along behind is the typed word “whoosh.” A train’s whistle is long and thin with a flared end, like a contrail of sound, and it covers the entire space it travels. A cat purrs a flow of dots.
The sounds linger in my head:
The electric milkers—suctioning the cows’ tits, sucking the milk.
The motor that ran the electric milkers at the barn. It had a throbbing rubber-against-air rhythm. In bursts, the exhaust air flowed to the outside of the small milk house adjacent to the barn.
In the barn, the two-by-four sliding into place, locking a cow by the neck into a stanchion so she could be milked. The splash and whish of urine running down a trough to a hole through the south wall of the barn. The plop of powdery white lime splatting and scattering onto the whitewashed concrete floor to smother the stain of fresh manure. The scrape of manure being shoveled from the barnyard into the manure spreader. The sound of boots sucking mud. So much sucking.
My pacifier was made of wood. I sucked wood. My first word was “sook-cow”—the cry my family used to call the cows at milking time. I’ve learned lately that the lowland Scots used “sook, cow!” to call their cattle; it comes from an Old English word,
sūcan
, to suck. It is a clue to our history, which has been mostly lost to memory.
My very first memory is a scene fading into that oblivion. It was a pleasant summer Sunday afternoon. I was still an only child. I was three. We had company, and Granny made vanilla ice cream, churned in a freezer filled with salted ice. I was wearing a blue-print dress and white socks and sandals. Mama had made my dress from a muslin feed-sack. It felt luxurious and finely textured, like Granny’s damask tablecloth. The kinfolks gathered on the front porch, where they could see anybody passing along the road, and I was sitting alone for a few minutes at the top of the steps to the back porch. The concrete stairway had a tubular metal rail, smooth and round to hold. When I got a little older,I would swing out under this rail to the ground, and the metal would make a slight squeak against my moist hands. But that day I sat on the top step in a quiet moment that has stayed with me always. I was concentrating deeply on a Coca-Cola bottle cap that Daddy had fastened onto my dress. He had separated the cork lining from the metal cap and then fitted the cap and cork together again, capturing the dress material snugly between. The texture of thin cork was like skin, pleasant to touch. The metal cap was cool, hard, and fluted, like the ones in Granny’s bottle-capper for the grape juice she bottled from the grapes on her arbor. I tested out the fitting of this marvelous wonder—the cap separated and then reunited on my dress—and I remember feeling that I was making a discovery about how the world works in clever ways—disparate objects making delightful, unexpected connections for no real reason other than for our pleasure in discovering them.
I remember the ice cream that day, vanilla and heavenly, with the occasional tang of salt from a crumb of salted ice flicked into the cream tub. (Granny and Granddaddy called ice cream “cream.”) Ice cream and Coca-Cola were imprinted on the appetite center of my brain that day. They became part of my mind’s unfolding, like the patterns on my dress.
That same year a much more significant scene occurred, but I have no memory of it. I climbed onto the kitchen table, and—no doubt pleased with myself—I stood there surveying the room from my new vantage point. Granny and Granddaddy had forbidden me to climb on the kitchen table.
“I was outside when I heard you squalling,” Mama says. “And I ran from the wash-house, up the back steps, to the kitchen. Bob was standing there with the razor strop in his hand. You were screaming like you’d been kilt, and he was fixing to thrash again. I jerked that thing out of his hand so hard it burnt the skin off of my fingers. Then I grabbed you up and
The sounds linger in my head:
The electric milkers—suctioning the cows’ tits, sucking the milk.
The motor that ran the electric milkers at the barn. It had a throbbing rubber-against-air rhythm. In bursts, the exhaust air flowed to the outside of the small milk house adjacent to the barn.
In the barn, the two-by-four sliding into place, locking a cow by the neck into a stanchion so she could be milked. The splash and whish of urine running down a trough to a hole through the south wall of the barn. The plop of powdery white lime splatting and scattering onto the whitewashed concrete floor to smother the stain of fresh manure. The scrape of manure being shoveled from the barnyard into the manure spreader. The sound of boots sucking mud. So much sucking.
My pacifier was made of wood. I sucked wood. My first word was “sook-cow”—the cry my family used to call the cows at milking time. I’ve learned lately that the lowland Scots used “sook, cow!” to call their cattle; it comes from an Old English word,
sūcan
, to suck. It is a clue to our history, which has been mostly lost to memory.
My very first memory is a scene fading into that oblivion. It was a pleasant summer Sunday afternoon. I was still an only child. I was three. We had company, and Granny made vanilla ice cream, churned in a freezer filled with salted ice. I was wearing a blue-print dress and white socks and sandals. Mama had made my dress from a muslin feed-sack. It felt luxurious and finely textured, like Granny’s damask tablecloth. The kinfolks gathered on the front porch, where they could see anybody passing along the road, and I was sitting alone for a few minutes at the top of the steps to the back porch. The concrete stairway had a tubular metal rail, smooth and round to hold. When I got a little older,I would swing out under this rail to the ground, and the metal would make a slight squeak against my moist hands. But that day I sat on the top step in a quiet moment that has stayed with me always. I was concentrating deeply on a Coca-Cola bottle cap that Daddy had fastened onto my dress. He had separated the cork lining from the metal cap and then fitted the cap and cork together again, capturing the dress material snugly between. The texture of thin cork was like skin, pleasant to touch. The metal cap was cool, hard, and fluted, like the ones in Granny’s bottle-capper for the grape juice she bottled from the grapes on her arbor. I tested out the fitting of this marvelous wonder—the cap separated and then reunited on my dress—and I remember feeling that I was making a discovery about how the world works in clever ways—disparate objects making delightful, unexpected connections for no real reason other than for our pleasure in discovering them.
I remember the ice cream that day, vanilla and heavenly, with the occasional tang of salt from a crumb of salted ice flicked into the cream tub. (Granny and Granddaddy called ice cream “cream.”) Ice cream and Coca-Cola were imprinted on the appetite center of my brain that day. They became part of my mind’s unfolding, like the patterns on my dress.
That same year a much more significant scene occurred, but I have no memory of it. I climbed onto the kitchen table, and—no doubt pleased with myself—I stood there surveying the room from my new vantage point. Granny and Granddaddy had forbidden me to climb on the kitchen table.
“I was outside when I heard you squalling,” Mama says. “And I ran from the wash-house, up the back steps, to the kitchen. Bob was standing there with the razor strop in his hand. You were screaming like you’d been kilt, and he was fixing to thrash again. I jerked that thing out of his hand so hard it burnt the skin off of my fingers. Then I grabbed you up and
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