The Cows I Milked One Last Time

The Hired Man Who Married In

We were all at Delbert’s table, the long oak one that has been in that farmhouse since before Joy was born.

Delbert at the head where he always sits. Joy next to me. Our two kids down the end with their cousins.

Delbert’s wife had passed four years back, so Joy had done the cooking, a ham and scalloped potatoes and the rolls her mother used to make.

Kurt came in late, the way he does, and sat down across from me with his coat still half on.

Kurt is Joy’s brother.

He is three years older than me and he grew up on that farm the same as Joy did, except Joy stayed and worked and Kurt left at eighteen and came back only for meals.

He sells farm insurance now out of an office in Green Bay.

He drives a truck that costs more than I make in a year and he likes to tell you so.

The talk had been easy.

Somebody asked how the herd was doing, and Delbert, who is close with a compliment, said the cows had never looked better and the vet had told him so.

I said thank you. I had worked hard on those cows.

Kurt set his fork down.

He had a look on his face I had seen before, the look of a man who has been waiting all through dinner to say a thing.

“Dad,” he said, “you talk about those cows like Marty owns them. He doesn’t own a hoof. He’s the hired man who married in.”

The table did not go quiet right away. My youngest laughed at something her cousin whispered. The furnace kicked on.

For a second it was just a thing a man had said at a table.

Then Joy’s face changed, and Delbert looked down at his plate, and I understood that Kurt meant it, and that he had meant it for a long time, and that saying it out loud in front of the children was the point.

“That’s what you are,” Kurt said, quieter now, to me.

“You married my sister and you got a cheap place to live and a job you didn’t have to go find. Fourteen years.

You act like it makes you one of us.”

How I Came to Delbert’s Farm

I was twenty-four when I met Joy at a wedding in Luxemburg.

I was working construction then, framing houses, and I was good at it and I hated it.

My own dad had farmed until the bank took it when I was in high school, and I had carried the shape of that loss around in me like a stone.

Joy told me her father ran a dairy over by Casco and was getting to where he could not do it alone.

Her brother wanted nothing to do with it. She said it like it was a shame she had made peace with.

I drove out the next Saturday.

Delbert met me in the yard, a short wide man in his sixties with hands like oak burls, and he did not say much.

He walked me through the barn.

He showed me the parlor, a double-six he had put in himself in 1994, and the free stalls, and the heifer shed, and the old bank barn he kept for calves.

He showed me the whole operation the way you show a man something you love and are afraid to lose.

At the end he said, “You ever milk a cow?”

I said no.

I said I had framed a lot of houses and I had grown up on a farm that went under and I was not afraid of a long day.