The Last Vat at Pike Lick

Tamsin Pruitt had just finished telling two hundred people that in forty years I had never lost a single batch when I set my paper plate down on the edge of the vat and understood I was going to have to say something.

She was standing under the dairy’s old cow sign, which somebody had hauled in from the road and propped against the wall of the make room, and she was holding the Founders’ Knife in both hands like it was a baby bird.

Her grandfather had cut the first wheel of Pike Lick cheddar with that knife in 1946. It has a bone handle gone the color of weak tea. They wanted me to cut the last wheel with it.

“Harker Dunn,” she said, “never lost a batch. Not one. Forty years.”

People clapped. My wife Lavada squeezed my hand, hard, the way she does in church when the preacher gets to a part she likes.

The steam was up in the vat behind me, ticking, and the air smelled the way it has smelled my whole life, sweet and warm and a little sour, like a clean barn in a good year.

And in the back row, in a folding chair beside the door, a woman about fifty was holding a faded green cap in her lap. The bill was folded down the middle in a crease I had not seen in forty-one years.

I knew that crease before I knew her face. Cyrus Gentry folded the bill of every cap he ever owned down the middle, like a roof, because he said it kept the glare off his glasses and the whey off his chin.

I am seventy-two years old. I worked at the Pike Lick Creamery for forty years, and I let that man lose his job for something I did.

I had been waiting four decades for a room full of the right people, and on the last day the building would ever stand open, I understood that this was it.

I am going to tell you how I got to that vat. It starts with a quiet man and a sleepless winter.

The plant

Pike Lick, Kentucky, is not on most maps. It is a church, a grocery, a feed store, a volunteer fire hall, and a creamery, set down in a fold of the hills where the creek makes a bend.

The creamery was the reason for the rest of it.

Every morning before light the milk trucks came grinding down the county roads from twenty miles of Holstein farms, and every one of them ended up at our dock.

I went in at seventeen, the summer after high school, sweeping floors for a dollar and ninety cents an hour. By twenty-two I was running the make room.

By thirty I could tell you the temperature of a vat of milk within a degree just by holding the back of my hand over it.

Here is the work, if you have never seen it. The milk gets warmed in a big stainless vat with a jacket of steam around it.

You add the culture and the rennet, and the milk turns to something like a tender custard. You cut it with the long steel knives, and it breaks into curds, and the whey runs off yellow-green.

Then you cook the curds slowly, a degree at a time, stirring so they do not knit together. Six to eight hours, start to finish, and every one of them matters.

A vat of milk is the most patient thing in the world until the minute it is not.

We made Colby and cheddar and a sharp white we called Pike Lick Sharp, and squeaky curds fresh every Friday that were gone by noon. I loved it.

I say that plainly, because the rest of this story could make a man think I did not. And being good at something, in a town where your neighbors are watching, gets in your blood.

People said, Harker Dunn does not make a mistake. I liked hearing it more than I should have.