I forgot all about the note Dad had said he’d left for Mom in the egg basket. I never thought about it again until that night about nine o’clock, when I was upstairs just about ready to turn out the light and tumble into bed. Then I got to thinking: maybe Dad had written something on it for me. In fact, maybe he had meant it for both of us, and Mom had forgotten about it. Maybe there was something special he wanted done around the place that he wouldn’t like if I didn’t do it.
I stood looking out in the moonlight, the way I nearly always do just before I drop down on my knees for a short prayer and before giving up the wonderful day I nearly always have had and forgetting about it while I wait asleep for the next one.
Thinking about the note in the basket and wondering if it might have been meant for me too—Mom hadn’t given me any extra orders—I stepped into my overalls and crept stealthily along the banister to the stairs and down them. With my flashlight I moved quietly into the kitchen so as not to waken Mom and Charlotte Ann. They were in the bedroom away on the other side of the living room and wouldn’t hear me unless I stumbled over something.
I shined my light into the egg basket that always stands on a table by the east window, which I noticed was open. If it rained during the night, I must be sure to rush down and close it. I mustn’t forget anything. So far I hadn’t. All the chores had been done as nearly exactly right as I could do them, and I deserved a good night’s sleep.
But there wasn’t any piece of paper or envelope in the egg basket, so I decided Mom had gotten it and that what had been on it was for her only and not for me. I was about to go back to my upstairs room when I spied some pencil writing on one of the white eggs.
I picked up the egg, and Dad had written all around it, starting at the top and writing round and round and round.
Well, it wasn’t any of my business at all, I found out. As quickly and as quietly as I could, I put the egg back, and, because the back door was standing open, I decided to see if the screen door was hooked, just for sure, and it was. Then, seeing the iron pitcher pump out at the end of the moonlit board walk, I unhooked the screen door to go out to get a drink.
“Is that you, Bill?” Mom called from the other room.
I called back, “I’m thirsty. You want a drink, too?”
“Why, yes, I believe I do,” she called. “It’s a pretty hot night.”
I took her a drink, and, while she was sitting up in bed drinking it in the light of my flashlight, I remembered the note in the basket and said, “I heard Dad say he had left a note for you in the egg basket. It might be important.”
“I’ve already read it,” she said, handing me the empty cup.
As I started to carry it back to the kitchen and on out to the pump to hang it on the wire hook there, she said, “That was very thoughtful of you, Bill. Thank you again—and good night! You’re getting to be more and more like your father in little things like that.”
As soon as I had the cup on the wire hook, I was ready to go in and back to bed. But I didn’t get to go for a few minutes, because I heard a noise up the road in the direction of the corral where, every morning and night, Shorty or his father or both of them managed to get their blue cow penned up so they could milk her—she never wanted to be milked and never wanted to be corralled.
I shined my light up the road to see if I could see anything. I couldn’t, but I knew I had heard something. Well, as “the man of the house” and of the barn, and feeling fine because I was thoughtful about little things like my father, I took a quick hike up the gravel road to see if old Babe was there, or near there, and was all right. She sometimes stayed in the corral, with its open gate on the woods side, until morning. Then, when they came to milk her, she’d make a dive for the opening and have to be rounded up again.
I found her there, and all right, lying on her side and chewing her cud. The only thing was, this time she was penned up and couldn’t get out. I shined the light on her, and her eyes looked pretty scared, but she didn’t start to run wild or anything.
So I said to her, “That’s what you deserve. They get tired of having to chase you down every morning. You’ll be right here when Guenther comes in the morning to milk you.”
I left her and went on back down the road to the house, feeling happy inside that I had gone to look after the cow. I guess I was happy because of something else too. Even though I wasn’t supposed to have read what Dad had written on the egg, I knew I would never forget it.
