Hard Times in the Country

Schooling not only happened at school. It occurred in the barnyard. Alex the Bull was my accidental teacher. In the same way that all the gray tomcats we ever had were named Gray Boy, all the bulls we ever had were called Alex. This Alex was Alex the Bull number three, and he was to be the last.

Alex was blind in one eye from a fight with a Brahman bull. He should never have left the safety of our pasture that day. He was downwind from Francis Meade’s luscious herd of redheads, white and red-spotted Ayrshire dames. Apparently so was the hoof-loose and fancy-free humpy-backed Brahman, three times Alex’s size. Alex could not be accused of not having guts. Having wits was another story. At Meade’s pasture, he should have turn-tailed and run. Instead, the artless creature stood his ground. He took it on the chin and then some. That Brahman was a meanie.

By the time the Meades and Wahls got to the scene— armed with pitch forks and sticks—Alex lay possum-like in the thicket of weeds and rumpled sod, fresh, round dollops of bull dew under his tail.

“Got the shit knocked out of him,” Dad noted.

A cow in the barnyard mimicking intercourse with another cow meant Alex time. "Cow's bullin'", my father said. It took both Billy Joe and Dad to control the excited bull, summoning him from his pen with a rod called a leader to the ring in his nose. The putting in of the ring had been an unholy process in which the partition in the bull’s nose was gored with a knife. (Dehorning yearling heifers with large shears, by comparison, was less an ordeal though about as bloody).

Alex raised his nose and sniffed the air and in an instant caught wind of which cow. Catching up with her, he butted her tail aside and took a deep, lingering whiff , puckering, like a wine tester evaluating the bouquet of vintage Cabernet. The moment seemed to intoxicate him. He bellowed and wobbled and thrashed his head.

What was wrong with Alex was his size. It did matter. Alex was six inches to a foot shorter than most cows. The challenge was to get the two to higher ground. A bossy in the bed of the crick was ideal. Alex could stand on the incline, making it easier to take the plunge.

The bull’s spindly apparatus functioned like a hydraulic system, cranking out and reeling in. The scenario could involve the cow taking off running, Alex on his hind legs trying to keep pace. Before long, it was back to the crick bed for take two.

Alex’s days as king of the herd were near an end the night my uncle Gerald dropped by. Uncle Gerald, who had lost a leg to the hay baler, had a gait like Chester Goode on Gunsmoke. Instead of Mr. Dillon, Mr. Dillon, Injuns, the look on his face spelled happy news. The paper rolled up in his hand stated he was a certified artificial breeder, trained at the Curtiss Artificial Insemination School in Iowa. “The seminary,” Uncle Gerald joked.

Dad could now pair cows with blue blood sires from a catalogue.