The House Cow My Father Gave Me

Luke at night

The first sign was the hauler.

Gene Bauer drove the co-op truck, and he stopped at my place one afternoon for a cup of coffee, which he never did. He stood in my kitchen and looked at the floor.

“Your dad’s on the every-third-day pickup now,” he said. “Used to be every other. He’s shipping less.”

“He sold cows?” I asked.

“Thirty, I heard. Feed’s high. Price is low. Everybody’s hurting, Jess. It’s not just him.”

I knew it was not just him. Two dairies in our county had sold out that year. The old Wilkins place was a hay farm now. But it was my father, and my brother, and the barn I had grown up in.

Two weeks after that, Luke came to my barn at night.

It was after nine. I was finishing the evening wash-up, and I heard his truck before I saw it. He parked by the barn door and sat with the engine running for a full minute before he turned it off.

He came in with his cap in his hands. My big brother, thirty-seven years old, with gray coming in at his temples and a burn scar on his wrist from the welder.

“Hey, Jess,” he said.

“Hey, Luke.”

He stood there looking at my three stanchions and my stainless sink and the row of clean glass jugs drying upside down on the rack. He looked at the chalkboard where I wrote the next week’s orders.

“How many gallons a week?” he asked.

“About three hundred and forty, this time of year. Less in winter.”

He did the math in his head. I watched him do it. Then he sat down on an overturned bucket like his legs had quit.

“We’re losing money,” he said. “Every month. Dad won’t say it, but I do the books now, and we are losing money every single month. I don’t know how much longer the bank lets it go.”

I dried my hands and pulled up the other bucket and sat across from him.

“How do you do it?” he asked. “I mean it. How do you do this on ten acres?”

So I told him. I told him about the people in Springfield and the young mothers and Mr. Kessler. I told him that nobody drives twenty miles for a dollar fifty-five a gallon, but they will drive twenty miles for a cow they can see and a woman they can shake hands with.

“It’s not the milk,” I said. “It’s that they know where it came from.”

Luke rubbed his face with both hands.

“I should have said something,” he said. “At that table. When he gave you the cow. I knew it was wrong, Jess. I was twenty-one and I just sat there.”

“You were twenty-one,” I said.

“That’s not an excuse.”

“No,” I said. “It’s not. But I’m glad you said it now.”

He looked up at me. He has our mother’s eyes, the same as I do, and in the light from the one bulb over the sink they looked wet.

“Would you talk to Dad?” he asked.

“No,” I said. “If Dad wants to talk to me, he knows where I live. He’s known for nine years.”

Luke nodded slowly. He did not argue. He put his cap back on, and at the door he stopped and looked back at the barn.

“Mom would’ve loved this,” he said.

Then he went out, and I heard his truck go up the road toward home, and I sat on that bucket a long time after.