morethanenoughtruth

My son Dale was the first grandchild for Garnet and Ray Rex Taylor.  No wonder everything had to be just right.  As soon as mother’s milk wasn’t enough to keep him tick-full and happy, Garnet began hand milking an especially good Guernsey morning and night and bottling it on-the-spot for his benefit.  She explained that an infant’s delicate digestion would be less challenged by milk from a single cow than by mixing an uncontrolled assortment of sources.  The “Perrier” of milks, it was literally  “Bottled-at-the-Source.”  The cow’s name was Nosey.

The Taylors cash crop on their three-hundred acre West Virginia farm was keeping a mixed dairy herd of Holstein, Guernsey, and Brown Swiss.  As a newbie with fresh-off-the-sidewalks-of-Connecticut provenance, I undertook the crash course in animal husbandry accruing to my position as wife and new mother in that family endeavor.

I made it my business to follow Ray Rex around, plying him with questions and getting his take on all things pastoral.  The first thing I had to do was cut my fingernails.  That made it possible for me to learn how best to squeeze a teat without ensuing pain and swift kicks.  There was a never-ending series of new amazements to see and apply to this lovely nepotism.  While the pecuniary emolument was non-existent, its rewards were rich and gratifying.   I arose, dressed, and helped with breakfast every single day without exception, then leaving my lazy husband to his bed, I followed Ray and Garnie to the barn where the cows waited, impatient, tails switching and hooves stamping, registering the urgency of need-to-be-emptied.  A more benevolent evolution would have provided for self-evacuation, but when push came to shove, natural selection must have voted on the side of waiting for the calf to do the job.  There’s no Darwinian advantage to trickle-moisturizing a green grass pasture with fresh cow’s milk.

There was no end of things to learn about the farm animals.  I noticed, for instance, that most bulls are exuberantly bi-sexual, a fact demonstrated daily in the barn lot, along with much swinging back and forth of impressive sacks bulging with fecundity.  Life on a farm does make a girl lusty.  It’s no wonder that when Ray and Garnie disappeared down the road on a well-earned February vacation, the first thing my new husband and I did was to check out the milk cooler.  No.  Not to look in it, but to climb on it and make love.  That’s when Dale got his start in life as an October surprise.

But I digress.  As Ray Rex’s side-kick, I picked up the occasional veterinary tidbit.  He showed me, for instance, what to do when a cow gains access to early spring grass.  The first shoots of sprouting new growth (the dicotyledons) are often poisonous to cattle, causing gas to build in one or another of their rumens.  A Vet fixes this with an IV of calcium.  A farmer, lacking access to parenteral solutions, can save the day with a quick knife jab to the swollen stomach.  The pressure relieves, and the animal is saved for another season of profitable production.  Where evolution failed to install an escape-valve, the farmer makes one.

One lovely spring day Ray Rex brought home from a livestock sale a pretty and very pregnant black Jersey heifer.   He pastured her on our side of the river.  She was a little gem, unique to the farm, since the Taylors specialized in high producing breeds typical to commercial dairies.  They provided milk with relatively less butterfat than a Jersey milker, but with more volume. Since we didn’t separate the cream and churn butter, that made a lot of sense.  His idea was to sell her calf and keep the cow as Dale’s “source” when Nosey went dry.  Even a cow deserves a vacation, and Nosey had done her share.  She would get her three months of rest and cud chewing.

One day as Ray Rex headed off to town, I checked on the new black heifer.  She was in labor and was not at all happy about it.  Why did that have to happen when I was alone on the farm?  I kept an eye on her, and eventually she delivered a lovely fat bull calf but wouldn’t get up to let it nurse.  She lay on the barn floor and panted, her eyes glassy and unfocused.  The calf was up but hadn’t yet bonded with its mother, and had ended up in a heap in a corner of the barn.  Not good.  As the evening wore on the problem congealed.  It seemed to be a complication of what must have been too much spring grass.  A balloon gathered just forward of the animal’s right haunch and threatened to constrict flow of breath and blood.  I tried to get her to stand up, but she was having none of it.  Eventually she stretched out flat on her side and commenced groaning.  I was going to lose this animal.  It was then that I ran to the house and fished out my favorite paring knife.  I didn’t have a handy-dandy Swiss-pocket-knife that all farmers carried in their overalls, and had to make do.

When I returned, the cow’s tongue was hanging out sideways.  She was groaning in shallow pants.  I aimed the knife at the bulge and poked.  It bounced back.  The knife was good for butter, but not much else.  Another run up the hill to the kitchen yielded a serrated steak knife.  It wasn’t much better, but I finally worked my way through, sawing at the tough hairy outer hide.  Then it seemed a reasonable thing to open the internal organ at a spot not lined up with the skin access hole.  So I pulled the outer hole leftward and proceeded to saw open the taut rigid rumen.  As soon as knife achieved puncture the hole erupted, spewing gas and digesting grass all over me.  My eyes swam with green juice and it dripped off my nose, but I didn’t care.  It was so good to have relieved that killer pressure bolus.  Right away she sat up, shook her head, and tried to get up.  She lurched forward, scrabbling with back hooves, trying to find some traction on the wet floor. After a few attempts, she made it.  I collected the calf, gave him an encouraging rub-down, and he began to suck with the-diligence of intense hunger. The Jersey didn’t bother with thank-you, but I sensed a measure of gratitude.

When Ray Rex came home, he congratulated me on my emergency veterinary prowess.  He was proud of me, and I was feeling a wee bit cocky, but as time passed, flies laid their eggs in the wound.  They turned into maggots, which is what fly eggs are wont to do.  When I pulled the skin sideways to peek at the stomach hole, a stream of slime and maggots flowed down he Jersey’s flank.  I thought I had failed her, but Ray Rex assured me that everything was fine—just fine.  He said that flies and maggots conspired to provide cleansing for open air wounds as a natural aid to healing. 

The Jersey cow healed;  The calf went to the sale for veal;  Nosey got to retire for the summer; and Garnet began tapping the rich milk of my erstwhile surgery patient.  No wonder Dale grew up so hearty.  He started out with the big feet of a pick-of-the-litter puppy and lived into them with the integrity that has ever been his trademark. It wasn’t until I brought home a baby girl swathed in pink beribboned flannel that I truly realized how staunch was his hold on the life I had given him.  Compared to her dainty hands, his had the look of a stevedore’s.  It’s amazing what comparison can do to perception.  The week before, I had envisioned him as my sweet little baby boy.  Suddenly he appeared as a bumptious big brother who would one day put the cat in the freezer to create a “catsicle.”  I would love them both.  I would love them all.  It was I, after all, who had put a board on my duckling and stood on it to make it quack.  Who am I to judge creative persuasion? Performing veterinary surgery without benefit of license is an illegal bit of business, but since luck was along for the adventure, this cow’s tale can end with a wink and a smile.