"My laundered
work jacket is folded and tucked neatly in the back of my jeep beside my
clean work boots, as if I'm only waiting for the weather to change before
putting them on again."
No cows to
worry about any more
By
Audrey Montana
I am not fretting
about cows in the maternity barn. I don't have to think about
them night and day, whether there is a first calf heifer that is going
to need assistance, whether the old cow will get milk fever and not be
able to get up after calving and will need tending within a few minutes.
I don't have to get up out of a warm bed to go pull a calf or change a
pulsator or fix a vacuum pump. I don't have to assist with a C section
at midnight under the stars and a floodlight any more. My father
no longer calls me at 3 a.m. to tell me the milker didn't show up for work.
My clothes are clean
now that I don't have cows. The back of my jacket isn't covered with
straw from stretching out beside a cow in labor; the front isn't covered
with the blood of pulling calves. I haven't had a piece of placenta
stuck to my shirt all summer. My boots have been washed and polished
and the pair of shoes I bought since the cows were sold have never had
manure on them.
My laundered work
jacket is folded and tucked neatly in the back of my jeep
beside my clean
work boots, as if I'm only waiting for the weather to change
before putting them
on again.
My skin isn't chapped
and tanned from the wind and the sun any more. Now I don't have pens
full of cows to walk each day while I check every cow individually, watching
to see how she looks, how she walks, how she's eating, how her udder is
bagging up; I don't have groups of cows to move each day to the milking
pen, to the milking barn, to the maternity pen, to the bull pen.
I think I'm starting to look pale from being in the house.
It's fall but there
are no heaters to check or fix so the water won't freeze in the tanks in
the pens and the pasture this winter. There won't be any fence to
put up around the corn stalks after harvest. There won't be any reason
to get into my old jeep on a winter morning and drive through the fields
and see pheasants running to the bush or hawks soaring overhead while I
check fence in a place where there is nothing to hear but the snuffling
of cows as they push away fresh snow to find forage.
There's no silage
to pack into the pits and no trucks full of green bales of alfalfa to watch
for and direct them down to the commodity barn to unload. The police haven't
called me to say the cows are on the road by the neighbors or heifers standing
on the runway preventing the cropdusters from landing at the airport.
And when a stray heifer bolted through the tables of merchandise at the
sidewalk sale on Main Street, nobody called me to see if I had one missing
- I read about it in the paper. And my old black jeep full of tools
and extra boots and winter caps and halters and vet supplies and spotlights
is still sitting in the driveway like it's ready to go, but my father keeps
telling me to put a for sale sign on it and park it by the road.
And although the
men are still farming, even that has become distant from my life:
the old diesel engine that ran the well by my house has been replaced with
a quiet electric motor. I don't have to go into the middle
of the field to check the drip oil twice a day; I don't wake up in the
night when the well stops running and know there is something wrong because
it's quiet. The two semis with their long trailers are parked in the bean
field. Since it takes quite a while to fill them, no drivers are
sitting around. The man in the combine just calls someone on the
radio occasionally to come and empty a truck and bring it back. No
bobtail trucks are needed there, so I am only watching them harvest from
the window.
When I go to the
farm office, I no longer make a pass by the maternity barn and all the
pens first. (It took a few weeks to train my jeep to stop doing that.)
It's very, very quiet. There are not only no cows, there are
no men busy working, no one carrying buckets of milk across the yard to
bawling baby calves, no hired men driving in and out, no milk truck pulling
in, no feed wagons or trucks moving tons of feed, no tractors cleaning
pens, no vet coming to do preg check, no dairy supply and maintenance crews
or even salesmen showing up, nothing to do but paperwork and nothing to
wait for.
The straw and calving
pens have been removed from the maternity barn. Now a
yellow loader and
a small green tractor are parked in it. The blade we used to push
up feed has been taken off the little tractor and sold. We disconnected
the yard lights that used to come on at dusk because we don't need to see
to walk the maternity pen at night.
The huge milk tank
has been sold and moved out of the room that was built to hold it.
The tank room stands just about where the north end of the old milkhouse
was, where a refrigerated room stored full cans of milk until it was time
to take them to the station and load them on the milk train. There
hasn't been a milk train for many years. Now there is no milk to
cool and the hole they cut in the building to move the tank out has been
replaced with a garage door and the room is a wash bay for pickups and
machinery.
In back is the laundry
room where the washer and dryer used to be running all the time, washing
the cloths for the milking barn. Now there's no hot coffee waiting
in the pot, no burritos or tortillas to be warmed up in the microwave.
This is where we gathered for breaks and meetings and we sat on white lawn
chairs and 55 gallon barrels of soap while we changed our boots and talked
about which cows were ready to dry off, which cows went off milk in the
morning, the load of new heifers coming in and where we were going to sort
them and who went to the dance Saturday night and whether the music was
good.
I hung racks for
work boots by the outside door, a line of hooks for coveralls on the north
wall, and a row of smaller hooks for coffee cups above the cabinet by the
washer. There was a clothesline holding clean, starched white work
shirts in the corner. The shirts had names sewn on them: Norberto,
José, Audrey, Ramon, Luis, Gaspar. We ate hot peppers
out of the can with tamales someone's wife had just made, and cheese and
candy homemade from our milk while we drank steamy hot cups of coffee and
spoke a mix of English and Spanish. After especially long or hard
or dirty jobs, sometimes in extreme wind or cold, we'd end up together
in that room, shedding our coveralls and catching our breath and someone
would always say, "not bad, for a boonch of keeds!" and we would laugh.
It was a warm and good place to go for a hot cup of coffee after walking
the pens on winter mornings.
The three corral-side
doors (one for the milker, two for the cows) that lead into the milking
parlor have been boarded over and nailed shut. Before they closed
up the parlor, they used the pressure washer to get everything clean and
then painted it white. It still smells like fresh paint, instead
of cows, if I peek in through the swinging door from the milkhouse.
Sometimes when I
can't sleep, I think it would be nice to have a barn full of cows to go
check.
Selling
the dairy cows
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