From New Mercies I See
by Stan Purdum
Cow 27
“I really could use the help, Reverend” Wesley said, “and with your baby coming and all, you could probably use a few extra bucks.”
Wesley, one of the dairy farmers in the congregation was planning a tiling job and was short on manual laborers. He’d asked me if I could help.
“Sure,” I said. “It sounds interesting.”
“Good. Be there at 7 Saturday morning. I’ll have the milking done by then, and well get started.”
While there is some rise and fall to the land in northeast Ohio, much of the ground is relatively flat, and often with a clay base. When it rains, water lies on ground that doesn’t have good natural drainage. For farmers, this is a problem, for although crops need moisture to thrive, water that remains standing on fields too long drowns out the crops. Tiling, a procedure to improve drainage, is the solution.
To tile a field, special machinery is used to dig several parallel trenches about four feet deep across a field, with the floor of the trenches sloping slightly toward where natural drainage can take over. A piping system with openings every foot or two to receive water is installed in the trenches, and then covered with straw. Finally the dirt is pushed back in to refill the trenches. When rainwater seeps into the earth, it eventually makes its way to these piping systems where it trickles in through the openings and flows away.
Today, the piping used is continuous flexible plastic tubing, with numerous holes in the tubing walls to let water in. But in the early years of my ministry, the plastic tubing had not yet been introduced. The system commonly used then consisted of baked clay cylinders called tiles, each about 18-inches long and 6-inches in diameter. There were no holes in them, but the tiles were laid in the trench leaving about a quarter-inch gap between each one for water to enter.
Since tiling fields was such a big job and required unique machinery, most farmers hired tiling contractors to install it in their field. Wesley, like most other farmers in Thornberry, had done that. But now Wesley had decided that the lane leading from his barn to the pasture should be tiled as well. When it rained, the lane turned so muddy that he had to hose down his cows when they came in the barn to be milked. And since the lane, though long, was narrow enough to require only one trench, Wesley had rented a trenching machine and resolved to do the work himself, assisted by his teenage son and now, his unwary pastor.
Come Saturday morning, I arrived as agreed at 7. Wesley and his son, Peter, were already in the lane, tinkering with the machine. Several palettes of tiles were stationed at intervals down the lane. I walked to where the father and son stood, and after greeting me, Wesley handed me a pair of work gloves. “Here. You better wear these. Those tiles are rough.”
We began at once. The trenching machine consisted of a tractor-like body with a huge digging wheel attached to its side. The device, with Wesley at the controls, began crawling down the center of the lane, slowing chiseling a trench and dumping the dirt on the opposite side from the machine. Peter and I labored in its wake placing the tiles end to end in a straight line in the bottom of the ditch. Peter worked in the ditch itself while I shuttled back and forth between the pallets and the trench, hauling the tiles, two at a time, to him. For the first hour or so, we traded places, and continued in that fashion throughout the morning.
Of course, it wasn’t quite that simple. Periodically, the digging wheel stalled on buried rocks too big for it to handle, and then all three of us worked with shovels and spud bars until we had extracted the obstruction. The sun rose, and the whole process was hot, sweaty work.
Wesley was right about the tiles being rough, for by midmorning, the tough cloth gloves Peter and I wore were shredding, and Wesley issued us each a new pair.
By noon, we were slightly over halfway down the lane, and Wesley called a halt for lunch. The father and son were used to long days in the fields, and were still going strong. I, however, had been dragging for the last hour and was grateful for the break.
“Shouldn’t I get the front-end loader and push the dirt back over the part we’ve finished?” Peter asked his father, referring to their tractor with a scoop mounted on the front. “It would protect what we’ve done.”
“No,” Wesley said. “We’ll do that later.”
Peter wasn’t convinced. “I think we should close it up now. Come on, Dad. I can do it pretty quick.”
But Wesley wasn’t having any of it. “It’ll keep.” He led the way toward the house where his wife had a huge farm lunch waiting.
After we’d eaten, the three us resumed our task, toiling through the hot afternoon. By 3:30, the entire trench lay open, and Peter and I placed the final tiles.
It would soon be time for the afternoon milking, and Peter headed for the pasture, carefully closing the gate to the lane so the cows coming in couldn’t use the lane. He was going to drive them into the barn by another route. Wesley drove the trenching machine toward the barn and I followed on foot.
Wesley parked the machine outside the barn, and we heard some bellowing from within. “One of the heifers must be in heat,” Wesley said. Heifers were the young female cows that had not yet been bred. Having had no offspring, they were not producing milk. Thus, for the economy of the farm, it was important that heifers be bred when came into heat. In fact, it was an opportunity not to be missed, for at other times, they would not welcome the bull. So important was it, that heifers were not turned out to the pasture with the lactating cows, but remained in the barn so they would be noticed when they were ready.
