BELOW-ZERO MORNING

I was awakened by the tap, tap of Pa gently rapping the stove poker on the stovepipe below our bedroom floor. It was my wakeup call, Pa’s way of telling me it was six o’clock and time to roll out of bed, dress, and hurry out to the barn for morning milking. I wouldn’t know until I glanced at the outside porch thermometer on my way to the barn that it was twenty degrees below zero.

The fire in the dining room stove usually went out around midnight, and now the upstairs bedroom was as cold as the inside of our icebox. I stuck a wool sock–covered foot out of my warm bed and thumped it a couple of times on the floor, hoping Pa would think I was up and dressing. But he had long known my ploy and tapped once more on the stovepipe, a little louder this time, letting me know there was work to do.

My brothers and I slept under piles of quilts that kept us flat and unmoving throughout the cold Wisconsin winter nights. As I crawled out from under mine, I saw thick frost covering the windows. The frost formed artistic shapes on the glass, some like giant tropical ferns, others like exotic trees with frilly limbs. To look outside and see what the weather was doing, I had to blow on the window to make a little hole through the frost. Through the gray dawn I saw nothing but snow-covered fields to the east and a slight hint of pink on the horizon, a cold sunrise on the way. It would be another bitterly cold day in the wake of a heavy snowstorm earlier that week.

I grabbed my flannel shirt and bib overalls, opened the bedroom door to an even colder upstairs hallway, and ran to the end of it and down the stairs into the dining room, where Pa had started a fire in the dining room stove. I crowded close to the woodstove as I rubbed the sleep from my eyes, put on my cold flannel shirt, and pulled up my bib overalls.

I pulled on my work shoes and walked into the kitchen, where Pa had a fire going in the kitchen cookstove. He had set the water pail on the stove to thaw the half-inch-thick crust of ice that had formed on the water overnight. The pail gently rocked on the stove, making a rattling sound as it warmed. The teakettle hadn’t heated up enough yet to send forth its usual steady stream of steam. Pa had lit the kerosene lamp that sat in the middle of the kitchen table, and it sent its warm yellow light into the still frigid room. Ma was nowhere to be seen; she refused to get up until the kitchen had warmed enough so “my feet won’t get cold,” as she said.

I pulled on my six-buckle rubber boots, slipped into my barn jacket, pulled on my wool cap with the earflaps down, lit my barn lantern, and was off to the barn. The first exposure to twenty-below-zero air nearly took my breath away, but the air was clean and fresh, albeit lung-freezing cold. I followed the narrow path my brothers, Pa, and I had shoveled a couple of days before when the storm blew itself out. When I pulled open the barn door, I was engulfed by warm, humid air dense with the smells of cows, silage, dried hay, and manure—not unpleasant smells to a farm boy. In those days the barn was the warmest place on the farm; fourteen cows, a half dozen calves, a team of draft horses, and the herd bull created considerable heat.

I hung my barn lantern on its nail behind the cows; Pa’s lantern already hung on its nail on the far end of the barn. On the little concrete walkway behind the cows stood the wheelbarrow contraption that Pa and the blacksmith in Wild Rose had invented. In it were two empty ten-gallon milk cans, one with a milk strainer stuck in its top, waiting for the first milk of the morning.

I grabbed an empty sixteen-quart milk pail and my three-legged milk stool and crawled under a cow to milk, muttering “Mornin’” to Pa. He was already busily milking one of his cows. We each had our own cows to milk, his usually the more difficult ones, those that would as soon kick your head off as look at you, plus a couple that milked hard, meaning he had to really work at it to get any milk out of them. “Cold one this morning,” he said as we worked.

My cow looked around at me as I settled in as if to say, “Good morning, Jerry.” I settled the stool in place, squeezed the milk pail between my knees, grabbed the front two teats, and began milking. The zing, zing sound of the first squirts of milk against the pail was my reward for knowing what I was doing. I thought about a neighbor who had moved into the community from Milwaukee and bought a small herd of cows that he intended to milk by hand. He had never gotten the hang of it and quickly bought a milking machine.

Soon the bottom of my pail was covered with milk, and the rich smell of fresh milk surrounded me, overpowering the ammonia odor coming from the manure gutter behind the cows. Foam began to rise from the milk as I switched from the front two teats to the back two, continuing a steady alternating pull with each hand, squeeze, release, squeeze, release, over and over and over again, until the cow was dry. About halfway through milking the first cow, the barn cats would appear, a half dozen or so of them, looking for a drink. We didn’t pay much attention to the barn cats; they weren’t pets, were never allowed in the house, and had just one job: keeping the mouse population under control. We did give them milk to drink; they had their own dish near the milk cans that Pa filled when he finished milking his first cow and before pouring the milk into the strainer, which was set into the top of the milk can. Other than the milk, the barn cats were on their own as far as food supply was concerned. Of course, their reward for doing their job well was a good meal.

Usually a couple of the cats couldn’t wait for Pa to fill their dish. They would stand on the walkway behind where I was milking and wait for me to send a stream of milk in their direction. Although they became quite adept at catching the milk in midair, sometimes they missed and the fresh milk would splatter against the concrete walkway. Pa frowned on this practice, calling it a waste of good milk.

When the milking was finished, Pa pushed the wheelbarrow with the two full milk cans to the pump house, where he put them in the water-filled cooling tank. There they would stay until the milk hauler came, usually by midmorning, to take them to the cheese factory in Wild Rose. Well water filled the cooling tank and then ran to the outside stock tank, which was where the cattle and horses drank when Pa let them out in midmorning. Earlier that morning Pa had started the fire in the stock tank to melt the coating of ice so the animals could drink.

Back in the house I pulled off my boots, coat, and cap and washed my hands and face using warm water from the cookstove’s reservoir. Ma was busy making breakfast on the cookstove, which by now was heating the kitchen comfortably. Donald and Darrel were up, dressing in front of the dining room woodstove. Soon we were all seated around the kitchen table, each in our place. On cold mornings like this, Ma often made an enormous batch of pancakes. I could eat ten of them at one sitting (Ma said I must have a hollow leg). We spread melted butter on top and sprinkled them with sugar or poured on Karo syrup or, during the war years, Ma’s sorghum syrup.

After breakfast we boys changed into school clothes and then bundled up in our Mackinaws, wool caps, and mittens and scarves knit by our Grandmother Witt. As always Ma wrapped the scarves tightly around our heads to ward off frostbite. When we arrived at school our teacher would check each of us over for white areas of skin, indicating that some part of us hadn’t been sufficiently covered. There we would unwind the scarves, peel off the many layers of outerwear and hang our coats and caps in the entryway, walk into the still chilly schoolroom, and settle into our desks for another day of school.