all day in school trying to concentrate on my own work while Miss Morrison struggles with the hopeless smaller kids, trying to teach them how to read and spell. Each day is like a month of my life.
In the morning, before school, I help my mother with the cow. I shovel the manure and pitch down hay from the scaffold above the stable. My mother milks. Milking, I am told, is women’s work. Before I go to school I will fill a hod with coal in the barn and bring it in for the fire. I will also fill the woodbox.
During winter the cow lives in the barn most of the time, venturing out only to drink some water from a washtub near the well. Then she’ll happily go back, even without being told. But starting in May we’ll just let her wander off anywhere she wants to go. And she always seems to go to the same place, around here somewhere, near where the causeway will connect. I usually find her in one of the fields and pastures that nobody uses near the old MacMillan place.
I wonder what will happen now. With the causeway heading in this direction and plans for a big canal right down there, across the back of Nicholson’s Point, it is difficult to imagine that these fields will be safe for a wandering cow anymore. Not even for an intelligent cow like Beulah who manages to take care of herself all day long.
It is my job, every evening in the summer, right after supper and the rosary, to go looking for her, though she is never hard to find.
One evening last May she didn’t answer when I called, and I had to come home without her. Nobody seemed to worry. My mother just said, “Start looking again tomorrow.” But I couldn’t find her then, either.
I found her by accident on the third day. She was hiding in a little grove of trees in a difficult place behind the graveyard. I could see that she was lying down and assumed that she was hurt. The dog went in first, then came running back, bouncing with excitement.
The cow was lying there, staring at me with annoyance in her large brown eyes. Standing nearby was a tiny calf. When the dog went over to sniff at it, the calf tried to move away but staggered and fell down. The cow started struggling to her feet, and then I saw the great disgusting mess behind her. A great puddle of slime that I now know is called the afterbirth.
I had to go and get adults to help me take her home.
What will Beulah do, I wonder, when the causeway takes away her territory?
I see the family moving through the crowd at the Legion Grounds, my mother and father and sisters. Suddenly I am hungry.
“I want to buy a hot dog,” I announce.
“The money is burning a hole in your pocket,” my father teases.
My mother says: “Save your money. In a little while we’ll go to the Cabot Grill.”
A restaurant. I have never eaten in a restaurant before because my parents see no point in paying someone for food you could prepare for yourself. “Money doesn’t grow on trees.” Plus, “Who knows what they do to the food out in the back kitchen?”
My father says he was getting tea at Mac’s Lunch one summer day and he could see a big raw T-bone steak on a plate inside the kitchen. It was crawling with flies. Then he saw the cook grab a dishtowel and kill all the flies on the steak with one whack of the rag. Then brush the dead flies away and toss the steak in a frying pan for some other customer.
When my father is away working, he eats in a cookhouse. When he comes home he always reports, among the most important details of his absence, that “the grub is great” or that “the bull cook wouldn’t know how to boil water if his life depended on it.”
In some places where he works, people have plotted to kill the cook—to shoot him or blow him up with dynamite.
I have heard my father and my uncle Joe Donohue talking about a lumber camp where they once worked and lived mostly on porridge and bread and molasses and got paid a dollar a day.
A dollar a day? It sounds like a lot of money when you’re