by Jon Scieszka
Most boys, I thought, couldn’t stand five minutes in a place like this.
I waited, pressing my fingers into my palms. Sis had been quite firm on that point, too. “It’s like haggling with a peddler on Mulberry Street. Once you offer your price, close your mouth. Let him speak next.”
Mr. Glander glanced around. Then, maybe realizing I was the only boy to choose from, he said, “All right, sixty-five cents. But I’ll dock your pay an hour for every minute you’re late in the morning.”
“Thank you, sir,” I said. “I’ll be on time.” My sister might be bossy sometimes, but she had been right. This time I was glad I’d listened.
“All right, get outta here. I’ll see you in the morning. And one more thing, Daley,” Mr. Glander added. “I expect absolute loyalty from my workers.”
“You have my word.”
I didn’t know then how much I would regret that answer. I scooted out of there as quickly as I could, not even caring if I stepped in a big pile of dung.
I did it! I thought as I got back out on the street. What I’d actually done (though I didn’t know this yet, either) was to step right into the muck of one the greatest scandals to hit New York City.
“I got a job!” I almost sang the words as I wove in and out of the noisy crowds on my way home.
It felt good to be out in the sunshine. I took my time, gazing into the windows of Italian bakeries. The rows of crusty loaves of bread and trays of shiny fruit tarts made my mouth water. At a flower stall, I saw bright yellow daffodils, so fresh and sweet they made me think of the little calf.
Daffodil. I’ll call her Daffodil, I thought. Not that she was mine, of course. But I was glad to know there would be at least one friendly creature to greet me the next morning. I had a feeling that the “milkmaids” might be as stern as their boss, Mr. Glander.
I also stopped to look at the latest issue of Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper. Well, I couldn’t not look at it! Each week there was a fantastic new illustration on the cover.
“I got my eye on you, boy,” said the newsstand man as I reached for it. I stepped back and stuffed my fingers into my pockets. My right hand closed around the stub of my pencil.
Sixty-five cents. I’d be earning sixty-five cents a day. I would turn it all over to Ma or Sis. I had a feeling Ma would be glad to let Sis keep watch on the family budget while she cared for Da and Bitsy.
Although I knew Sis would frown as she marked the cost on her tally sheet, I made up my mind right then to ask for six cents a week for myself, so I could buy the new issue of Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper each Tuesday. I might even beg for a little extra for pencils and a notebook, too.
As far as needing new shoes, well, I wouldn’t mention that right away. I’d just have to put up with the hole. The chance to pore over each issue of Frank Leslie’s paper would be well worth a muddy wet foot.
During my first week as a stableboy, I learned three important things.
The first was to keep my head down and my mouth shut. If I didn’t, one of the milkmaids who fed and milked the cows would box my ears and yell, “Get back to work, lazy Irish boy!”
Second, I found out that no matter how hard I worked to clean all the stalls (several barns with long rows of them), my task was hopeless: the stink just wouldn’t go away.
And then there was the third thing: there was a reason why the dairy smelled so bad. It wasn’t only the cow dung. No, the stables reeked because of what the cows ate, which wasn’t hay or grass or anything you might expect. I discovered this one day as I watched one of the milkmaids, a bulky man with a thick beard and filthy hands, pour foaming, hot liquid into a trough.
“What’s that?”
“Swill, of course.” Seeing my confused expression, he added, “It’s waste from the distillery—a sort of grain mush left over from making the liquor. That’s what we feed them.”
“It’s boiling hot!” I exclaimed, watching a cow step back as steam from the disgusting mush rose up in her face. “She can’t eat it.”
“It’ll cool. They soon come to like it,” the man assured me. “Works out well for Mr. Johnson, the owner. The swill is free waste, and we just cart it over from the distillery next door. We dump the rest in the river.”
“I don’t think swill can be good for the cows,” I blurted. “I mean, some of them have sores on their backs and bad teeth. And their tails . . . their tails seem to be rotting off. A few have normal long tails, but others just have stubs left.”
