What he did was to crate the animal up and send it by prepaid air express to Darroch’s mother in St. Louis. O’Hara did this with neither permission from the lady or warning to her. Jane’s grandmother was understandably both upset and confused. She did not want the dog, had no facilities for caring for it, and therefore was forced to take steps towards its disposal.
When O’Hara told me about these maneuvers, he did so in the high good humour of someone who feels he has accomplished a genuinely clever coup. Kate also appeared to feel that an essentially brilliant joke of some sort had been played. When they recounted their prank to Dorothy and me, we both had the sudden, uncomfortable feeling that we were listening to people who were not entirely sane. Fortunately there was no grave question of cruelty to the child involved. The dog was such an impossible pet that even Jane’s predictably prejudiced view as the beast’s owner could not envision his permanent tenure. But exactly why O’Hara had chosen to badger an aging and harmless widow with a malicious, apparently senseless prank was mysterious to say the least.
The child, who could not have been much more than ten at the time, was equally confused. Her watchfulness towards O’Hara became even more steely than it had been before and she confided to Dorothy that “she did not like his jokes.” It occurred to me that O’Hara might be deliberately fostering a breach between himself and the child, but as yet I could see no credible reason for such a pointless and foolish act.
In any event, O’Hara’s vagaries could not be allowed to occupy my mind for long. The few weeks before Bill’s auction rapidly shortened to days and there were many plans to make regarding the future and many councils of war to hold devising the means to make the success of those plans possible.
My mother, heroine of the exchequer as always, agreed to advance the funds necessary for the expansion of the farm. In conference, she, Dorothy and I settled upon the sum of $10,000 as the top amount we would pay for Bill’s place. I had high hopes that it might go for less. The one thing that could drive the price higher was the very eventuality that Bill was hoping for: that it would be bought by some townie who had plenty of money and wanted it solely for recreational purposes and for its beauty.
And so, May 5, the day of the auction finally arrived. Auspiciously enough, it was a lovely day, warm and balmy with the early Appalachian spring. By that time Dorothy and I were old hands at attending auctions but our bids had never been offered on anything of greater magnitude than hand tools, plows or the occasional piece of furniture. As I write now, I have before me a copy of the handbill which advertised the sale. It is a euphoric and wholly American document. Headed by advice of a free wristwatch to be given away to some lucky visitor, it goes on to advise of sale by absolute auction of Bill’s farm of 75 acres located on the “Glade” road 7 miles West of Wytheville, Va. The list of personal property for sale is preceded by the words: “Mr. Retired Man This Is It!” The bill concludes with notice that lunch will be served by the ladies of Mt. Pleasant PTA.
When the bidding got to $10,000 that morning, I was fairly certain that I had lost my chance to buy the place. And the bidding got to that figure ominously fast. Indeed, it turned out that the very thing Bill had been hoping for had happened: someone was after the place to use as a recreational place in the country. Whoever the gentleman was, he must have placed approximately the same ceiling on his price as I had on mine for, at ten thousand, the bidding slowed practically to a halt. At that point, I received nudges from both my wife and my mother to continue past the limit we had set ourselves and I did so. By fits and starts, my opponent and I got to the point where the last bid had been $10,000. from me. After a very long pause, he made it $10,550. With absolutely no hope at all that I could drive him out but feeling that I would have one more, almost wholly symbolic try, it made it $10,555. I’ll be damned if the five dollar increase didn’t turn the trick. We were now the owners of a farm totaling 165 acres and, while we were a long way still from being in the Grade A dairy business, we now had the requisite land to do so.
It was then early May. My intention was to be well enough set up by fall to begin milking nine or ten cows and be able to apply for Grade A status. There was no guarantee whatsover that one’s application would be acted upon favorably but the probability was that the permit would be granted if the proper requirements had been met. To do so was going to necessitate a prodigious amount of work between now and our proposed date to begin marketing milk. With pencil and paper, in my head and with requests for advice up and down the country, I had been working on the planning aspect of the problem for the past two months. Therefore I had a fairly sound and specific idea of what I wanted to do and how I wanted to do it.
