We drove across the West Virginia/Ohio border to a farm where there were four cows for sale—a Brown Swiss bull and three Jersey cows. Two of the Jerseys were mature milkers, and one was still a heifer. I was there to pick from the girls.
If 52 had any reservations about getting a cow, he didn’t say so.
“What about hay?” I asked as we crossed the river into Ohio. “How much hay do cows need a year?”
I was worried about the cost of a cow, whether we could afford to keep one. Buying a cow was one thing. Taking care of one was another. I’d already discovered when we’d hastily acquired sheep that the amount of pasture we had available at Stringtown Rising was seriously deficient. Now we were going to add a cow?
“A hundred bales a winter for one cow,” he told me.
We’d only needed around two hundred bales for all our donkeys, sheep, and goats combined the previous winter. We didn’t have any place to store even that much hay.
“Can we afford that? What about feed? How much pasture does a cow need? I don’t have a milk stand! What if I can’t milk her?”
“Do you want a cow?”
We were probably within thirty miles of the farm with the cows for sale. I’d waited till now to panic?
“Yes.”
“Happy birthday.”
It was a ridiculous conversation anyway. We both knew we were going to get a cow.
The gesture itself was romantic. 52 often gifted me with things that were out of the norm, not something you’d find in a magazine gift guide. An elderberry bush. A vintage KitchenAid stand mixer. A box of day-old goslings. He was thoughtful at keying in on just the things I wanted but wouldn’t buy for myself.
In between those gestures, his behavior toward me seemed to be growing increasingly angry and sometimes irrational. I was his second chance, just as he was mine. He told me he wanted our relationship to work, but he wouldn’t discuss our problems.
He pressured me to make more money, but he blew up at me about the time I spent working. I kept hoping he’d be less stressed if I could take the financial pressure off, so I continued to work hard to grow my website. We were still on shaky financial ground from building the house.
Taking on the responsibility of a cow wouldn’t help with the financial pressure, but it was almost like a couple in trouble deciding to have a baby. We threw ourselves in headfirst, off on another adventure in self-sustainable living. Moments like these brought us together.
And eventually pulled us apart, but we weren’t good at looking ahead.
We arrived at the farm to look over the cows. I thought the heifer was gorgeous, but she’d never been pregnant, never been milked. Probably not the best choice for an inexperienced person who’d never had a cow before. Or even spent much time up close to one. I didn’t need a cow that required training. What if she was a kicker? And she wasn’t even in milk, of course.
The younger mature Jersey was pretty, too. I thought she might be just right except she didn’t have a good udder. Not that I would know, but the man selling the cows pointed it out.
And then there was the old cow. She was priced at a bargain.
She was a career girl with a good udder, but she wasn’t a beauty queen like the others. She looked rode hard and put up wet. She’d been worked in a dairy operation. She was a professional cow. One of us had to know what we were doing, and it wasn’t going to be me, so she seemed like the best choice despite the fact that she was, well, almost ugly. I’d never seen a more bony cow in my life. Add to that, she had a limp.
I reached under and gave her a quick test. She just stood there, placidly staring back at me as milk squirted from her long teats, relieving my lingering not-so-good feelings since my experience milking Clover. I looked up at 52.
“I like this one,” I said.
So did he. She was the cheapest one, at $500.
She’d been with the Brown Swiss bull for four months, so she might be bred.
The man said, “I can’t feel a calf when I punch her, though, so she might not be.”
He showed me how he punched her to feel for a calf. I tried punching her. It was a complete mystery to me how anyone could tell if there was a calf in there or not. And she was so skinny, I was afraid of killing her by punching her.
“If she’s not bred,” the man said, “just milk her as long as she has milk, then she’ll make good hamburger.”
I looked into those humongous placid cow eyes. She needed me. She was old, ugly, bony, and she had a limp. Without me, she’d be hamburger.
A week later, we went back to get her.
We backed the truck up to a big pile of gravel, and they led my new cow up the pile, using the feed to entice her to move, and then onto the truck. The man selling the cow had a bunch of kids, and the whole family got involved with the pushing and shoving.
I wondered, if it took half a dozen people to shove her on, how were we going to get her off? I asked them if they wanted to come to West Virginia with us. They said no. And right about then they leaped into action as a family again, chasing down a calf that made a break for it while we were all paying attention to putting the cow on the truck.
