The Morning We Walked the Herd Home

“I don’t know,” he said. “Just in case.” Then, before I could say anything else: “The tank’s eight hundred gallons. Compressor runs. You’ll have to wash everything three times over, it’s been sitting. My well was tested in March.”

“Elmer, what do you want for rent?”

“We’ll talk about that after you’ve milked,” he said. “What time are you moving them?”

I looked at the clock over the stove. “Half past ten?”

“I’ll call the neighbors to hold the crossings,” he said, and hung up.

I sat there with the phone in my hand. I said a short prayer, the kind you say in a kitchen with your boots still on. Then I went back out to the barn.

Nate was already on his phone with the co-op. He talked to the field man, Kurt, who had been our inspector for four years.

Kurt knew Elmer’s milk house. He had walked it a hundred times back when the Kuehns were shipping.

Kurt said he would drive out to Elmer’s at one o’clock and look the milk house over himself.

If the tank and the wash system checked out, he would call the state that afternoon and the co-op would take our milk at the new address while the paperwork went through.

“He says the state man will be out by Friday,” Nate told me. “And he says to tell you he’s sorry.”

The units were ours, thank God. We had bought them new three years before, eight claws with their shells and hoses and pulsators.

They would hang on Elmer’s pipeline the same as they hung on Arnold’s. I took them down one at a time and washed them in the sink.

Feed was the next problem. Our haylage sat in Arnold’s silo, and I was not going to stand in his yard unloading it that morning.

Nate called our neighbor to the north, a big quiet man who milked a hundred head. He said he would bring two wagons of round bales to Elmer’s before noon.

By ten o’clock the gravel road in front of Arnold’s place had begun to fill up.

The neighbor boy from the north farm came first, sixteen years old on a four-wheeler, with a buggy whip across his knees.

Then an older couple from the church in their pickup, who parked across the end of a field lane so no cow would wander into it.

Then a woman I barely knew from the feed mill, with her husband. Then two more trucks. Nobody said much.

They nodded at us, and at the barn, and at the white house across the yard, and went to stand where Elmer had told them to stand.

There was one real crossing on our mile, where the gravel met the county highway about halfway down. Elmer had put two men there with orange flags.

The rest of the road was field lanes, ditches, a culvert, and one stretch of pasture fence that sagged.

At half past ten I went into the barn. The cows knew something was off.

They had been fed late and milked on time, and the radio was not on, and there were strangers in the yard. A few of them were bawling.

Some of those cows had never set foot on a road in their lives. A tie-stall cow lives most of her days in her own stall with her own neighbors on either side.

Taking her out a door she has never used is like asking an old woman to change churches.