A Bad Goodbye --- Against the Black Tire, His Stream of Tears Was Milky White
Posted: Tuesday, April 15, 2008
by Marty RicKard
Hood cinched tight, head turtled back between hunched shoulders, I pressed against the razor of a dark north wind, toward the morning milking a rock-hard mile away.
Each dawn and dusk that winter, I greeted the bent old man in his bent old bone-gray barn and helped coerce the frothy offering from a dozen smelly parishioners as ancient and toothless as the priest himself.
They came with dumb, gentle force to each her own stanchion, and stood and gossiped and ruminated sweetened grain while we relieved their creamy burden.
In America we love products---tires, cars, ham---we hate the smoke-belching factories where they're made. A protest sign you never see: "PUT THE FACTORY NEXT TO ME".
I loved milk, hated the smelly factory. Hated milking but, loved knowing how. It looks easy. It is not. The coordinated, sequential pinch, squeeze and pull requires learning. Milkers develop thick forearms with sinews that writhe like ropes between the hands and that walnut-sized knot protruding at the elbow---the milking muscle.
Balanced on a T-shaped stool, head against a heaving, crusty flank, the udder must be washed with soapy disinfectant, then dried.
Finally, the ritual begins. The flow is slow, until Bossy "lets down her milk", then it's a heavy stream, with sounds from heaven, first, a tinny soprano ring against the empty pail, then, as the milk pools, the heavy, foamy, solid baritone voice of luscious white liquid velvet.
A milker can evaluate another milker with his ears. The sound of the milk in the bucket is the music that tells it all.
Finally the job is finished, and the noisy chorus is freed, each with an affectionate slap on the rump. They aren't in a hurry to leave his loving voice.
In the milkhouse afterwards we talked.
"Gov'ment rules is gonna kill me."
"How so?"
"Gotta buy milkin' machines, new milkhouse, new coolers, cost morn' $30,000. Cain't ‘ford thet."
"What will you do?"
"Sell out. Ain't got no choice." He huskied his voice to hide pain.
Milking for me, a job. But his ancient blue eyes saw a sacrament, communion with his children.
I was there on the day of the sale.
"These are beautiful cows," the auctioneer said, as he sold each child separately. The old man said goodbye, scratched each ear, before they were taken from him.
After his cows were gone, we stood together in the funeral silence of a home without children. He leaned against a tractor tire and put his head down on the papered skin of those sinewy forearms, and his tears snaked down the rubber, a stream so much blacker than the tire, that when it reflected the light just so, it looked milky white.
"Damned cows, anyway. Damned cows." He cursed them with such deep affection. "They glue you to a farm. You got to milk ‘em day and night. No vacation in forty years. Now mother and I can get away." And his hands milked the air as he talked.
"Sure," I patted his back.
"We'll go to New York . We'll get away."
But he didn't get away. They found him the next spring sitting on the ground leaning against a willow, down on the river bottom where his cows used to craze. He told his wife he was going mushroom hunting. He had a big morel in his left hand, crushed, like he had milked it. He had a gun in the other.
Marty RicKard Bio
Marty RicKard attended William Penn College , Iowa State University and University of Southern Mississippi , from which he holds a BS degree in journalism and photojournalism. He also has a Masters Degree in photography, in addition to the Craftsman, CPP, and A-ASP degrees. Marty spent two years as a technical writer for White Motor Company, and has worked for the Charles City Press, Mason City Globe-Gazette, and Davenport Times-Democrat. He was co-owner of the weekly New Sharon Star, where he was twice named Iowa Master Columnist for his article, which was syndicated in twenty Iowa newspapers. For more than a decade Marty's regular column appeared in the Professional Photographer magazine. He has been published in many other magazines and newspapers, including Writer's Digest, Writer Advice, Golf Digest, Resource Magazine, Picture, Range Finder, and Darkroom. In addition to his writing credits, Marty has won numerous photography awards, has lectured in 48 states, and has traveled internationally as lecturer, and judge. He was one of thirty from the U.S. to participate in the first cultural exchange with China in 1986. He currently is a regular columnist for Lens Magazine, and a full-time writer of fiction and poetry. He is the author of two poetry books and one volume of short stories. He is an entertaining speaker.
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