It’s always entertaining when a farm animal gets out—if it’s not yours.
I helped block the calf from going on down the road and herded her to the gate. They thanked me for helping. I said, “No big deal. I herded a ram this morning before I got here.” Sentences like that made me feel like a farmer. Our sheep were constantly escaping and wandering down the road.
Once we got back to our farm, 52 backed the truck up to the creek bank. We got the cow turned around inside the truck, and it only took a little pulling to encourage her to come right off. She walked around our meadow bottom like a giant in Lilliput. I started milking her the next morning.
Her previous owners had been getting up to two gallons a milking from her, sometimes a gallon and a half, and they had her trained to milk once a day. I’d never heard of milking a cow once a day, but I liked it. I brought home three-quarters of a gallon the first time. I stared and stared at the milk in my refrigerator. And took it out and examined it. And put it back. And took it out. And photographed it like it was artwork.
My cow and I, we made that. I named her Beulah Petunia and became besotted with her.
Morgan declared she was having nothing to do with the fresh cow milk. I told her I wasn’t buying any more milk from the store, so she’d have to drink water for the rest of her life. She insisted she would buy her own milk. Of course, she had no way to get to the store, and she liked milk. She came home from school the next day and declared, “I’m drinking this milk!” And filled up a big tall glass and drank it down.
It was typical of her short resistance to farm life. She’d say no to anything new and different, then quickly jump in. The boys were older when we moved to the country, and their resistance usually lasted a little while longer, though Ross had eventually embraced West Virginia and would try anything with bravado and move on as if he’d been doing it all his life. Between work and his girlfriend, he’d never been much involved with the farm, but he helped out with anything I asked of him. His boot camp ship date was nearing, and when he came home from Texas, he didn’t think twice about drinking my fresh milk.
Weston was the most resistant to farm living, and it was a bone of contention between 52 and me that I wouldn’t push Weston to take on more chores around the farm. It had been my choice to move to a farm, and I didn’t see the kids as laborers in fulfilling my dream. I encouraged 52 to develop more of a relationship with Weston so that Weston might enjoy doing projects with him, but he said Weston didn’t like him and he wasn’t going to ask him to do anything.
“Weston is a child and you’re an adult,” I pointed out. “You have to take the lead.” This got me nowhere, and the sense that he and I, and I and the kids, were two families living in the same house grew.
I started out milking Beulah Petunia inside a sheep shelter in the meadow bottom. The first couple of days, I just had her tied to a post in the shelter. That didn’t work very well because she could move around quite a bit. Side to side. Back and forth. Once she’d run out of her feed, she’d get even more restless. I couldn’t blame her. I wasn’t an experienced milkmaid, and it took me forever to hand-milk her. Within a few days, 52 had built a stanchion with a headlock inside the shelter, which was similar to a goat milk stand except the cow walked into it rather than climbing up on a stand. A feed bin at the far end encouraged the cow to stroll right in, put her head between the boards, and start eating. The two boards were then pushed in place to hold the neck, with a pin to lock them until the milking was done. Beulah Petunia couldn’t get her head out of the headlock until I released her, though one day she did walk off with the entire milk stand still locked around her neck.
After that episode, 52 secured the stand to the posts of the shelter.
Since I milked her in the meadow bottom, I’d take the milk back to the car where I’d sit on an overturned bucket in the middle of the dirt road and pour it into quart jars to take up to the house. I didn’t have a tight-fitting lid for my make-do milk pail and unless I poured it into jars with screw-on lids, I’d spill the milk lurching up our rocky driveway in my vehicle. Back in my kitchen, I’d filter it and pour it into an oversized bowl in the fridge to set the cream.
It was a production, but nothing I’d done on a farm to that point—hatching chicks, collecting eggs, raising and milking goats, raising and chasing sheep—had made that primal connection for me with farming that a cow did. A cow was an experience—work and hardship and challenge. Everything I’d been looking for when I’d come to the country.
My life had been sheltered, spoiled, too easy. When I came to the country, I’d been looking for some kind of connection with life that was visceral, purposeful, even sometimes dirty, but most especially difficult. I’d left my box behind, but I was still trying to find out who I was outside of it. I felt weak for all the years I’d lived up to everyone else’s expectations. I set new expectations for myself, many of them difficult, looking for some intangible sense of strength.
