The Last Vat at Pike Lick

The last day

The Pruitt family announced the closing in August. The co-op that bought our milk was consolidating, and a family cheese company with eleven employees could not make the numbers.

Tamsin, who had come home from a teaching job in Nashville to run the place after her father’s stroke, cried at the front of the fire hall when she told us.

I did, too, and not all of it was for the building.

She called me a week later and asked me to come back, though I had retired in 2011 after forty years. The plan was a last make, the final vat the plant would ever cook, with the whole town invited to watch. She wanted the oldest living cheesemaker to set the steam.

She wanted me to say a few words and to cut the last wheel with her grandfather’s knife.

I said yes before I had time to think. And what I thought when I hung up, God help me, was that I could stand at the vat, say a few nice words, take the knife, and walk out with my plaque.

Lavada knew something was wrong. She can read my face the way I read a thermometer. The night before, she said, “You have not slept in a week, and it isn’t the closing.”

I told her it was the closing. She looked at me a long moment and let it go, and I have not forgiven myself for that, either. She let it go because she trusted me.

I got to the plant at six. The crew had scrubbed every inch of it, the stainless shining like a wedding.

At nine we filled the vat with ten thousand pounds of milk, the last that would ever come down the county road. At ten I walked up to the valve.

My hands shook so hard Tamsin had to steady my wrist. I opened it. I did not take my eyes off that thermometer, not once, for the next three hours.

By noon the place was full. They had run a rope along the edge of the make room and set up folding chairs from the church, and people stood three deep on the loading dock.

Our son Truett and our daughter Annalee came with their families, and my grandchildren, Wren and Boone, stood at the rope with their noses nearly on the stainless, watching the curd.

Just before the program, Carol Satterfield caught my sleeve as I passed. She is eighty-eight now and ran the cheese room for thirty years, and she sat at the front in a lawn chair with a blanket over her knees.

“Hark,” she said. “Cyrus’s girl is here.”

I do not remember what I said. I remember turning, and seeing the cap.

The cap

She had come alone. She was Billie Gentry, forty-nine years old, a hospice nurse in Hamilton, Ohio, tall and slow-moving like her father, with his long face and his steady gray eyes.

She had spent weeks deciding whether to come. Her father had died in September, quietly, in his own bed, at seventy-seven. I did not know any of that yet.

I only knew she was looking around the room at the vats and the steam like someone looking at a place she had been told about her whole life.

Tamsin took the microphone at ten past one. She talked about her grandfather and what it means to feed a county. And then she said what she said about me, the forty years and the never losing a batch, and held up the knife.

People clapped. I stood there with my hands at my sides. The curd was cooking behind me, sweet and patient. The thermometer read ninety-nine.

I thought of the tiles in that hallway, forty-two of them, and understood that I had been walking toward that door for forty-one years and had never once stepped through it.

I could have taken the knife. Nobody in that building would ever have known.

Instead I put down my paper plate.