Although Wesley’s herd included nearly 100 cows yielding milk, and a couple of dozen heifers, there was only one bull. Most male offspring, once they were old enough, were sold off to slaughterhouses for meat. Only an occasional bull calf was raised to maturity to service the cows, and those were usually swapped between farmers to prevent inbreeding.
To farmers like Wesley, cows were primarily milk factories. Though he treated them well, they were hardly pets. When they were no longer able to bear calves and produce milk, they were sold for hamburger. Thus, none of the cows had names. Instead, each animal had a metal tag in her right ear stamped with a number. The bull, however, had no number. In his distinctive role with the herd, he’d received a name. He was Elmer, a massive animal that occupied the first stall in the barn. A stanchion -- a loose-fitting steel framework attached the stall -- surrounded his massive neck and kept him from moving around much. Every stall had a stanchion, and when the cows came in for their twice-daily milkings, they obediently put their head through the stanchions to reach the feed on the other side. Peter or Wesley then moved down the line snapping the stanchions shut. The heifers, however, roamed loose in a pen.
Wesley asked me if I would like to watch the procedure, and when I said yes, we stepped into the barn, leaving the door open. Inside, there was a sense of suppressed activity, with the normal docile animals lowing and milling about. The heifer in heat, wearing an ear tag with the number 27 on it, was moving in the pen and Elmer, evidently catching her scent, was tugging against his stanchion.
Wesley, with a halter in hand, opened the pen and pushed his way through the young animals to cow 27. Clamping his arm around the young animal’s neck, he slipped the halter on her head and then attached a lead rope to it. Tugging the rope, he led the prancing heifer out of the pen and into an empty stall, where, in her excited state, she resisted extending her head through the stanchion. After a couple of tries to get her to cooperate, Wesley merely tied the lead rope to the stanchion.
Leaving cow 27, Wesley then walked to Elmer’s stall. Clipping a lead rope to the huge bull’s halter, he opened the stanchion and led Elmer, who moved quite eagerly toward the young cow.
Within seconds, Elmer reared up and mounted the young cow, who was now fairly dancing in the stall. Completing the act, Elmer returned to all fours, and then, with a sudden movement, reared up again and repeated the action. The bull, apparently satisfied, now stood quietly, and Wesley took him back to his stall.
Cow 27, however, now moved wildly, tugging at her rope with jerking motions of her head and bucking. Wesley, returning to her, said, “I guess I should have gotten her into the stanchion. Heifers can get pretty excited when they’re being bred.” Just then, 27 lunged backward hard, snapping her lead rope. Without an instance’s hesitation, she bolted out the open barn door and ran down the lane. Wesley took off in hot pursuit.
27 showed no signs of slowing, and when Wesley yelled at her, she leaped sideways, landing in the open trench. I could hear tiles smashing under her hooves.
He said some more things too that I didn’t hear, for by now 27 was loping down the trench with Wesley running behind, moving out of earshot. Sprinting behind, I could see Wesley’s fist upraised.
At that moment, Peter, returning from the field, spotted the running cow and climbed over the gate at the far end of the lane to head her off. Seeing him, the excited beast, by now near the end of the trench, suddenly halted. Wesley was beside her in a second, grabbing her halter. Peter took the other side, and with father and son tugging, the animal climbed out the trenches. As I caught up, I could hear Wesley saying, “You goddam cow! You mangy, goddam bastard!” Then, seeing me, he suddenly looked embarrassed.
Cow 27 stood quietly now, sides heaving, and Wesley told Peter to take her back to the barn. Then he and I begin walking back as well, surveying the damage to our day’s work.
It was significant. Nearly every fourth or fifth tile was broken and in places, the cow’s passage had caused dirt from the sides of the trench to fall in. It would have to be cleaned out by hand as the tiles were replaced.
Surprisingly, however, Wesley seemed more concerned at that moment about his outburst. “I guess I kind of lost my temper,” he said to me sheepishly. “That’s not a very good way to behave in front of my minister, now is it? I’m sorry.”
“It looks like you had pretty good reason,” I said.
“I suppose, but it feels like being caught with my pants down.”
“I’m granting you absolution,” I said, grinning, and jokingly made the sign of the cross with my hand, something not normally done in our denomination.
Wesley went suddenly quiet.
I worked quite often for Wesley after that, helping with milking and harvesting, and never heard him curse again. Peter later commented on it. “Dad’s never been really profane, but it used to slip out when things went really wrong. Not anymore though. He told me that a man has to take absolution seriously and mend his ways.”
