The Cows I Milked One Last Time

What Delbert Found That Evening

I was not there for what happened next.

Joy pieced it together for me later, from her father and from the neighbor, and I have turned it over so many times since that it feels like a thing I saw.

Delbert slept late that New Year’s morning, which he does maybe twice a year.

By the time he got to the kitchen it was past eight and he figured I had the morning milking long done, which I had.

He had his breakfast. He watched the parade on the television for a while, which Joy’s mother used to love.

He did not come out to the barn. There was no reason to.

For fourteen years there had been no reason to, because the barn ran, because I ran it.

It was not until the afternoon milking that he walked across the yard.

He came in the parlor door at half past three, the way he had a thousand times, expecting to find me already in the pit with the first group coming in.

The cows were bawling at the holding pen gate because no one had brought them in. That alone would have stopped him.

In fourteen years the cows had never once gone unmilked.

And there on the step by the door were my boots.

Joy says he knew right then.

He is not a quick man with words but he is not slow in his heart, and he stood there and looked at those two cracked boots set out toe to the yard and he understood the whole of it, Christmas and Kurt and the quiet he had kept, all of it, in the time it takes to draw one breath.

He found the note on the clipboard. Every cow that needed watching, in my hand, written out plain. Number 88 due in March.

The heifer and her shot. Number 12 and her left side.

And then Delbert, who is sixty-nine years old and had not run that parlor alone in fourteen years, took off his coat and hung it on the nail and went and got the cows.

He milked them himself. All hundred and sixty, in a double-six parlor, alone, an old man, in the dark.

It took him until almost nine at night, Joy says, more than twice as long as it took me. He had to sit down twice.

He got kicked once and it raised a bruise on his forearm the size of a saucer.

But he milked every cow, and he fed them, and he did not call anybody to come help, because there was no one to call.

Kurt was in Green Bay. Kurt had never milked a cow in his life.

Delbert finished near nine and he turned off the milk house light and he walked back across the yard to the dark farmhouse, and Joy says he sat at the kitchen table a long time with his bruised arm on the oilcloth and did not turn on the lamp.