“Missing” was shortlisted for the 2025 Best in Rural Writing Contest by judge Jamie Guiney. Learn more about the contest here.

My mother had lived in the same house for over fifty years before we took her from it on the last day of March 2012. Not a week before, telling no one, my youngest brother Danny had sold the house, the cows, and what was left of the farm.

My wife, Bridget, and I got there that Saturday morning just after eight. Overcast and damp, the weather felt more like late fall than early spring, and we looked more like we were evicting a miner’s widow that moving my mother. All day the temperature hovered around freezing.

As we silently piled what she had into cars and trucks, two friends arrived, oblivious. The grim looks on our faces were enough. They retreated, glanced back once or twice, and climbed into their car and left.

After the last was packed and tied down, my mother wandered the empty rooms. She wanted to cry alone. We stood outside and waited.

The next day was Palm Sunday and April Fool’s Day.

Bridget and I left at four or so. As I opened the car door, I glanced around, at the barn, the pastures, the woods. We bounced down the driveway, not looking back, and I knew I would never set foot there again. Some moments you know are life-altering. You cross a threshold and understand that the loss is forever, with no chance of return. You fall into the empty space of whatever comes next, and what was once familiar goes dark, erased.

***

Most of the ground was not good for much more than grass, so we raised Holsteins, black-and-whites, with a red-and-white once in a while. We never had many, forty-five at most, all grades, none registered, which would have required family histories filed at the national breed association. My brother Bobby bred the cows and kept our records. Inside the barn, bolted to the wall next to the milk house door, a slim box held charts listing each cow by number and the name of each bull and the cost of his semen. My father couldn’t buy the most expensive bulls, which were hundreds of dollars a vial, and I often wondered who could afford them. The semen he did buy he stored in a tank of liquid nitrogen that sat by the bulk tank. Outside on the milk house wall, a sign announced, “ABS: American Breeders Service.”

Around cattle every day, we knew them, sort of, and they knew us, but this didn’t stop us from butchering or selling one. That they would be missing one day may be why we didn’t name them, although when she was four or five, my sister Ann called one Cream of Wheat and when Danny ran the farm he named another Magic. My father knew a cow by her place—third from the south door—her age—that second-calf heifer—and, less often, her biography—lost a calf last fall.

***

My father and I weren’t early risers; maybe we were up at 6:30 and in the barn by 7:00. We’d start at 6:00 at night, so we weren’t milking every twelve hours. I wasn’t great at waking up on time, but, like anything, you do it enough, it gets to be what you do.

Fog shrouded the sidehill.

At the barnyard gate, my father called, Come, bos!

Cows answered from different parts of the pasture. A few filed from the near fence corner. Others stepped from the woods below the ditch. Most, though, were nowhere in sight. He turned to me, a ten-year-old, and said, Go on.

So I walked the stone road up the hill and over the ditch to the first gate to be sure none stood in the shade near the twenty-acre lot. Then I topped the crest to see whether any were grazing near the second gate. A few were in the woods, moving toward the lane that divided the meadow from the Miller Road, but the rest lay in the clearing atop the sidehill, chewing their cud, ignoring what they heard from the barn.

Later I learned that bos is Latin for “cow.” I heard “boss,” which was true enough, I thought, but I came to like “bos,” which sounded more like an appeal than a command.

The cows picked their way downhill, back and forth across a steep, stony slope, one behind another, following worn paths to the bottom and up and over the ditch before fanning out across a wet stretch of open ground. After a rain, the mud there could be deep. One or two would stop. Moving them meant a stuck boot and soaked socks, so I’d toss clods and stones. Once, when a cow refused to budge, no matter my shouts and tosses, I threw a rock that smacked her face, sounding on bone. She blinked, but didn’t flinch, which troubled me enough never to cast another.

