Honk, honk. Honk, honk, honk. Hoooooonnnnnnnk!!!!
The first honks were like announcements of arrival. The last one--insistent. Just like my grandmother sometimes when she wanted us to do something.
"Nettie's outside!!" I yelled, looking out the picture window and seeing her big old lumbering 1953 black and white Buick.
"What does she want?" Susan called from her bedroom, where she was doing math homework. I knew this because I had opened the door earlier and been told to get out because she was "doing math homework". I knew she wouldn't leave her room anyway to go outside to see what Nettie wanted. She never did.
She was what I called "an inside girl." She had perfect, unmarred hands and fingernails. She didn't like to get dirty or sweat. And she would much rather read, or play Canasta or Scrabble than run down the sides of the creek or climb on the thick wooden rails of the corral. I couldn't understand it.
On days when the entire family rose at 6 a.m. on a Saturday to work cattle, Mother and Daddy usually made a halfhearted effort to get her involved, then gave up, saying something like, "Well, you can set the table for lunch then." Like that was a punishment! They probably made a show mainly to keep Jan and I from whining about why she didn't have to help, and we did.
Nettie knew I'd always ride with her in her car,and sometimes Jan would, riding through the dusty pasture roads, looking out at the Herefords grazing placidly on the thin grass, standing hip high in thistles and milkweed., stirring up the grasshoppers. I found their intermittent bawls oddly calming and pleasant. Sometimes they jerked their heads up from eating, grass jutting from their white lips as they stared at us, unperturbed, chewing rhythmically on the green repast, saliva dripping from their mouths, watering the dry ground below.
She sometimes stopped the car suddenly, throwing up a small dust cloud behind us. She opened the driver's side door, held onto the steering wheel and turned her ample body sideways. Holding to the open door, she then stood up slowly, her arthritic knees creaking like two rusted barn door hinges begging for oil.
"Hand me my cane," she'd say, "and my hat." I stuck the wooden cane toward her from my place in the front seat while Jan grabbed the huge sombrero-like hat and set it on the driver's seat. Nettie grasped the smooth wood in the curve of the cane handle, steadied herself, reached down for the hat, and after dwarfing her head with the monstrosity, started out toward the cows. Prone to skin cancers, she wasn't taking any chances. The hat and a long sleeved shirt were summer standards.
That was our cue to get out of the car and scramble toward her. She wasn't afraid of the cows and neither were we, but it was best to walk close to her so if she started a stampede, punching and yelling at them, that we weren't in their way.
"You old heifer, what are you looking at?" she'd ask, jabbing her stick toward a large red and white cow, with bags hanging almost to the ground.
"Why, I'm looking at you," Jan would whisper, chuckling. We stifled laughter.
"Where's your baby?" she said, louder, like the cow hadn't heard her the first time. "Oh, I see him. Right over there. Now he's a pretty thang." Now softer, like you'd exclaim over a mother's new baby, a REAL one, "He sure is. Come here baby, come here." The calf ran lickety split, kicking up his heels with abandon. He was nowhere near Nettie and not planning to come any closer by the way he was acting.
I shaded my eyes and squinted up at the blinding sun . Jan kicked at a dried cow patty with the toe of her tennis shoe. We weren't with Nettie anymore. It seemed to be just her and the cows. I wondered if living alone as a widow so many years made her converse with things other than people. She might talk to her furniture for all I knew.
"Here bully, bully, bully," she teased. "You old bull. You think I'm afraid of you because of those big old horns. I'm not afraid of you. You made some pretty calves this year. You sure did."
She took a few steps forward, away from the car, and waded into the middle of the herd, about fifty cows. Her felt Daniel Green houseshoes would be no match for this dust. Her red and black plaid dress moved slightly in the hot breeze, and the back of the cotton longsleeved shirt she wore over it waved like a multicolor flowered flag.
Most of the herd began moving slowly away like bored guests at a dinner party moving away from a boorish speaker. A few stood very still, looking at her, their slight defiance caving when she continued walking toward them, her cane stabbimg into the ground, anchoring each step. The bull was the last to cede his territory, but he, too, eventually moved out of her way, his 1200 pound body drifting slowly away like a large ship on calm water. Hooves plodding, he gave a token shake of his long thick horns, their dirty ivory tips at least three feet wide.
We could never figure out why she did it. The cows were having a perfectly lovely day, munching on grass and weeds in the pasture until she came and broke up their party. There was no point. Only to tell our dad, her son, that she had "looked at the cows" and give her observations. That was her contribution to the family business, I guessed.
