Milking time

When I was about four years old, my family moved from Magazine, Arkansas to Booneville (the next town down Highway 10) and built a house on thirty acres of rocky hillside, where I grew up and where my parents live to this day. Daddy enjoyed messing with cattle, and always kept a few head on the place to keep the grass eaten down and to provide beef – and milk. Yes, as strange as it seems in this health-conscious day, we milked a cow every day that we had one fresh. The only health precaution taken was that Mama would strain the milk through a boiled cloth. As far as I know, we never suffered any ill health effects whatsoever. As long as my digestive system allowed me to drink it, I loved a cool glass of milk, and cornbread and milk was a staple on Sunday nights at our house.

Daddy loved clabbered milk, strangely enough, and he would set out a jar of milk for that purpose. Eventually the curd would separate from the whey in a white mass. He would dip out the curd and eat it like ice cream. We made our own butter, of course, and it usually fell to us boys to churn. Most of the time Mama would put the milk in a gallon jar and we would slosh it back and forth until the butter came. Later on, Mama got a Daisy churn, which was easier. The best method, however, which we never had at home, was the crockery churn my Grandma Green had. It had a wooden plunger, and you would raise and lower it in the church with a pleasant and satisfying  “ker-sploosh” sound. Great fun!

 Some of the time Daddy had a bona fide milk cow of a dairy breed. I particularly remember one named Pet (a Guernsey, I think), who was very tame and mild-mannered, and who actually would let us children ride on her back (for a few steps, at least). However, if we did not have a milk cow per se, Daddy just milked whichever of the cows he could get to stand still in the stall. Hereford, Angus – it mattered not, as long as they were milkable. Daddy was a good milker. He had strong hands and could really make the milk foam. As he milked, there would be a particular rhythm to the sound, which fascinated us children.

Eventually, we boys got old enough, and Daddy got a job at the college in Fort Smith, which necessitated his leaving earlier, so we took over the milking. None of us ever was as good as he was, but we muddled through. I remember the routine well. We would stumble down to the barn in the early morning hours, put the feed in the trough, turn in the cow, secure her head in the stanchion, and go to work. It took us a good bit longer than Daddy, and we never were able to strip the milk as completely as he did. One of the real challenges of milking was to keep the cow from stepping in the bucket. You had to have our left hand ready to block her hind leg when she would kick. Despite our best efforts, however, occasionally she would kick the bucket, or even get her foot in it, and the milk would be ruined. That did not go over well at Headquarters. Another hazard of milking was that in the summertime we probably would not wear shoes, and there was always the chance  the cow would step on our unprotected foot. That was a thrilling experience!

Much of the time there would be a goodly contingent of cats in the barn, waiting for their fair share of the proceeds. They could get to be pests at times, trying to get to the milk bucket. What with swatting cats and watching for the cow's foot and dodging her tail, things could be very lively. We taught the cats to catch streams of milk in their mouths. They would stand on their hind legs and drink the milk "on the fly."

One thing about drinking raw milk in an unimproved pasture is that the milk takes on the flavor of whatever the cow eats. We always had a problem with bitterweeds, and so sometimes the milk would have a definite unpleasant flavor. As boys, one of our fund-raising projects was to pull bitterweeds. Daddy would pay us a penny for every 50 plants we pulled. We attacked the project with gusto - but you had to be careful not to put your hands in your mouth until you had washed them. Yuck!