There are two essential methods of dealing with milk cattle. The most traditional way is to house them throughout the winter in what is called a stanchion barn. Most dairy farmers today believe that this is an inefficient system. In this system, the cows are kept imprisoned with their necks in stanchions before, during and after milking. The only two positive points of such a system are these: denied contact with each other, the cows tend to escape minor injuries of the udder which lead to a disease called mastitus, which is nasty, wasteful of milk and expensive to cure. The other positive aspect of the stanchion barn system is simply that the cows have more warmth if kept inside during the cold months.
On the discredit side, the list of points against the stanchion barn system is practically endless. The most important of them are connected with labour. The cow eats, voids and is milked in the same place, which means that everything, milking machines, cleaning up equipment and feed, must be brought to the cow. I think most dairy farmers would agree also that the stanchion system creates a low state of physical well-being among cattle. Finally, the stanchion system is murderously expensive to install. In fact, I think it is safe to say that farms which cling to the stanchion system do so only because their solidly built, cement-floored barns were built by an earlier generation. The expense of building such a burn today would be prodigious and the rewards dubious.
The system which I had settled upon utilized an L-shaped structure called a milking parlour. The cows wait for entry to the parlour in a narrow runway which assures that they remain in single file and do not quarrel about precedence and pecking order and thereby injure themselves. Inside the parlour, a single operator stands in a pit some three feet below the level on which the cows will enter. Facing him are three stalls made of steel rails with a swinging gate at the rear and at the front of each, which the operator can control from his pit by levers. By a system of ropes and pulleys, he can also open and close the entrance and exit doors to the parlour as he pleases. Assuming that an operator is fully set up to begin milking his cows, this is the procedure: A milking machine is hooked up, ready to go in each stall and the cows moo and anxiously await entry in their runway. The operator simply opens the rear half of the gate of the stall furthest to his right, making it impossible for the first cow entering to go anywhere but into that stall. He then hauls the door open with his ropes and pulleys, the cow enters and proceeds to the stall at which point the operator swings shut the gate which imprisons the cow in a space comfortable but too narrow to permit much movement by the cow. The operator then proceeds to do precisely the same thing until all three stalls are occupied. As he finishes milking each cow, he removes the milking machine, opens the front half of the steel gate and allows the cow free passage to the barnyard by opening the exit door with the system of ropes and pulleys. He then proceeds to allow a new cow to fill the vacated stall, and repeats the process. The constant flow of cattle through the parlour allows the operator to minister to the herd without moving more than a few steps left or right.
The small room in the center of the long stroke of the L is a feed room where the ground corn and protein supplements are kept. Between one and five pounds of this feed is given to each cow during milking, the amount depending upon her capacity to produce. The gift of this grain also serves to preoccupy the co
w and settle her down for milking. The room in which the feed is kept also contains the hot water heater necessary to provide for the proper washing of the milking equipment.
The particular milking system which I had decided to install was called Surge and is manufactured by the Ford Motor Company. I doubt that it differs seriously in principle or performance from any other. Mine was a marvellously simple and efficient machine whose heart was a vacuum pump located above two stainless steel sinks in the room which forms the serif of the L. In the center of this room was a huge stainless steel tank which received the fresh milk through a Pyrex tube and immediately began the process of cooling it to 45 degrees. This tube ran from the tank through the feed room into the milking parlour proper where it followed the same L-shape as the building.
From it descended a connection at each milking stall to which was attached a milking machine. When these were attached to the cows, the vacuum pump would cause a pulsating motion which drew the milk up into the glass tube, along it through the feed room, and finally deposited it in the huge stainless steel tank. The milk, therefore, was literally never carried or even handled.
When the milking was finished, the milking machines were hung on a rack in the two stainless steel sinks and the same vacuum pump automatically washed and sterilized the entire system by driving hot water, detergent and, finally, rinse water back and forth through the pipes.