“Irish boy, let me tell you something about working here,” he hissed, leaning so close I could smell his foul breath. “You just do your job, keep your head down . . .”
“And my mouth shut,” I finished. “Sorry, I forgot.”
“Don’t forget again.”
“Keep my head down. Keep my mouth shut.” I repeated those words to myself many times in the weeks to come. My family needed me to keep this job. We needed the sixty-five cents I made each day.
But it got harder and harder to see Daffodil and the other cows in such misery. The manure I shoveled didn’t look like normal cow dung. Instead, it was a sticky liquid, as if the cows had diarrhea.
And they had no room to move! Each cow was tied in a stall only about three feet wide. She could only stand up or lie down, but was never taken out into the fresh air or allowed to walk around.
Most of all, I could never get used to seeing those rotting tails.
After hearing about how awful the stables smelled, you might expect that was how I came to be called Stink. But that’s not the reason either, although I admit I now reeked like an open sewer.
Remember how I’d worried about getting mud inside my shoe because of one hole? Well, every day that awful stuff covered the tops of my shoes, turned my pants black, and stained the sleeves of my shirt.
I’d be fibbing if I told you I didn’t cry sometimes. Tears ran down my dirty cheeks, but I didn’t dare wipe them off, or I’d get stinky gunk in my eyes and mouth. I just kept my head down and hoped none of the milkmaids noticed me.
I couldn’t go home smelling that way. Our apartment was tiny—only two rooms and no bathtub. There weren’t even any public baths in our neighborhood.
At least I did manage to find a solution to that problem. The stables weren’t far from the Hudson River. Every day after work, I walked there to rinse off (upriver from where the distillery dumped the rest of its waste). Usually, my clothes had just enough time to dry on my thirty-minute walk home.
Sis still wrinkled her nose at me every night. I could never totally get rid of the smell that clung to my skin and hair. Mostly, though, I was able to fool my parents, who imagined me working on a small farm, hidden away in the midst of buildings on the outskirts of Manhattan.
As Mr. Glander had reminded me, most boys would be happy earning fifty cents a day. So I couldn’t tell my family the whole truth—not about what I saw every day or how I wanted to quit that job more than anything.
How could I add to the problems we already had?
“I’m proud of you, Danny,” Da had said when I’d told him how I’d asked for a higher wage. He was still lying flat, to help the pain in his back, with his right ankle propped up on a pillow. “Your grandpa would’ve been pleased, too. He always said you had the makings of a farmer.”
We were silent, thinking of all we had lost in the potato famine. The disaster had struck all of Ireland, destroying crops and causing widespread starvation that killed many, including my four grandparents, and my baby brother, too. It was why we had left.
Bitsy, the only one of us born in America, had been named after Da’s mother, Mary. “She is a gift and carries all our hopes for a new life,” Ma had said when Bitsy was born.
No, until Da was well again, I’d have to do my part and stick it out. Besides, what could I do to change anything there?
Even so, I couldn’t shake the feeling that by not saying anything, I was part of the bad things happening at the stables. Every day that I
went to work, I felt more and more like the cows. But instead of sores on the outside, I had something rotten eating me up on the inside.
Over the next weeks my father got better slowly. But Bitsy seemed to grow worse. She cried constantly, her little legs kicking hard. Sometimes she rubbed her tummy like it hurt. And while she had been sleeping through the night, now she woke up several times, crying to be fed like a newborn. It was almost as if the milk didn’t satisfy her. Once, when I saw Ma change her diaper, I was put in mind of the cows.
“Let her sleep out here with Danny and me from now on,” Sis finally said, to give Ma a rest from getting up so much with the baby at night. “I’ll give her a bottle when she stirs.”
Helping Ma take care of Bitsy was Sis’s responsibility, not mine. But the next night my sister was so worn out from bending over a sewing machine during the day that she didn’t stir when Bitsy began to whimper beside her.