I was driven by that deep-seated need to test myself—in a situation that was both harsh and quaint. A cow was a perfect vehicle to that end.
In the first few weeks, the physical exhaustion of milking, and handling all the milk, nearly beat me into the ground. It took me an hour and a half the first day just to get three-quarters of a gallon. Two weeks later, I looked up one day to realize I was milking twice that amount in a third of the time.
My fingers and arms and back were stronger. I had more stamina.
I learned to make butter from heavy cream using a quart jar to shake the cream until it thickened. 52 often got involved. He’d shake the jar, then I’d finish up with washing the butter and pressing it out. We had buttermilk biscuits and buttermilk pancakes. I’d bake fresh bread and bring him a warm slice with a pat of the newly made butter.
Difficulties I’d had before with making cheese were forgotten as I started making cheese left and right, improving as I gained experience. I experimented with all sorts of different hard and soft cheeses.
My milk pitchers were overflowing. I was feeding my family out of that skinny, limping, ugly cow. I loved her and that wonderful spring. We’d been at Stringtown Rising for two years. Our farm finally seemed to make sense and have purpose. We had chickens laying eggs, a cow providing all our dairy, and lambs bouncing around our meadow bottom. The ramps I’d planted the first year were coming up on our hillside for the second year in a row, and they were spreading. We had fruit trees, berry bushes, and grapevines, and our livestock were flourishing. The farm was bursting with life.
But spring also meant flooding rains, and some days, it was almost like winter again and I was stuck. The rain would come in pouring blasts. The goats would hide in their shelter. The chickens would hide in their coop. The dogs slept on the porch. And I’d be scared to drive because of the deep mud and high water.
Georgia called me one stormy afternoon to tell me the water was up to the trees behind her house.
“You better not go anywhere!” she ordered. She worried about anything and everything and called me on a regular basis to make sure I wasn’t getting into trouble.
“I have kids to pick up from the bus!” Weston and Morgan would be getting off the bus at the Slanted Little House, where I picked them up every day since the school bus didn’t come down our road.
I headed down my driveway. I could see trouble before I was all the way down. The river was flooded, rushing wildly, out of its banks.
There was water running down the road.
The bridge over the creek on our driveway was stopped up with branches and brush and a tire that had washed down the creek from who knows where.
The water was flooding out over the driveway and into the road and part of the sheep’s field. The creek running alongside the sheep’s field was full to the banks.
I rolled down my window to stare at the creek, checking the crossing in the field. The water was loud, high and running hard.
The first creek in the road was the deepest, and it was full and running fast, too. I chickened out, backing up to a place where I could turn around and go home.
I called Georgia and made her day by telling her she was right. The kids would have to spend the night at my cousin’s house, and I wasn’t going anywhere. Even if the water was down enough in a few hours for 52 to make it home, he wouldn’t bring the kids, not when the water was high. If it rained again overnight, they would miss school the next day if they came home, so it was safer for them to stay put in civilization.
I missed my kids the most on those unexpected days when they couldn’t come home. School was almost out, and Weston and Morgan would be leaving for summer in Texas with their dad. Ross would be leaving soon for boot camp.
I wasn’t one of those mothers who had cried at the kindergarten door. I was one of those mothers who skipped back out to the parking lot full of plans for what I could do all day now that the kids were at school. Not that I didn’t love them, but I had stuff to do!
It was different watching them grow up and leave the nest.
The next week, I delivered Ross to the navy recruitment office in Charleston. He packed up his room, leaving everything, even his beloved cell phone. He went with nothing but the clothes on his back and his wallet. His clothes would be taken from him and either donated or sent home at his expense. He wore clothes he didn’t care about and told them to donate them. He walked in the door of the recruitment building, made a sharp turn, saluted, and said, “First Recruit Ross McMinn, reporting for duty.” They sat him down and had him sign a bunch of papers. I stood, watching him, feeling suddenly superfluous as his mother. I kissed him good-bye and cried, leaving before I could embarrass him too badly.
I wrote him a letter every single day. I didn’t expect to get many letters back, but he surprised me.
