Elsie

I don’t have all the dates worked out completely in my mind, but my dad bought a new milk cow sometime in the middle or late 1950s. We had other cows, six or seven at a time, which were part of our small dairy herd. In those days, our farms were not exactly subsistence, but we did try to produce as much as we could for our own living. A family of four young kids could always use the milk to supplement their diet, it’s being a staple in both drink and in cooking. After drinking all we wanted, we separated the cream from the milk and saved it aside until the coming Saturday when we would take it into town to sell. This produced a small cash income for the family which would go a long way toward meeting our regular daily needs. The left-over milk was fed to the hogs to help fatten them up. They were another cash crop on those small farms in Oklahoma during those years.

Most of our milk cows were just range cows we had tamed for the sole purpose of milking. For some of them, it was a challenge to sit down on their right side near their hind leg, place yourself in a position of danger and start the milking process. These old range cows considered this an unnatural intrusion on their dignity and their only response was to kick the fool out of you. We did have a somewhat gentle cow, a large one which was part Jersey or Guernsey. Her name was “Babe.”

We named our milk cows. While I don’t remember them all, I do remember Babe and another named “Flossie.” The others escape me. Then, one day my dad brought home a small Jersey cow, yellowish tan in color with small horns curving to the front of her face. She was the perfect appearance and disposition of a Jersey cow, very gentle and productive. She looked exactly like the mascot for the Borden Dairy and, probably for that similarity, we named her Elsie.

As time went on, we pared down the dairy cows. As they got older we didn’t replace them and reduced the numbers we were milking. Eventually, we were down to Elsie and Babe, and still later we were just milking Elsie. My dad had found employment nearby which reduced the necessity of selling cream for cash and my older brothers left home which greatly reduced the milk hands, reduced, in fact, to me. Wherever we lived, my parents always wanted to have a milk cow. It was probably in part to give me something to do and it was their way of holding onto their past. They were children of the Depression and remembered times when people had little to eat. I believe they felt so long as they had a milk cow and a fattening hog, they would be alright. They might have to buy flour, salt and corn meal, but so long as they could do that, and so long as they had milk on hand, they could feed themselves and their children.

As kids moved away and the family at home got smaller, the one cow produced more than enough milk for us. It wasn’t pasteurized and the facilities were not at all sanitary, but we never got sick from drinking this raw milk. Milk, butter milk, cream, sour cream, butter, cottage cheese, all these were staples in our diet. We might sit down to a simple supper (dinner to the rest of the world) of cornbread and milk, but we were grateful to have it. And, as I look back at it now, mother had been working on the family farm as much and as hard as the rest of us, if not more, and she was probably too tired at times to prepare anything other than a pan of cornbread. Our diet was usually much more hearty than that simple fare, but at times that was all we had and we never complained.

We reached the point that Elsie was the only milk cow we had. When we left the farm, we took her with us. The galvanized milk buckets we used held about 3 ½ gallons and she always produced enough milk to fill it, twice a day. And, I would say that at least a third of that was cream. That much cream twice a day makes a lot of butter and whipped cream. She remained almost a member of the family. Even when a fifth child had been born and there was no one there but me and my younger sister, 14 years my junior, and my parents, we kept Elsie as part of our daily routine. When we moved even further from the farm, we finally quit milking. Elsie was allowed to run with the remainder of the cows, a small herd of mixed cows usually run with a pretty good Angus bull, to produce calves which were a cash crop on the family farm.

Elsie was getting older and I was told to go by the farm and feed her apart from the others. I locked her up in a lot and gave her a special feed, some sorghum rich grain and some hay. She had water available and I petted her and talked to her while she ate. I left her there in the lot, intending to come by later and let her out. I don’t know what it was that I had to do, but I was distracted and forgot to come back by the farm. Two days later, my mom and dad went by and found her dead there in the lot.

I felt terrible and my dad, foolishly, ate me out for leaving her there so she could starve to death. That bothered me for a long time until I finally realized that a cow, which had access to water, won’t starve to death in a day or two without food. It’s not good for them, but it won’t kill them. The truth of the matter was that she was old and weak and that was why I was feeding her a special feed. She simply got old and died. As do we all.

We never had another milk cow, Elsie was the last. I remember well those cold winter mornings I would trudge out into the freezing weather to call in the cows. We would bring them into the barn and put them in the feeding and milk stations. We would sit down beside them, place our cold hands up between their flank and their udder to warm them, and then milk until the bucket was full. The cats would come around and make a nuisance of themselves and we would squirt some of the warm milk into their face. They would lick it off and go back to bothering us. By then we would have enough to pour some into a pan so they would leave us alone and quit trying to climb into the bucket. They had their job and we had ours. Theirs was to kill as many mice and snakes as they could and that was worthy a drink of warm milk a couple of times a day. It wasn’t really hard work, it was just constant. Every morning, every evening, the cows had to be milked.

Milking the cows was my dad’s job. Then it became his and my oldest brother’s job. Soon, it was the job of my two older brothers. Then my middle brother’s and mine. Then mine. Then, we were out of the milk cow business. It’s funny how that works. My sons would have probably been better people if they had had a cow to milk.