Growing Up Country: Memories of an Iowa Farm Girl

by Carol Bodensteiner

  For what seemed like minutes, I waited. Dad looked at me and then said in a conspiratorial tone only I could hear, “Don’t let Ma hear you say that.” In that moment, through that one little slip of the tongue, and even though I was only about six years old, I grew closer to Dad and took a step toward adulthood.

  Ever after that, I heard Dad swear with a mixture of horror and fascination and a vague awareness of forbidden pleasures. We never spoke of it. I never swore in his hearing again. Still, I understood something new that day.

  “She probably went up the hill,” Dad said. “If she doesn’t come up in the morning, I’ll have to come back and find her.” Dad scanned the hillside, hoping she hadn’t gone far, hoping she would come up with the rest of the herd the next day. But now it was time to milk and he couldn’t take time to traipse all over the Back 40.

  We climbed back in the truck and I asked, “Can I go along tomorrow? If you have to look for her?”

  When he said yes, I almost hoped the cow didn’t show up in the morning, so strong was my desire to have an important chore to undertake with Dad.

  Cows near to calving like to go off by themselves. Some cows calve easy and they can calve on their own. Some cows calve hard and giving birth could kill the calf and even the cow. Dad didn’t want to risk cow or calf.

  I was eager to help look for the cow and calf, but Dad didn’t always let me. Cows can get protective and it may be dangerous to be around them. Dad wasn’t worried for himself but having one of us kids along was just one more thing to worry about. The next morning, I was eager for milking to be over and I didn’t let Dad out of my sight in case he forgot he said I could go along. He didn’t forget, and finally we were back in the truck headed for the pasture. Jane and Sue came along, too; Jane in the cab taking gate duty; Sue and I in the back.

  With the truck bumping over ruts and rocks, Sue and I held tight to the side of its bed to keep from bouncing out, sometimes crouching on bent knees to keep from slamming our tailbones. When Dad stopped the truck by the creek, we piled out.

  “We’ll start on the west end and work back,” he said. “They’re usually in this section.” We fanned out, moving in a wide swath up the hillside. It was the same pattern we took when we went squirrel hunting. “Keep your eyes open,” Dad ordered, as though he thought we thought we were there to play.

  The hill was steep and we struggled up the grade, over fallen tree trunks, through blackberry brambles. The air was cool under the trees; it smelled fresh from dew that would not dry until nearly noon. The ground was springy soft under blankets of leaves. Sunlight filtered through the leaf canopy, making cow and calf hard to spot. I wanted to be the one to see them first. I figured it was my right since Number 24 was my cow.

  But Sue claimed the honor, calling out, “I see her.”

  “Stand still,” Dad commanded. “We don’t want to scare her.” We froze in place as Dad walked toward Sue, his footsteps muted on the soft woodland floor.

  “There.” Sue pointed toward a secluded thicket of fallen tree trunks and young saplings and just like that we could all see the cow. I’ve seen paintings in which the artist has concealed all manner of faces and figures—horses or wolves or Indians—images that are virtually invisible until someone points them out. It was like that with this cow and calf. The calf was curled up in a nest of leaves, hidden in shadows. If it weren’t for the cow’s size and movements, we could have missed the calf. The cow stood licking the calf’s black-and-white coat, clearing the hair of birth remnants, stimulating her baby’s circulation. We must have arrived within minutes of her dropping the calf.

  Even as we stood motionless, watching, the mother cow nudged the calf, urging it to stand. The calf pulled its front legs under its body, straightened its back legs, pushing up in an awkward effort to gain its feet. It stumbled as it rose but finally stood upright, tottering. Knowing the goal by instinct and directed along by a gentle nudge from its mama, the calf stumbled toward the cow’s udder, nosing around until it latched onto a teat. With neck extended, legs splayed for balance, the calf nursed with vigorous determination. A breeze blew through the trees and the sun flickered off the leaves, shining on the calf’s curly hair, damp from the cow’s licking. Right then, I wished I was an artist. I would have liked to capture this scene.