I saved all his letters. Carried them around in my purse. Read them over and over, cherishing my favorite parts and all the fascinating details of the mysterious life behind boot camp walls.
“The day I got here,” Ross wrote me, “we came in around 2100 and they yelled and screamed and cussed us out all night. We were all pretty much shell-shocked. The way they acted is kinda funny to me now. When we finally got to the compartment, it was 0430. They let us sleep for 5 minutes then got us up again.”
I got so many shots, I lost count. I couldn’t sit down for three days after the butt shot.
I wish I could take a shower by myself for more than 2 minutes, have my cell phone, sleep in, have my truck, eat McDonald’s, and get a day off. I miss you.
Boot camp is stressful. It’s not like on TV. I mean it is, but on TV all they do is work out and do drills and train. They don’t show you that you have to take tests and prepare for inspections. We have to make our own time to study, like cutting into our 6 hours of sleep and eating with one hand and holding our book in the other. We get from 0700 to 1300 on Sundays to do what we want, but that’s also the only time we have to shine our boots and iron our clothes. I’ve been sneaking in writing after “Taps.”
We lost one guy because he punched another recruit. Two guys quit and one guy from the division across the hall deserted, just ran away in the middle of the night.
I can now make a flotation device out of a set of coveralls while I’m in the water and start wearing them in about 3 seconds.
I hurt my foot but I haven’t told anyone because I’ll miss training, so during the PFA I did 75 pushups in 2 minutes (only needed 46), 79 sit-ups (only needed like 50) then I ran a mile and a half on one foot in 12:40.
Mail call is the most exciting part of my day.
We just got told at 1400 we are all gonna get beat because one of the guys decided to sneak a cookie into his rack and got caught so now we all gotta pay for it. If we are lucky, they’ll let us watch fireworks today, but the way this day has started, I doubt it.
His next letter read:
We didn’t get to watch fireworks yesterday. We just marched.
And then:
I’ve decided I hate marching.
He made me feel like a good mother for all my daily writing.
We’ve all been talking about back home. Everybody’s homesick. We have so much to study, we always have a book in our hands. Keep writing me. I’m always excited about mail. Most of the guys don’t get any and they’re always jealous.
I just did the math to see how much they’re paying me since I’m on the clock 24 hours a day, and it’s roughly $1.80 per hour.
Everybody here is already just counting the days to graduation.
The dates on his letters were always way, way behind from when I received them. When he left for boot camp, I promised him that I would come to his graduation. In the first few weeks he was there, my mother decided she would fly from Texas to meet me there and we’d attend his graduation together. She was eighty-one and not in very good health, but she was determined to make the trip. I wrote Ross that his grandmother would be coming, along with me and the kids.
Weston and Morgan were in Texas for the summer by then, and 52 and I were having our usual summer to ourselves. Our neighbor across the river, Frank, was letting us fence the five acres adjoining our farm that he owned on our side of the river for more pasture for the sheep. One of 52’s projects that summer was getting the new field ready. One lazy mid-July evening when I’d finished all my work and had dinner simmering on the stove, I walked down to the bottom to hang out with him. I walked along the riverbank taking pictures, then sat on the tractor talking to him while he strung electric fence wire.
He was in a good mood, which was the best time to talk to him because then he didn’t find me so annoying. The oddest thing about our relationship at this point was that we hadn’t been intimate since the previous fall. We shared the same bedroom, but we were like ships passing in the night. I kept farmer hours, up as early as five and to bed before ten, often by nine. On weekends, he didn’t get up till nine, and any day, he didn’t go to bed—or even come into the house—until after midnight.
I wasn’t sure what to think about our lack of physical intimacy, but whenever we got along and had an enjoyable evening, I thought we could just start over again and everything would be all right. The tirades would disappear and we’d go back to being lovers and best friends. The old 52 was back!
“Do you think you could come to bed early tonight?” I asked him.
He gave a shrug and a half smile. “Maybe.”
I don’t know what time he came to bed, but it was long after I did. The phone rang in the middle of the night.
It was Morgan calling me from Texas.
The phone had woken 52, too. He asked me if anything was wrong.
I said, “My mother is in the hospital. She had a seizure or stroke or something, I don’t know.” My voice broke. “She’s brain-dead.”
He was silent for a long beat then he said, “I’m sorry,” and rolled back over to sleep again.