Before there was time for the white ridges to recede from my hands, Dad emptied another milk bucket, dividing the milk evenly into our pails. We lugged these much more manageable pails into the milk house. This time, Jane let me go first.
Determined to do it just right, just like Jane did it, I clenched the handle with both hands, lifted the pail of milk until the bottom edge rested on my knee and the rim of the bucket leaned against the side of the tank. I looked at Jane and she nodded. I repositioned one hand under the bottom of the bucket, took a deep breath and lifted the pail up over my head so the bucket now balanced precariously on the edge of the strainer. My arms quivered and for a terrified second I had visions of spilling all the milk on the floor.
Fear can make you ever so strong. I tightened my puny arm muscles and forced the pail to remain steady as I poured milk into the strainer. It was only when I brought the pail down and set it on the floor that I realized I’d been holding my breath. I gulped in air as I wiped sweat off my forehead with the hem of my shirt.
“Good job,” Jane smiled. “You did it.”
I had done it. That felt good. But then, lest I get to feeling too proud of my effort, Jane whipped her pail up to the strainer and emptied it as though it weighed nothing. I gazed at her with nothing short of adoration. Back to the barn we went and I put my pail down near Dad.
As I stood there, out of the corner of my eye, I saw a cow down the row arch its back, a signal it was going to pee. I grabbed my pail and took a quick, giant step backwards to avoid the splatter. In the course of milking, you just couldn’t avoid getting cow pee or poop on yourself. But at least I could do my best to keep it out of the milk pail. When the cow finished, I moved my pail back up close so Dad didn’t have to carry the milker very far.
Dad filled our pails. We emptied them. Back and forth we went, carrying pail after pail to the milk house. If a cow didn’t give a lot of milk, there might only be enough milk for one of us. Those times, Jane and I traded off carrying. With each pail emptied into the tank, my confidence returned.
“Okay?” Jane caught my eye when I returned from a solo run.
“Did it,” I beamed. “Easy.”
She raised an eyebrow. “Easy?”
“Easy.”
Jane handed me her pail. “Then you can take both pails,” she said. “I’m going to go bed the pens.”
My mouth dropped open. “Wha …?”
“Carrying two is easier than carrying one,” she explained. “You’re more balanced.”
Before I could protest, she was gone. I turned a questioning eye toward Dad. He nodded and divided the latest bucket into the two pails. “She’s right,” he said.
Okay, if he thought I could do it, I thought I could do it. I grabbed the handles and lifted. The muscles in my shoulders knotted and the handles dug deep grooves in my fingers as I struggled to walk to the milk house, the rims of the buckets chafing against the sides of my legs. At the milk house door, I turned my back and pushed in. By the time I set the pails back down, my arms were quivering. I shook my arms, curling and uncurling my fingers. I stared up at the strainer.
“Okay,” I muttered. “Here we go.” Grabbing the first pail with both hands, I brought it up to my knee, shifted one hand to the bottom of the pail and lifted it up to the strainer. The milk surged, filling the strainer to the top. I eased the pail back, let the milk drain down, and poured the rest in.
“Easy,” I said when I set the pail on the floor. “I can do this.” The other pail wasn’t even half full. No problem. I don’t want to say I got cocky, but maybe just a little overconfident.
Smug in my success emptying the first pail, I grabbed the second bucket and swung it up with one hand instead of lifting with both hands like Jane taught me. Without repositioning my hands, I shoved the pail straight up to the strainer. In my enthusiasm, the pail went too high, too fast. The stainless steel pail crashed against the strainer with a resounding clank, the strainer tilted haphazardly to one side.
In a split second, everything switched to slow motion. The milk splashed high and wide, and I watched in horror as that precious liquid streamed down the side of the tank, formed a white river across the floor and disappeared down the drain.
Frantic, I struggled to get both strainer and bucket back to level. Seconds felt like hours as I righted the strainer and finished dumping what little milk remained from the pail into the strainer. With the pail emptied, I grabbed the hose to wash away all traces of the spilt milk, all the while praying no one would come in to witness this disaster.