She sure couldn't help us on Saturdays when we worked cows. That was when the real work with the livestock took place. Cows aren't very smart. We'd often get behind them in the pasture and yell, walking them toward the corral. Rarely, Daddy would saddle Sugar and try corraling them that way. She was so lazy that she'd get tired and wouldn't run fast enough to herd them, instead trying to go to the horsebarn, a different place altogether. If one of the methods didn't work, or too many decided to cut and run, we'd load a bale of hay in the back of the truck and they'd follow it like kids following an ice cream truck.They fell for the "food trick" almost every time, except in the spring when they had gorged on new grass.
Once they were all inside the corral, we just shut the gate, and we had them. Several of them would always run over and drink water out of the old porcelain bathtub that was their watering trough. Then, it was a matter of culling a few at a time from the group, persuading them to go into the smaller pens and eventually running them into a corner where we could push a gate against their rear ends, making their walking area smaller and smaller until they had to move forward in a line until each one individually reached the "squeeze chute."
That had to be manned by my dad or someone strong. The cows were enticed in there because they could see an opening. They occasionally had to be prodded with a hotshot, a metal stick with batteries that delivered an electric jolt. In my father's defense, he didn't use it much or let others use it much. Only with the most recalcitrant bovines.
My cousin Phil usually found time to chase Jan and I with it, threatening to shock us, and laughing happily at our screams. He usually managed to herd us toward a cow paddy that we stepped in, our feet sliding wildly through the brownish green muck. Simultaneously we shuddered, shouted our disgust, and ran for rags to wipe off the slimy mess, all to the background peals of laughter of Phil and the rest of the "crew."
The "squeeze chute" was made so that the cow's head could stick out through a gap in the bars, while its body was squeezed tight. But dumb as most of them were, they would imagine they could jump through the hole for their head and drag their whole body behind. The chute was hinged on the sides, so my dad could "cinch" the metal bars tight enough to hold them still and then do the necessary work.
It was hot, messy, nasty work, and the branding seemed downright cruel to me. I could hardly bear to look. A small fire was built and the branding irons placed there. Once they were red hot, they were applied for a few seconds to the cow's hide. The cows bawled-loud-but it only lasted a few seconds. Then they had a new letter S on their right hip.
And they never seemed to hold it against my dad or even remember it after they escaped the corral. The branding was always the last thing after tattoos were inked into their ears with a tool that looked like it had a thousand sharp needles sticking out of it, and shots were given for who knew what, and they were doctored for anything else that was wrong with them.
Some of them had pinkeye at times, and my dad squirted some type of drops in their eyes. They also got sprayed with insecticide to kill the swarms of tiny flies and the thick, slimy white grubs that imbedded themselves under their tough hide.
Sometimes one of the boys who might be helping work cows would mash hard on each side of a small opening on the cow's hide and out popped a shiny worm, blasting up like a rocket, rising high above the cow's back, then descending like a failed flight, to the trampled dirt and manure inside the corral.
About 11:30 on cow working day, Mother headed for the house where she scrubbed her arms and hands, and prepared hotdogs, french fries, ice cold tea and usually a frozen dessert like lemon or chocolate cream pie. When it was ready, she stepped outside holding a large cowbell in her hands, and shook it hard, till the sound was loud enough to reach us working at the corral.
In a few minutes, the old turquoise truck pulled up to the garage and in tromped seven or eight sweaty and dusty kids and adults. Half headed to the two bathrooms while the others waited their turn for hand and arm washing at the sink.
Conversations at the lunch table usually consisted of the morning's excitement, the wild cows, the bulls, the mad ones, the mean ones, the sick ones, the ones that tried to escape. Everyone jockeyed for position to tell their story, waiting impatiently to tell their viewpoint of the activities. Some times they got to, but more often my dad held center stage. If he took a breath and someone talked really fast, they might get to tell something before he started in again.
My cousin Phil was about 17 now, and he often came down and participated, though I couldn't understand why.
If I were an only child and lived in a nice, modern, and most of all "air conditioned" house, I doubted I'd ever come down to a hot place like this, that smelled of manure and cow medicine and sizzling cowhides.
"Hey, where were you this morning, Snow White?" he teased Susan. She ignored him, but you could tell she, like the rest of us, never got mad at him. He was totally good natured about everything he said and did. He was like the seventh kid in the family when he was there, but better natured.
"I set the table," she finally said, like it was justification for something.
