[6th draft, word count = 2448]My folks never owned their own land. We lived in ranch houses. Not “ranch style,” but ranch properties. The River Ranch Dairy Company owned most of the homes in Mira Loma on the last street before the Ranch and the River and the Cemetery on the far hill.
But we didn’t live on that street. We lived at the heart of the place, down a long gravel drive, in a small brown house with two bedrooms and a red rose bush that thrived under Mama’s bedroom window. The rose was hers, not Daddy’s. Sweetpeas on a hogwire fence out front were Daddy’s, until he cut a handful and gave them to her. Then they were Mama’s, too.
I shared the second bedroom with my brother and Uncle Gerald. Randy, four years younger, was pure nuisance; Uncle, ten years older, worked nights hauling green feed, slept days, and seemed more a shadow than real.
By the time I was ten or eleven—all arms and legs and string-bean skinny—Daddy set me on a tractor towing a wide rake with circular, rotating tines. He drove a separate tractor with a mower; I followed his cutting lead. Behind me, fresh-cut alfalfa mounded up into rows. The whole air was clover then. And sometimes our tractors jogged out around a patch to dodge nesting pheasants or quail.
Before dawn, Uncle and Junior, another ranch hand, cleared all our rows from the field. The Winrower Junior drove sucked the green up a long tube that crooked over and down to spit the feed into Uncle’s truck. Uncle’s truck bed seemed twenty feet high, but I was just a kid.
During cutting season, I’d hear their engines. From our front room I could watch their headlights work the field. I swear, you couldn’t walk between them—they worked so closely, side-by-side. When they turned at the end of a row to go back, the machinery left me their silhouettes. But either way, coming or going or turning, a light at the top of the Winrower’s long neck floated like a bright eye.
Forty-eight years later I shouldn’t swear to anything. Except to say, mornings found all the fresh-cut rows from yesterdays gone. And, sometimes, those nesting patches me and Daddy dodged, still there.
The full name of the river forming a curved boundary of this land we never owned is the Santa Ana. I can’t say where it begins, only that it separates Mira Loma from Norco, California, and ends in the Pacific.
I can’t say why, but “the compass”—the directionality the Santa Ana River cut—becomes important as I write. And I let memories take me beyond the river to stand beside bronze markers with their names, Mama’s and Daddy’s, up at Crestlawn. I watch an old sun come down, let shadows lengthen out across a patchwork of Daddy’s alfalfa in the bottomland, let those shadows swallow our small brown house, and know the river’s cut marked the Ranch’s “northwest” border.
Daddy ran the calf set-up on the Ranch and oversaw the fields. He plowed and planted, fertilized when necessary, cut and raked the harvest, and flood irrigated pastures where the pregnant Holsteins grazed.
The calf set-up Daddy ran was where the babies came. I could see their barns from the room I shared with Randy and Uncle Gerald. I could see their tin roofs out beyond my Sears Roebuck swing set, the broken privet hedge, and the month-old pens.
There were two barns: The Day Old Barn, even though calves stayed there longer, and the Sick Calf Barn. Separate and smaller, less open to the elements, it had six stalls, all down one side, and was kept white-washed, inside and out. Our local Church of God’s clapboard building where Mama took us on Sunday mornings might have been almost as white, but not any more caring or sacred.
The Day Old Barn had sixty stalls. Two wings with center aisles ran off a main room where Daddy mixed powdered milk in a stainless-steel pot. There was a small washroom off the main room with sinks and racks for drying all the bottles and nipples. The sinks were deep and the faucet high, with a pressure hose attached. I used to manhandle that hose while standing on a low stool. Steam filled the room and, using my shoulder, I’d wipe sweat, along with hair loosed from braids Mama plaited the day before, off my face. I plunged long-handled bristle brushes in and out of the glass calf bottles, worked shorter, slimmer brushes inside the nipples, mostly black, but some orange as a red brick.
