My diligence passed on to all other chores.
Unlike tending gate, making breakfast was not boring at all. I poked a finger at the package of sausage in the sink, disturbing the beads of perspiration coating the wrapper. It was completely thawed, so I unwrapped the meat, searched the spice shelf in the cupboard for sausage seasoning and sprinkled a generous coating over the flattened ground meat. The meat squished through my fingers as I kneaded in the spice and formed the neat little patties I stacked on a plate by the stove.
For the fifty-sixth time, I reviewed the menu in my mind, which order to do things, what didn’t hurt to sit and what had to be done at the last minute, how to time it. I wanted it to be perfect, just like Mom did it; just like I could do it when Mom helped me.
Whenever I was learning to cook something, Mom was always right there, pulling a spice off the shelf just as I needed it, whisking away the egg shells as soon as I’d cracked them into the bowl, washing bowls and spoons as soon as I was finished with them, wiping up spills as they happened. With her ready assistance and encouragement, there was no cooking project too complicated because there was no way I could fail. At the same time, without Mom there as my ever reliable safety net, I never became exactly confident I could do it well myself, a dilemma I only came to realize many years after I’d been cooking on my own.
With the sausages ready, I turned my attention to the pancakes. Pancakes were no doubt the thing I was best at, next to tomato soup with homemade egg dumplings. Under Mom’s watchful eye and helpful hands, I’d made pancakes many times. The recipe was etched in my brain but I still pulled out the stained recipe card just to be sure.
Pancakes
Two cups of flour
Two teaspoons of salt
Two teaspoons of baking powder
Two tablespoons of oil
Two cups of milk
Two eggs separated
I beat the egg whites stiff in their own bowl and then mixed the rest of the batter in another bowl. These could sit until I saw everyone coming up the hill from the barn.
With the bottle of maple syrup warming in a pan of water on the stove, I set the table, poured the tomato juice, and made a pot of coffee. At the last minute, I remembered the butter dish and salt and pepper.
I cannot think how many times we’d all just sat down to eat and Dad would say, “Where’s the salt and pepper?” In less than a heartbeat, Mom would be out of her chair to grab the shakers from the cupboard.
Glancing at the clock, I anticipated I had about 10 minutes before I’d see everyone coming up the hill so I turned on the burner to fry the sausages. Just as the sausages achieved the perfect crispy outside, Mom and Dad and my sisters walked in the door, right on schedule. I turned down the heat, put a lid on the frying pan to keep the sausages warm, folded the egg whites into the batter and headed for the basement, pausing as Mom came into the kitchen.
“How are you doing?” she asked as she lifted the lid on the sausage pan.
“Got it under control,” I said, watching for her nod of approval before I turned toward the stairs and the big, black griddle.
Fixing meals all on my own seemed a daunting task. Until I had to do it myself, I never entertained the first thought about how Mom did it. How she managed to time everything to arrive at the table hot and perfect at exactly the moment we were ready to sit down was a mystery I started to unravel when I was 10 years old.
A Dangerous Game
“Do you see her?” Sue looked up at me as I clung to the top slat of the gate, craning my neck to see as far as possible.
“No. Maybe she’s in the barnyard yet,” I suggested, scanning the field between the house and our country schoolyard, staring hard at each of the cows Dad had just let out of the barnyard. We never used to pay attention to the cows, only to the bull, but these days we also had to keep an eye out for one particular heifer.
“Are you sure you’d know her if you saw her?” Sue challenged.
“Pretty sure,” I said. One black-and-white cow out of several dozen black-and-white cows? Only Dad was able to tell each and every one from the others. I wasn’t absolutely, totally sure, but I thought I could.
“If she is out there and we just don’t see her, do you think we can make it?” Jane asked, her voice wavering. We edged through the gate and out into the field, stopping to look again while we were still behind the windbreak line of trees.
“I don’t see her yet and we can’t wait any longer,” I said. “We’ll be late.”
“Okay,” Jane said, taking a deep breath and grabbing hold of Sue’s hand. “Let’s go.”
With that, we took off running, sped along by pumping adrenaline. It was less than a quarter-mile from the fence by the house to the stile over the schoolyard fence. But that’s a long, long way when a cow is after you.
As we raced through the knee-deep grass, our hair and lunch boxes flying, the hems of our dresses caught up around our knees, we kept one eye on the cows and one on the schoolyard. The cows that stopped to eat as soon as they came to the first green shoots looked up with mild interest and then dropped their heads for another mouthful of grass. Spring pasture was far more interesting than three little girls chasing across the field.
Before we reached the stile, we spotted the cow of our concern, a heifer less than two years old, breaking into a trot across the field.
“There she is,” I yelped. “She’s coming! Hurry!”
The heifer was too far away to be a real danger, but my stomach did a flip and I ran faster. We all did.
Jane pushed Sue up the stile steps ahead of her, then we scrambled over. Safe on the other side, we looked back and saw the heifer slow to a walk. We caught our breaths, leaned into each other in relief and broke out laughing. Escaped death once again!