He could always get away with saying things to my dad we would never say. He made fun of him for getting so worked up and yelling and cussing the cows which was as much a part of cow working days as sweating.
"Hey," he called across the timbers of the chute one day, his arms hanging across the third rail, feet planted on the first, "you'd bawl too if someone stuck a hot iron to your butt."
We all watched to see my dad's reaction. His face was already red and flushed from the heat, the effort, and the frustration with the cows, who never seemed to understand what was expected of them. I watched as his face appeared to turn from red to fuchsia.
Then he was done branding the cow, and his shoulders relaxed. He released the bar that held the cow's head in place, and she backed up fast, her rear end slamming against the metal gate behind her, hooves scrabbling on the dirt of the chute. My older brother Elton Jr. was at her head and released the pin on the small gate that had held her and swung it back, running backward quickly, not because he was scared of her, but to encourage her to run forward.
Once she saw the opening created when Jan or I slid the corral gate open at the end of the chute, she took off for the opening, kicking her heels wildly as she exited to open pasture. By that time, we had jumped on the corral fence to make sure we didn't get her happy back feet in our faces. We were always amazed that these lumbering beasts could move with such agility as they ran, their back feet leading, twisting their bodies up and around like an invisible hand was wringing them out like a dishrag.
Daddy watched her go, laughing at her antics when she got outside the corral. Then he picked up the branding iron and held it toward Phil, who was safely across the chute. "Boy," he said, "you keep on and we may have to use this on you."
We all laughed, then looked toward Phil, whom we knew would have a retort.
"Yeah, well, you'd have to catch me first, short man," Phil said to peals of laughter.
My dad didn't say anything, but I could see him smiling as he pitched the branding iron back on the fire.
'Well, I believe we're about through for today, boys and girls," my dad announced, at the same time that we noticed a black and white buick moving toward us like a mirage, the sun reflecting off the shiny metal bouncing up and down in the middle of a thick cloud of brown dust. We could barely see Nettie's head over the steering wheel, but we could see the huge sombrero-like hat, sticking out on each side.
Honk, honk, hoooooooonnnnnnnnnnk!
"Yes your majesty?" Phil cracked, sweeping his hand across his body and bowing at the waist.
"Let's go, everybody!" Daddy said, moving toward his mother's car. "Nettie's here for the day's report!" he laughed goodnaturedly.
The first honks were like announcements of arrival. The last one--insistent. Just like my grandmother sometimes when she wanted us to do something.
"Nettie's outside!!" I yelled, looking out the picture window and seeing her big old lumbering 1953 black and white Buick.
"What does she want?" Susan called from her bedroom, where she was doing math homework. I knew this because I had opened the door earlier and been told to get out because she was "doing math homework". I knew she wouldn't leave her room anyway to go outside to see what Nettie wanted. She never did.
She was what I called "an inside girl." She had perfect, unmarred hands and fingernails. She didn't like to get dirty or sweat. And she would much rather read, or play Canasta or Scrabble than run down the sides of the creek or climb on the thick wooden rails of the corral. I couldn't understand it.
On days when the entire family rose at 6 a.m. on a Saturday to work cattle, Mother and Daddy usually made a halfhearted effort to get her involved, then gave up, saying something like, "Well, you can set the table for lunch then." Like that was a punishment! They probably made a show mainly to keep Jan and I from whining about why she didn't have to help, and we did.
Nettie knew I'd always ride with her in her car,and sometimes Jan would, riding through the dusty pasture roads, looking out at the Herefords grazing placidly on the thin grass, standing hip high in thistles and milkweed., stirring up the grasshoppers. I found their intermittent bawls oddly calming and pleasant. Sometimes they jerked their heads up from eating, grass jutting from their white lips as they stared at us, unperturbed, chewing rhythmically on the green repast, saliva dripping from their mouths, watering the dry ground below.
She sometimes stopped the car suddenly, throwing up a small dust cloud behind us. She opened the driver's side door, held onto the steering wheel and turned her ample body sideways. Holding to the open door, she then stood up slowly, her arthritic knees creaking like two rusted barn door hinges begging for oil.
"Hand me my cane," she'd say, "and my hat." I stuck the wooden cane toward her from my place in the front seat while Jan grabbed the huge sombrero-like hat and set it on the driver's seat. Nettie grasped the smooth wood in the curve of the cane handle, steadied herself, reached down for the hat, and after dwarfing her head with the monstrosity, started out toward the cows. Prone to skin cancers, she wasn't taking any chances. The hat and a long sleeved shirt were summer standards.