In addition to its primary purpose, incidentally, the milking parlour is also ideally conceived for the subsidiary care of milk cattle: medical treatment, artificial insemination and preventive sprays against pests and parasites.
The other factor in caring for milk cattle is their feeding. A good milk cow consumes roughly three tons of coarse feed during a winter. Rather than feed cattle solely on hay which would also require a fantastic amount of storage space, most farmers feed both hay and corn silage in a ratio of two tons of silage to one ton of alfalfa hay. Even at that ratio, it meant that I would need a barn capable of holding at least 30 tons of alfalfa hay if I were to have the herd of thirty milking cows to which I aspired. Roughly one thousand bales of hay would be required. Accordingly, my intention was to build a 60 by 60 foot hay storage barn in conjunction with what are called “loafing sheds”. Because the hay stored in it would rest upon the ground and not on the floor of a loft, the structure need support no other weight than its own. The cattle would have free access to the loafing sheds on either side of the central hay storage section. What manure they deposited in those loafing sheds could be covered with straw then cleaned out each spring with a tractor loader and spread upon the pastures. I had been told by many farmers who used the loafing shed system for feeding their cattle that the cattle would elect to remain outside the barn when not actually feeding except in the coldest of weather. This turned out to be perfectly accurate.
I called my friend, Tiptree, the night after the auction which was a Saturday. He agreed to come over the next day to take a walk around the new place with me and discuss my plans. When he arrived, we went over the plans for the big barn and the dairy barn. He made several very valuable suggestions about their placement which took into account problems of drainage I had not accounted for.
After we had finished our discussion of the proposed construction, Tiptree and I took a walk through the timbered portion of the farm. He confirmed what I had thought to be true: There was more than enough first-class timber to mill from my own trees all the lumber for the two barns and to pay for the milling by trading a like amount of milled lumber to the contractor who undertook the job. I asked Tiptree if he could recommend anyone who would take on the timber cutting but he could not. Furthermore, he warned me that the men who did that sort of work were a tricky lot and to be careful in my dealings with them. Never was better advice given; the chicanery of the man I eventually hired to cut and mill the timber led finally to the only law suit I have ever been involved in my life. Curiously enough, the law suit would lead indirectly to a grotesque and definitive confrontation between O’Hara and me a year later.
As we walked around the farm that day looking at the timber, I knew Tiptree was figuring his price to build the two barns and I was holding my breath. I wanted the barns completed and ready for operation by fall. Finally, hemming and hawing, Tiptree allowed as how if he could wait to start the job until his two sons were finished with their semester at VPI and available to help him, he could do the job for $1900. Even then, it was an unbelievably low price. Today it seems like a joke. With the timber coming off my own land, I was going to be out of pocket only the cost of cinder block, hardware and roofing materials. And, as it turned out, the total cost of my milking parlour, the machinery inside it and the 60 by 60 hay feeding and storage barn came to less than $12,000. Tiptree and I shook hands on the deal which was fulfilled by him to the last jot and tittle. Once, long afterward when he stopped by my house and we were having a drink, I confessed that I had been a bit apprehensive as to whether or not I might get screwed. Tiptree smiled his lazy smile and said, “Hell, Jawn, you cain’t screw a friend.”
Past experience had taught me to have considerable faith in Luther, the friendly livestock dealer from whom I had bought. Vacca, the sheep and the two doomed pigs. Accordingly, I now went to see him and advised him of my plans for setting up a dairy farm. Everything I had read and everything I had been told had convinced me of the wisdom of buying only the finest stock I could possibly afford. I wanted young heifers due to come fresh in the early fall with their first calves and I wanted them to be from the same farm. For the simple reason that a going farm keeps its finest heifers and sells only the culls, this was a trickier proposition than it might appear. However, from time to time, successful dairy farms would be sold at auction and Luther specialized in buying cattle at such sales. By giving him plenty of warning, I knew that he would have time to find me something good. These would, after all, be the nucleus of the future. It was my intention to do all the future breeding through artificial insemination; the sires of the future calf crop would be literally the finest money could buy and the furthest I could extend to now in terms of quality among the heifers would pay huge dividends at a future date. Too many times had I seen dairy farms in the neighborhood which were turning in a mediocre to poor showing because of indifferent cattle bred to just any old bull of the same breed in order to keep them on the production line.
