Jim and I spent the summer of 1954 with Mama's youngest sister, Aunt Tot, who was a widow living with her only son, Sonny, way out in the countryside of Northern Mississippi. She made a living milking cows for her brother-in-law. It wasn't a big dairy farm like those along 99 Highway where thousands of cows are standing on a very stinky pile of you know what, or feeding at a mile-long row of troughs full of manufactured cow-feed. You know... the kind of dairy farm you smell long before you get there or after you pass it, depending on which way the wind is blowing.
Aunt Tot had only about five or six cows to milk. They grazed in the woods nearby all day, and came to the barn mooing every evening. They knew their calves were locked in the barnyard all day. Aunt Tot would milk each cow before allowing the calf into the pen with her. She had some big buckets, and would get, I thought, about a gallon or two of milk from each cow.
To me, it was fun to watch Aunt Tot milk. She was good at it. She would squat down real close to the cow's right back leg and talk real straight to her. "Awright, now, girl, don't you kick me. C'mon, now, let's get this done..." Aunt Tot had really long fingers, just like Mama did, and she would grab onto two of those four teats firmly right up against the bag, and squeeze them down toward the bucket, pumping them up and down. It made a kind of "ping-swish" sound as the first few streams of creamy milk hit the bottom of the bucket. Sometimes the cow would shift her weight, and Aunt Tot would push against her and repeat, "Awright, stop that. Don't you kick me, girl...C'mon, now..."
When Aunt Tot was satisfied that we had most of the milk in the bucket but there was some left for the calf, she would remove the bucket carefully and bring the calf into the stall. Then she would carefully pour the milk into the big metal containers with screw-on metal lids (I think they held about five gallons, maybe more) and repeat the process with the next cow. She sometimes grumbled that the cow was holding back all the cream for the calf. She was sure cows could do that. Can they? I know humans can't. At least I couldn't.
Jim and I named each cow after a person we knew. I don't remember what we named them but I'm pretty sure we named one of them Berl. Somehow, she looked like our Aunt Berl in the face; it was just her expression. Aunt Tot would laugh. We didn't dare name one of them Tot, although in retrospect it seems like Lottie would have been an appropriate name for a milk cow. Lottie was Aunt Tot's real name. She was just called Tot because she was the youngest of twelve children, our Mama being the next older than her.
Every cow had a calf, of course. All the calves were kept locked inside the barnyard all day, so that the cows would come back after grazing to get relief for their painfully full bags of milk. We thought the playful calves were the cutest, funniest creatures on earth.
One of them, though, was a very sad little calf. It was blind. Aunt Tot always took special care of the little blind calf, being sure to leave plenty of milk for it, because it was kind of sickly.
Two mules had been temporarily left at our barn by Uncle E.G., the man who owned the cows (and the place). One day something suddenly spooked them. They started running in a big circle around the barn but inside the fence. The little blind calf must have heard the ruckus. Maybe he thought it was the cows coming in early. Maybe he thought his mother was there, too, and he wanted to go out to meet her.
Whatever he thought, he went toward the sound of running hooves, right out into the path of the mules. They were circling the building at a high speed. I'm not sure if they didn't see the little calf, or saw him too late to avoid him. Maybe they just didn't care; mules have never been known to be close friends of cows and calves. Anyway, they knocked him winding, and when all the dust settled and the mules quieted, there lay the little blind calf. He was dead.
We cried. I stayed away from the barnyard after that. I wouldn't let myself get too attached to anyone in there. Nor did I have any desire to learn to ride those mean old mules...
Grief is often short lived for little kids when they're having fun. Besides funnybooks and waxed paper, as mentioned in an earlier post, I did sand painting. The hills of Mississippi have all different colors of soil, seriously. You can gather sand of several different hues, and sifting it through your palms, you can "paint" a picture on the ground. It is so cool.
The house was a cabin with only three rooms, kitchen, middle room, and bedroom, and two porches, one front and one back. The ceiling of the kitchen had a million little bitty black dots left there by flies over the last forty or fifty years. There was no sink, only a small homemade cabinet on top of which sat a two-gallon water bucket with a dipper in it.
