and large: that only cows of high quality tend to come down with milk fever.

  Carrying a lantern, I examined the cow one last time before going to bed that night. She seemed fully recovered and her calf was working away busily on her bag. It did not seem too distended. I decided that I could give myself one more day’s grace before trying to milk her.

  I passed the next day absentmindedly knocking down old plaster walls. But my heart was not in the task; I was much preoccupied with the coming ordeal. My thoughts were a mixture of those of a young knight preparing for his first tournament, and a terminally-ill patient putting his affairs in order. In the afternoon, I drove to the local farmers’ co-op and purchased a very professional looking stainless steel milking pail and a three-legged stool. It seemed unfair somehow that I should be forced to pay for the implements of my own torture. Still—as I was beginning to repeat to myself like a litany—nobody had forced me to this dreadful pass; I was there solely of my own choosing.

  The next morning, I dawdled over my breakfast as long as possible even though I knew the business could not be postponed indefinitely. Finally, I gathered my new pail and stool and remarked to my wife with what I hoped was suitable jauntiness that I guessed I’d better go milk that cow. She smiled encouragingly but there was a certain tightness about the smile which deprived me of its solace. It was about half past seven when I set out morosely for the barn.

  Both cow and calf appeared to be in good shape. The calf was butting and sucking away lustily at his mother’s bag while she munched placidly away at her hay, showing no effects whatsoever from her siege of milk fever. As I entered the stall, they both turned to examine me. I could not help feeling a certain sarcastic sense of “Get him”, in the cow’s calm gaze.

  The first problem was to remove the calf from the immediate scene of operations; my confidence was frail enough to start with, without having
the calf butt away at his mother’s bag as I attempted to milk her. I removed the lower rail from the entrance to the stall, manhandled the calf outside, and then replaced the rail so that he could not re-enter. The calf took immediate umbrage at this and began to bawl loudly, a disturbance conducive to the peace of mind of neither me nor the cow. I then loaded up the cow’s manger with fresh alfalfa hay and made her fast enough with her halter rope so that she would have a limited amount of play while I tried to milk her. The fresh alfalfa hay, would, I hoped, prove succulent enough to the unfortunate beast to conceal her owner’s ineptitude. Having accomplished those small tasks, I went out and sat on the creek bank to smoke a cigarette and examine the sky for signs of succor. None were forthcoming. Finally, I took my pail and stool and advanced to the fray.

  It seems odd now to think that I could have ever been afraid of Vacca who became, later on, such a pet. She was, in fact, a perfect love of a cow, the most gentle beast imaginable. Bad-tempered cows are not uncommon and, in time, I would own a few. If Vacca had turned out to be such a beast, I am certain it would have coloured my entire attitude towards milk cattle forever. However, as I made my highly tentative entry into her stall that day and stealthily placed my stool by her side, I was convinced that I was dealing with a bad actor and that I would be seriously kicked within seconds. Vacca made a few abortive motions with her leg which sent me scurrying for cover, but after about fifteen minutes, I managed to overcome my terror enough to sit beneath her on my stool. Still far from trusting me totally, the beast at least no longer seemed consciously malevolent.

  Planted insecurely on my stool beneath the cow, we exchanged one long glance composed of supplication on my part and contemptuous curiosity on hers before she turned back to her manger. The moment seemed auspicious and I laid tremulous hands upon the two teats nearest me. Holding them gingerly, I began to make tentative up and down motions such as I remembered the farmer in Canada having employed. Even though her teats had been dripping milk when I took to my stool, precisely nothing now happened as a result of my ministrations. Still, I was rather pleased with myself. I was, after all, seated beneath the cow, actually pulling on her teats—and this was, in my heart of hearts, further than I ever thought I would get. A slight tinge of euphoria was born; it seemed to me that I looked both competent and professional as I pulled away at the poor beast’s teats in what I felt was the approved manner. I increased the speed of my motions and smoothed out their tempo. Still, nothing happened; Vacca turned to examine me wonderingly a time or two before turning back to her hay in seeming resignation to her proprietor’s ineptitude. I jogged along happily for a while, certain that things would turn out all right. But they didn’t; not a single drop of milk appeared. A feeling of leaden fatigue began to attack my forearms.

  Milking a cow (or not milking a cow as I was then doing) places an almost unbelievably arduous strain on the arms of anyone not accustomed to it. Some months later, Darroch came to visit us on the farm, bringing with him some archery equipment whose virtues and beneficial effect upon the soul he was then extolling. A far more powerful man than I, he warned me rather contemptuously that the bow required extreme pressure to bend and that anyone such as I who was not used to shooting the thing would not be able to do it. He was absolutely right; my brother, who was present also at the time, tried to bend the bow and succeeded only in getting it half way back before his arms began to shake and then collapse. Conditioned, by that time, to the twice daily milking of a cow, I was able to bend the bow without strain.

  Now, as my untrained arms jerked and hauled upon poor Vacca’s teats, the strain proved too much. My arms began to tremble and I had to desist. I crawled out from beneath the cow and went to sit beside the creek again to smoke another cigarette and try to figure out what I was doing wrong.

  What I was doing wrong—or, to be more precise, what I was not doing at all—was based on complete ignorance of how a cow’s lactation system functions; I did not get very far in my diagnosis of the trouble, therefore. No one had told me that there is a certain amount of voluntary cooperation required on the part of a cow before she can be milked. A cow must be induced to “let down” her milk, particularly when she is in strange circumstances (as Vacca certainly was), or after calving when she is tense and upset. This can be accomplished by bathing her bag with a warm cloth. Once she has “let down” her milk, the problem is simply one of squeezing the milk from each teat, using one’s hand as a pump and then relaxing the pressure for a second while the teat refills itself. The jerking and pulling motion I was using may have seemed terribly stylish to me but what I did not know was that it couldn’t and wouldn’t extract one drop of milk from that poor cow. Having no way of knowing any of this, I returned to the wars on the same old terms. With exactly the same deplorable lack of results.