When I had everything cleaned up, I snatched the buckets and hurried back to the barn, casting one last glance behind me to be sure all the milk was gone from the sides of the tank and washed down the drain.
When I set the pails down near Dad, I could not meet his eyes. If he just looked at me, I was sure he could see what I had done. Humbled by my foolish haste, I knew I would not be so careless again.
But the milk house was a separate world from the barn. While I’d been cleaning up my spilt milk, another problem revealed itself with a cow.
“I think this one might have mastitis,” Mom told Dad as she finished washing a cow. The milk she squirted out of one cow’s teat came out clotty thick like sour milk. Mom would not put the milker on until Dad checked it out.
When Mom stepped away, Dad planted his hand firmly on the cow’s haunch, stepped in and crouched down to check her out. He squeezed milk from all four teats. Three of them were fine, but sure enough, milk from the fourth teat continued to be clotted even after several tugs.
“Shit,” he muttered.
Mom sighed a reproach. If Dad heard her, he gave no sign.
“Okay, we’ll milk her out and use the milk to feed the rest of the calves,” he said. “Squirt, get a tube out of the box.”
I ran to the small wooden medicine box on the wall by the feed box, lifted the lid and picked out one of the mastitis treatment tubes.
“This?” I asked, holding the tube up to show him before I closed the lid. Dad nodded and stuck the syringe in his shirt pocket so it would be handy as soon as he took off the milker.
Once he milked the cow out and poured all the milk in the calf buckets, Dad inserted the large, plastic syringe into the inflamed teat and injected the full dose of antibiotic. Milk from this cow could not be sold until the mastitis cleared up and the antibiotic cleared her system.
I’d watched the milk hauler take a sample of milk from the tank and store it in the cab of his truck before he siphoned the milk from our tank into his truck. Samples taken every day from every farm on the trucker’s route were taken to the milk plant. Before the truck was unloaded, the plant tested a sample of milk from the tanker. If that sample showed any antibiotic trace, all the milk in the truck was dumped. Then each farm’s sample was tested. The farmer who let milk from a treated cow get into the tank was charged for the lost cost of the whole load. Dad never made a mistake.
Cow by cow, Dad and Mom worked their way down the rows, washing an udder, putting on the belt, attaching a milker, washing the next cow, putting on the belt, attaching a milker, checking how the first cow was doing, washing another udder, putting on the belt, attaching a milker, checking the second cow, taking the milker off the first cow, emptying the bucket, attaching it to the third cow, checking the second cow, and on and on. And Jane and I carried the milk of every cow and dumped it into the tank. There is a routine to milking cows, a constancy like the rising and setting sun, that is both comfortable and comforting.
In an hour we worked our way through milking all fifty cows in the herd. “I’m going to the house to start breakfast,” Mom said the moment she attached a milker to the last cow. She left the barn barely acknowledging Dad’s comment that we’d be up to the house within the hour.
Dad moved on to check another cow’s progress. The milking was almost done but chores weren’t.
When the milking machine came off the last cow, Dad walked down the line, releasing th
e stanchions, slapping each cow on the shoulder to get her to back up. “Get out of here now,” he ordered. The cows complied, contented now that their udders were empty to amble out to the hay bunk in the barnyard.
As soon as the last cow was out the door, I grabbed a broom and swept down the stalls and alleyways; Jane shoveled manure out of the gutters. Dad climbed up to the haymow and threw down a couple of bales to feed the calves. After breakfast, Mom would come back to the milk house to wash the milkers and buckets.
“That looks like it,” Dad said when we finished the barn chores. Sleep long gone from my mind, I stood surveying the barn, feeling strong, imminently useful, and more than a little hungry. Standing beside Dad, my fear that I could not do the work was gone. I’d spilled milk but I wouldn’t do that again. I hoped.
I slipped my hand still bearing the ridges imprinted by the bucket handles into Dad’s big strong hand. He gave me a squeeze, rested his other hand on Jane’s shoulder, and we walked up the hill to breakfast.
