does thirty, and whichever man finishes first milks the last lady by hand. This is the competition his uncle has set up; this is how the boy earned the money in the coffee can that will buy him a pair of shoes: his uncle gives him the value of whatever milk he gets from the sixty-first cow. The boy knows it is just a game and that his uncle will buy him a pair of shoes as soon as he is able, and he knows also that his uncle could best him without even trying, but, as happened yesterday and the day before, he finishes a half cow ahead of his uncle, and he almost whoops for joy as he runs to find the last of the ladies.
He locates her where she has nosed her way in at the end of atrough. A few of the ladies he recognizes by their spots or scars: Dolly of course, her udder the size of a medicine ball, and the bulls, and the lady with five teats, but despite his best efforts—his uncle knows every one of his herd individually—most of them remain anonymous to him. This is one of the latter. An Ayrshire whose face is entirely black except for the insides of her lips, which are as pink as a Negro’s, and both her ears, which are white. All of this is distinctive enough, but the boy finds it hard to remember something when it doesn’t have a name. He has never dared ask why they don’t name the ladies, just as he’s never asked why they don’t call them ladies in front of people who aren’t associated with the farm. Cows, they call them, not cattle—cattle are food—but he puts the matter out of his mind as the black-faced lady turns back to her breakfast. He wipes her udder down as though it were a baby’s face, and then, using both hands, lifts up the milksack and tries to gauge from the heft of the warm aqueous bag how much it will yield. This is less game than intermission: the pail holds five gallons, twenty quarts, and only Dolly has ever required a second one. But the boy knows a full pail is worth more than a dollar and he likes to think of the warm weight in his palms as pennies that will buy him a pair of shoes that will cover his feet as softly as warm milk. And, too, he likes the water-balloon shape of the udder, the soft down that covers the pink skin and the slip of the teats through his fingers. Once, just after Lance came home from the hospital, he’d snuck beyond his parents’ curtain and lifted his newborn brother from his crib. Lance was neither as plump nor as warm as a cow’s udder but it is the closest the boy can find to a twin to this feeling, and it is almost reluctantly that he squeezes offtwo teats between the thumb and forefinger of each hand and begins to milk.
Good practice, huh?
The boy tries not to jump at the sound of Donnie Badget’s voice but he feels his cheeks turn as pink as the udder before him.
Squirt squirt squirt. You been practicing upstairs? Maybe up in the hayloft? Milking it to get ready for the girls?
The boy tries to concentrate on his task but he jerks the tender teat and the black-faced Ayrshire looks up from her feed. She stamps one of her hind legs, nearly upsetting his pail.
Careful there, Amos. Don’t want to pull too hard. You’ll give the lady blisters.
The boy gets up from his stool, heads toward the vat room. His pail is hardly half full and the Ayrshire’s udder isn’t completely drained, but he wants to escape Donnie Badget’s insinuating tone.
The holding vat is an enormous stainless steel cylinder that can take five thousand gallons of unpasteurized unhomogenized whole milk—twenty thousand quarts, or twelve hundred dollars—which his uncle’s ladies produce every ten or eleven days. The duct is sealed by a valve that has a handle like the handles on submarine doors to emphasize how valuable the farm’s sole commodity is—a gallon of milk costs four times a gallon of gas, as his uncle has pointed out—and when he unscrews the valve it opens with a buttery hiss so thick you could cut it with a knife and spread it on toast. After he flips
He locates her where she has nosed her way in at the end of atrough. A few of the ladies he recognizes by their spots or scars: Dolly of course, her udder the size of a medicine ball, and the bulls, and the lady with five teats, but despite his best efforts—his uncle knows every one of his herd individually—most of them remain anonymous to him. This is one of the latter. An Ayrshire whose face is entirely black except for the insides of her lips, which are as pink as a Negro’s, and both her ears, which are white. All of this is distinctive enough, but the boy finds it hard to remember something when it doesn’t have a name. He has never dared ask why they don’t name the ladies, just as he’s never asked why they don’t call them ladies in front of people who aren’t associated with the farm. Cows, they call them, not cattle—cattle are food—but he puts the matter out of his mind as the black-faced lady turns back to her breakfast. He wipes her udder down as though it were a baby’s face, and then, using both hands, lifts up the milksack and tries to gauge from the heft of the warm aqueous bag how much it will yield. This is less game than intermission: the pail holds five gallons, twenty quarts, and only Dolly has ever required a second one. But the boy knows a full pail is worth more than a dollar and he likes to think of the warm weight in his palms as pennies that will buy him a pair of shoes that will cover his feet as softly as warm milk. And, too, he likes the water-balloon shape of the udder, the soft down that covers the pink skin and the slip of the teats through his fingers. Once, just after Lance came home from the hospital, he’d snuck beyond his parents’ curtain and lifted his newborn brother from his crib. Lance was neither as plump nor as warm as a cow’s udder but it is the closest the boy can find to a twin to this feeling, and it is almost reluctantly that he squeezes offtwo teats between the thumb and forefinger of each hand and begins to milk.
Good practice, huh?
The boy tries not to jump at the sound of Donnie Badget’s voice but he feels his cheeks turn as pink as the udder before him.
Squirt squirt squirt. You been practicing upstairs? Maybe up in the hayloft? Milking it to get ready for the girls?
The boy tries to concentrate on his task but he jerks the tender teat and the black-faced Ayrshire looks up from her feed. She stamps one of her hind legs, nearly upsetting his pail.
Careful there, Amos. Don’t want to pull too hard. You’ll give the lady blisters.
The boy gets up from his stool, heads toward the vat room. His pail is hardly half full and the Ayrshire’s udder isn’t completely drained, but he wants to escape Donnie Badget’s insinuating tone.
The holding vat is an enormous stainless steel cylinder that can take five thousand gallons of unpasteurized unhomogenized whole milk—twenty thousand quarts, or twelve hundred dollars—which his uncle’s ladies produce every ten or eleven days. The duct is sealed by a valve that has a handle like the handles on submarine doors to emphasize how valuable the farm’s sole commodity is—a gallon of milk costs four times a gallon of gas, as his uncle has pointed out—and when he unscrews the valve it opens with a buttery hiss so thick you could cut it with a knife and spread it on toast. After he flips
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