Kent Haruf - The Tie That Binds

So Edith went on, of course, cooking and cleaning and mending and washing clothes and ironing. Also, she still had the garden to manage: to plant, hoe, water, can, and pickle. Also, she had the wood to cut and carry in, the stove to stoke, the chickens to feed, the eggs to gather and clean. Also now, every morning and every night, on top of all those other duties she had to do the milking.

Have you ever milked cows? No, I suppose not. Well, milking cows is all right if there isn’t any way you can get out of it, but it’s not quite the fun times old pictures make it out to be, with some bare-armed milkmaid sitting down beside some nice brown and white Guernsey cow under an oak tree and over there not far away is a blue stream bubbling and everything looks lazy and fine and somehow it’s always summer. No, you get up — Edith got up — every morning in the dark, never mind if it was blizzarding out, never mind if she was still exhausted. She got up, threw on a dress and a coat and went outside to find the five or six Shorthorns in the cow pasture. She walked them through the gate and into the barn, set the head catch to hold them there, hitched up her skirt and coat to climb up the ladder to the loft, threw down some hay into the manger, climbed down again, set the T-shaped milk stool in place, sat down with her head close to the cow’s flank to keep from getting hit in the face too much by the stinging shit-filled, eye-blinding tail, washed the tits off with a wet rag, pulled some first squirts of milk from each tit to further clean them and to check for mastitis, squeezed the bucket between her knees, and then, finally, milked the cow out enough to still leave some for a calf to suck and survive on. And then she did the same with the next cow, and the next, and the next. And all the time she was talking quietly to them to keep them calm enough that they would let the milk down and not kick the bucket away from her.

When she was finished milking, she turned the cows out to pasture again, and then carried the buckets of milk into the house to the back porch, where she ran the milk through the separator, turning the crank by hand. Afterwards, sometime during the day, she had to find time to make butter and to get the sour cream ready to take to town to sell. I believe they did that once a week, took the cream and eggs they didn’t need into town to Bishop’s Creamery opposite the railroad tracks.

But you understand, don’t you, that what I’ve told you so far was just the morning milking. Because she had to do it all over again late in the afternoon before she cooked supper; twice a day she had to do it, every day in the week. You also understand that what I’ve said about milking cows is based on the shaky assumption that everything would go right. I mean, that’s how it was supposed to be. But, of course, it didn’t always go that way. There were many days when whatever could go wrong, did go wrong. A cow stepped on her foot. Another one kicked the bucket over. One of them turned up sick and had to be doctored. Or maybe they just didn’t want to come in from the pasture in the first place. Who knows what an old speckle-faced cow is thinking? Or if she’s thinking anything at all? Well, some people claim pigs are smart, and maybe they are, but nobody I know has ever said that about cows.

But the worst part of milking was always that constant stinging foul tail. Now a shit-filled tail is bad enough. Struck across your eyes or snapped into your mouth, a shit-filled tail will do for starters, and it happens all the time. But you don’t know what bad is, you haven’t experienced the full benefit of stink and outrage, until you’ve had a fresh cow (especially an old raw-boned bitch of a one that you hate anyway) come in to be milked for the first time after having a calf, and when she gets in she has a three-day-old afterbirth hanging down out of her because she hasn’t cleaned out right. So there it is, that damned stuff is hanging down out of her, swinging there between her back legs; it’s shit-soaked, juicy, buzzing with flies, and the rottenness of it is so putrid, so God-awful, that it’s all you can do to keep from throwing your guts up. But you’ve got to milk her, don’t you? That’s what she’s there for. So you set the bucket down, perch your butt on the milkstool, and you pray or hope or cross your fingers, you make all kinds of impossible promises: if only you can just get her milked without having to taste any of that putrid foulness. And by God, yes, it looks like you’re going to make it. Yes, that’s right, you’re going to make it. So easy now, easy Mama, easy. That’s right. And Jesus, yes, you’ve almost got her milked out enough to call it good — when bang, oh holy shit, oh Christ on a crutch, she hits you with it all, all of that blood and shit and juice and unbelievable outrage, right across your face. It covers your eyes, your nose, your mouth. You can even feel some of it dripping down the back of your neck. Oh brother, help me. Son of a bitch. Then you can’t hold it any longer: you throw up, all over yourself, all over the damn cow, all over the milk bucket. You throw up until you’re gagging on acid bile, your stomach hurts, and you’re groping for air.

Well, it happened to me once. Once was enough. It made me want to kill something. But I suppose it happened to Edith Goodnough a number of times. It had to. Edith milked cows twice a day, every day of the week, all those years.

BUT LYMAN, meanwhile what about Lyman? Because, after all, Lyman was stuck, too. I mean, he sure as hell wasn’t any sixteen-year-old kid from the city. He was just a tall big-boned mop-haired farm kid, with raw wrists and patched overalls and high-topped shoes, and he seemed to stumble about in a kind of daze, like he had lost something and couldn’t remember what it was he had lost, let alone know where to look for it. Lyman was stuck out here on that same sandhill farm, stuck in the same way his sister was. He was caught in the same vise, smothered in the same mud hole with just his chin (weak and pointed like his mother’s) sticking up above it, and I don’t believe Lyman was even able to get his head up enough to look around him, to see that there wasn’t a thing in the world out there but more of the same.

Roy saw to that. Roy, with his destroyed hands and his hard eyes, kept Lyman’s nose buried in it. It was like Lyman was just some ass-whipped mongrel dog that Roy kept at heel on a short chain, and any time Lyman got any notion otherwise, then his father would give him a sharp jerk to make him remember and pay attention. Because that’s the way it was for a long time: Roy kept Lyman’s nose buried right there at home. He made damn sure that Lyman never had time enough to hatch up any escape plans; he saw to it that Lyman spent all his brain and all his muscle and all his sweat right there planting those quarter sections of corn and wheat, planting the same corn rows year after year and then cultivating that corn and handpicking it, planting the same wheat fields and disking and harvesting, and in between times when he wasn’t working corn or working wheat, then he was exhausting himself with raking the same hayfields and stacking the same haystacks.

So, for a long time, Lyman stayed there working. And it wasn’t that there was anything particularly unusual about that — everyone in the country worked, worked hard too— but what made it worse for Lyman, the thing that must have made it seem like he had one of those barbed goat heads, one of these poisonous sandburs, buried forever in the back of his neck was the fact that all the time, every day, he was being ordered around. There was never any letup. It was Roy who decided everything. Roy ruled it all. If Lyman had had any say-so, if he had had any choice in when to plant the corn or where to stack the hay or how many acres of wheat he was going to plant, then it might have been all right. But he didn’t. He might just as well have pissed against the wind as to suggest anything to Roy.