The Cows I Milked One Last Time

The Last Milking

The parlor was warm the way it is only before dawn in January, when the cold outside has pushed the whole herd in close and the furnace of a hundred and sixty bodies has nowhere to go.

Steam rose off the backs of the cows and off the concrete and off my own arms.

I stood in the pit with the last unit in my hand and I did not hurry.

It was five minutes to five on New Year’s morning.

I had milked these cows twice a day for fourteen years, and this was the last time I would ever do it.

Number 44 was the last cow in the last side.

She was an old Holstein, broad in the hip, with a white face and a patient way of standing that I had come to count on.

I wiped her down, stripped each quarter into my hand to check her, and dipped the teats. The milk came warm and quick.

She leaned into the grain in front of her and chewed and did not know a thing had changed.

I knew. I had known since the day after Christmas.

The pipeline hummed.

The vacuum pump ran its low steady note out in the milk house, the same note it had run every morning of my grown life.

I listened to it the way you listen to a song you have heard so many times you stopped hearing the words.

I was hearing them now.

When 44 was done I pulled the unit, dipped her again, and let her out the front.

She walked the alley to the free stall barn without being told.

Every cow on that farm knew where to go, because I had taught them, one heifer at a time, over fourteen winters.

I shut the gate.

I washed the units and started the wash cycle, and the detergent and hot water ran through the lines the way it had to, whether I was there to see it or not.

I checked the bulk tank. Eleven thousand pounds and climbing, a good tank, the butterfat up where it should be in cold weather.

The hauler would come at seven and never know whose hands had filled it.

Then I climbed out of the pit and stood on the parlor floor in the bare-bulb light and looked at the room for a while.

I was not sad, exactly. I was something I did not have a word for yet.

I had given this place the best fourteen years a man has, and I had done it for a wage that a man could not raise a family on, and I had done it gladly because I loved the old man who owned it and I loved his daughter more.

And a week ago his son had stood at the Christmas table and told the whole family what he thought I was.