Farms present a wide range of life-threatening circumstances. Our parents warned us about some of these dangers on a regular basis. “Don’t go on the highway,” Mom said anytime we played in the field north of the house. Mom said Don’t go on the highway so often that my skin prickled as though shocked by an invisible electric fence anytime I was within 30 yards of that road.
The highway was a real and present danger. We knew this for certain because a little girl who lived across the highway from us, the only child in the neighborhood who was just my age, was struck and killed by a car on this highway, right in front of our lane, when she was only four. Mom would never, never, never let us forget.
Because nothing serious occurred as a result of other fairly obvious dangers, we were cautious but not overly concerned. Take the bull, for instance. A massive, 2,200-pound Holstein, with hulking body and a neck as thick as a 55-gallon drum, the bull spent his days in a stall in the barn. A fine coating of barn dust blanketed the bull’s hide, making him look old even though he was in his prime. None of us brushed the dust off or gave him a friendly pat when we passed by his stall like we did with the calves in adjoining pens or the cows when they were in for milking. The same invisible electric warning fence sounded by our parents about the highway kept us on alert around the bull.
The bull escaped from his stall one day when we were playing in the haymow with our cousins. From the safety of the haymow, we peered down the hay chute with a combination of horror and delighted hysteria as the bull worked his way up and down the alleys, cleaning up remnants of hay and grain. In the bizzaro minds of children, this was the kind of happening that just proved how great it was to live on a farm instead of in town like our cousins.
The bull chose to lie down at the base of the ladder, our only means of escape. The lowest doors out of the haymow were a good 20 feet above the ground, an intimidating height none of us was willing to jump. It should be noted that as long as we remained in the haymow, we were perfectly safe, but of course as soon as we could not leave, it was the only thing we wanted to do.
Shouting like lunatics from the haymow doors, we created enough commotion to attract the attention of our parents in the house. Roused from th
eir Sunday afternoon naps, Dad and Uncle Ed came to the barn to rescue us. As a result of that day, I never entered the barn again without bracing my knee against the barn door before opening a one-inch crack and peeking in to see if the bull was loose.
Other circumstances never struck us as dangers at all. We scampered across the roof of the hog shed in games of tag, balanced our way along the two-by-four boards that divided the grain bins in the upper levels of the corn crib, climbed to the top of the silos, 50 feet in the air, where we used pitchforks to clear silage away from the blower when Dad chopped corn and hay to fill the silos. Every building, every field on the farm was open to us for play and work.
But farms do present the possibility of danger whether we recognized it or not. The cows were in this group.
On a dairy farm, heifer calves are raised to join the milking herd. The cow that eventually caused us such trouble started out as one of those darling little calves. All legs and great big, liquid black eyes. Like all the other calves, she sucked hard on our fingers as we dipped her nose in a bucket of warm milk to teach her to drink. Since our chores didn’t take long, my sisters and I also played with the calves.
Every year, we watched the boys and girls in the boys’ 4-H clubs show their animals at the Fair. Our pleas to show calves fell on deaf ears. Dad was as adamant in his position about boys’ 4-H as he was about letting me have a horse. No. No. No. No. No. No matter how often we asked. So pretending our calves would eventually be show calves became one of our games.
We braided ropes out of binder twine, hooking the knotted twine over nails in the barn walls across from the calf pens and competing to see who could make the smoothest ropes. We fashioned these ropes into halters. When the calves were little, we cornered them in the pens, slipped the halters over their heads, and led them out of the barn. We guided them round the yard as though we were showing them at the county fair.
From time to time, we pretended we were cowboys, practicing our lasso techniques in the pens. Romping around the pens, butting up against us, the calves appeared to have a good time, too.
These games lasted only a short while. The farm offered an endless range of diversions, from chores assigned by Mom or Dad to activities we dreamed up—things like converting the outhouse to a playhouse or staging grand dramas when our cousins came to visit and charging our parents two cents to see our productions. Plus the calves grew up quickly. From about 80 pounds at birth, within a few months, a calf weighed several hundred pounds. A mature Holstein cow weighs 1,300–1,500 pounds.
While most calves outgrew playing just as we kids did, the problem was that even as this particular calf grew to full size, she still loved to play. She scrambled to greet us when we came in the barn, tossing her head and forcing the other calves out of the way so we could scratch her forehead or hug her neck. In just one year, she had reached nearly full size, and while we weighed about 75 pounds and were ready to stop playing, she weighed close to 1,000 pounds and was not.
That’s when the real games—and the real potential for danger—began.
One Sunday when the platter was cleared of the last piece of fried chicken, Mom looked around the table and suggested, “Why don’t you kids go outside and play.”
On any other day, we girls had to do dishes, but on Sundays when we had company and there were other kids to entertain, Mom let us off the hook. This Sunday Aunt Joyce and Uncle Ed and our cousins came to visit, arriving right after we got home from church and just in time to get dinner on the table. When Mom let us loose, we slid off our chairs like our bottoms were greased and charged out the door before she could change her mind.
Once out of the house, we asked our cousins—three boys who matched the three of us girls in ages—“What do you want to do?” We let them choose because they lived in town, which was boring to us, and because they were guests, so it was polite. Donny said, “Let’s go down by the creek.” That was as good an idea as any, so we raced off down the lane to the Back 40.
