Of all my relatives, my favorite was always Uncle Bill. I liked him even better than I liked my mom (whom I loved) because uncle Bill was never in position of having to make me eat mushrooms, and even if he had been, he probably wouldn’t have.
Uncle Bill was actually my dad’s uncle, but we all just called him Uncle Bill. For as long as I knew Uncle Bill, he was retired from what he called his “desk job”. He’d never talk about it more than that, because he felt that working at a desk was no great achievement. He preferred to think of his previous job as the real career of his life, back when he had been a cowcatcher for the Great Eastern Railroad.
Once I asked Uncle Bill why he quit cowcatching if he loved it so much. “You’ve seen my limp, right? You ought to have–I carry it with me everywhere I go! Anyways, that’s the result of something that happened back when I was working for the railroad, and that’s why I had to retire.”
Obviously, there was a story to be had here. “What happened?”
“Well, I was working on the train we called ‘Old Mick-or-mack’, running from Mississippi to New York. While we were crossing the mountains in Tennessee, we had to stop for a delivery. Some guy there down in the valley was opening up a new dairy cattle ranch, and he needed stocking up. So a couple of miles before we reached where the train was to stop, I hopped off, so I could rush down the mountain and get to the farm earlier so that the train wouldn’t have to stop so long.
“So I’m down there, and I’m getting into cow catching position, and everything’s going okay. They toss the first couple down no problem, and I catch ’em and hit ’em up on the rump and send them on their way. But then there was this one cow…
“Y’see, Tony, my usual tosser, was out that day. He had come down with a slight case of rheumatoid pneumonia, and was taking a couple days off. We got a sick day every year, and by that time Tony had almost a two full weeks built up, so it was all right. So anyway, there was this new guy doing the tossing, and he seemed a bit green, but I thought he’d be okay.
“So this cow is coming down, and I could see she was mooing. Couldn’t hear it, of course–when you toss something as heavy as a cow down from that high, she’s going quicker than the speed of sound, particularly if you give her a good toss. Anyway, cows aren’t rightly smart animals, and I don’t even think they’d qualify as rightly smart vegetables if you planted their feet in the ground. Usually, it takes ’em a while of plummeting before they realize that there is something unusual going on, and then they all start mooing. But this one was mooing from the get-go
“Anyway, I’m looking up there, and this cow is mooing like a storm, and I’m trying to figure out what’s going on. Then I see it–this cow is in the middle of giving birth to a calf! Tony woulda never thrown a cow in that condition, but when you’re trying to catch a cow, you’ve got no time to think of wouldas, couldas, or shoulda. You just gotta keep your eye on that cow, especially on a sunny day like this was. The sun’ll often get in your eyes, but you still gotta catch that cow. In all my years, I never missed one, but I saw it happen once and let me tell you, it was not a pretty sight.”
This was a bit too much of a digression. I wanted on with the core story. “So whatja do, Uncle Bill?”
“I caught that cow, of course!” he said with a grunt. “I told you that I never missed a cow. But with all her kicking and screaming and such, she didn’t come down good and centered like she ought. She was coming down front first, so I caught her around the shoulders. I did it as gentle as I could, but it was still such an abrupt halt that the young’n who was coming out was slammed all the way back in.”
“And that’s when you hurt your leg?” I asked, full of assumption.
“I’m getting’ to that part. Just let me tell the story!” he chided. “Naw, I caught her fine, and I finished the load, and then I went up and had a few words to say to that new guy. I went to him and said ‘Cincinatti,’ — that’s what we called him, cause that was his nickname –‘Cincinatti, why in the fool hill would you go and toss me a cow while she was having a baby?’ Well, the kid made all kinds of excuses, basically saying that he wanted to throw the cow before the calf was out, because if he threw it after the calf was out, we’d be stuck with a calf that no one ordered, but while it was still at least partway in, it still counted as part of the mother.
“Cincinatti didn’t last long at the railroad, of course. Last I heard, he was doing some sort of government work in a bar in New Orleans. So anyways, a few years later, it was me and Tony again, just the way it shoulda been, and we were delivering a load of cows to a valley in Kentucky this time. So I’m down there, doing my job, and Tony’s way up in the train at the top of the mountain, doing his. It was a good-sized shipment. I’d caught a few dozen cows so far, and was getting a little tired, because this was the fourth delivery that day. Then I heard Tony grunt a bit, and I got a little worried. Tony was right strong; if he had to grunt to toss a cow, you knew it was a big one. So I brace myself the best that I can and up in the sky I see the biggest cow that it has ever been my pleasure to experience.
“So this huge cow is coming right down toward me, and as it’s starting to get real close, I see its eyes go wide. I could tell that it had recognized me. Now, that takes some doing. Cows are dumb, and you really have to make an impression on them to get recognized. I mean, your average cow wouldn’t recognize Bing Crosby if he came in singing ‘White Christmas’ with a pipe in one hand and Dorothy Lamour in the other. So I’m trying to figure where this cow would know me from, and that’s when it strikes me.”
“Where you know the cow from?”
“No, silly, the cow itself. It hits me full force, and because my mind had been on thinking when it should have been on cow catching, I wasn’t quite prepared. Oh, I caught the cow all right, and as I’m sure you figured, it was the same cow I had caught while it was trying to give a baby. But I wasn’t braced quite right, and I dislocated my leg.”
I tried to look as sorry as I could for something that had happened decades before I was born. “I’m sorry to hear that. Maybe you could tell me…”
“Now wait a minute! I didn’t say that the story was done, did I? So I catch this cow, but it’s a bit of a jarring catch, and suddenly boom! Out of the back of the cow pops this other cow, full normal sized. Turns out that the baby had been slammed in there so good when I first caught the momma, that she had never come out until we just jarred her out! Not only that, but this new cow that just popped out was a momma as well, with three baby calves of her own!
“So I quickly hop up on my one good leg–had to, because Tony had already tossed the next cow. I caught the last couple. Luckily, that was the last delivery of the day. The next morning, I could tell that I wouldn’t be much of a cowcatcher much longer with a bum leg. I came in and gave my resignation, and a couple of the guys even threw me a party a couple days later. Great guys. One of ’em even helped me land the desk job.”
And with that, Uncle Bill looked off into space, the slight glimmer of moistness in his eye.
From that day forward, whenever I poured myself a glass of milk, I would think of Uncle Bill and what he sacrificed to America’s dairy industry, and then I’d stir in the chocolate syrup.
I think Uncle Bill would want it that way.
