But you understand, don’t you, that what I’ve told you so far was just the morning milking. Because she had to do it all over again late in the afternoon before she cooked supper; twice a day she had to do it, every day in the week. You also understand that what I’ve said about milking cows is based on the shaky assumption that everything would go right. I mean, that’s how it was supposed to be. But, of course, it didn’t always go that way. There were many days when whatever could go wrong, did go wrong. A cow stepped on her foot. Another one kicked the bucket over. One of them turned up sick and had to be doctored. Or maybe they just didn’t want to come in from the pasture in the first place. Who knows what an old speckle-faced cow is thinking? Or if she’s thinking anything at all? Well, some people claim pigs are smart, and maybe they are, but nobody I know has ever said that about cows.
But the worst part of milking was always that constant stinging foul tail. Now a shit-filled tail is bad enough. Struck across your eyes or snapped into your mouth, a shit-filled tail will do for starters, and it happens all the time. But you don’t know what bad is, you haven’t experienced the full benefit of stink and outrage, until you’ve had a fresh cow (especially an old raw-boned bitch of a one that you hate anyway) come in to be milked for the first time after having a calf, and when she gets in she has a three-day-old afterbirth hanging down out of her because she hasn’t cleaned out right. So there it is, that damned stuff is hanging down out of her, swinging there between her back legs; it’s shit-soaked, juicy, buzzing with flies, and the rottenness of it is so putrid, so God-awful, that it’s all you can do to keep from throwing your guts up. But you’ve got to milk her, don’t you? That’s what she’s there for. So you set the bucket down, perch your butt on the milkstool, and you pray or hope or cross your fingers, you make all kinds of impossible promises: if only you can just get her milked without having to taste any of that putrid foulness. And by God, yes, it looks like you’re going to make it. Yes, that’s right, you’re going to make it. So easy now, easy Mama, easy. That’s right. And Jesus, yes, you’ve almost got her milked out enough to call it good—when bang, oh holy shit, oh Christ on a crutch, she hits you with it all, all of that blood and shit and juice and unbelievable outrage, right across your face. It covers your eyes, your nose, your mouth. You can even feel some of it dripping down the back of your neck. Oh brother, help me. Son of a bitch. Then you can’t hold it any longer: you throw up, all over yourself, all over the damn cow, all over the milk bucket. You throw up until you’re gagging on acid bile, your stomach hurts, and you’re groping for air.
Well, it happened to me once. Once was enough. It made me want to kill something. But I suppose it happened to Edith Goodnough a number of times. It had to. Edith milked cows twice a day, every day of the week, all those years.
BUT LYMAN, meanwhile what about Lyman? Because, after all, Lyman was stuck, too. I mean, he sure as hell wasn’t any sixteen-year-old kid from the city. He was just a tall big-boned mop-haired farm kid, with raw wrists and patched overalls and high-topped shoes, and he seemed to stumble about in a kind of daze, like he had lost something and couldn’t remember what it was he had lost, let alone know where to look for it. Lyman was stuck out here on that same sandhill farm, stuck in the same way his sister was. He was caught in the same vise, smothered in the same mud hole with just his chin (weak and pointed like his mother’s) sticking up above it, and I don’t believe Lyman was even able to get his head up enough to look around him, to see that there wasn’t a thing in the world out there but more of the same.