The Cows I Milked One Last Time

The Boots on the Step

They were a mess, those boots.

Cracked across the toe, the left heel worn down, manure dried in the seams no matter how many times I hosed them.

Joy had been after me to buy new ones for a year. I had kept saying after calving, after planting, after the price came up.

I took them off and I set them side by side on the step, pointing out toward the yard, the way a man sets his boots when he is done.

I do not fully know why I did it.

I had a pair of town shoes in a bag by the door that Joy had packed for me.

I could have carried the barn boots home.

But it felt right to leave them, there on the step, where the man who walked into that parlor at the next milking would see them first thing, before he saw the clean stalls or the fed cows or the note on the clipboard.

A pair of worn-out boots, set down and left. I think I wanted them to say the thing I could not say to Delbert’s face.

I was here. I gave you everything these boots gave you. And now I am done.

I put on the town shoes. They felt strange and light, like I was walking on somebody else’s feet.

I shut the milk house light off, which I had never once done in fourteen years, because there had always been a next milking.

I left it dark.

Joy was waiting in the kitchen with the car running out front, warming up, the exhaust white in the cold. The kids were still asleep.

She looked at me in my town shoes and she did not say anything.

She just handed me a travel mug of coffee and she took my hand.

The frosted window over the sink was going gray with the first of the light. New Year’s Day.

I would have been starting the morning feed about now.

“You ready?” Joy said.

“No,” I said. And then, “Yes.”

We went out to the car.

The barn sat dark across the yard behind us, the herd inside it fed and clean and quiet, the best I could leave them.

I did not look back more than once.

Joy pulled out of the drive and turned toward town, toward the elevator, toward a job that paid a man what he was worth, and the cows I had milked that morning stood in their stalls behind me chewing their cud in the dark, not knowing, the way animals do not know, that anything at all had changed.