by Cheryl Peck
My life has been punctuated by testy relationships with cattle.
In fact, I have not done well with anything sporting cloven hooves. When I was very, very small, my parents employed a twelve-foot goat to torment me. Her name was Suzy and she lived in the Suzy House, which, before Suzy, had been a small milk house attached to the barn in our back yard. When Suzy moved in she spent a great deal of her time creating small brown beads, which she used to decorate her new home. I could not have been much more than three or four when Suzy lived with us, so bits and pieces of my memories are missing—most notably, how I repeatedly came so close to an animal I hated so passionately—but I spent much of my early youth pinned to the ground in the back yard under my parents’ goat while she stood on the straps of my bibs and ate my hair. She was big and ugly and she smelled bad. Eventually she ate all of the grass in her pen and my father began chaining her to a cement block, which she dutifully dragged all over the neighborhood until one night he came home and found her standing on the roof of his car (I don’t remember, offhand, where the block was) and she mysteriously disappeared.
My middle sister, the UnWee, is a woman of firm and determined opinions. A few years ago she bought a new house and while I was searching for a housewarming present I asked her what she needed or would like. She said, “Anything but a cow.” I admired her resolve, but assured her I rarely present urban dwellers with livestock as housewarming gifts. She was unmoved. She came to the city to get away from cows, she assured me; she did not want any cows in her back yard. She did not want any cows in her life. (This is probably why she moved to Old Dairy Farm Road.) She did not want any cows on her refrigerator, or her cookie jar, or her dish towels. Any likeness of a cow, the UnWee told me, would be unwelcome in her home. She plans to live her life in a cow-free environment. Reassured, I took her out for a steak.
The UnWee has reason to be bitter: she was forced to quit school in kindergarten during The Great Cow War. Our mother was summoned to the school and spoken to by the teacher because the UnWee had rolled up her nap blanket and gone to wait for the bus. The UnWee informed our mother that the teacher had told the entire class that ONLY BULLS HAVE HORNS. The UnWee, who had only recently been treated to the sight of thirty (female) cows staggering around in a bloody daze because they had been de-horned, knew her teacher was too dumb to teach anything the UnWee cared to learn. It took some persuasion from our mother to convince her that knowledge extends beyond basic farm lore and that perhaps even city folk know things five-year-olds do not.
I (the Least Wee), the UnWee and the Wee One (and two smaller brothers we never bother to count) all lived in a farmhouse with no farm. Someone had dug it up and carried it away as gravel so rather than being surrounded by farmland we were surrounded by a huge hole in the ground, which included two big ponds. When we were very young, there was a huge barn at the back of our lot and it was to this barn that the Suzy House was attached. Having abandoned his profession as a goatherder, our father briefly penned in a few calves around the barn, had his picture taken with them and then apparently sold them. My father never wanted to be a farmer. He had grown up on a small dairy farm; his life had been dictated from five in the morning until whenever he finished at night, seven days a week, for twenty years, by the milking schedule of a herd of ungrateful Guernseys, and he was done. He fought briefly with the farming gene, first with Suzy, then with the calves, and I think he was relieved when our landlord came over one day and towed away the barn. The barn, as I remember it, was huge, a haymow in the middle, with milking stanchions and the milk house at one end, and a few animal pens on the other. One day a group of men came, shored up the beams, picked up the whole barn, set it on a frame with wheels, and drove away with it. I can still see that barn moving slowly down the road, the rural answer to mobile homes.
My father’s parents were dairy farmers, my mother’s parents did a variety of things—my grandfather was a retired railroadman—but, having survived the Great Depression, they maintained a garden, a barn, several fields and two cows. When the economy fell apart again, the banks crashed and all of the rich people killed themselves, my grandparents would manage, once again, to survive. This was my grandmother’s explanation of why she kept two cows she never seemed to like, and for years I believed everyone kept cows as insurance against the next Great Depression, which could happen anytime the Democrats were elected. I felt much safer when, as a child, I was given a grocery sack full of baby ducks, because I knew I was at least six ducks away from starvation and suicide myself. I asked my mother why we didn’t keep two cows in case Democrats were elected and the Great Depression came back and my mother muttered words she told ME never to use.