  As we moved closer, the cow swung its head toward us and lowed softly. Some cows are aggressive after calving, intent on protecting their offspring from threats real or perceived. But Number 24 was gentle. Dad waited a few more minutes while the calf nursed and then stepped closer. He talked to the cow in low tones.

  “Good girl,” he said, his voice familiar to her from countless sessions in the milk barn. “You did a good job.” Running his hands along the cow’s side, he noted she had already passed the afterbirth. As he quietly but firmly edged the calf away, he examined it, too. “Looks like we got a heifer,” he said, pleasure evident in his voice. He was glad to have a good cow like this one yield a female calf that would grow up and join the herd. “Let’s get her down to the truck.”

  We began the challenging task of getting the calf down the hill. Still wobbly on its feet, the calf stumbled on each step down the steep slope, through the tangle of branches and leaves. The calf bawled at being separated from its mama for even a few minutes. The cow mooed in return and followed us, anxious regarding our intentions for her calf. We helped guide this newest member of the herd with Jane and me keeping our hands on the calf’s front shoulders to keep it from falling and Dad pushing, lifting, guiding from behind. Sue scrambled ahead to clear brush out of the way. At the same time we kept a wary eye on the cow lest she make a move to reclaim her baby.

  Back at the truck, Dad lowered the end gate, squatted to get one arm around the calf’s chest and the other around the calf’s rear end. In one swoop he lifted the 80-pound newborn into the back of the truck. Sue and I clamored into the truck bed with the calf, petting its neck and whispering “you’re okay, you’re okay” to quiet it and to make sure it didn’t try to stand up while we drove. Dad latched the end gate, wiped the sweat from his head and neck, and climbed into the cab.

  Out of sight of its mama, the calf bawled in earnest as we drove back on the property line lane. The cow came up the barnyard lane. Cow and calf called to each other the entire way like an echo across a canyon except one bawl was young and frantic and scared and the other was deep and anxious and caring.

  Back at the barn, Dad herded the calf into one of the pens in the barn where she joined the other calves born this month. The calves were less likely to be injured in the calf pens than if they stayed with the cows, and the cow must take her place in the milking herd in any case. My sisters and I were responsible for the calves, feeding them milk and hay; spreading clean, dry straw for bedding each day; pitching wet straw and manure out of the pens into the wheelbarrow each weekend.

  Anytime we came into the barn, the calves rushed to the alleyway, thrust their heads through the slats and bawled, expecting we would feed them. If it was not feeding time, we scratched their heads and let them suck on our fingers, a sensation that was strangely satisfying. At feeding time, we brought pails of milk and let each calf drink its fill. With a new calf like the one we just brought up from the pasture, we had to teach it to drink.

  Each new calf was fed the extra-rich colostrum milk from its mother for several days. The thick, yellowish-tinted colostrum transferred the cow’s immunity to the calf, ensuring the calf a good start on life. Milk from a cow that just had a calf was kept separate until it returned to its normal white, so calves or cats drank this milk until it cleared.

  That night while Dad and Mom milked, I took the galvanized tin pail half full of foamy, warm milk only minutes from the cow and stepped into the pen with the new calf. At 80 pounds, the calf weighed more than I did, but I had experience on my side and commitment to this responsibility. The calf, still unsteady on its feet, bawled with hunger but she had not the least idea how to drink from a pail. Not realiz
ing I carried the answer to her hunger, the calf backed away as I came close. “Come on, baby. You’re going to like this,” I coaxed, maneuvering until I had the calf wedged between my hip and the side of the pen.

  Dipping my fingers in the milk, I clamped my hand over the calf’s velvet soft nose so my fingers slipped easily into her mouth. The calf recognized the milk smell and taste and sucked with desperate energy even though she was less than 24 hours old. The texture of sandpaper, her tongue tickled and was remarkably strong. As the calf concentrated on absorbing every last drop of milk from my fingers, I drew her nose down into the pail of warm milk. When she inhaled milk through her nose, she snorted and jerked away. “Wow, that was a surprise, wasn’t it?” I laughed, letting her catch her breath before we tried again.