“I really could use the help, Reverend” Wesley said, “and with your baby coming and all, you could probably use a few extra bucks.”
Wesley, one of the dairy farmers in the congregation was planning a tiling job and was short on manual laborers. He’d asked me if I could help.
“Sure,” I said. “It sounds interesting.”
“Good. Be there at 7 Saturday morning. I’ll have the milking done by then, and well get started.”
While there is some rise and fall to the land in northeast Ohio, much of the ground is relatively flat, and often with a clay base. When it rains, water lies on ground that doesn’t have good natural drainage. For farmers, this is a problem, for although crops need moisture to thrive, water that remains standing on fields too long drowns out the crops. Tiling, a procedure to improve drainage, is the solution.
To tile a field, special machinery is used to dig several parallel trenches about four feet deep across a field, with the floor of the trenches sloping slightly toward where natural drainage can take over. A piping system with openings every foot or two to receive water is installed in the trenches, and then covered with straw. Finally the dirt is pushed back in to refill the trenches. When rainwater seeps into the earth, it eventually makes its way to these piping systems where it trickles in through the openings and flows away.
Today, the piping used is continuous flexible plastic tubing, with numerous holes in the tubing walls to let water in. But in the early years of my ministry, the plastic tubing had not yet been introduced. The system commonly used then consisted of baked clay cylinders called tiles, each about 18-inches long and 6-inches in diameter. There were no holes in them, but the tiles were laid in the trench leaving about a quarter-inch gap between each one for water to enter.
Since tiling fields was such a big job and required unique machinery, most farmers hired tiling contractors to install it in their field. Wesley, like most other farmers in Thornberry, had done that. But now Wesley had decided that the lane leading from his barn to the pasture should be tiled as well. When it rained, the lane turned so muddy that he had to hose down his cows when they came in the barn to be milked. And since the lane, though long, was narrow enough to require only one trench, Wesley had rented a trenching machine and resolved to do the work himself, assisted by his teenage son and now, his unwary pastor.
Come Saturday morning, I arrived as agreed at 7. Wesley and his son, Peter, were already in the lane, tinkering with the machine. Several palettes of tiles were stationed at intervals down the lane. I walked to where the father and son stood, and after greeting me, Wesley handed me a pair of work gloves. “Here. You better wear these. Those tiles are rough.”
We began at once. The trenching machine consisted of a tractor-like body with a huge digging wheel attached to its side. The device, with Wesley at the controls, began crawling down the center of the lane, slowing chiseling a trench and dumping the dirt on the opposite side from the machine. Peter and I labored in its wake placing the tiles end to end in a straight line in the bottom of the ditch. Peter worked in the ditch itself while I shuttled back and forth between the pallets and the trench, hauling the tiles, two at a time, to him. For the first hour or so, we traded places, and continued in that fashion throughout the morning.
Of course, it wasn’t quite that simple. Periodically, the digging wheel stalled on buried rocks too big for it to handle, and then all three of us worked with shovels and spud bars until we had extracted the obstruction. The sun rose, and the whole process was hot, sweaty work.
Wesley was right about the tiles being rough, for by midmorning, the tough cloth gloves Peter and I wore were shredding, and Wesley issued us each a new pair.
By noon, we were slightly over halfway down the lane, and Wesley called a halt for lunch. The father and son were used to long days in the fields, and were still going strong. I, however, had been dragging for the last hour and was grateful for the break.
“Shouldn’t I get the front-end loader and push the dirt back over the part we’ve finished?” Peter asked his father, referring to their tractor with a scoop mounted on the front. “It would protect what we’ve done.”
“No,” Wesley said. “We’ll do that later.”
Peter wasn’t convinced. “I think we should close it up now. Come on, Dad. I can do it pretty quick.”
But Wesley wasn’t having any of it. “It’ll keep.” He led the way toward the house where his wife had a huge farm lunch waiting.
After we’d eaten, the three us resumed our task, toiling through the hot afternoon. By 3:30, the entire trench lay open, and Peter and I placed the final tiles.
It would soon be time for the afternoon milking, and Peter headed for the pasture, carefully closing the gate to the lane so the cows coming in couldn’t use the lane. He was going to drive them into the barn by another route. Wesley drove the trenching machine toward the barn and I followed on foot.
Wesley parked the machine outside the barn, and we heard some bellowing from within. “One of the heifers must be in heat,” Wesley said. Heifers were the young female cows that had not yet been bred. Having had no offspring, they were not producing milk. Thus, for the economy of the farm, it was important that heifers be bred when came into heat. In fact, it was an opportunity not to be missed, for at other times, they would not welcome the bull. So important was it, that heifers were not turned out to the pasture with the lactating cows, but remained in the barn so they would be noticed when they were ready.