The words went round and round in my mind as I undressed again, turned out the light, and went to bed. By this time Dad would be over a hundred miles away in the big city, and he would probably go to sleep with a grin on his face as he remembered what he had written to Mom:
I won’t have a chance to tell you straight out that I think you’re a wonderful wife and mother, so I take this roundabout way of saying, I love you.
The note had been signed: “Your bum husband, Theo.”
I grinned to myself as I remembered it, and then I sighed a great big sigh, thinking about all my responsibilities tomorrow. I dropped off to sleep, not knowing that one of tomorrow’s responsibilities was going to start early in the morning, and that, before nine o’clock, I’d have wished a thousand times that Dad had been home to help me save Paul Bunyan’s blue cow’s life from having eaten too much fresh dew-wet ladino clover on an empty stomach. Her stomach was empty before she started to eat because she had emptied it out by chewing her cud all night and swallowing it back into her other stomach. And she had been in the corral all night and had not gotten to eat even one bite of bluegrass or other cow food that grew in the woods.
8
I had the chores almost finished the next morning and was just winding up the milking, sitting on Dad’s metal, twelve-inch-high, three-legged milk stool, stripping old Jersey Jill, my favorite cow friend. She was always as gentle and easy to manage as Guenther Long’s Babe was cantankerous.
I was making the last few strokes to get the rich, creamy milk out of her udder and feeling fine because I had looked after Mom and Charlotte Ann and the stock and everything. I didn’t know that a few minutes later there’d be an excited interruption that would knock all the peace of mind out of me.
“Just sixteen more squeezes, and I’ll be through,” I said to Jersey Jill.
She was acting a little impatient, as much as to say, “I wish you’d keep your fingernails trimmed a little better! That hurts like everything!” She switched her tail at me a few times, as though I was as much a nuisance as a dozen flies buzzing around. She also lifted her right hind foot several times, as if she would like to set it down in the pail if she could.
So I said, “So!” which any farm boy knows means, “Stop whatever you’re doing!”
Mixy was meowing hungrily and moving faster and faster around my legs and arching her back and rubbing her sides against Jersey Jill’s front legs and acting impatient herself. So I quickly took a few last short strokes, getting practically nothing more in the pail, and the milking was done.
“That’s it!” I said to Jersey Jill. “Now you wait right here till I get this milk up to the house, and I’ll be back to turn you out to pasture.”
I was on my feet, the milk pail in one hand and the three-legged stool in the other, starting toward the cattle-shed door, when I heard a boy’s voice calling.
“Swo-o-ok! Swo-o-o-k!”
I knew it was Shorty somewhere out in the woods across the road, calling his cow. I’d heard him call her many times the past month, ever since Babe had been living there. I felt sorry for Shorty, because he probably had never known how nice it was to have a well-trained cow like Jersey Jill.
And then I thought, How come he’s calling her? She was in the corral all night, just like I’d had Jersey Jill in her corral on the south side of our barn.
I hung up the milk stool in its place and stepped outside to look toward the woods to see where Guenther was. I was thinking that as soon as I had the milk carried to the house a
nd Jersey Jill in her own pasture east of the barn, I’d run out and help him round up his cow. Maybe Babe had gotten out and was down along the bayou somewhere, not wanting to be milked.
I could save time, I thought, if I’d let Jersey Jill out right now and let her run up to her trough at the pitcher pump. She could be drinking while I went on into the house with the milk.
The idea seemed to exactly suit my contented cow. The very second she was out in the bright sunlight, she started on the run for her drink as though I had forgotten to water her last night, which I hoped I hadn’t.
I stopped as Dad always does and poured a little fresh milk into Mixy’s breakfast bowl on the barn floor beside the cabinet where Dad kept his shelf of farm library books and all his special tools and medicines for the stock.
When I got to the iron pitcher pump a minute or two later, Jersey Jill was busy helping herself. “I’ll be back in a minute,” I said to her. She looked up at me with a question mark in her brown eyes as Shorty Long’s voice called from across the road near the elderberry bushes, saying, “Swo-o-o-o-o-ok! Swo-o-o-o-ok!”