There was nothing magic that happened to me between the last day I was nine years old and the day I turned 10; I was still a kid. Of course, I could not do the work of an adult at that age. But the work I did, the work all three of us kids did, had meaning. Everything we took on lessened the load Dad and Mom carried. Everything they asked us to do increased our sense of value to ourselves and to our family and to the farm. And because Dad and Mom valued what I did, that was the best gift of all.
House Chores
“What are we having for breakfast?” Mom asked with studied casualness as we finished putting away the supper dishes. Her question was a combination reminder that I was cooking—as if I could forget that; a check on the completeness of the menu—it was pretty much a given that in my inexperience I’d forget something; and a chance to offer help if I needed it without ever actually coming out and saying Do you need help?, which would have made me feel inadequate when I was trying hard not to be.
“Pancakes and sausage, I think,” I said, glancing up quickly to see if she agreed with my choice. I slipped pancakes into the meal rotation as often as I could when I was cooking. They were my favorite breakfast ever since I was a little kid and Mom set me on top of the freezer next to the gas stove in the basement to watch as she poured pancakes in the shapes of elephants and rabbits and the occasional and infinitely more difficult giraffe on the big round cast-iron griddle. In addition to liking them, pancakes were one of the few things I felt confident making all on my own.
She nodded. “You’ll need to get a package of sausage out of the freezer tonight, then.” When I nodded and headed toward the cellar, she added, “Better check and see if there’s enough tomato juice in the refrigerator.”
As though it had been my plan all along, I changed course to scope out the juice supply. “At least a quart. Looks like enough to me,” I said, bounding off to the basement.
“It’s in the basket on the left,” she called, anticipating my next challenge before I’d had a chance to think of it.
A blast of cold air hit my face as I lifted the heavy lid to the chest freezer. The one-pound packages of pork sausage, tightly wrapped in white freezer paper, stamped in blue ink to identify the contents, were indeed piled in a wire basket on the left. Looking at the neatly stacked packages of meat, Tupperware boxes of vegetables, and apple and rhubarb pies ready to bake, I wondered if she had the location of every item in the freezer memorized. It wouldn’t have surprised me. Grabbing a package of sausage, I let the freezer lid drop shut. I was glad the sausage was on top. Sometimes I had to pull a chair over to the freezer and practically stand on my head to reach certain items.
Running, I took the cellar steps two at a time and dropped the sausage brick into the kitchen sink. It would thaw by morning.
The next morning, after feeding the calves, I raced up the hill to the house. Leaving my boots and coat on the porch, leaping the three steps into the kitchen, I felt a tiny wave of pride sweep through me. And trepidation. Cooking breakfast. By myself.
Shortly after my 10th birthday, about the same time I got to start carrying milk, Mom got it in her head I was also old enough to take on the responsibility of cooking breakfast. Through some logic of her own, Mom decided that planning and preparing breakfasts for a week at a stretch would be good training. But making breakfasts on top of carrying milk would slow mornings down too much, particularly when we kids had to get to school by 8 o’clock. The trade-off was that she took over most of my barn chores when I made breakfast. This was the latest step in Mom’s plan to secure our futures as competent housewives.
As long as I can remember, Mom had been doling out chores around the house. She was determined that my sisters and I would grow up with better preparation to be homemakers than she’d had. Each Saturday she posted lists on the refrigerator.
Here is a list of chores Mom set out for us each weekend:
• Dust the living room furniture
• Shake the rugs
• Dust the floor
• Take fruit jars to the basement
• Sweep down the cellar steps
• Take garbage to the dump
• Clean your room
• Change the sheets on your bed
• Throw dirty clothes down the chute
• Clean the bathroom
• Iron the handkerchiefs
• Practice accordion – 15 minutes
The list was divided into three columns and a column was assigned to each of us girls. Mom must have spent some time thinking about this list each week because the chores assigned changed from week to week, but each list of chores took almost exactly the same amount of time to complete. I was sure of that because I timed it.
