Excerpt of Dairy Queen by Catherine Gilbert Murdock
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Dairy Queen
This whole enormous deal wouldn’t have happened, none of it, if Dad hadn’t
messed up his hip moving the manure spreader. Some people laugh at that, like
Brian did. The first time I said Manure Spreader he bent in half, he was
laughing so hard. Which would have been hilariously funny except that it wasn’t.
I tried to explain how important a manure spreader is, but it only made him
laugh harder, in this really obnoxious way he has sometimes, and besides, you’re
probably laughing now too. So what. I know where your milk comes from, and your
hamburgers.
I’ll always remember the day it all started because Joe Namath was so sick. Dad
names all his cows after football players. It’s pretty funny, actually, going to
the 4-H fair, where they list the cows by farm and name. Right there next to
“Happy Valley Buttercup” is “Schwenk Walter Payton,” because none of my grandpas
or great-grandpas could ever come with up a name for our place better than
boring old “Schwenk Farm.”
Joe Namath was the only one left from the year Dad named the cows after Jets
players, which I guess is kind of fitting in a way, seeing how important the
real Joe Namath was and all. Our Joe was eleven years old, which is ancient for
a cow, but she was such a good milker and calver we couldn’t help but keep her.
These past few weeks, though, she’d really started failing, and on this morning
she wasn’t even at the gate with the other cows waiting for me, she was still
lying down in the pasture, and I had to help her to stand up and everything,
which is pretty hard because she weighs about a ton, and she was really limping
going down to the barn, and her eyes were looking all tired.
I milked her first so she could lie down again, which she did right away. Then
when milking was over I left her right where she was in the barn, and she didn’t
even look like she minded. Smut couldn’t figure out what I was doing and she
wouldn’t come with me to take the cows back to pasture—she just stood there in
the barn, chewing on her slimy old football and waiting for me to figure out I’d
forgotten one of them. Finally she came, just so she could race me back home
like she always does, and block me the way Win taught her. Smut was his dog, but
now that he’s not talking to Dad anymore, or to me, or ever coming home again it
seems like, I guess now she’s mine.
When I went in for breakfast Curtis was reading the sports section and eating
something that looked kind of square and flat and black. Like roofing shingles.
Curtis will eat anything because he’s growing so much. Once he complained about
burnt scrambled eggs, but other than that he just shovels it in. Which makes me
look like I’m being all picky about stuff that, trust me, is pretty gross.
Dad handed me a plate and shuffled back to the stove with his walker. When
things got really bad last winter with his hip and Mom working two jobs and me
doing all the farm work because you can’t milk thirty-two cows with a walker,
Dad decided to chip in by taking over the kitchen. But he never said, “I’m going
to start cooking” or “I’m not too good at this, how could I do it better?” or
anything like that. He just started putting food in front of us and then yelling
at us if we said anything, no matter how bad it looked. Like now.
“It’s French toast,” Dad said like it was totally obvious. He hadn’t shaved in a
while, I noticed, and his forehead was white the way it’ll always be from all
those years of wearing a feed cap while his chin and nose and neck were getting
so tan.
I forced down a bite. It tasted kind of weird and familiar. “What’s in here?”
Excerpted from Dairy Queen, © 2006 Catherine Murdoch. Reproduced by kind permission of the publisher, Houghton Mifflin. All rights reserved.