As far as the specific breed, I had very little real choice. Since butterfat had ceased some years before to be a factor in the price paid for milk, the high-butter fat, low-volume breeds such as Jerseys and Guernseys were not really practicable. The majority of the higher-volume breeds such as Ayrshires and Brown Swiss were too scarce in the locality to work and the have-your-cake-and-eat-it plan of milking Shorthorns to sell both milk and beef I am convinced always comes to a bad end. Which left Holstein-Freisians as the logical candidates. By that time, Vacca had been bred (artificially, of course) and it was time to turn her dry. So, to get my feet wet, I bought a recently-fresh young Holstein cow for family use, planning to incorporate her into the herd in the fall. That cow’s name escapes me now but I remember that the same feeling of rapport and mutual warmth that I obtained with Vacca was quite definitely not present. After milking little old Vacca, crawling under this beast was like sitting under the dome of St. Peter’s. She was a most undocile cow which was probably just as well; she prepared me for some of the wild Indians I would later own. Dairy cattle, let me add, are frequently less peaceful than their bovine image suggests.
The search for suitable cattle now having been laid on and Tiptree having agreed to take in hand the building of the barns, the number one priority automatically became the cutting and milling of timber for the barns. In June, Tiptree would be ready to begin and the lumber must be ready and available. Timbermen prepared to take on such a task as mine proved to be in fairly short supply. However, I did finally locate a man called Ralph who showed interest in the job. I would like to be able to say that I was aware of Ralph’
s penchant for crookedness from the first but I cannot. He was a nondescript little fellow who made no great impression upon me one way or the other. He owned the proper equipment and had the knowledge to do the job and that was that. He came, looked over the situation and said that he would be willing to take on the job. He also offered me an astonishingly large amount of cash for a cluster of five or six big poplar trees standing at the top of one of the pastures. It was that which decided me and we made a deal on the spot. He was to bring his saw mill equipment in and set it up on the spot; he would then cut and mill the so many thousand board feet required by Tiptree for the barns and a like amount which would be trucked away and sold in payment for the labor involved.
To give Ralph, the sawmill man some credit, he was a hardworking little devil. But he never did actually bring his mill to my land, a fact which gave him the opportunity of robbing me. When he explained that the job was really too small to warrant setting up the mill, I complied in his request that he be allowed to truck the cut logs away to his place and return with the milled lumber. The only trouble was that, having no way of checking into the number of board feet which could be milled from a given log, I was pretty well at his mercy. It is my considered conviction that Ralph was taking twice as much as he was returning but this suspicion neither dawned nor became certainty for some time. The reassuring fact was that the timber for the barns now began to accumulate slowly but surely. It was mighty lumber, great oaken six-by-sixes and two-by-eights of a length and grade one would be hard put to find in a lumberyard.
We had long since decided that we would change our place of residence to Bill’s house on the new farm. It was a smaller house than our present one; indeed the three tiny upstairs bedrooms were little more than cells. I expropriated one for an office of sorts, one was apportioned to Linda (then coming up on her third birthday) and the third would be available for the new baby due in the fall. However, we could not make the move immediately; there were the formalities of closing the transaction to be gotten through and Bill and his wife needed time to get organized for their hegira to the promised land of Utah. I must say in passing that the prospect of removing to the heartland of his religion had done wonders for Bill’s spirits. Normally tending towards the lugubrious, he now moved about in an absolute cloud of exaltation. In retrospect, I find his high spirits at leaving the locality very easy to understand. There is little inspiration for the indigenous among the southern mountains. This is why there is a grudging respect behind my sallies at Bill; he needed to go and he was psychologically wily enough to hook up with a religion which would give him the impetus to go.
Maggie's Farm Page 17