My mother’s parents’ two cows were a Holstein and a Guernsey. For city folk, that is a big black-and-white cow and a big red-and-white cow. Both give milk. As I recall, the Holstein was so large she could barely make it through the barn door, which apparently worried her too, because she always did it at a dead run. I avoided her. Particularly, I avoided being in the same barn doorway with her. I believe her name was “Petunia.” The Guernsey was named “Junie.” Petunia annoyed my grandmother at great length because she would only eat the grass on the far side of the fence, and, being a big cow, she did this by simply leaning against the fence until it gave up and let her over. She preferred to effect these escapes on or near the railroad tracks that ran along the edge of my grandparents’ property; because my grandfather had worked for the railroad, this posed a particularly strong sense of responsibility for them. I don’t believe Petunia ever actually attacked a train, but she certainly kept my grandmother alert and fit.
I never felt entirely safe at my grandparents’ farm. My father’s parents kept about thirty Guernseys. Guernseys are not small cows and they don’t get any smaller when there are thirty of them. When my sisters and I spent the night with my grandparents, we would be sent down the lane in the morning to fetch the cows. This is much like sending mice to find a flock of eagles. The cows would be standing around the woods at the end of the lane, waiting for small children to trample, and when we appeared they would lower their heads, study us intently, turn to each other, and give the signal: “MOOOOOooo.” I would then turn and run like the wind for the barn with thirty cows galloping along behind me. Among my fondest childhood memories this rates right up next to my aunt’s favorite game, called, “No, YOU test the electric fence …” My aunt was five years older than I was, and she believed quite firmly that I was a useless pain in her backside—her response to that challenge was to electrocute me.
When we got the cows up to the barn, they each had a specific stanchion they plodded to be milked. Occasionally brief territorial battles would break out over whose stanchion was whose, which would cause my grandfather to snarl, “Hey,” and slap his cows with a pitchfork. My sisters and I never argued in front of him. The cows would then be locked by the neck into their stanchions where they ate and were milked at the same time. My grandfather’s cows never appeared to truly enjoy being milked. Periodically they would kick at the milking machines, or jerk around as if trying to pull their udders free, and every once in a while they would let a hind foot fly back in search of small children. Their favorite amusement, however, was to wait until someone ordered a small child to deliver something at the far end of the barn, load their tails up with used cowfeed and then WHAP the child in the face with it as they sidled by. Cow tails are made of hairs of about the consistency of fishline and when delivered with just the right touch they sting like mad. This is probably why flies don’t like them.
I lived in terror of being bitten by a cow for years. This amused my grandparents and my aunt to no end, which made me feel abused and misunderstood, but the most reassurance I ever got was, “No cow bite is gonna hurt you.” Eventually I strayed too close to a calf just before feeding time and while I was trying to pet him, he ate my hand. He clamped down good and hard and set up a sucking motion that was impressive, and I was about to set up a shriekin
g action that would be just as impressive, if not more so, when I realized IT DIDN’T HURT. Cows only have upper teeth: apparently it doesn’t take more than that to pluck grass. So when my greatest cow fear came to pass, I did not lose my arm to the elbow, I was just slimed.
Still. Cows Get Out.
Whenever we were at our grandparents’, the UnWee, the Wee One and I lived in terror of the inevitable: someone would appear out of nowhere and report breathlessly, “The Cows Are Out!” When we were very small, we would be ushered into the house and ordered to stay there until someone came to get us— and we immediately presumed that might, in fact, be the cows, having killed all of the adults. … I still have nightmares about the cows Getting Out, breaking into my grandparents’ house, stampeding up the stairs after me and looking into the trunk where I am hiding. … When we were older, we were ordered OUTSIDE and told to stand in front of the flower gardens and wave our arms. In a cattle stampede we were expected to risk our lives to protect the begonias.
We had all seen Rawhide.
