Learning to Milk

For as long as I can remember, I had had a hand with the egg production operation. It was okay, but it was kid’s work. Milking the cows was what the “men” did, my mother often reminded me. I bristled under her words, convinced that I was one of them and should not be put in some other penis-less category. My oldest brother, Maurice, was ten years older than I and had absorbed the near poverty of my parents during the Great Depression. He hated farming with a passion and had a special dislike for farm animals, both cows and horses, not to speak of the stinking pigs. Wayne, seven years older than I, was the exact opposite. He seemed immersed in everything with the emotion of a man in love. And my dad, whom all three of us loved beyond our ability to voice, was a quiet long-suffering man who for the most part dealt with grace and dignity with all the advice he received from Mother. Therefore, my chief objective was to silence my mother’s implicit criticism and to become one of the men. This meant learning to milk a cow. Maurice kept silent, but Wayne warned that once I learned there would be no turning back; it would be a daily, oft onerous, task. I did not care.

The barn (later replaced by one we men built) was a bit rickety, but had stanchions for eight cows. Old Pet, one of the more diminutive cows – perhaps because there had been a Jersey bull somewhere in her ancestral chain – usually occupied the first stanchion as one entered that part of the barn. She was to be my guinea pig. She was pregnant and would soon go dry so it was less important that she be totally emptied of the milk she was eager to dispose of. With Dad watching, Wayne began guiding me through the process. I had seen it many times and did not think I needed any guiding. The first thing was to approach Pet with a pail of not hot, but hotter than warm, water and a dirty old rag. Dipping the rag into the water, I bent over and was at near eye level with Pet’s udder. As I washed, her teats became full and milk seemed to descend from some secret spot to make the udder swell. So with a metal bucket and a t-shaped stool, on which to balance myself, I moved to the spot on Pet’s right side from which I had, while standing, washed her utter with all the concentration a young boy could muster. Like an expert, I thought, I sat down, leaned my forehead against her flank and began to pull on her teats.

Nothing happened. I pulled again and again, then jerked. Still no reward; no flood of delicious warm milk met the bottom of my metal pail with the force I was used to seeing and listening to as the men milked. Pet was not pleased with all this pulling and jerking and did the impossible step for a cow. She just leapt on all four legs away from me about a meter. I toppled head first into the spot where I had placed the bucket to receive its previous cargo and received a swift kick to the right shoulder from that sweet animal we called Pet.

By now the men were all laughing hysterically. Wayne wiped the tears from his eyes as I scrambled out of harm’s way with my own tears streaming down my face. His from laughing, mine from the failure and embarrassment I had just endured, not to speak of the pain inflicted by Pet’s right hind leg.

I wanted to quit and go to the house. Wayne would not allow me. Dad supported him, “What you have begun, you must now finish!” Maurice merely had an amused look on his face and continued to milk his third cow that was his quota for the evening. In genuine tenderness, Wayne told me to watch his hands. He pantomimed the motions of milking. I could see his big hands, first the top finger moved to a position on his palm just below the thumb followed quickly by the other fingers following suit in one smooth motion, but finding its own place on the palm. This motion, he explained, was to mimic the action of a calf sucking. Each finger as it moved sped the milk in the teat out and into the bucket; one released briefly and the teat filled up again and the action repeated.

Once again, I bravely took the bucket and the t-shaped stool and approached Pet. I half expected her to clobber me once again. For a moment, I was tempted to ask for the hobbles that the men used when a cow took objection to their squeezing and massaging, but to ask even for that would have been to admit I was not up to the task. Pet merely looked at me as if to smile with her huge eyes, and then turned back to foraging for the remainder of the chopped grain used to lure her into her familiar place in the barn. It worked! I repeated the squeezing routing Wayne had taught me and was rewarded with a stream of milk that splashed in the bottom of the aluminum bucket. What a thrill! I could milk a cow.
About the time the bottom of the pail was fully covered with foaming milk, the muscles just back of my wrists, on the forward part of my forearm, began to ache. Each squeeze was rewarded with a painful reminder of the energy those muscles were transferring to old Pet’s teats. Soon I was in pain. The pace of the squeezing grew slower and slower. Luckily, the others were busily engaged in their own endeavor and were blissfully unaware of my painful condition. I continued this painful exercise until the bucket was nearly half full. Dad came over to observe after finishing his cow and asked to see how much was in the bucket. To my relief and overwhelming joy, he pronounced me finished. He knew to the drop how much each cow in the herd should produce. I stood up only to find that my back ached even more than my forearm muscles. Milking cows was not all it was cracked up to be, I thought, and for a minute wished I had postponed learning this skill. But now I numbered among the men. I had milked a cow!  And I continued doing so for about the next fifteen years.