  When I dipped my fingers in the milk again, the calf didn’t hesitate to suck. Again, I drew her nose down into the milk. This time the calf sucked my fingers and pulled in milk from the pail. She ran out of breath and yanked back again. On the third try, the calf gained a balance between drinking the milk as fast as she could and still breathing. She’d learned to drink from the pail. She might forget again by the next morning, but it usually took just one more experience sucking on my fingers to remember. After that, anytime I came to the barn, whether it was feeding time or not, the calf pushed her head through the fence, jockeyed for position with the other calves and was ready to drink.

  Dad watched the first time I taught a calf to drink and then I was on my own. When he filled the calf buckets with milk and sent me off to feed them, he never had to say a word. I knew I could handle the chore and so did he.

  Mulberry Pie

  We had just floated our bark-and-leaf boats out into the creek that ran through the Back 40 when Sue spotted them.

  “Look, Carol. Look at the mulberries!” she yelled, pointing up, down and all around us at the same time.

  Overripe berries dotted the ground and were squashed under our feet. Overhead, berries lined the branches, thick and plump and so blue-black we could taste the sweet juice just by looking. Like grasshoppers, we jumped again and again, grabbing the branch tips and pulling them down with one hand as we skimmed the juicy mulberries into our palms and scooped them into our mouths. The saliva of desire formed in the corners of our mouths as we strained to pluck berry after berry, swallowing them almost before we could taste them.

  Once we’d stripped the low branches clean, we flopped on the ground, gazing up at the even bigger, even juicier, berries beyond our grasp. So many mulberries!

  “I bet we could easy pick enough for Mom to make a pie,” Sue said.

  “Mmmm. Pie,” I hummed. For several moments, we drifted off into thoughts of Mom’s pies.

  We always had dessert at dinner and supper. Usually pie—that or Mom’s special ice water chocolate cake—or ice cream—or ice cream on cake—or ice cream on pie. Always dessert. Often pie.

  From time to time when Mom put a pie on the table, Dad would claim that he taught her everything she knew about making pies. While she didn’t deny that, we never saw him rolling out the dough that turned into flaky, melt-in-your-mouth crusts.

  Rhubarb pie in spring when the green/red stalks shot up with their big floppy, elephant-ear leaves. Peach pie when Dad brought a couple of lugs home from the store for Mom to can. Cherry pie when the Fareway got 20-lb. cans of frozen berries. The occasional, rare gooseberry pie when we happened upon a bush in the pasture with tart green or sweet deep purple berries ready to pick. Mostly apple pies because we had lots of apples and they froze well. Complete, unbaked pies Mom made and stacked up in the freezer ready to pop in the oven over the winter or to take to a funeral or an auction. A lemon pie only once that I remember—Dad didn’t like it. Banana cream, chocolate cream, coconut cream pies with toasted, fluffy meringue. Every single time Mom made pie with meringue, she claimed it was watery or pulled away from the crust or was too brown. Every single time, Mom said Edna Hoffman made a better meringue. But I loved how the meringue dissolved in my mouth like sweet air. It was all fine by me.

  And mulberry pie, only in the spring. As Sue and I looked up at those branches loaded with berries and sucked the sweet juice off our purple-stained fingers, we figured there just could not be any kind of pie better than mulberry for today.

  “Pie would be great. If we could find something to stand on, we could do it,” I suggested, scrambling to my feet. “And we could make a basket out of one of our shirts.” We looked for a fallen tree or rocks or something we could use to boost us a foot higher, but found nothing.

  “I know,” I said, dropping to my hands and knees. “Stand on my back. See if you can reach the branches.”

  Stepping gingerly up onto my back, Sue wobbled as she balanced and reached up. With a yelp, she lost her balance, toppled off, rolling into a ball as she tumbled to the ground. “I couldn’t reach them anyway,” she admitted as we caught our breath laughing.

  Suddenly Sue sat up, her brown eyes sparkling with excitement. “I know. We could get a ladder. And if we laid a sheet on the ground, we could shake the tree, all the berries would fall off and we could just roll them into a bucket.”

  “That would be great,” I agreed, jumping to my feet. “We’d have enough berries in 10 minutes. And we can make it a surprise.”