All of this came back to me the day I gazed through Hopalong’s windshield and discovered inmate #43 and I were on the same side of the fence. He was Out. He was big. He was bovine. He had the same flat, stupid eyes I remember from my childhood. I drove away in a flash, thinking, “To hell with the begonias …”
Let some convict chase cows.
the atlantic and pacific tea company
MY GRANDMOTHER MOLBY did all of her trading at the Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company. I often went along to trade with her because it summoned up notions of wearing hides and feathers and swapping tobacco for firewater (neither of which I had or even remotely needed) and because we always came out with M&M’s. She knew all of the checkout people by name and they all knew her. One—Alice—had grown up with my Aunt Janette and had become a career checkout clerk. It was an admirable career, not one anyone took lightly. When I was in high school, checkout clerks were rumored to make almost as much per hour as employees at GM.
My grandmother was not that far removed from the generation when one really did walk into the Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company, slap down fifteen animal pelts, six dozen eggs and four billion tomatoes and use them as tender for those exotic things one could not grow or catch on one’s own—tea, for instance. My grandmother could have traded hollyhocks, poppies, roses and gladiolas for M&M’s, but I never actually saw her do it.
When I went to the A&P with my grandmother, I was always allowed to bask in the glory of my heritage. Old women who seemed to know my grandmother would walk up to us and say, “Well—this must be Eloise’s daughter,” and I would smile and squirm self-consciously. That I was that easily recognized by people I did not know but who knew my elders had not yet become problematic.
So we did our trading at the A&P and then we carried the M&M’s home and put them away, and then we cleaned house, and then we made and ate supper and washed the dishes and carried out the trash and then we sat down to watch Groucho Marx abuse George Fenneman. My grandmother hated Groucho Marx, and fussed about him for the entire half-hour he was on, every time he was on, for as long as he was on. Then she went to the kitchen and came back with three bowls, one for me, one for her, and one for my grandfather, and we had M&M’s. My grandmother and I would use the various colors to make floral arrangements in the bottoms of our bowls, while my grandfather would just scoop them up by the handful and eat them. We felt morally superior to him. We were more aesthetic. We would frequently discuss our moral and aesthetic superiority in his presence, but I don’t know that he even heard us. Certainly our conversations never affected the way he ate M&M’s.
I often stayed over at my grandmother’s house. There was no plan or pattern to it. She would come to our house bearing old copies of The Ladies’ Home Journal, Redbook, Family Circle, and Reader’s Digest. Either she or my Aunt Janette brought us National Geographic. She brought us flowers all summer that she had grown in her yard. She brought us peas and beans and tomatoes and strawberries. She brought us dress patterns and fabric and dresses pinned together to be measured and fitted. And then she would decide to go home and one of my sisters or I would decide to go with her.
My grandmother was a stately woman, about five feet six inches, a stout woman, a large and powerful and safe woman. Unless she was going to town she always wore an apron and she always smelled faintly of soap. Dirt and disorder in any form lived in mortal fear of my grandmother. Dust mites in other people’s houses went scurrying off under the furniture to get away from her. She did not tolerate disorder in her own life and she did not tolerate disorder in the lives of those she loved. She did not tolerate it particularly well in the neighbor’s dogs.
When I was eleven I was standing in the dining room of her house on M-86 and I was flipping through either Look or Life magazine while she and my mother talked and I discovered an article about an eleven-year-old girl in India who had just had a baby. Worried this might be contagious, I read on that this girl had said the father was a twenty-one-year-old soldier currently off fighting a war. I read this information to my mother and I asked, “How does she know who the father is?” My mother got one of those I-should-have-been-childless expressions on her face, but my grandmother never hesitated: she looked up at me and she said, “Just never you mind.”
Her hair always fascinated me. She did not cut it until she was well into her eighties and the strain of keeping it up just became too wearing. When I was a child I used to sit and watch her comb it each morning when she got up and each evening before she went to bed. It fell down over her shoulders, down her back, past the stool where she sat and nearly touched the floor. She was in her early sixties when I was born and the strain of her life had taken its toll, so her hair was quite thin, but the length, nonetheless, made me envious. During the day she always wore it up in a bun on the back of her head, and while I knew her, the hair around her face faded from dark gray into silver, but the bun on the back of her head stayed brown.
