In the years before World War II, Mom and Dad were migrant workers.  Summers they worked in the lettuce sheds in Salinas, Mom trimming and Dad packing.  In winter they’d go to Arizona, somewhere near Yuma I think, to work the melons.

I spent much of my first years with my Aunt and Uncle near Pleasanton.  Aunt Jerry and Uncle Ted.

Selling milk in those years was serious business.  Even though Uncle Ted had a regular job, morning and night he still milked Mom Babe, their cantankerous Jersey cow.  He would bring the milk into the house and strain it through folded layers of  cheesecloth into a shiny five gallon metal container.  The container had a metal top attached to it by a small chain.  At a precisely timed moment, he would take the can out to the end of the driveway.  Almost immediately the truck from the creamery in Pleasanton would pull up, collect the container and, having left off a clean empty, proceed down the road to the next driveway.

This regimen he followed, morning and night.  I’m sure Uncle Ted would have preferred to milk later in the evening when the cool had arrived.  Given the inflexible pickup schedule, he had no choice.  He would come home from his day job, change clothes and go directly out to the shed.

In the late afternoon I’d go with him, clutching my little enameled tin cup in one hand and holding one of his fingers in the other.  I had to run on my stubby legs to keep up with him.  Once in the shed I’d climb up the side of the partition next to the stanchion.  I’d wait there, hanging with my elbows on the top, while he brought Babe in, put her in the stanchion, dropped a full can of  mash in the trough and then got on with the business of milking.  The cats accompanied us.

Uncle Ted sat on a one-legged stool.  Once he had cleaned her bag and she’d let her milk down, he milked in earnest, pulling first one tit and then the next in rhythmic order, working industriously to fill the five-gallon bucket.  I listen impatiently to the milk hiss into the bucket.  At some point early on he’d pause, reach back for my cup and milk it full.  Wonderful taste, milk warm from the cow. The foam would stick to my upper lip.

Once he’d filled my cup Uncle Ted would take the right front tit in hand, lean back and shoot a stream across to each cat.  Up on their hind legs they would stand in turn, mouths open wide.  Uncle never missed.  Right in the kisser, one full pull on the tit.  Satisfied, each cat would sit back and proceed to clean the milk splatter from the fur.

As he milked a strange process regularly began.  I did not understand it.  I only observed.  Babe would, of course, regularly swish her tail to get rid of flies.  But once she had eaten most of the mash Uncle had given her, she would swish it up onto her back, leave it there for a moment and then gently let it slide off to plop down and rest on his shoulders.  This became especially bothersome on the hot summer days when he would have taken off his shirt.  Regularly I’d hear him muttering to himself.

He’d shrug off the tail.

She’d again deposit it on his shoulders.

Again he’d shrug it off.

One hot summer afternoon he evidently reached something of a breaking point.  Along with the milk bucket he brought with him to the barn a heavy brick and a length of baling wire.  He closed Babe in the stanchion.  He put mash in the trough.  Then he wrapped the wire securely around the brick and then around the end of her tail.

At first she did not seem to notice.  Her  initial concern, as always, was the mash.  That evening while she ate she tried, several times, to swish her tail.  The brick held it down.  At last, as if ready to get serious about things, she began to swish her tail in earnest.  Back and forth it went, gradually increasing its arc.  Like a pendulum in the grandfather clock in the house, back and forth it swept.

Uncle Ted was of course oblivious to this.  Milking was serious business.  His bald head pushed firmly against her flank, he concentrated on filling the bucket.  Then, as fate would have it, he sat up,  leaned back and looked to his left.  At precisely that moment the brick reached a kind of critical mass.  Around it came, slowly tracing a graceful arc.  As if predestined, with a thud it met his forehead.

Back he fell.  Startled, Babe stepped forward, kicking over the bucket.  White milk splashed over the straw and manure.  The cats squalled in terror.  Babe lowed.  I hung tight on the railing.

Lying there in the straw, Uncle Ted, in a loud voice, talked to the cow.  Being only four I did not understand much of what he said.  I only knew these were words I had been told I must never use.

Crawling around on his hands and knees, Uncle got hold of the brick.  He stripped it off her tail.  Babe mooed and kicked.

He let her out of the stanchion.

She ran from the shed.

He returned to the house.  Aunt Jerry bandaged his head.