That was our cue to get out of the car and scramble toward her. She wasn't afraid of the cows and neither were we, but it was best to walk close to her so if she started a stampede, punching and yelling at them, that we weren't in their way.
"You old heifer, what are you looking at?" she'd ask, jabbing her stick toward a large red and white cow, with bags hanging almost to the ground.
"Why, I'm looking at you," Jan would whisper, chuckling. We stifled laughter.
"Where's your baby?" she said, louder, like the cow hadn't heard her the first time. "Oh, I see him. Right over there. Now he's a pretty thang." Now softer, like you'd exclaim over a mother's new baby, a REAL one, "He sure is. Come here baby, come here." The calf ran lickety split, kicking up his heels with abandon. He was nowhere near Nettie and not planning to come any closer by the way he was acting.
I shaded my eyes and squinted up at the blinding sun . Jan kicked at a dried cow patty with the toe of her tennis shoe. We weren't with Nettie anymore. It seemed to be just her and the cows. I wondered if living alone as a widow so many years made her converse with things other than people. She might talk to her furniture for all I knew.
"Here bully, bully, bully," she teased. "You old bull. You think I'm afraid of you because of those big old horns. I'm not afraid of you. You made some pretty calves this year. You sure did."
She took a few steps forward, away from the car, and waded into the middle of the herd, about fifty cows. Her felt Daniel Green houseshoes would be no match for this dust. Her red and black plaid dress moved slightly in the hot breeze, and the back of the cotton longsleeved shirt she wore over it waved like a multicolor flowered flag.
Most of the herd began moving slowly away like bored guests at a dinner party moving away from a boorish speaker. A few stood very still, looking at her, their slight defiance caving when she continued walking toward them, her cane stabbimg into the ground, anchoring each step. The bull was the last to cede his territory, but he, too, eventually moved out of her way, his 1200 pound body drifting slowly away like a large ship on calm water. Hooves plodding, he gave a token shake of his long thick horns, their dirty ivory tips at least three feet wide.
We could never figure out why she did it. The cows were having a perfectly lovely day, munching on grass and weeds in the pasture until she came and broke up their party. There was no point. Only to tell our dad, her son, that she had "looked at the cows" and give her observations. That was her contribution to the family business, I guessed.
She sure couldn't help us on Saturdays when we worked cows. That was when the real work with the livestock took place. Cows aren't very smart. We'd often get behind them in the pasture and yell, walking them toward the corral. Rarely, Daddy would saddle Sugar and try corraling them that way. She was so lazy that she'd get tired and wouldn't run fast enough to herd them, instead trying to go to the horsebarn, a different place altogether. If one of the methods didn't work, or too many decided to cut and run, we'd load a bale of hay in the back of the truck and they'd follow it like kids following an ice cream truck.They fell for the "food trick" almost every time, except in the spring when they had gorged on new grass.
Once they were all inside the corral, we just shut the gate, and we had them. Several of them would always run over and drink water out of the old porcelain bathtub that was their watering trough. Then, it was a matter of culling a few at a time from the group, persuading them to go into the smaller pens and eventually running them into a corner where we could push a gate against their rear ends, making their walking area smaller and smaller until they had to move forward in a line until each one individually reached the "squeeze chute."
That had to be manned by my dad or someone strong. The cows were enticed in there because they could see an opening. They occasionally had to be prodded with a hotshot, a metal stick with batteries that delivered an electric jolt. In my father's defense, he didn't use it much or let others use it much. Only with the most recalcitrant bovines.
My cousin Phil usually found time to chase Jan and I with it, threatening to shock us, and laughing happily at our screams. He usually managed to herd us toward a cow paddy that we stepped in, our feet sliding wildly through the brownish green muck. Simultaneously we shuddered, shouted our disgust, and ran for rags to wipe off the slimy mess, all to the background peals of laughter of Phil and the rest of the "crew."
The "squeeze chute" was made so that the cow's head could stick out through a gap in the bars, while its body was squeezed tight. But dumb as most of them were, they would imagine they could jump through the hole for their head and drag their whole body behind. The chute was hinged on the sides, so my dad could "cinch" the metal bars tight enough to hold them still and then do the necessary work.
It was hot, messy, nasty work, and the branding seemed downright cruel to me. I could hardly bear to look. A small fire was built and the branding irons placed there. Once they were red hot, they were applied for a few seconds to the cow's hide. The cows bawled-loud-but it only lasted a few seconds. Then they had a new letter S on their right hip.
