Coop_ A Year of Poultry, Pigs, and Parenting - Michael Perry [28]
Eighteen Holsteins and a passel of calves easily generate a barnload of body heat, especially when it’s all concentrated beneath a low ceiling insulated by hay bales stacked twenty feet deep. Sometimes during the day when the cows were settled we kids went to the barn and lay lengthwise along the backs of the tamer animals to absorb their warmth. Because of the way she tucks her hindquarters, a cow at rest tilts off-kilter, allowing you to nestle rump to withers against the ridge of the backbone while draping your limbs across a hemisphere of abdomen. You rise and fall with each bovine breath, and if you hold especially still you will feel the subterranean thump of a five-pound heart. At regular intervals the cow will lurch softly and summon a cud. The dewlap ripples, and a wad of ruminated forage rises visibly up the throat. Rolling the bolus to her tongue, she’ll work her jaw forty or so times, swallow, wait a patient moment, then raise another. It’s hard to imagine regurgitation as a form of meditation, but for cows, it is so. If you feel the animal rock forward, it is time to bail. She is working up the momentum to rise, and it is critical to get clear before she heaves to her feet, hooves scrabbling on the concrete or perhaps your toes.
Barn cats also covet the warmth of cows, but their approach was the reverse of ours; they waited until a cow stood, at which point the cat cruised in to curl up in the warm straw where the cow’s belly had rested. Fine and dandy, until the cow decided to lie down again. A cow does not lower itself gently to earth but rather shuffles about a bit and then pulls the rip cord. The older cats were usually wise to this, but now and then a youngster got caught. When a cow parks on a cat, the cat shape-shifts. In short, there is an increase in square footage. We called them pancake kitties.
All those years ago I already knew I didn’t want to milk cows for a living, and yet those winter nights in that barn remain in my memory as sanctuary. I can see Dad down on one knee, head bent to the black-and-white flank, watching the milk course through the clear tube from the udder to the pail. The very provision of his family, passing before his eyes. I was a kid, so it never occurred to me to wonder what was in his head—if he was running the math on this month’s groceries, or preparing a ruling regarding the latest bad news from school, or just longing for a full night’s sleep—but I absorbed a deep reassurance from his posture. Once when I was still a small grade-schooler but old enough to help with the chores, a traveling salesman drove into the yard, jumped from the car, strode up too close, and patted me on the head. I remember his knee bouncing behind creased polyester pants, and then, hearing the sound of the vacuum pump, he said, “Where’s your daddy? Pullin’ tits?” “He’s milking cows,” I said, as coldly as a grade-schooler could, quietly furious that this shiny-shoed stranger would barge up our driveway and profane my father’s work.
Lest I create the impression that every milking session was a hushed ritual of patriarchal ceremony, I should add that between cows Dad dangled upside down from a bar bolted to the whitewashed beams and taught us how to do skin-the-cat and the monkey-hang, and sometimes led us in chinning contests (he was an agile farmer—we often rushed to the kitchen window after supper to watch as he stepped off the porch, kicked up his heels, and walked all the way to the barn on his hands). We’d see who could pitch the milk rag into the soapwater bucket from the farthest distance. He taught us to squirt milk straight from the cow’s teat into the gaping mouth of a barn cat, which was entertaining for everyone involved except the cow. He told us Ole and Lena jokes, and we laughed whenever one of us got smacked in the face by a cow tail freshly swabbed through the festering gutter. Some nights we got to talking and the conversation ran all evening long, moving