Quail asks his older brother.
“Honey, how did you get covered in mud,” Mrs. Rivers anxiously asks her son.
“Well, I wasn’t paying attention,” Wayne begins. “I was driving back to the main road into town when all of a sudden I hit a patch of melted snow left over from the last storm. The snow must have just been slush because as soon as I drove over it, the car immediately slid into the embankment on the side of the road.”
Quail gets a little humor out of this when he mentions, “I told you to get a truck when you bought that car.”
Wayne ignores his brother, and finishes explaining his accident to Sam Rivers.
“So when I managed to get out of the car, I realized the wheels were submerged in mud.” Wayne pauses as he looks down at his mud-soaked pants and shoes. “I looked around for something to dig the tires out and noticed a stray pile of wood that had been dumped, so I grabbed a piece to try and dig with it. All I managed to do was cover my lower half with mud. After that, I decide to walk the couple of miles back here for some help.”
Quail and Mrs. Rivers both console Wayne for his bad experience. Mrs. Rivers goes to get Wayne some dry clothes while Wayne and Quail discuss getting his car unstuck. They decide the farm’s tractor should do the trick, but now that it was dark, they decided to rescue the vehicle in the morning. Mrs. Rivers returns to the kitchen with dry clothes for Wayne. Quail goes to the back door, where he puts his coat and boots on. Wayne was changing out of his mud-soaked attire while his mother dished up a bowl of chili.
“Mom, thanks for the chili. I’ll be back in a little bit.” When Wayne returns to the kitchen, he asks, “Did Quail go to milk?”
Mrs. Rivers explains that he had as she puts the bowl of chili on the table.
When Wayne finishes eating, he puts on one of his father’s coats to go down to the old barn and help with the evening chore. Quail had already milked five cows when Wayne got down there.
“Need any help?” Wayne asks.
Quail looks up from the cow he was milking at the moment and says, “Are there cow patties in the pasture?”
Wayne grabs a stool and positions the dairy cow that he picked to milk. They both work without speaking, mimicking each other with the sound of milk being squeezed from the cow’s udder ricocheting off the sides of the buckets they use to collect the milk in.
The Rivers are a traditional family and prefer doing this chore the old fashion way. This was Mrs. Rivers’s idea. After she and Dalton were married, she talked her husband into buying the dairy cow her father sold Devro Rivers. Samantha Rivers grew up milking her father’s cows and enjoying the fruits of her labor. The milk she grew up on was not processed or store-bought. It was homegrown and collected by Sam and the rest of her family. They all took turns with the chore. This was a part of her early life that she was very grateful for. It instilled a work ethic in her that Mrs. Rivers wanted her children to have. Also, the fruit of her labor was always a rich delight to drink fresh milk. Samantha Rivers swears that children raised on fresh dairy milk were less prone to disease, had stronger bones, and seemed more mild tempered.
Mrs. Rivers’s kids took to milking right away. Once they learned how to pull the milk out of the udder, they milked on a daily basis. Mr. Rivers also enjoyed milking the cows. After long days at the office, Mr. Rivers’s favorite thing to do was to come home and milk a cow. As the boys grew, Mrs. Rivers asked her husband to breed their dairy cow. Each year the Rivers did this, they started increasing the size of their herd. When the amount of milk they were collecting each day got too large for the family’s own consumption, Mrs. Rivers began distributing the milk in town. She would take milk to both sides of her family. The Rivers dairy milk was prized for its quality and became very popular throughout Pickerville. The milk got so popular that it is sold in the grocery market, and it is served to the town’s schoolchildren for lunch every day.
After the two brothers are finished milking, they place what they collected into a large refrigerated tank that stores the milk at the preferred temperature. The two brothers go back up to the large cabin-like farmhouse to get some rest. They know they have to get up early the next morning to pull Wayne’s car out.
The Rivers Brothers
The two rise before the sun is up and, once again, make their way down to the old milk barn. This trip to the barn is not for milking but for the farm’s tractor. Wayne grabs a chain as Quail fires up the large green tractor. It’s obvious the two brothers have done this before. Wayne recalls a memory.
“Hey, do you remember that time Mom and Dad held a New Year’s Eve party out here?” Wayne has to shout over the tractor’s engine noise.
“Yeah, almost everyone got stuck trying to leave because of all the snow,” Quail shouts back to answer his brother.
“I think we ended up pulling out about ten cars that night,” Wayne comments.
Quail flips the lights on and drives out through the front doors of the old barn. Wayne holds on to one side of the tractor as they roll out into the cold predawn air. Before heading toward the road, they roll over the cattle guard that separates where the family lives and where the family farms. Quail puts the tractor into gear as the two brothers ease by their parents’ house so not to disturb, as they connect with the drive leading to the main road.
There was still plenty of snow on the ground from before, which reminded Wayne of another storm on its way.
“Do you think you’ll finish the new barn in the next few days?”
“I should, yeah. Why?” Quail answers.
Wayne leans in closer to Quail as they both look forward, still having to shout. “There is a big snowstorm coming to town, and the temperature is supposed to drop too low for the cows to stay outside.”
Quail briefly looks at his brother. “Really?” He turns his attention back toward the road as Wayne explains what he saw the night before on the news.
“Yeah, said we should expect more than a foot of snow the first two days of the storm followed by another couple of days with single-digit temperatures.”
This seemed to alarm Quail, and he actually speeds up the tractor. The storm was supposed to arrive in the middle of the following week, which meant Quail needed to get a move on the new barn if he wanted to finish insulating it and get the cows in before the change of weather.
The old barn was actually too small to fit all their equipment plus the cows now that the herd was larger than ever before. In past years, if the weather got bad, the family would move the farm’s equipment outside and put the cows in the barn. They would also set up heaters in the old barn. This would keep the cows through the night, but during the day, the cows needed more room to move around. So the Rivers would leave the barn doors open so the cows could come and go as they please. Well, this worked for the cows but caused several problems for the Rivers.
Heaters would go out constantly from overheating or just wearing out. The cows constantly used the barn as a bathroom, so any waste the cows dumped would need to be cleaned up. If the mess wasn’t taken care of, the milk production could be contaminated or the cows could get sick. When the herd was smaller, the cows had plenty of room. Mr. Rivers built the old barn after the family purchased its first dairy cow. The old barn was originally built to hold around fifteen cows and any equipment. Dalton purposely built the barn larger than what was needed, thinking
