The Last Vat at Pike Lick

The winter of 1985

That January I was thirty-one years old and falling apart in a way I did not know how to say out loud.

Lavada was seven months along with our second. We had put every dime into forty acres next to my daddy’s place, and the note on that ground came due the first of every month like a heartbeat.

On top of the night shift, I was stripping tobacco in my daddy’s barn until midnight, because the tobacco check paid the note and the creamery check paid everything else. I was sleeping three, four hours.

A man in that condition should not be trusted with a steam valve. I thought tired was just the price of being a man with a family.

On the night of the twenty-second I came on at ten.

A grocery chain out of Louisville had signed a three-year contract with us that winter, the biggest we had ever had, and the first order had to be on a truck at the dock by eight in the morning.

Old Mr. Cullen Pruitt, Tamsin’s grandfather, came down personally to tell us so.

He stood in the make room in his good overcoat and said, “Boys, if this goes right, nobody in this building has to worry about a layoff again.” Then he went home.

I had the last vat of the order. I cut it at one in the morning, and it broke right, clean and firm.

I opened the steam to cook it, a slow rise, and I set the valve where I always set it. Then I walked out the dock door to stand in the cold and wake myself up.

I want to be honest about what I did next, because I have rehearsed it a thousand times in the dark, and every time I have wanted to change a detail. It was nineteen degrees.

I got in my truck cab to get my jacket. The heater was still warm. I put my head back for one minute.

When I opened my eyes there was frost on the inside of the windshield and the clock on the dash said twenty past four.

Twenty past four

The make room was full of steam so thick I could not see the far wall.

I got to the vat and put my hand on the stainless and snatched it back, and I did not need the thermometer. I looked anyway. It read one hundred thirty-one degrees.

You cook curd to about a hundred and two.

At a hundred and thirty, the proteins seize and the culture dies and the curd goes tight and rubbery, squeaking like a shoe on a gym floor, and nothing will bring it back. We call it leather.

Ten thousand pounds of milk, and the Louisville order, gone.

Cyrus was already there. He had come in early, the way he sometimes did, because he had seen me slumped at the end of the previous night’s shift and figured he would give me a head start.

He was standing at the vat in his white coat with the long paddle in his hands.

He had already thrown the steam off and opened the drain, and the whey was running across the floor in a great yellow tide. He was trying to save it.

He looked up and saw my face. He did not say a word about the valve, and he did not ask where I had been. He looked at the thermometer, and then back at me.

“Go wash your face, Hark,” he said, very quietly. “You look dead.”

I did not go wash my face. I just stood there.

At a quarter to five the dock door banged, and Mr. Pruitt came in with Leland Hoskins, our foreman, still buttoning his overcoat. The Louisville truck had backed in at four-thirty. Mr.

Pruitt took one look at the vat and the floor and the curd, and he went the color of a candle.