Cows With Guns
(It was my turn to choose the blogging topic today. I dread to think what sort of payback the beloved has in store for me)
Several years ago, before I developed Fibromyalgia, a chronic pain syndrome, I was working two part time jobs and studying full time at university to become a qualified secondary school teacher.
One of those jobs was working in a dairy shed as a milk harvester, which is just a fancy way of saying I milked cows. Six hundred and forty of them to be exact, every afternoon and quite a few mornings. It was hard, physical work that gave me fabulously toned arms and I actually rather enjoyed it. It’s hard to believe now, that I ever worked such a job – out in all weather, some mornings so cold that the water that washed the cups would be frozen on them by the time the platform had traveled the two feet to where I stood. On those mornings the first thing I did as the cows lined up would be to fill a bucket with steaming hot water to dunk my hands in every few minutes to thaw them out.
It was a dirty job. You learned very quickly to skip out of the way whenever a cow looked like raising her tail. Then it was a case of wrestling with a high pressure hose thicker than my wrist to wash the muck away. When I first started milking, I wasn’t even strong enough to use that hose. By the end, I had that sucker well and truly licked.
I enjoyed the animals, admired the ones that were intelligent enough to have figured out that if they were first in line to be milked they were also the first to get back to the paddock. The cows were pretty easy to like though I pitied them their life, hustled back and forth to the dairy shed twice a day. Bulls are another matter of course, as I almost found out to my detriment the day I wasn’t paying attention and almost rammed a suction cup onto a bulls gonads. Not something I recommend anyone trying.
Whatever you can say about milking cows however, you can’t claim that it’s in anyway a mentally stimulating job. I was forced to take care of that myself.
For a while I contented myself with thinking up names for the cows as they travelled around the spinning platform. I never dreamed I knew the names of so many flowers. And trees. And clouds…
Growing bored with that, I graduated to practicing my rusty French on them. Bonjour ma belle cherie, comment ca va aujourd’hui? Vous etes une vache tres belle.
Then, just to mix things up a little, I tried naming them again. In German. It was soon apparent how much of that I’d forgotten since leaving school.
I remembered two poems I’d learned for German oral tests, however, so the lucky animals were treated to repeat performances of those.
Then poems recited in English. In a variety of exotic accents.
Finally, one afternoon, I shut up and listened to the radio for a while.
For some odd reason that the radio DJ probably thought was funny, a song called Cows With Guns was played at least once every morning and afternoon at milking time. It was a local radio station in the middle of one of the biggest farming districts in the country, so hell yeah, that guy knew what he was doing.
Cows with Guns.
Fat and docile, big and dumb
They look so stupid, they aren’t much fun.
Cows aren’t fun.
They eat to grow, they grow to die
Die to be et at the hamburger fry.
Cows well done…
Well, since the cows I was currently staring in the rear end of weren’t beef but a dairy herd, I wasn’t too worried about an imminent cow insurrection. So my mind wandered from the song to murder in general.
As is apt to happen without enough mental stimulation.
And from murder to the issue of that mighty document, the Last Will and Testament.
And back to murder.
How, I wondered, if I were a man, would I kill my wife so as to get away with it?
I whiled away almost the whole afternoon on such pleasant thoughts and soon had come up with an interesting idea. Or if not precisely an interesting one, at least an almost amusing one, if you’re easily amused by such subjects.
The cows continued on their circular journey around the milking platform, the machinery humming, the milk flowing and I decided how to murder a wife and maybe even get away with it.
Two years later I wrote a blog post called Fat Pat and the Accidental Death of Maryanne.
Man with tum, murder well done.
Filed under: Writing Journal
