The Cows I Milked One Last Time

New Year’s Morning

I called Ray the Monday after Christmas. He said the job was mine and I could start the second of January, a Thursday.

That gave me the rest of the week to leave the herd in good shape, and it gave me New Year’s morning for the last milking.

I did not tell Delbert.

I am not proud of that, but I could not make my mouth say it to his face, and some part of me, the part Joy had named, wanted him to find out the way he had found out everything that mattered to me for fourteen years, by walking into the barn.

New Year’s Eve I went to bed early.

Joy and the kids stayed up for the ball to drop and I heard them laugh through the floor and then the house went still.

I was up at three. I made the coffee.

I stood at the kitchen window with my hands around the cup and looked across the dark yard at the barn, the one light I always left burning in the milk house, and I let myself feel it all the way down.

Then I pulled on my coat and I walked across the snow one more time.

I milked them the way I had milked them ten thousand times, and I paid attention to every one.

I knew their names, not official names, barn names.

I knew Number 12 kicked if you came at her left side wrong, and I knew Number 88 was bred back and due in March and somebody would need to watch her, and I knew the heifer in the sick pen needed her second shot that afternoon, and all of it, all the thousand things I carried in my head about those animals, I would be handing to a stranger, or to no one.

I milked the whole herd and I fed them and I scraped the alleys and I bedded the stalls with fresh straw until the barn was as right as I knew how to make it.

I checked the heifers.

I left a note in the milk house on the clipboard where Delbert would find it, every cow that needed watching, written out plain, because whatever else was true I was not going to let a cow suffer for a thing that was between men.

And then I did the last thing.

I sat down on the step by the parlor door, the concrete step worn smooth by fourteen years of my own coming and going, and I unlaced my barn boots.