When we got to the pasture, the cows were scattered across the east end of the field, grazing or lying in the shade of trees along the creek, chewing their cuds. Their coats glistened clean in the afternoon sun, like a picture in Dad’s Hoard’s Dairyman magazine. We headed to the other end of the pasture, upstream of the cow herd. The cows took no particular notice of us, and we were under standing orders from Dad not to bother them. Don’t make the cows run were always the last words Dad uttered anytime he knew we were going to be around the herd.
On that summer day, it truly never occurred to any of us anything would happen. If we thought about it at all, we figured there was safety in our numbers. We were wrong.
In the cool shade of trees along the creek, oblivious to the cows, we built sailboats out of bark, sticks and leaves, skimmed stones along the water, and decided to build a dam from bank to bank. We thought we might attract beavers, though we’d never seen one in our creek. None of us paid any attention to the cows and it was only when one left the herd and ambled directly toward us that we took notice.
I didn’t recognize the heifer at first. Coming straight at us, we couldn’t see the pattern of the black-and-white markings we would all come to know as well as our own faces. When it sank in that this was the heifer, I scrambled to my feet. “She’s coming,” I exclaimed.
“Who’s coming?” Donny asked, glancing up as he grabbed another stone and added it to the pile we were amassing in the creek.
“That heifer.” The tone of my voice brought my sisters to their feet.
Without hesitating, Jane said, “We have to get out of here. Come on!” The urgency in her voice yanked the boys to attention.
When all six of us stood up at once, the Holstein heifer pulled up short. She studied us. Warily, we watched her.
“What’s the big deal?” Johnny asked. The oldest among us, six months older than Jane, Johnny was almost 13 and the closest thing to an older brother I had. Skinny, approaching gangly, he stood with feet apart, hands on hips, like a man but not yet a man. Johnny was ready to back the cow down. Donny and Herm stepped up beside him.
“It’s that heifer,” I repeated with edgy stress, as though that explained everything, which of course it didn’t. “The one that got Mom down.”
The boys jerked around to look at me in disbelief. “That’s the one that broke Aunt Belle’s wrist?” Johnny was incredulous. I nodded, feeling the weight of the realization beating down on all of us like the early summer sun. We all knew this story.
Mom was in the barnyard getting the cows in to milk. She saw the heifer coming toward her and figured she’d stop it by throwing her arm around its neck. The young cow tossed her head and threw Mom off balance, knocking her to the ground. The heifer planted her forehead square in the middle of Mom’s chest and pushed her across the manure-covered barnyard. Mom screamed. And screamed. And screamed. Dad raced out from the barn and with one shout of “HEY!” the heifer looked up, looked back at Mom, and trotted off.
When Dad helped Mom to her feet, Mom knocked off the chunks of manure and defended the heifer, “She just wanted to play.” Though her wrist hurt, she didn’t go to the doctor until a month later when her wrist still hurt. When she learned her wrist was broken, she opted for a brace instead of a cast. That wrist never did heal right.
Coming to the farm for Sunday dinner or for a week’s vacation in the summer, our cousins didn’t know much about the cows nor were they certain what to do when one came toward them. Still, we’d all been stuck in the haymow when the bull got loose in the barn. He scared the bejeesus out of us. Bulls could be mean; we knew that. But cows weren’t a threat. Generally.
As one, we all looked back to the approaching heifer who regarded us with the same steady gaze. She did not seem angry. Just curious. Like she wanted to play. But she wasn’t a calf anymore; now she weighed a thousand pounds. We’d had more than one encounter with her, but those times it was always just us girls. Now there were six of us kids. In spite of Jane’s alarm, we s
tood our ground.
It was a standoff worthy of Marshall Dillon in Gunsmoke. Stay or run? The heifer took another two steps toward us and began to look in our imaginations every bit as menacing as a bull ready to charge.
I looked at Jane. “What do you think?”
“I don’t know.” She never took her eyes off the heifer. “Maybe she won’t come any closer.”
Just as I looked back at the heifer, she took a step, then two. If this was a game of chicken, we lost. “Let’s go,” Jane said. The six of us turned and ran.
A quick glance backward revealed that as we ran, the heifer began to lope toward us, picking up speed with each step.
“Run for the fence,” Jane yelled. We all raced toward the barbed wire fence between the pasture and the corn field. Leaping over ditches, scrambling up banks, Johnny, Donny and I were soon yards ahead.
When we looked back, we saw that Sue and Herm were falling behind and Jane was holding back to stay with them.
“Hurry up! She’s gaining on you,” Johnny shouted. The heifer was coming at them, moving with purpose in a gait that was not full-out running, but that ate up yards in a hurry.
“They’re not going to make it,” I panted as I bent over, my hands on my knees, sucking in air.
“Maybe we can get up a tree,” Johnny suggested. We scanned the terrain.
“There’s one,” Donny pointed toward a tree with fairly low limbs and two trunks forming a crotch we could use as a step up. We ran toward it, screaming at the others to follow.
Growing Up Country: Memories of an Iowa Farm Girl Page 8