“I’ll be over and help you round her up in a few minutes,” I called.
He called back, “I can’t find her anywhere.”
Mom, I was glad to notice, was just wiping the last breakfast dish when I reached the kitchen door. She said, “What’s all the excitement about?”
“Paul Bunyan’s cow again,” I answered. “He can’t find her. I promised him I’d help.”
“That’s thoughtful of you,” Mom said.
I thought so myself—after all the things Shorty had done to me—but I didn’t say so.
I set the heavy pail on the worktable where Mom wanted it and went back outdoors to drive Jersey Jill, my good-mannered, well-trained cow to her own mostly bluegrass pasture, which was only about one-sixth clover and was safest for cows. It also was good for cows to eat some dry food if there was a lot of clover or alfalfa in their pasture, so there wouldn’t be so much gas formed in their paunches.
But even nice-mannered cows sometimes get mischievous streaks and take a notion they don’t want to do what you want them to do. All of a sudden, old Jersey Jill started off in another direction, heading toward the pignut trees away up on the other side of our garden.
“Oh, no, you don’t!” I exclaimed and was after her like a shot. I grabbed up an ash stick I had carried home from the bayou yesterday and started on the run to head her off. I had used part of the stick to make a new arrow, and this was what was left.
Seeing the stick, Jersey Jill broke into a run ahead of me, making the straightest cow path you ever saw in the direction of the pignut trees.
Oh well, I thought, why waste good breath, when Dad and I had made a good fence and put it along the side of the clover field? She’d stop when she got to the new gate that was hanging on the big cedar post my powerful biceps had dug a hole for that spring.
But old Jersey Jill didn’t stop at the gate! And why? Because, to my astonishment, the gate was open, and she went swishing through and right out into that clover field. She stopped quick after she was about fifteen feet out in it. Dropping her hornless head into the rich, green, all-clover pasture, she started eating as though she hadn’t had anything so wonderful in her diet in a long time.
Well, there are a lot of things around a farm that stir up a boy’s temper a little, and something like that was one of them. I quickened my pace to a fast run, reached the pignut trees in a few seconds, and zipped through the new no-sag gate myself, wondering how it had gotten open in the first place.
Waving my ash stick, I swung out into the field to make a wide arc around her so that I could drive her back out and shut the gate and get her into her own safe pasture.
“I hope you realize, young lady,” I called to her, “that people get punished for things like this! Just because a blue cow goes on a rampage is no reason why a fawn-colored one can do it!”
She kept on taking great big hungry swipes at the clover with her rough tongue, biting off mouthfuls and swallowing them fast, ignoring me except to sidle away and eat as she went, running only a few feet and getting another mouthful. I knew she wasn’t chewing it. She’d wait till later, as cows do, and then she’d lie down somewhere or maybe find a shade tree and stand with a contented expression on her face and swallow the food backward, one mouthful at a time, and chew it, and swallow it all over again into her second stomach. And no matter what color her food had been, she would digest it and make it into white milk.
The only thing was, she wasn’t headed toward the gate but toward the bottom of the hill, down by the other iron pitcher pump we had away down there for watering our stock when we had them in this field.
And then I saw something that made me feel goose bumps all over. For down by the fence—in knee-deep clover, not eating but just standing and gasping for breath, her sides bulging, looking like a big blue balloon with four legs under it—was Shorty’s blue cow with the bloat!
She was panting and groaning as she struggled for breath.
And now, what was I, the head of the house, taking my father’s place, going to do? One thing I remembered from What to Do Before the Doctor Arrives was the need to chase the cow up a hill, keep her moving, not let her stop and lie down, or it’d be forever too late. Also, “Phone for the veterinarian quick!”
I knew old Jersey Jill couldn’t eat enough in only a few minutes to get the bloat, so I’d have to let her go and try to save Shorty’s cow. Her case was an emergency.