And they never seemed to hold it against my dad or even remember it after they escaped the corral. The branding was always the last thing after tattoos were inked into their ears with a tool that looked like it had a thousand sharp needles sticking out of it, and shots were given for who knew what, and they were doctored for anything else that was wrong with them.
Some of them had pinkeye at times, and my dad squirted some type of drops in their eyes. They also got sprayed with insecticide to kill the swarms of tiny flies and the thick, slimy white grubs that imbedded themselves under their tough hide.
Sometimes one of the boys who might be helping work cows would mash hard on each side of a small opening on the cow's hide and out popped a shiny worm, blasting up like a rocket, rising high above the cow's back, then descending like a failed flight, to the trampled dirt and manure inside the corral.
About 11:30 on cow working day, Mother headed for the house where she scrubbed her arms and hands, and prepared hotdogs, french fries, ice cold tea and usually a frozen dessert like lemon or chocolate cream pie. When it was ready, she stepped outside holding a large cowbell in her hands, and shook it hard, till the sound was loud enough to reach us working at the corral.
In a few minutes, the old turquoise truck pulled up to the garage and in tromped seven or eight sweaty and dusty kids and adults. Half headed to the two bathrooms while the others waited their turn for hand and arm washing at the sink.
Conversations at the lunch table usually consisted of the morning's excitement, the wild cows, the bulls, the mad ones, the mean ones, the sick ones, the ones that tried to escape. Everyone jockeyed for position to tell their story, waiting impatiently to tell their viewpoint of the activities. Some times they got to, but more often my dad held center stage. If he took a breath and someone talked really fast, they might get to tell something before he started in again.
My cousin Phil was about 17 now, and he often came down and participated, though I couldn't understand why.
If I were an only child and lived in a nice, modern, and most of all "air conditioned" house, I doubted I'd ever come down to a hot place like this, that smelled of manure and cow medicine and sizzling cowhides.
"Hey, where were you this morning, Snow White?" he teased Susan. She ignored him, but you could tell she, like the rest of us, never got mad at him. He was totally good natured about everything he said and did. He was like the seventh kid in the family when he was there, but better natured.
"I set the table," she finally said, like it was justification for something.
He could always get away with saying things to my dad we would never say. He made fun of him for getting so worked up and yelling and cussing the cows which was as much a part of cow working days as sweating.
"Hey," he called across the timbers of the chute one day, his arms hanging across the third rail, feet planted on the first, "you'd bawl too if someone stuck a hot iron to your butt."
We all watched to see my dad's reaction. His face was already red and flushed from the heat, the effort, and the frustration with the cows, who never seemed to understand what was expected of them. I watched as his face appeared to turn from red to fuchsia.
Then he was done branding the cow, and his shoulders relaxed. He released the bar that held the cow's head in place, and she backed up fast, her rear end slamming against the metal gate behind her, hooves scrabbling on the dirt of the chute. My older brother Elton Jr. was at her head and released the pin on the small gate that had held her and swung it back, running backward quickly, not because he was scared of her, but to encourage her to run forward.
Once she saw the opening created when Jan or I slid the corral gate open at the end of the chute, she took off for the opening, kicking her heels wildly as she exited to open pasture. By that time, we had jumped on the corral fence to make sure we didn't get her happy back feet in our faces. We were always amazed that these lumbering beasts could move with such agility as they ran, their back feet leading, twisting their bodies up and around like an invisible hand was wringing them out like a dishrag.
Daddy watched her go, laughing at her antics when she got outside the corral. Then he picked up the branding iron and held it toward Phil, who was safely across the chute. "Boy," he said, "you keep on and we may have to use this on you."
We all laughed, then looked toward Phil, whom we knew would have a retort.
"Yeah, well, you'd have to catch me first, short man," Phil said to peals of laughter.
My dad didn't say anything, but I could see him smiling as he pitched the branding iron back on the fire.
'Well, I believe we're about through for today, boys and girls," my dad announced, at the same time that we noticed a black and white buick moving toward us like a mirage, the sun reflecting off the shiny metal bouncing up and down in the middle of a thick cloud of brown dust. We could barely see Nettie's head over the steering wheel, but we could see the huge sombrero-like hat, sticking out on each side.
Honk, honk, hoooooooonnnnnnnnnnk!
"Yes your majesty?" Phil cracked, sweeping his hand across his body and bowing at the waist.
"Let's go, everybody!" Daddy said, moving toward his mother's car. "Nettie's here for the day's report!" he laughed goodnaturedly.
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