A Year on a Dairy Farm · February: Inside the Barn

February: Inside the Barn, part 3

“How’s Hazel?” Sarah says.

“Fine. Big.”

“Soon?”

“Soon.”

Anna looks up. “Is it Hazel? The one I helped pull out of the mud that time?”

“That was Hazel.”

“How old is she now?”

“Six.”

Anna considers this. “She’s old.”

“She’s not old.”

“For a dairy cow she’s old.”

Tom sits down. Sarah puts a plate in front of him: two eggs, toast, bacon she got at the farmers market in Trumansburg. He picks up his fork. “She’s not old,” he says again, to no one.

Sarah laughs, the small private laugh of a wife who has been listening to a particular argument inside her husband’s head for thirty-two years.

After breakfast the day breaks open into the things that have to be done, and the things that have not yet decided whether they have to be done. The first category includes feeding the dry cows, refilling the calf hutches with fresh straw, pushing up the feed at the bunk so the cows can reach what they had pawed away from themselves overnight, and starting the skid steer to scrape the alleys. The second category is what makes a farm a farm: the unscheduled thing that happens at 9:47 in the morning when you are halfway through scraping an alley and Marcelino comes out of the heifer barn and says the waterer is frozen.

There are two waterers in the heifer barn. They are heated. They are heated with a small electric element that has, for reasons the manual does not fully explain, decided last night not to heat. Now there is a domed cap of ice over the surface of one of them, and the heifers — six of them, between four and twelve months old — are standing around it looking at it and at Tom with the particular patience of animals who have understood that a problem exists and that it is not their problem to solve.

Tom goes back to the shop for a hammer and a kettle and an extension cord. The hammer breaks the ice. The kettle, plugged into the extension cord, pours hot water on the element. The element comes back on, eventually. The whole repair takes forty minutes and accomplishes nothing that wasn’t already supposed to be happening on its own. This is a lot of farming.

At noon Marcelino goes back to the trailer. The trailer is a single-wide set up on the slope behind the barn, on cinder blocks, with the propane tank visible from the kitchen window of the main house. Tom’s father put it in for a hired man in 1991 and it has been a hired man’s home ever since, with different hired men in it. Marcelino has been in it for almost five years. The inside is clean — Marcelino is meticulous about this — and the kitchen has a small electric kettle and a pan and a bag of dried corn for tortillas and a stack of plates with a pattern of yellow flowers around the rim that he chose at the Walmart in Geneva because his daughter had picked out the same pattern, in a smaller plate, for her grandmother in Huehuetenango.

He eats lunch alone most days. Today he eats lunch alone. He puts the phone on the counter on speaker, and his wife answers, and for a while there is the small clatter of two kitchens — one in upstate New York and one in the highlands of Guatemala — and the voice of his daughter, who has just gotten home from school, asking him if it has snowed today.

Sí, mija. Mucho. Mucho mucho.

¿Te divertiste?

He laughs.

In the afternoon Tom does the things that involve paper. He does not like the things that involve paper. He has done them his entire adult life and he does not like them yet. Sarah is at the kitchen table with the laptop and a stack of milk receipts, three months of them, and she is entering numbers into a spreadsheet and frowning at the screen the way she used to frown at her students when she was a fourth-grade teacher in Penn Yan and did not believe their excuses about their homework.

“How was last month,” Tom says, getting coffee.

“It was last month.”

“That bad?”

“Not bad. Last month.”

Tom looks at the spreadsheet over her shoulder. There is a column for income and a column for expenses and a column for difference. The difference column has both kinds of numbers in it. He does not stay long enough to count which kind there are more of. He has the kind of relationship to this spreadsheet that you have to a check engine light: it is on, you know it is on, you will deal with it, you do not need to look at it right now.

“Is Anna still here for dinner?”

“She’s leaving Sunday.”

“Good.”

He goes back outside.

The afternoon milking starts at three-thirty and ends at six. It is the same as the morning except that the light is failing instead of arriving, and the cows are slightly slower, and Tom is more tired, and Marcelino does not say much, and there are no eggs at the end of it. By six-fifteen Tom is back in the barn pushing up feed for the night. By six-thirty the cows are settling.

He does the last walk-through at twenty to seven. The barn is quiet. The cows in the milking string are lying down or eating. The dry cows are at the back. He walks the alley slowly, the way he walked it that morning, looking at the ones he passes.

Hazel is standing now, at the bunk, pulling at a rope of baleage with the steady patient work of a cow who has thirteen hours of digesting ahead of her and intends to begin. Her belly hangs low. Her ears are forward. She does not turn to look at him. She is busy.

Tom stands at the gate and watches her for a minute.

Outside, the wind is moving across the snow. Inside, it is still warm. The vacuum pump is off. The fluorescent lights are off; only the small night lights at the end of each row are on, casting the barn in a low blue. The cows breathe in the half-dark. Somewhere a hoof shifts on concrete. Somewhere a cow lets out a long, slow exhale, the kind that means she is settling for the night.

In three weeks, give or take, Hazel will have a calf.

Tom closes the gate and turns out the last of the lights and walks back across the snow to the house, where Sarah is making dinner and Anna is on the phone and Jess is under the table and the radio in the kitchen is still on, very low, talking now about something other than hay.

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