We went to the A&P on Tuesdays. I don’t know why she selected that particular day as opposed to any other, but I do know that she lived and shopped as if she lived fifty miles by oxcart from the nearest store. During the time I knew her, the farthest she ever lived from the A&P was four miles. She just did not go to town often. Going to town was an event. It required preparation. One had to look one’s best. She always combed her hair. She always touched up her makeup, pancake makeup which she wore to cover blemishes in her complexion, the only makeup she ever wore. She always wore a clean, freshly pressed dress. It came out of the closet pressed and she pressed it again.
In fact, she always wore a dress. According to my mother, when she baled hay, which is a hot, dusty, scratchy, thankless job, she pulled on my grandfather’s coveralls over her dress; but she gardened in a dress; she mucked out stalls in a dress; she tended her chickens in a dress—she even killed them in a dress. She had one dress pattern from which she made every dress I ever saw her wear, so the question when we saw her drive in was not what she was wearing, but whether it was navy-and-white-dotted Swiss, brown-and-white-dotted Swiss, navy small-print cotton gingham, brown small-print cotton gingham, or navy-and-white gingham plaid, or brown-and-white … And once she had made a dress, she wore it until the spots fell out. My grandmother got the last possible drop of use out of everything she ever owned.
She wore a “good” dress to go to town. She carried her purse, which opened with a clasp at the top and swung by the straps from her forearm and which had a snap/latch on the inside to hold her car keys. If she ever bought a new purse it must have looked just exactly like the old purse because I only remember one.
The clothes she made for us—and she made nearly all of them—reflected her values, if not necessarily her private tastes. She built dresses for active children who lived in their clothes, dresses with triple stitching between the blouse and the skirt and reinforced stitching to hold on the sleeves. As soon as I discovered style and popular fashion these dresses became th
e bane of my existence. They were homemade. They were indestructible. The first store-bought dress I ever owned I wore during a rousing game of trucks and, scooting around on my hands and knees on the floor, I ripped the skirt right off the blouse, an accident unimaginable in one of my grandmother’s dresses. Much to my mortification she bought a new sewing machine that boasted a raft of decorative stitches and I was compelled to appear before my peers in dresses with rows and rows and rows of machine-sewn ducks and snowflakes and whirly-gigs. No one else wore dresses like that. I would walk into my class and my schoolmates would smile and say, “Oh, your grandmother made you a new dress.” Older now, I think perhaps I heard the criticism in my own head and missed a more subtle, kinder message.
She did use more than one pattern for our dresses, however, and she certainly used more than two colors. Our clothes were color-coded for us to reflect our personalities and tastes. Nearly everything she made for the UnWee was blue, while the Wee One was decked in bright yellows and I was ensconced—until I finally objected—in a sea of pink. But she made us beautiful clothes. I remember a shirtwaist dress of polished cotton she made for me that was a coppery brown with pink piping and a row of pink set in down the sides of the front placket; and an ivory polished cotton dress with a drop-waist and pastel flowers in the print … One of my favorite dresses of all time featured the much-hated rows of fancy machine-stitching down the front. I believe we compromised on the number of rows of ducks. Our dresses were beautiful. Not necessarily the cutting edge of fashion at the time, but each and every one of them was a work of love.
On the way into town to the A&P we would pass the abandoned buildings around the cement factory where, once upon a time, the Dagos had lived. They had all come over here—many from Italy—to work and live in the cement plant, and then it closed. So they all moved downtown and bought ice cream parlors. As I remember that story, there was a point to it, some sort of life lesson about struggle and hard work, but it’s gone now. My grandfather spent hours smoking his cigar and telling me stories about the railroad, the job he had before the Depression, the kinds of jobs on the railroad he had during the Depression, the railroad lines and where they went and who owned them and who bought them and the freight that was shipped and Chicago, Toledo, Baltimore, Philadelphia … and what I remember of these long, historically rich ramblings is one word—Nickleplate. It sounded funny. I was sitting at a train crossing years later watching the cars fly past and there, written on the side of one, was the word—Nickleplate. I was so excited I nearly drove into the side of it.