  Thus I strove for what seemed an eternity, pulling and hauling until my muscles would no longer stand it, resting for a while and then pulling and hauling some more. As my frustration grew, so did my anger. Although, it was a brisk morning, I was stripped down to my shirt and wringing wet with sweat. The only positive benefit accruing was that it was beginning to dawn on me how fortunate I had been in drawing such a good-natured and long-suffering cow. Vacca was, indeed, a family cow. She continued to view my macabre fumblings with mystified and resigned eyes.

  Finally, through sheer luck and fatigue, I cracked the case. The muscles of my hands and forearms became so cramped that I could no longer use them with any effect. In desperation, I reached out with only my thumb and forefinger and gently ran them from the top of her teat to the bottom. I had unwittingly stumbled upon a technique known as “stripping.” With no hope that I was doing anything still other than going through the motions, I did this a number of times. I could hardly believe my ears when I heard the ping of a feeble stream of milk hitting the bottom of the empty bucket. Unbelievingly I continued as the streams of milk grew stronger. An understanding of the entire process suddenly flooded my mind and I changed naturally from the “stripping” motion to a squeezing motion. The milk now hissed merrily and foamily into the pail. In half an hour, I had actually succeeded in milking the poor cow dry. I had begun the attempt at seven thirty in the morning. At twelve thirty that afternoon, I staggered back up the hill carrying a full pail of the richest milk I have ever seen. Never, before or since, have I been so proud of myself.

  Our ownership of the cow provided certain benefits as real in the psychological sense as they were in the physical sense. We now had unlimited milk; the humiliating visits to the supermarket were over. Jersey cows are noted for the extent of the butter fat content of their milk and that which I obtained from Vacca was literally too rich to drink. At an auction, we bought a second hand electric churn for five dollars and Dorothy began to skim the cream from the milk and put it aside in a crock. Before too many days, Dorothy was turning out more butter than we could possibly use, as well as buttermilk and cottage cheese. We soon discovered that only a small fraction of the cream obtained sufficed for our needs and that it was possible to sell the rest in Wytheville. Every week, we carried a gallon or two of cream to town. The actual amount of money we got for it was negligible—about five dollars a week. For purposes of morale, however, this little bit of money was invaluable. Pittance though it was, it was a pittance being earned by our farm and thus an augury for the future.

  More important, there was now some form of animal life on the farm: the place ceased being a total abstraction. And life has a way of turning into more life. My mind now began to toy with the idea of hogs. No garbage truck calls in the hills of Virginia and the disposal of excess and leftover food presented us with a real and rather messy problem. Pigs are, of course, natural garbage disposal units so I hied myself back to my friendly livestock dealer to discuss the purchase of a couple of shoats. In due course, they arrived and I installed them in a pen near the barn where I built them a small shelter sturdily, if rather sloppily constructed by affixing boards to Locust posts sun
k in the ground. We subsequently raised these pigs to maturity, had them slaughtered and cured at the local locker plant and enjoyed our own bacon, ham and sausage for some time as a result. However, this was our sole venture in pig raising; hogs did not bring out the best in me.

  They fascinated me, I admit. Many a time, I have let an hour go by as I leaned idly on the rails of their pen watching them. The affection and reverence I felt for Vacca, as a source of both good nature and good things was entirely reversed in the case of the pigs. My attitude towards them was Shavian in concept and one of basic horror. Pigs are brutish, insensitive and concerned only with eating their way to their own extinction. Worst of all, they brought out a streak of cruelty in me that I had been unaware of previously. Never having before displayed sadistic tendencies, I now found myself going out of my way to give one or the other a kick. Once, later on, when a stray hog got into our garden, I shot him in the rear end with a shotgun full of birdshot and I confess shamefacedly that I enjoyed his squeals of pain as he ran away. This rather worried me until I unwittingly discovered that pigs tend to bring out the worst in everyone. Reading a farm magazine one night, I came across an article called, poetically enough, “Take It Easy On That Hog”. Its point and purport were that this pig-hate I felt was so common that farmers were cutting their own throats by bringing hogs to market whose hides had been damaged by senseless acts of violence. Somehow the knowledge that pigs were universally detested enabled me to curb my dislike of mine and I was kinder to them after that. But I decided that I wanted no more pigs in the future.

  Shortly after buying the pigs, I made one other foray into the purchase of livestock which eventually turned out to be rather interesting. Our land, as I have said, was poor, overgrown and in need of lime and fertilizer which we would eventually apply. I had been told that sheep or goats would eat a great deal of those poor land growths which a cow would disdain. Goats somehow did not seem our speed at all. However, I talked over the idea of sheep with L., the livestock dealer, and he agreed that a few sheep might be profitable and would certainly benefit the land. Accordingly, we bought and installed fifteen ewes and a ram. They were silly animals, appealing from a distance but noxious upon closer acquaintance. They required little or no maintenance, however; even during the winter they live almost completely off the land; an occasional bale of hay thrown into the fields when there was snow on the ground was all they needed to survive. ((It is rather interesting to report that those sheep were an amazingly profitable venture. I paid $300 for the lot and kept them through the winter, spring and most of the following summer. When I finally sold them, I found that from their wool, the lamb crop and the resale of the ewes and ram, I had made over $700.))