Some days we moved the herd below Baxter Road, where they could wander into a neighbor’s pasture, grown mainly to hemlock, woods into which Johnson Creek flowed. The best grass grew a mile from the barn, far for a milker to make her way and back. More than once I searched for them and returned after an hour without several, so after bringing the cows I had to the barn, I marched back to the woods to look again. Sometimes even then I didn’t find the missing, despite walking everywhere, pushing between mountain laurels and stepping back and forth across the creek. If I got lucky, I’d walk from the woods and the lost would be at the gate, waiting to climb the hill to home. Once in a great while, a cow, leaking milk and bawling, wouldn’t show up till the next morning, which could be trouble because an unmilked cow can come down with mastitis.

***

A sick cow sometimes needed an antibiotic, which required pushing a long needle into the flesh on either side of her tail. To do it, someone bent her tail back to keep her still enough so someone else could jab in the needle and empty the syringe.

Bridget and I were doing the milking one night, and a cow had to have a shot. She was the last to be milked, and we set aside what she gave. Straining to hold her still, Bridget pressed her tail back, but I couldn’t bring myself to stab her.

–Let me try, Bridget said.

–No, I said, I can do it.

–I’m having a hard time holding her.

I hesitated again, and the cow started to side step.

–I can’t do it, I said, laughing nervously.

Bridget let go the tail.

–Here, I’ll do it.

I handed her the needle and pushed up the cow’s tail.

–Ready? Bridget said.

–Yeah.

She stabbed the cow, pulled the needle back a bit, and emptied the syringe.

–There, she said. I’ve seen Lillian and Cheryl do it.

–To people.

She shrugged.

–Same thing.

***

Breakfast was around nine, after milking. My mother made bacon and eggs, and I ate and read the paper or a book. She sat across from me, between us an open loaf of Stroehmann, a stick of butter—crumbs at one end—and an open jar of jelly, sometimes raspberry, sometimes strawberry. She might eat toast, but not much more.

Staring at the window, she wrapped her hands round her coffee mug.

–Got a cow to breed, my father said, taking up his last bit of toast.

–Bobby’s working this morning, she said.

It was Saturday.

–Third one from the milk house door, on the right.

–You tell him.

My father left the house, his empty plate right where my mother had placed it full. The screen door slapped shut.

–I can’t stand living here, she said, here in the sticks.

Sad-eyed, she looked at me, a junior in high school.

–I should get an apartment, she said. Move out. Get a job.

I buttered a piece of toast.

–Your father’s an easy-going man, but….

I knew she wanted to live in the Carbondale of the early ‘50s, when she married her first love. The farm was exile. I turned to my book, back to another place.

–He puts the cows first. Everything for the farm, the barn.

I ate some toast and drank more coffee.

–Are you listening? she said.

What else could I be doing, I wanted to say. I thought, go ahead, move out, get a job. No one’s stopping you. Do what you want.

She never did, but she never stopped saying that she would.

The repetition wore on, almost daily. I couldn’t help, and none of it seemed possible.

–I should…

–Go ahead, I said, finally. Move out. Get a job.

–You want me gone, is that it?

–You’re the one wants to leave!

–You don’t care, she said. You’re just taking your father’s side.

But I never knew his side. He never said.

After a while, I just listened and nodded. She wanted me to hear, not speak, and I had no idea anyway what to do with what she told me. She wanted to go but couldn’t or wouldn’t. And she never mentioned others going with her.

I waited for her to pause.

–I got to go, I said.

She cried as I pulled on my work shoes.

–You don’t understand, she said, but let me tell you this: you get married, you put your wife first. Nothing else.

–Uh-huh.

I pushed open the screen door. She was picking up plates.

When my father saw me, he might say nothing or he might wonder aloud why I took so long with so much undone.

***

In March 1948, not a month after turning seventeen, Robert Weaver joined the U.S. Army. The next year, he earned promotion to corporal, and the Army sent him to Alaska and Hawaii before posting him to Fort Drum, New York. On New Year’s Eve 1951, he and my mother—eighteen, acned, and withdrawn—married in St. Rose Church in Carbondale. This was the twenty-sixth anniversary...

The Milk House

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