What else could I do? I got up and padded across the room. “Come on, Bitsy girl,” I whispered, reaching down for her. “I’ll give you a bottle.”
We had a small icebox, where my mother kept the milk Mr. Timm delivered, and a few other things. I lit a lamp, and bouncing Bitsy on my shoulder, poured out milk from the larger container into her glass feeding bottle with its new, modern India rubber tube.
For the first time, I looked at it closely. If our Pure Country Milk came from the cows I saw every day, how pure could it be? Could what ailed Bitsy be caused by the milk?
There were milk sheds next to the barns, but I’d never been inside. That very first day, Mr. Glander had warned me to stay away from them. And he’d reminded me every week since. “Remember, boy, you got no business in the sheds,” he’d say. “We use them to store milk before it’s bottled and loaded onto carts.”
Now I wondered what really went on inside those sheds. If someone caught me poking around them, I might lose my job. But as I looked down at my little sister’s dark eyes in the lamplight, I decided that was a risk I had to take.
The next morning, I left home earlier than usual and ran the two miles to West 16th Street. I had my new pencil and a small notebook tucked into my back pocket. If anyone asked, I’d just say I wanted to sketch Daffodil.
I worked in several barns but always saved Daffodil’s for last. That way, the men would be done feeding and milking, and I’d have the place to myself. I’d gotten into the habit of letting Daffodil loose. She loved to follow me around, sniffing at my heels. I wished I could take her with me to the river so she could feel the sun on her back, and even eat some real grass on the riverbank. I’d noticed Daffodil had already started to get ulcers like the other cows.
When I got to the dairy, I made my way across the mud and stood behind one of the milk sheds. The yard seemed deserted at first. I was about to dart inside when I spotted Mr. Glander and a man I didn’t recognize coming out of a barn.
I ducked around the back of the shed just in time. I held my breath as they opened the door and went inside. There were cracks in the walls, and I found one large enough to peer through.
The light was dim, but I could just make out Mr. Glander standing over a large vat. The other man began pouring something into it while Mr. Glander stirred the mixture with a large wooden paddle.
“That’s it. So, we water it down first, like this,” Goldy Glander was saying. “Then we’ll add that chalk, flour, and starch over there to thicken it again.”
“What about the molasses?” the man asked. I guessed he was a new worker learning his job. But what exactly was that job? What were they doing to the milk?
“That comes last. Mr. Johnson likes us to use molasses to give the milk a good color,” Mr. Glander said with a low chuckle. “And that’s how just one gallon of milk from the cows becomes several gallons of Pure Country Milk! Now it’s ready to pour into cans and load onto the carts for delivery.”
Delivery! So this is what we’ve been feeding Bitsy.
Before the men emerged, I slipped away quietly and made my way to the nearest barn. Grabbing a shovel, I got to work as usual. Inside, though, I was shaking.
For now I knew: Not only were the cows sick from being fed swill, Mr. Glander (following Mr. Johnson’s orders) was watering down the swill milk. That way, the dairy could get as much money as possible. Even worse, the milk was being doctored with other substances—like chalk—to make up for the poor consistency and give it the appearance of farm-fresh milk.
Pure Country Milk was a lie. It was swill milk from cows with rotting teeth and tails. Babies shouldn’t be drinking chalk and flour! It was making my baby sister sick.
I wondered if all the men who worked here knew what was added to the milk. They certainly knew about the condition of the cows—and that some cows that died were even sold as meat.
But maybe the men didn’t care. They just kept their heads down and their mouths shut. And they did their jobs.
Like me, I realized. I’m as bad as them. For weeks I’d known about the sick cows with rotting tails. But I’d been too scared of losing my job to tell anyone.
I had to make sure Ma stopped feeding Bitsy swill milk. I knew we bought this kind because it was supposed to be good—but also because it was cheap.
But my little sister couldn’t be the only baby getting sick. What about babies and children from other poor families who were drinking it, too?
By the time Mr. Glander came into the barn at seven to check on me, I was busy mucking out a stall as usual.
