The Morning We Walked the Herd Home

The milk was still moving when I opened the milk house door. Not much of it by then. A thin white sheet sliding across the concrete toward the floor drain, and the sweet smell of it everywhere.

The outlet valve on our bulk tank was turned wide open.

The handle stood straight out the way it only does when you are rinsing the tank after a pickup, and there had been no pickup. Nobody had emptied that tank but the drain.

I stepped across the wet floor in my barn boots and closed the valve. It squeaked the way it always did.

Then there was only the drip from the outlet and the compressor humming on the wall, still trying to cool a tank with nothing in it.

It was twenty to eight on a Monday morning in early May. Rolf Steinke, our milk hauler, was due at eight.

He picked us up every other day, so that tank had held four milkings from 64 cows.

I did the figures standing there, because that is what you do on a dairy before you let yourself feel anything.

Our cows were averaging about eighty pounds a head that spring. Two days came to a little over ten thousand pounds.

That is close to 1,200 gallons of milk. At what the co-op was paying that month, a little under twenty dollars a hundredweight with our quality premium, it came to a bit over two thousand dollars, gone down a four inch drain.

People who have never milked think a milk check is extra money. It is not. It is the money.

It is the feed bill and the vet and the electric and the groceries, and in our house it was school shoes for a seven year old girl named Alma.

I looked down at the grate. A ring of foam had caught around it. I remember thinking I had better scrub that before Rolf came in, as if the foam was the problem.

Then I went to find my husband.

Nate was out at the calf hutches with a nipple bottle in each hand.

He saw my face from fifty feet away and set the bottles down on top of a hutch, carefully, so they would not tip.

“The tank,” I said. “Somebody opened the valve. It’s all on the floor.”

He did not ask who. He walked past me to the milk house and stood in the doorway a long time.

Then he walked to the tank, put his palm flat on the cold steel, and looked at the open lid.

“Two days,” he said.

“Two days,” I said.

There were exactly three keys to that milk house. Nate had one. I had one.

The third hung on a nail inside the back porch door of the white house across the yard, where Nate’s father had lived his whole life.

We both turned and looked at that house. The kitchen curtain was closed.

Arnold’s pickup was in its spot by the machine shed, the hood still cold in the morning air, the way it would be if he had walked over and walked back.

I need to tell you about the night before, or none of the rest makes sense.

Nate and I had been renting his father’s barn for six years.

Sixty-four stanchions and two box stalls, a pipeline Arnold put in himself in 1991, a milk house, a machine shed, and eighty acres of hay ground. We paid him $1,400 a month.