The Morning We Walked the Herd Home

It took about forty minutes. When the last one was in, the neighbor boy from the north farm counted down the line out loud and said, “Sixty-four.”

Then the neighbors went home. That is how it is done out here. Nobody stood around waiting to be thanked.

The church couple left a cooler of sandwiches on the milk house step. The feed mill woman left a box of donuts and a note that said only, “Call if you need anything.”

Then the real work started.

Then we washed. We filled the wash vat with hot water, ran a warm rinse through the pipeline, then a hot chlorinated alkaline wash, then an acid rinse.

Then we did it all a second time and a third. Nate checked every gasket and replaced two that had dried out.

Kurt from the co-op pulled in at one o’clock sharp.

He walked the milk house slowly with his flashlight, checked the wash water temperature, ran his finger along the inside of the tank, looked at Elmer’s well report, and wrote for a long time on his clipboard.

“Elmer,” he said at last, “this milk house is cleaner than half the ones I walk that are shipping every day.”

Elmer just said, “Well.”

Kurt signed his sheet, told us the state man would be out by Friday, and said Rolf could pick up from Elmer’s tank until then.

On his way out he shook Nate’s hand and held onto it a second longer than he needed to.

At three thirty I walked down the lane and stood by the mailbox. The bus came over the hill, stopped, and let her off.

Alma climbed down with her backpack bouncing and looked past me at the barn.

“Are the cows in there?” she said.

“All of them,” I said.

She ran. She did not wait for me. She ran all the way up the lane and through the barn door and down the walk, saying hello to cows by number, the way she did every afternoon at home.

Elmer was standing by the milk house door and she nearly ran him over.

“Sorry,” she said.

“That’s all right,” Elmer said. “It’s been a long time since anybody ran in here.”

She looked up at him. She had known him her whole life the way children know old men at church: as somebody who gave out peppermints in the narthex. She had never seen him in a barn.

Then she pointed past him, at a shelf by the door, above the light switches.

“Why is there a radio up there?”

It was an old one, cream colored plastic with a gold dial, the kind that sat on every barn shelf in Wisconsin when I was a girl.

It was dusty on top but nowhere else. Somebody had been wiping it off.

Elmer looked at the radio for a while before he answered.

“That was my wife’s,” he said. “She had it out here forty years. She said the cows milked better with music on. The cows liked her station.”

“Does it still work?”

“I don’t know,” Elmer said. “I haven’t turned it on since she passed.”

Alma looked at me. I looked at Elmer. He was standing very still with his hands in his pockets.

“Six years,” he said, to nobody in particular. “I come out here and wipe it off. I don’t know why. I couldn’t stand to hear it in an empty barn.”

At ten to four, Nate threw the switch on the vacuum pump.