Diddle Diddle

“Pa! Bessie’s actin’ up somethin’ fierce!” The screen door slammed behind Tommy as his boots clomped over the linoleum floor in the big country kitchen.

Ma sat at the huge oval table, snapping fresh green beans freshly picked from the garden. “You better not be trackin’ in nothin’,” she said.

Tommy glanced at his boots caked with mud from his morning chores. “Sorry, Ma. I’ll clean it up.” He backed out the door, and yelled through the screen. “I just thought you oughta know. That old cow keeps tryin’ to jump out her pen in the barn. Ain’t no way I can milk her while she's kickin’ up such a fuss.”

“Dagnabbit!” Pa exclaimed.

Ma pursed her thin dry lips, and shot him a look. “What did I tell you about that kind of language? It has no place in this household.” Ma looked older than her years, as did Pa. They'd been old all of Tommy‘s life, which seemed the natural state of farmers around here, the result of hard work under the beating sun.

“I ain't cussin’,” Pa protested. He adjusted the strap on his bib overalls over his broad shoulders and glared at her.

“Just cuz you move a couple of syllables around don't mean you ain't takin’ the Lord's name in vain,” Ma scolded.

Pa scowled at her. “Nonsense woman.” He turned to Tommy. “Let's go see what's botherin’ the old girl.

They made their way to the weathered red barn, just Tommy and Pa, because Ma was too busy getting supper ready. They passed the cistern, with the hand pump for pulling water up from the well, and the door to the root cellar which burrowed into a small hill overlooking their rundown two-story house. The house tilted visibly to the left, as if pulling away from the grass-covered hill like an inexperienced girl from an ardent suitor.

The barn was about 30 yards from the meadow, opening onto the fenced off pasture. The smell of hay and cow dung filled the air, accompanied by the buzzing of swarms of flies.

They entered the ramshackle barn. In one of the stalls just beneath the loft, their eight-year old prime heifer was kicking up a fuss. “What in tarnation? Why’s the old girl actin’ up like this?” Pa asked.

“Beats me, Pa.”

The brown and white spotted cow was standing on its hind legs, trying with all its might to pull itself over the fence of its hay-lined pen. Its udders were swollen with milk Tommy was supposed to squirt out half an hour ago.

“What we gonna do, Pa?”

“Whoa Bessie,” Pa said. He stretched out a hand and tried to touch her side, but she mooed like a steamboat whistle, and bucked away. He grabbed a rope, and managed to tie it around her body. “I don't know what‘s gotten into the old gal. Maybe we should send for the vet, and have him take a look at her.”

“See, Pa? This is why we need a telephone. All our neighbors are gettin’ ‘em.”

“Button your lip son. We can't afford no phone. Now you high tail it over to the Scranton place, and tell them to call that old horse doctor, Doc Harvey.”

“Yes, Pa.” Tommy scampered out the barn door, and ran across the pasture towards the main road. As he ran, the biggest moon he'd ever seen in the daytime rose on the horizon. A full moon in broad daylight. As he ran, trying to miss the pies of cow poop, he couldn't stop looking at that moon.

Tommy stopped when he heard his father hollering after him.

“Son! Son!” Pa called.

Tommy turned around and saw something that stopped him in his tracks. Bessie was floating out the barn door, tethered to the inside by a long rope. The heavy animal, at least 500 pounds, was already ten feet off the ground. Something it had never done before.

“You gotta help me pull her back!” Pa called as he struggled with the long rope.

Tommy ran back, and joined his father in trying to pull the cow down. They yanked and pulled mightily, until Bessie was nearly back to Earth.

The cow reared her head, and started flailing her hoofs towards them.

“Damnit! Why’s she fighting so hard?”

“Pa! Look at the moon!”

Pa stopped and turned around. “That's the biggest, brightest moon I ever seen, night or day.” The moon was so big it made Pa lose track of Bessie for a second, just long enough for one of Bessie’s hooves to knock him upside the head.

“Pa! You alright?”

No answer. He lay sprawled on the ground like Uncle Teddy after a night drinking moonshine with the boys. Something Ma took no truck in.

Tommy clung to the rope as Bessie floated higher. It dragged him across the dirt. He dug his heels into the ground and pulled on the rope as hard as he could for a fourteen-year old. He couldn't lose the cow. They needed the milk.

“Ma! Come quick!” he cried.

Bessie rose higher and higher. Still Tommy clung to the rope. The bristles from the sisal cut into his hands until they were raw. But still he hung on. The cow pulled him so high he could see over the roofs of their homestead. He could see the small brook that fed their pond, and the hedgerows that separated their place from the Scrantons’. He couldn't let go. He wouldn't let go. If he fell now, even Doc Harvey couldn't fix him.

Ma appeared on the porch just in time to see him and Bessie sail over the moon.

The morning Dixonville Gazette was full of accounts of dishes running away with spoons, missing cows, and the epic lunar event.

“What sport!” a little dog was quoted as saying, a comment many considered in poor taste.

Ma and Pa were too distraught to consider going out that night, having lost their only son, and best milk cow. A shame, too. The cat wouldn't perform with its fiddle for a long time in these parts. A very long time.

As for diddle diddle, it would be almost forever before Ma was in the mood.