Water came from a shallow well out front in which a pipe coming up out of the well supplied water when you turned on the faucet handle. To this day I'm not sure how that worked. There was no pump apparatus that I knew of. My later experience with wells tells me there probably had to be a pump somewhere for us to be able to get water out of it. Anyway, we filled the bucket to tote water into the house, setting the bucket on the little counter, and dipping water from it either to drink from the dipper or to pour into the dishpan on the kitchen table for cleanup after a meal. There was a Number Two Washtub on the back porch for baths, eh... once every week or so. I'm smiling. For that you had to heat water on the butane kitchen stove. I don't remember taking a bath that whole summer, but I'm sure I must have...
The kitchen also had a very small electric refrigerator where we kept all the fresh milk and cream. I learned to churn the soured milk to get the butter. You have to shake a gallon jug of raw milk for a long, long time, for that cream to turn into butter. I didn't like churning. We ate vegetables from the garden, eggs from the hen house, milk, cream, and butter from the cows, and corn from the field, blackberry jam from wild berries in the woods. It was all so good. Aunt Tot would make cream pies, and she would let me "lick the bowl" (using a spoon, of course... except when she wasn't looking.)
Aunt Tot and I slept in the middle room. It opened directly onto the front porch. The kitchen and middle room had tongue-and-groove floors. The other room where Jim and Sonny slept had floors made out of two-by-eights with one- to two-inch cracks between them. You could see the chickens walking around under the house. There was a light bulb screwed into a fixture in the middle of each room's ceiling. That was the only electricity into the house. Between the light bulb and the fixture in the ceiling was a connector into which you could plug the iron, or the radio, or whatever else you had that needed plugging in. But only one at a time.
To me, that old, gray, shacky house was more fun than anywhere else in the world. I could sit on the edge of the porch with my feet dangling down, or enjoy digging my bare feet into the mud, or the dry, warm sand, or make my own paper dolls, design their dresses which always had wide circle skirts and puffed sleeves... I would pet Missy, the dog, burying my face in her soft fur, getting her fleas in my hair, ... I'm telllin' you, it was a child's wonderland.
That was a really fun summer. Sonny taught Jim and me the Morse Code. Dot, dot, dot... dit, dit, dit... dot, dot, dot. I think that's S.O.S. (It may be the other way around; maybe I spelled O.S.O. I can't remember...) Anyway, it was lots of fun to learn that. The boys were much better at it than I was.
Chickens are really fun. When you heard a hen cackling in the back yard, having just come out of the hen house, saying "Bok bok bok ba-GAK!..." repeatedly, you could tell she had just laid an egg and was proudly announcing it to the world. The rooster, though, never said "Cockadoodledoo," as portrayed in the children's stories. To greet the dawn, roosters jump on a fence or other high place and say, "Er-er-er-erk-er-ER!" a whole bunch of times. See? That summer, I learned to speak Chickenese.
Chickens are pretty stupid, though. After Aunt Tot had harvested and dried some of the peas she had planted, we all sat out on the back porch and shelled the dry peas into bags in our laps. Occasionally, a pea or two would fall to the ground and the nearest chicken would pounce on it and gobble it up.
Sonny, who loved to tease, began to throw out a few peas and watch to see which chicken was the fastest pea-getter. Then a light came on in his eyes and he took a handful of shelled peas, walked over to the sawed-off coffee can (from which the chickens drank water) and began to throw peas in there one by one. The chickens all gathered around. Closer and closer they came, right up to the edge of the coffee can. It had about four or five inches of clear water in it. The chickens could see the pale green peas down on the rusty bottom. They turned their heads to one side or the other so that at least one eye could stare at the lovely pea in the water.
Eventually, one brave hen, bless her soul, got up enough nerve to thrust her head down in the water to retrieve it. When the water closed over her head it scared her so much she yanked her head out and started flopping around, squawking. That scared all the others and they ran away squawking, too. Big Squawking Party all over the back yard. I was laughing so hard my side hurt. And that stupid chicken, as soon as she flopped all the water off her head, went back for more. She would just stare and stare down into the coffee can and try again every minute or two.Yeah, chickens are really stupid creatures. But they give good eggs.
We didn't have a bathroom, or even an outhouse, at Aunt Tot's that summer. We just went out behind the chicken coop. I hated that part. The chickens would follow me out there and make a wide half circle around me as I backed up to the back wall of the little building. "Bok...bok... bok... bok..." all around the circle the chickens encouraged. They didn't follow me back to the house, and I didn't see what they did back there, but the next time I would visit that same spot, there was nothing there. Except the chickens who followed me again, "Bok... bok... bok... bok..." encouraging.
Sonny, Jim, and I all three had the mumps out there that summer. I'm not even going to tell you that story...
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