The House Cow My Father Gave Me

The cows

Matt bred my cows himself. He is good with an AI gun, better than most of the techs I have seen, and he bought Jersey semen from a good bull out of Wisconsin. We wanted heifers, and we paid extra for sexed semen when we could afford it.

Pearl gave me two more daughters after we moved. Opal gave me three. June gave me two and a bull calf, and we sold him at the sale barn for not very much.

Some years we did not get a heifer at all. Some years a calf came backwards in the middle of the night and Matt and I were on our knees in the straw until dawn.

When I was twenty-eight, I bought three bred Jersey heifers at a dispersal sale over by Mountain Grove. I paid nineteen hundred apiece and lay awake for a week over it. They were good heifers, and they fit right in.

By the time I was thirty-four, I had eleven Jerseys on that ten acres, and every one of them except the three I bought came down from Pearl.

I milked eight at a time and kept the rest dry or bred. I sold milk at nine dollars a gallon, and I skimmed the cream and made butter on Thursdays in an old electric churn, and the butter went out the door faster than I could pack it.

I want you to understand the arithmetic, because my father certainly did, in the end.

The big dairy sold its milk to the co-op at the commodity price. That year it was about eighteen dollars a hundredweight. A hundredweight is about eleven and a half gallons. That is a dollar and fifty-five cents a gallon, before the hauling and the co-op fees came out.

I sold mine for nine.

The Saturday line

By the ninth year, the line started at seven in the morning.

People parked along the county road on both sides, nose to tail, from my mailbox nearly to the Haskins place. They brought their own coolers. Some brought their kids to see the cows, and I let them stand at the fence and pet whoever would come over.

Usually it was Pearl.

She was nineteen years old by then, and she had been dry for two years. I did not breed her back after her last calf. She had done enough. I turned her out in the little pasture by the road, and she spent her days standing at the fence with her head over the top wire, letting strangers rub her forehead.

The kids called her the Grandma Cow. They were not wrong. Seven of the cows in my barn were her daughters or her granddaughters.

I sold out most Saturdays by ten.