Before Daddy let me work off a stool cracking eggs into the vitamin-enriched mix the day-olds would drink, before he taught me to hold two eggs in each palm and whack-whack, whack-whack all four shells on the pot rim and somehow, somehow empty yolks and whites into the mix—I used to dawdle by the gates of the true day olds. The wobble-legged and wavy-haired black-and-white babies. Coats, with a sheen like satin and the feel of cushiony silk. Eye lashes, so long and thick and dark over midnight blue eyes pricked with dancing light.
I used to dawdle and do something Daddy had taught me: to stick two fingers through the gate for a calf to suck. Such a pull those babies had on my fingers! Rough as an oatmeal facial scrub. Even now, a grainy scrub can bring the tongues of those newborns to lick through my thinking, bring a smile to this slack, elder-Muppet face, followed by frown lines, a head shake—at a loss as to when the girl I knew was replaced.
I’d dawdle until Daddy came pulling a cart of bottles, stopping at each narrow pen. With the true day olds, he’d straddle gates and bring the calves to the nipple, coax them along to get them started. I should mention the din, how loud those babies bawled, how they quieted, one by one, as he placed those bottles in the gate holders.
There was other bellowing, too. Long into the nights as the cows, each in their turn, wailed their losses. There were seldom more than two or three bereft mamas on any given day. Usually, just one. For whatever reason, one seemed worse, far sadder, than when there were more. It’s not that I might have thought those cows, grieving in unison, had empathy, or provided sympathy for each other. I was a kid. I don’t think my thoughts reached that far. But, with something more than pure imagination, I know how the crying of one cow could wake me from a sound sleep, while more than one did not.
Other night sounds depended upon which milkers had which shifts. When Howard had graveyard, there was whistling. He could whistle anything. Warble like the sweetest birds of morning. Beethoven’s Fifth. Amazing Grace. Lullabies. He had a moustache and I couldn’t tell you if his voice was deep or high, but, if he were alive today, I think I’d know his whistle.
And there’s that “thud” I have in this old head of mine. Thud of a ten-pound sledge hitting, square-on between the eyes, a cow gone past her prime. Daddy used to take them down with one blow, when we needed beef. Along with the land and house we didn’t own, we got all the beef we could eat and all the milk we cared to drink.
When school didn’t interfere, I took a gallon milk pail to the Milk Room. The pail was a miniature of big milk containers still found in antique stores, but it had a bail handle and “Due” lettered on the lid with Mama’s coral polish. Daddy brought the filled pail home after work. It held fresh cream for hot oatmeal, the makings for home-churned butter for hotcakes and field corn. Daddy and Uncle Gerald had buttermilk anytime they wanted. Not owning our own land didn’t seem all that important. To any of us, as I recall.
All memories from childhood are not idyllic. As brutal as the recollections that follow may seem, they are as true to my formation, who I am now, as the kinder parts.
Let me say that when Daddy lost a calf, when all the medications and care he could offer failed to save a sick one, conversation at our dinner table was next to nil. He would go watery-eyed, off and on, all evening. And Mama—a tender, soft-spoken woman ninety-nine percent of the time—would go even more tender toward him, give the kind of care a kid gets when her tonsils get taken out, take a bowl heaped with ice cream to him in his easy chair.
Those babies that couldn’t be saved went to the Dead Calf Pile. At first, it was just a biggish, ant-hill-shaped mound of sawdust, no higher than me as a girl. Then, something dead got added, usually a calf, but sometimes a pet. I’m thinking of Old Ricky, in particular.
A Collie-German Shepherd cross with a coat the color of ginger and cigarette ash, Ricky spent his younger days riding shotgun in Daddy’s pick-up truck or chasing down jacks in the fields. His older days, he spent napping anywhere he found shade. He was Old Ricky for a good long time. Then, while sleeping in the shade of a big-treaded tractor tire, he didn’t wake up when Howard started the motor, shifted into gear and backed up, crushing him, absolutely.