I started yelling for Mom as loud as I could as I ran for the top of the hill to where she could see and hear me.
She heard me all right. She was out on the back steps when I got to where she could see me, and she called, “What’s the matter? You’re making enough noise to wake up the whole neighborhood.”
“The whole neighborhood needs to be waked up!” I yelled back. “Old Babe Bunyan’s got the bloat! She’s out in the clover field with the bloat! Call the veterinarian!”
“Where is she?” Mom called.
“Out in our clover field, down by the pump! She’s gasping for breath harder than I am! She’s bigger than the side of a barn!”
And then is when I found out something about Mom I never knew before. Boy oh boy, she flew into action faster than an old setting hen can go racing across the barnyard when she’s just been let off the nest.
She shot orders back to me like lightning. “I’ll phone him! You race out to the barn for the funnel and an empty pint bottle out of the cabinet, and bring them here. Hurry! We’ll have to drench her!”
It was just like an army that was about to lose a battle all of a sudden getting a new captain that knew what to do.
And I hurried. In less than two shakes of a lamb’s tail I was in the barn, found the bottle right where it was handy, grabbed up the funnel that was there just as though somebody had placed it there on purpose, which Dad probably had, and went racing to the house with it.
Mom took it quick and ordered me, “Run back to the pasture and keep her moving. Don’t let her stop or lie down. Drive her uphill—always uphill, so her head will be higher than her body. We’ve got to get her to start belching!”
“I will,” I said, glad I had taken time that spring to read what to do in case a cow gets the bloat.
Even as I ran toward the open gate, where Jersey Jill lifted her head and stared at me head-on, I got a glimpse of Mom’s fast-flying blue apron with her behind it, rushing to the shelf beside the toolshed and pouring kerosene into the bottle through the funnel.
I reached the gate, dodged around Jersey Jill, who for some crazy reason just stood there in the way, and ran on with my ash stick toward the four-legged blue balloon that was staggering around, trying to keep from falling down. She was gasping and looking bleary-eyed.
She’s dying! I thought and wondered who would be to blame. Had I accidentally left our gate open myself yesterday when I’d gone through to look for my new arrow? I suddenly sadly r
emembered I had missed what I had been shooting at and my straight ash arrow had gone far out into this very field!
It wouldn’t matter who had been to blame for Babe’s getting out of the woods, which probably was herself, but if I had left this gate open—
That thought was too sad. I hoped the veterinarian would hurry up and come—really hurry. And I hoped Mom and I could keep Babe alive till he got here.
“Hey!” I cried to old Babe when I got near her. If only she would get scared and start on a wild run for the gate up the hill!
But she didn’t. She couldn’t! That I found out after a few seconds of shouting and using the ash stick on her. I didn’t want to hurt her, but I knew I had to sock her and make her keep moving so that she could belch and get the gas up and out and her life saved.
After a lot of pushing and coaxing and scolding and whipping, she did start to move awkwardly in the direction I was trying to get her to go.
I had even begun to feel a little encouraged when all of a sudden I heard Shorty’s angry voice calling down to me from the pignut trees. He was yelling and saying, “You leave my cow alone! Don’t you dare hit her with that big club!”
“I’m trying to save her life!” I yelled back up to him. “She’s dying, and if we can’t get her to belch, she’ll be dead in thirty minutes if the veterinarian doesn’t get here!”
And I started whamming his cow on the rump again and demanding she get going. “Uphill!” I yelled to her. “You’ve got to run uphill to save your life! You’ve got to belch that gas up! Keep your head higher than your body!”
I don’t suppose I ought to have blamed Shorty for not understanding, because what would he know about what to do before the doctor came? Seeing me whamming away on his cow with my ash stick, he lost his temper and started on the run for me, yelling angrily, “This time I’ll really knock you out!”
Sugar Creek Gang Set Books 25-30 Page 54