“Good morning, Mr. Glander,” I said cheerily. My hands were still shaking, and my head was still whirling with confused thoughts, but I couldn’t let him see that.
“Get over to the big barn, Daley,” he ordered. “Mullen needs your help.”
“Right away, sir,” I replied.
Mr. Mullen was waiting for me near Daffodil’s stall.
“We got a dead one to sell as meat. Help me haul ’er outta here,” he said shortly. “You should be strong enough for that. The mother’s upset.”
He moved to the side. That’s when I saw Daffodil lying stiff on the ground beside her mother.
I stared, unable to move. My heart pounded, and I pressed my nails into my palms to keep from crying.
“Well, come on. I got other work,” he barked. “Grab her hind legs. We’ll load her onto a cart to be hauled off.”
That’s when I made up my mind.
I’d never drawn Daffodil while she was alive. But I’d do it now.
Somehow I got through the rest of the day. On my way home I bought the new issue of Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper with the six cents I had in my pocket.
I stood pressed against a building, away from the crowds rushing past me. I searched until I found what I was looking for, and then I made my plan.
“What are you drawing?” Sis asked later that evening, trying to peek over my shoulder. She was pacing the floor, bouncing Bitsy on her hip to get her to sleep. “You’ve been making sketches all night.”
“Nothing much,” I said, covering my paper with one hand. “Just drawing baseball players.” She would believe that, I figured.
Every boy on Prince Street, me included, was excited about the New York Knickerbockers and the new association of baseball clubs formed just last year. If I hadn’t been working such long hours, I’d be out in the alley playing.
But my sister wasn’t fooled that easily.
“I can always tell when you’re lying, Danny,” she whispered. She glanced toward the other room, where our parents lay asleep. She patted Bitsy’s soft hair. “I know something’s wrong. You can trust me—I’m your sister.”
At first I hesitated. But I had to tell someone.
“I . . . I haven’t wanted to say anything, because we need the money I earn at the dairy. But, Sis, that dairy is a bad place. We have to stop feeding Bitsy milk from there. It’s making her sick. I just know it.”
“What do you mean, Danny?”
I opened the notebook and pointed at a sketch. “T
his shows how crowded the stalls are.”
Turning the page, I said, “The cows get sick from eating the swill from the distillery. This is what happens to their tails. This is a picture of a calf that died today.”
Sis gasped. Then I showed her my last drawing. “And this shows men adding flour and chalk to the milk we buy for Bitsy.”
My sister sank into the chair beside me. Tears filled her eyes, and she clasped Bitsy close. “Is this true, Danny?”
“Yes. And lots of poor families like us buy Pure Country Milk,” I said softly. “Everyone believes they’re feeding their babies good, fresh milk. But they’re not.”
Sis was quiet for a long moment. At last she said, “I’ll talk to Ma about the milk. She can tell our neighbors, at least. But you can’t go back there, Danny.”
“I have to! We still need the money until Da is better.” I gathered my drawings. “Besides, I . . . I need to find out more.”
“What do you mean?”
“I want to make more drawings—to gather evidence.”
She frowned. “It could be dangerous if they catch you.”
“They won’t catch me,” I said.
Over the next two weeks, I was the perfect stableboy. I got to work early and stayed late. I kept my head down. I kept my mouth shut, and I didn’t ask any questions.
But secretly, I kept my eyes open. And, just like Sis, I did a lot of arithmetic.
I counted the cows packed into each crowded barn and kept a tally of how many died each week. I counted the number of cows with only stubs for tails and how many had ulcers on their backs. I also counted those who had to be propped up in a sling to be milked because they were too sick to stand.
At night, I bent over my notebook, making sketches and writing down everything I’d learned. Da, who was hobbling about now, looked at me curiously.
“Is that arithmetic you’re doing, Danny?” he asked one night. “I thought Kathleen was the one who liked figures.”
“I’m giving Danny some problems to do so he can keep up,” Sis put in quickly.