Although Wesley’s herd included nearly 100 cows yielding milk, and a couple of dozen heifers, there was only one bull. Most male offspring, once they were old enough, were sold off to slaughterhouses for meat. Only an occasional bull calf was raised to maturity to service the cows, and those were usually swapped between farmers to prevent inbreeding.
To farmers like Wesley, cows were primarily milk factories. Though he treated them well, they were hardly pets. When they were no longer able to bear calves and produce milk, they were sold for hamburger. Thus, none of the cows had names. Instead, each animal had a metal tag in her right ear stamped with a number. The bull, however, had no number. In his distinctive role with the herd, he’d received a name. He was Elmer, a massive animal that occupied the first stall in the barn. A stanchion -- a loose-fitting steel framework attached the stall -- surrounded his massive neck and kept him from moving around much. Every stall had a stanchion, and when the cows came in for their twice-daily milkings, they obediently put their head through the stanchions to reach the feed on the other side. Peter or Wesley then moved down the line snapping the stanchions shut. The heifers, however, roamed loose in a pen.
Wesley asked me if I would like to watch the procedure, and when I said yes, we stepped into the barn, leaving the door open. Inside, there was a sense of suppressed activity, with the normal docile animals lowing and milling about. The heifer in heat, wearing an ear tag with the number 27 on it, was moving in the pen and Elmer, evidently catching her scent, was tugging against his stanchion.
Wesley, with a halter in hand, opened the pen and pushed his way through the young animals to cow 27. Clamping his arm around the young animal’s neck, he slipped the halter on her head and then attached a lead rope to it. Tugging the rope, he led the prancing heifer out of the pen and into an empty stall, where, in her excited state, she resisted extending her head through the stanchion. After a couple of tries to get her to cooperate, Wesley merely tied the lead rope to the stanchion.
Leaving cow 27, Wesley then walked to Elmer’s stall. Clipping a lead rope to the huge bull’s halter, he opened the stanchion and led Elmer, who moved quite eagerly toward the young cow.
Within seconds, Elmer reared up and mounted the young cow, who was now fairly dancing in the stall. Completing the act, Elmer returned to all fours, and then, with a sudden movement, reared up again and repeated the action. The bull, apparently satisfied, now stood quietly, and Wesley took him back to his stall.
Cow 27, however, now moved wildly, tugging at her rope with jerking motions of her head and bucking. Wesley, returning to her, said, “I guess I should have gotten her into the stanchion. Heifers can get pretty excited when they’re being bred.” Just then, 27 lunged backward hard, snapping her lead rope. Without an instance’s hesitation, she bolted out the open barn door and ran down the lane. Wesley took off in hot pursuit.
27 showed no signs of slowing, and when Wesley yelled at her, she leaped sideways, landing in the open trench. I could hear tiles smashing under her hooves.
He said some more things too that I didn’t hear, for by now 27 was loping down the trench with Wesley running behind, moving out of earshot. Sprinting behind, I could see Wesley’s fist upraised.
At that moment, Peter, returning from the field, spotted the running cow and climbed over the gate at the far end of the lane to head her off. Seeing him, the excited beast, by now near the end of the trench, suddenly halted. Wesley was beside her in a second, grabbing her halter. Peter took the other side, and with father and son tugging, the animal climbed out the trenches. As I caught up, I could hear Wesley saying, “You goddam cow! You mangy, goddam bastard!” Then, seeing me, he suddenly looked embarrassed.
Cow 27 stood quietly now, sides heaving, and Wesley told Peter to take her back to the barn. Then he and I begin walking back as well, surveying the damage to our day’s work.
It was significant. Nearly every fourth or fifth tile was broken and in places, the cow’s passage had caused dirt from the sides of the trench to fall in. It would have to be cleaned out by hand as the tiles were replaced.
Surprisingly, however, Wesley seemed more concerned at that moment about his outburst. “I guess I kind of lost my temper,” he said to me sheepishly. “That’s not a very good way to behave in front of my minister, now is it? I’m sorry.”
“It looks like you had pretty good reason,” I said.
“I suppose, but it feels like being caught with my pants down.”
“I’m granting you absolution,” I said, grinning, and jokingly made the sign of the cross with my hand, something not normally done in our denomination.
Wesley went suddenly quiet.
I worked quite often for Wesley after that, helping with milking and harvesting, and never heard him curse again. Peter later commented on it. “Dad’s never been really profane, but it used to slip out when things went really wrong. Not anymore though. He told me that a man has to take absolution seriously and mend his ways.”