That one percent of Mama not given to soft-spoken tenderness came out when she learned Daddy had designated Old Ricky to the Dead Calf Pile. I heard about what he’d done after the fact. Days later, or that same night. All I know is that I knew, before I heard it.
The Dead Calf Pile was near the path to the Milk Room, next to the Sick-Calf barn. When any critter was placed there, fresh sawdust was heaped on top. Mostly, the dead disappeared until the rendering truck came. And it came regularly, like Waste Management trucks come by now to empty bins lining our street on Wednesdays. But sometimes a black-and-white satin leg poked out, tiny hoof more deep gray than black.
I can’t say how it was that I saw the sawdust-colored tail of Old Ricky poking out from the pile. But I did. Not knowing, in that eye blink, he was dead. You take two sides of a second: on one side there’s an old friend drooling wet licks all over your ears and chin; on the other, there’s a tail you won’t ever see wag again.
I don’t know how old I was in years; I do know I knew anything in that pile was not coming back, ever. And I knew not to go digging around.
There’d been another time, earlier, by a year, more or less. Daddy had hit a cow, dead-on, with the sledge. The butcher’s truck had come. A burly man, thick-chested and thick-armed, had strung the cow up by its hind legs, slit its throat and cut off its head. I could go on, but I’d be guessing at details.
What’s not guessed at is what happened with the head. It got missed by the butcher when he took all the parts of the cow away to be made into hamburger, steaks, roasts, and you name it. It got missed by him and picked up by somebody else—Howard or Daddy or some ranch hand—and added to the Dead Calf Pile. Whoever added it there left enough of that old head visible for a kid, bored with summer, to get curious.
I spent a good hour trying to pry and/or severe one eyeball from that skull, using sticks, sharp-pointed, and rocks with a broken sharp edge. But nothing, no amount of tugging or hacking or twisting or whatever strategies a tom-boyish girl of nine or eleven could bring to bear made the least difference. That eye stayed in that head.
How my folks came to know about this . . . what should I call it: misadventure? scientific research? morbid curiosity? I can’t say. Maybe old whistling Howard caught me and snatched the head away, later telling my folks, in a voice I can’t recollect.
I don’t remember any real trouble. Or Mama’s face stricken with absolute horror. Or if she even knew what I’d done.
I do remember Daddy telling me, in a voice I’d never cross, had seldom ever heard, that the Dead Calf Pile was strictly Off Limits to me. I never touched anything remotely connected to it ever again. Not even that hint of Old Ricky’s tail.
In 1977, my husband, Al, and I bought thirteen acres 600 miles north of the River Ranch. We built a home next to our year-round creek. Owned the land, the house, the blisters and memories of blisters from peeling logs to stack and fit two stories high—taller than Uncle Gerald’s green feed truck. We filled the house with three kids, let them wander the bottomland, have their own misadventures, even cross the southern boundary the creek cut. We owned everthing then.
Now there is me. And a deed. And children with children and their own deeds and happy homes. The cemetery on the hill down south holds all my kinfolk, save Al. I floated his ashes out on the currents in 1989. But life goes on. And I go on with it. What you own in the end is all that you ever had.
All memories from childhood are not idyllic. But I have some hope they may become so. When Grandma Elsie died and joined Grandpa, up on the Crestlawn hill, she was 88 and childlike. She called my mama, Mommy—all the yesterdays in between mown away. She seemed more content. Less agitated. More drowsy.
I am hopeful, should I live so long, my near-wakeful moments will find me walking into a flood-irrigated pasture, holding Daddy’s hand. I’ll be wearing a yellow swimsuit with green turtles swimming across the top. I’ll hold his hand until we get to the concrete pipe in the field where he needs to adjust irrigation flows or fix something broken. I won’t ever be so far away I can’t hear him humming if I lift my head up from the water. But mostly I won’t be able to hear him. I’ll be floating in that trough of water between the flood-irrigated mounds, soft pasture grasses tickling my back, little green turtles dancing across my chest in the sun. Braids making esses like blond snakes on the water.
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