Practicing the accordion was the only thing Mom set a time on. She added it to the Saturday chore list even though we had to practice every day. When we had started taking accordion lessons a couple of years before, we’d all been enthusiastic. Mom thought we’d learn classical music. We kids thought we’d be as good as Myron Floren who played accordion on the Lawrence Welk Show we watched on TV every Saturday night.
After two years, we hadn’t progressed much beyond “Lady of Spain” and “Beer Barrel Polka.” Still, we persisted. Fifteen minutes of practice was not enough time to become proficient, but it was as long as Mom could get us to sit down, pick up the fancy accordions that had seemed so glamorous in the beginning, and practice. And when Mom got her mind set on something, we all knew we might just as well do it.
Some chores were so easy they almost didn’t count. Taking the fruit jars to the basement, for instance. That took about two minutes. Fruit jars came up from the fruit cellar one or two at a time as Mom planned the upcoming meal and sent us down to retrieve whatever she needed at the moment: a two-quart jar of tomato juice to make tomato soup, a pint of green beans or carrots, a pint of blackberries to serve over ice cream. No doubt Mom was carrying empty jars back to the basement every time she went down herself, but considering Mom drew three to five jars a day from the shelves of the grocery store that was our fruit cellar, there were always jars to carry back to the basement. On Saturday, whatever jars still on the counter were on the chore list.
Lined up neatly on the shelves, mouths down so spiders and bugs couldn’t crawl inside, the empty Mason jars marked the progress of the year until the next canning season. In an ongoing test of how many jars I could carry at once, I tucked jar after jar between my arm and my chest and then looped each finger into the rims of other jars. Up to eight jars in one arm and five in the other made it safely to the basement. I never lost a one.
On an average Saturday, house chores didn’t take more than about half an hour. It was only during spring or fall cleaning that we would be at it for a whole day. Then we washed windows and moved furniture to vacuum. Nonetheless, I always liked barn chores better.
Dad never wrote the barn chores down. He just issued our marching orders as we finished breakfast. “Clean out the calf pens,” or “Sweep down t
he cobwebs in the barn,” or “Go chop the thistles at the end of the lane.” Those chores could take hours, but being outside or around the animals was my preference. Still, I rose to the challenge of housework, just as I rose to the challenge of most assignments, because they were set before me.
This is not to say I always stepped up to these chores like Miss Mary Sunshine. Oh, no. But generally, my resistance to chores took the form of rolled eyes, heavy sighs and grand Do I have to’s? Directed to Mom. Never Dad. Except one Saturday. The Saturday Dad tagged me to watch the gate between the barnyard and the field while he hauled manure. Watching gate was one boring job.
After Dad filled the manure spreader, I opened the gate so he could drive through. Once he was outside the barnyard, I closed and latched the gate. While he drove through, I watched to ensure none of the cows snuck out with him. Then I waited for Dad to return, at which point I opened the gate again, he drove through, and I closed the gate. Again. And again. And again.
It was true that my presence kept Dad from having to climb on and off the tractor countless times in the course of the afternoon. And it did ensure the cows didn’t get loose. So the chore was worthwhile. But it was boring. In fact, if you looked in a dictionary, I am fairly certain you would find ‘tending the gate’ as part of the definition of ‘boring.’ Depending upon which field Dad was spreading the manure on, the one minute of action required of me might be sandwiched between 15 or 20 or even more minutes of mindless inactivity.
That Saturday afternoon, I convinced myself that while Dad was out spreading a load of manure there was plenty of time for me to run to the house, watch some of the latest Lone Ranger episode, and get back to the gate before he returned. As soon as I latched the gate behind him, I raced to the house, flopping on the floor in front of the TV just as the announcer said, “with a cloud of dust and a hearty, hi ho Silver!” That was the last thought I had of the gate until I heard Dad’s heavy boots clomping across the kitchen linoleum. I never left the gate again.
Growing Up Country: Memories of an Iowa Farm Girl Page 7