  Just like that, we took off for the garage. As we raced up the lane, we could already see a fresh pie, hot from the oven, with a big scoop of vanilla ice cream melting on the side.

  Getting a ladder was not such an outlandish idea. From time to time, we carried a ladder a hundred yards up to the mulberry tree along the fence by the mailbox. Technically it was Miller’s tree, but branches draped over the fence, dangling so many fat black mulberries in front of us each spring that we came home with stained hands, shirts and mouths. The lure of a fresh mulberry pie sent us on that quest at least once a year.

  In no time, we’d wrestled the wooden stepladder off the wall of the garage. Sue grabbed one end as I took hold of the other. “It’s not so heavy,” I said, shifting the ladder from hand to hand to get a comfortable grip. A meticulously folded, clean white sheet sneaked from the linen closet in the hall balanced between us on the edge of the ladder. Empty paint cans we used to collect eggs or pick blackberries hung from our belt loops, ready to be filled with all the mulberries we would collect.

  When you’re 10 years old and your coconspirator is eight, you don’t notice that the trek from the house back to the pasture is close to half a mile over rough ground and mostly downhill.

  As we walked, the ladder banged against our bare legs, my arms began to ache, and my fingers grew numb. I shifted the weight from hand to hand. We carried the ladder on our right side; we switched it to our left side. I walked in front; then Sue took the lead. In spite of all of our machinations, by the time we arrived under the tree we had matching red patches on both sides of our legs. And my fingers felt as though they were going to drop off.

  “Wow,” I huffed a sigh of relief when we dropped the ladder under the tree. “That was heavier than I thought it would be.” I rubbed my sore hands down my equally sore legs. “Look,” I chortled, “I have black-and-blue marks already!” A visible testament to our adventure.

  “Yeah, me, too. But come on. Let’s get started,” Sue said, fairly hopping around with excitement.

  So we did. We tipped the ladder up, positioning it under the most promising looking branches of the tree and spreading the sheet to catch all the berries. Scrambling up the ladder, I shook the limbs. Some berries fell on the sheet; more fell on the ground.

  “Wait. I’ll move the sheet,” Sue said. “We’re missing too many.” She tugged the sheet here and there, looking back and forth from the branches overhead to the uneven ground below, gauging where berries would fall and roll. “Okay,” she stepped back. “Now try.”

  I shook the limbs again. More berries fell. Some of them hit the sheet; some fell on the sheet but rolled off on the ground; many didn’t hit the sheet at all. I cam
e down from the ladder and we gathered up the corners of the sheet to channel the berries into our bucket. Some went in the bucket; some rolled back onto the ground.

  We peered into the bucket. Many of the berries were green. How is it that green berries fall off while ripe ones cling stubbornly to the branch? Can you make a pie with green mulberries? we wondered. We didn’t know for sure but we didn’t think so. Maybe with enough sugar?

  This wasn’t quite as slick an operation as we’d thought it would be. We stared. All that effort to get a cup of berries.

  “But I want a pie.” Disappointment filled Sue’s voice and her eyes glistened.

  “We’ll get enough,” I tried to convince us both. “We have to keep at it. Come on. Let’s move the ladder.”

  Together we wrestled the ladder under another part of the tree and spread the sheet again. This time Sue climbed up to shake the limbs. Mulberries rained down on the sheet and ground. “It’s okay,” I said. “We can pick up the ones from the ground.”

  We fell to our knees picking up berries out of the deep grass. The little piles of berries in the buckets grew though we stepped on just as many. Our fingers, our knees and the soles of our feet resembled the blotchy purple spots blooming on the sheet.

  Every couple of minutes we peered into our buckets. Certainly not the bountiful bucketfuls we had dreamed of. When we figured we had enough, we folded up the sheet, collapsed the ladder and began the hike back to the house. Uphill. That old wooden ladder weighed more with every step.

  By the time we struggled back to the yard and stowed the ladder in the garage, our hands were scraped red and the sides of our legs were a mottled black-and-blue mess of bruises. But we were back and ready to forget all the hard parts. We had pie in sight.

  “Look, Mom! We picked mulberries,” Sue exclaimed as we raced into the kitchen, each of us tilting a bucket for Mom to see.