Harris and Me

(it hadn’t been a good morning so far)—and moved to see what Harris was beating on.
My movement distracted Harris momentarily and as he looked up there was a scurry of more dirt and feathers and his enemy disappeared in a hole under the granary floor. But not before I could get a look at it.
“A chicken?” I asked. “That was a chicken?”
Harris stood, threw the board aside, and brushed the dirt from his pants. “Hell, no—it’s a rooster. Ernie. If you hadn’t made me look up I would have killed him, too. He’s been working on me for years. I just hate it when I can’t see him.”
I leaned down and peered under the granary, saw one yellow eye glaring back at me out of the darkness.
“He’s got to jump me by surprise. In a fair fight I can whip him, but when you can’t see him... that’s the only way he can get me.”
Now that the dust had settled I saw that Harris was scratched and tom in several places on his chest and one cheek. “You’re bleeding.”
He wiped the blood off. “It’s his spurs. He gets to raking with them and it cuts some. I’d like to kill the old thing but Pa, he likes Ernie. Says he’s good to keep the hawks and owls away.”
I could believe that. I didn’t know anything about hawks and owls but I sure wasn’t going to tangle with him.
Harris was halfway to the barn and I hurried to catch up—not wishing to be left too close to the hole under the granary floor.
“We got to separate,” he said. “And we’re late.”
“Why separate? Is there something else going to come after us?” I looked back, to the sides, half ready to duck.
“No. Not us, dummy. The milk. I thought I’d give you a chance to learn about the farm and the best way to start is separating.” Harris paused to cough and spit and look away—a sure sign, I would find, that he was lying through his teeth. “The folks said to have you run the separator.”
He walked in the double open door of the barn as he spoke and I followed him. I had never been in a barn during milking and was surprised to see that it was full of cows. Down the center was a clean, concrete-floored aisle twelve or so feet wide, with gutters on each side. On either side of this there were cows standing with their back ends to the aisle and it seemed like most of them were going in the gutter, which was already full of runny manure and urine.
The stench was overpowering—thick and fresh and so full of ammonia it clogged my throat and I had to wait a moment to get my breath before going inside.
As I entered, Clair came out from between two cows. She was carrying a three-legged stool and a bucket brim full of milk with thick foam on top, wearing a tattered old denim coat that hung in shreds. She smiled at me. “So you’re up and about—feeling better?”
I nodded. “Just a bump on my head.” I looked at the cows. “Is Vivian here?”
“Third from the end on that side.” She waved. “Don’t get near her hind end.”
She walked past me and into a small room near the door and Harris followed. I turned but stopped. Louie was milking, sitting back in by a cow reaching up under her, and a huge cat, much larger than any cat I had ever seen, was sitting on its hind legs in the aisle in back of Louie. As I watched Louie directed a stream of milk at the cat’s mouth and the cat swallowed it as fast as it came, waving its paws in the air.
Clair had dumped the milk in the little room and had come back out and Harris looked around the corner of the door. “Come on—don’t you want to see this?”
Inside the room was a machine with two spigots. One fed into a large milk can and the other into a tall, thin bucket. On top of this device was a big stainless steel bowl full of milk and at the side was a wooden-handled crank.
“It’s a separator. You put milk in the top and turn the crank and you get cream out of one spout and milk out of the other.”
“Really?”
“Yeah.” Cough, spit. “It’s fun—want to do it?”
“Sure...”
I took the crank and started to turn, or tried to. It seemed to be stuck, resisted my effort. “It won’t turn.”
“Sure it will. It just starts slow. Keep at it until it whines—then it’ll be easy.”
He grabbed the handle with me and helped and we kept at it and he was right. After ten or fifteen turns it started to whine and from then on it was easy, just a matter of keeping it going.
And going.
And going.
Harris waited until the handle was turning easily and then left, disappeared completely, and inside ten minutes I smelled the rat. They milked seventeen cows by hand, the four of them—Clair, Glennis, Knute, and Louie—and every drop of milk from all those cows went through the separator.
Which I kept cranking.
Each time one of them finished they came into the little room to dump their milk in the separator and so the level never seemed to go down in the big supply bowl on the top, and inside twenty minutes my arm felt like it was going to fall off. There was an urgency to it that took over—the milk, rivers of it, kept coming and I worried that if I didn’t keep it up, they would just keep pouring and the separator would overflow.
The milk can on the floor began to fill and just as I worried that it would flow over Knute came in to dump a bucket of milk in the separator and replaced the full milk can with an empty one. All without talking and I realized I hadn’t heard him say a word