The Milk Truck at the Church Steps

The truck and the boy

I should tell you a little about my truck, and about my boy, because they are tied together in a way that matters to the rest of this.

The truck is a straight truck, not a semi. Day cab, single tank, stainless steel, holds about thirty-eight hundred gallons. I own it. I have a contract with the cheese plant to pick up from eleven dairy farms on a loop that runs about ninety miles, every other day, rain or snow or the Fourth of July.

You need a commercial license to drive one, and in Wisconsin you need a bulk milk weigher and sampler license too. At every farm I check the temperature on the tank, stick it with the measuring rod, write down the reading, and pull a sample into a little vial before a drop goes in my truck.

People think a milk hauler just drives. A milk hauler is the only person outside the family who sees every one of those farms every other day. You know whose dog died. You know whose barn roof leaks and whose son went off to the Army and whose wife is sick.

My wife’s name was Janet. She died of cancer when Aaron was ten. I won’t say much about that here, except that it was a long fall and a short winter, and then it was just the two of us in the house.

That first summer after, I didn’t have anybody to watch him, so I took him on the route. He was ten years old, sitting up in that passenger seat with a cooler of baloney sandwiches and a Brewers cap two sizes too big.

By the end of that summer he could read the tank thermometer and write the readings in my book in his big, careful print. By twelve he could tell you which farms ran a Holstein herd and which ones had Jerseys mixed in, just by the color of the milk in the sample vial.

He learned to say please and thank you to farm wives who had been up since four. He learned that you never pull into a yard fast, because there might be a kid or a calf around the corner. He learned to shut every gate he opened.

He went to college at River Falls and came out an agricultural engineer. Now he designs ventilation systems for dairy barns. He sends me pictures of new freestall barns, and I say, That’s real nice, son, and I mean it more than he knows.

He met Madison at a friend’s wedding in Wausau. She teaches second grade. The first time he brought her out to the house, she walked straight past the front door and around to the shed, because she wanted to see the truck.

“Aaron says you let him drive it in the field when he was fourteen,” she said that day.

“I never,” I said.

“He says you did.”

“Well,” I said, “it was a hayfield. It was empty. And there was nobody around to say I did.”

She laughed so hard she had to sit down on the bumper. I liked her from that minute on, and I have never stopped.